Other English Language and Literature Commons^™

Nice White Ladies: Exorcising The Ghost Of Lady Bountiful, Renee Lynch

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

This article explores how individuals with racial privilege can both acknowledge and start to move beyond the ways they are implicated in systemic injustices in internationalization through collaboration. The study examines how the author acted in complicity with colonial power in an international collaborative research project in English language education at a university in Tanzania. Critical ethnographic data was analyzed using positioning theory and applying the archetype of Lady Bountiful - a “nice white lady” who graciously participates in the civilizing work of colonization. This construct illuminates how the author perpetuated colonialism at the intersection of whiteness and femininity while …

A Case For Societal Provenance: Marguerite Harper As Told By The Men She Represented, V. Emily Cranwell Deinert

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This paper argues for making societal provenance the grounding framework for archival descriptive standards to ensure that important voices already present in archives are no longer buried. This study reclaims from archival obscurity the career of literary agent Marguerite E. Harper to illustrate the need for this expansion. Harper proves strikingly absent from some of the archives for the authors she represented. Likely an unwitting omission from archivists that uncritically accepted the narratives of these male authors, Harper’s erasure provides a potent example of the ways that archival descriptive standards may unintentionally further silence historically marginalized voices within archives. The …

Ztc Eng 2400: Composition Ii Syllabus, Ann Marie Dorr

Open Educational Resources

Asynchronous continuation of writing studies in Composition II considering the lens of the role of the cultural critic using New York Times access as the key resource via the CUNY Library system to consider writing research based essays including personal narrative, academic research papers, and reviews.

Performing Nefertiti: Feminist Afterlives Across Museum, Digital, And Cosmetic Cultures, Zaryab Khan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article examines the afterlives of Nefertiti’s bust as performances that stage the intersections of gender, empire, and visual culture. Moving beyond biographical reconstruction, it argues that the bust operates as a repertoire of performances continually re-scripted across cultural sites. Three case studies structure the analysis: the staging of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum, which performs colonial possession and the aestheticization of feminine beauty; the digital intervention The Other Nefertiti (2015), which performs resistance through the circulation of unauthorized 3D scans; and the cosmetic “Nefertiti lift,” which performs the queen’s visage through contemporary bodies, inscribing antiquity as a template for …

The Pragmatics Of Emoji: A Multimodal Investigation Of Politeness And Sarcasm In Student Interactions On Facebook, Twitter, And Reddit, Wesam Khairy Morsi

English Language and Literature

This study investigates the pragmatic functions of emojis as multimodal resources in students' interactions on Facebook, Twitter (X), and Reddit, with a focused distinction between politeness and sarcasm. Drawing on a corpus of 4000 naturally occurring student-generated posts (Facebook: 1200; Twitter/X: 1500; Reddit: 1300), the study applies a qualitative-quantitative coding framework grounded in Brown and Levinson's politeness theory and Gricean pragmatic models. Emojis are analyzed as components of semiotic bundles rather than isolated affective markers. Statistical analysis reveals significant gendered patterns (χ2 (1, N = 420) = 89.2, p < 0.001), with female students demonstrating greater use of emojis for politeness and solidarity functions (70.0%) compared to male students (35.0%), while male students show higher utilization for sarcasm and irony (65.0%) versus female students (30.0%). Platform-specific affordances significantly shape these pragmatic functions, with Facebook favoring politeness strategies, Reddit enabling ironic communication through anonymity, and Twitter facilitating compressed evaluative expressions. The findings suggest that emoji competence constitutes a fundamental component of digital pragmatic literacy requiring integration into higher education curricula.

Just Roll With It: Literacy And Community Building In Hobby Board Gaming, Mackenzie C. Allen

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

With the rise in popularity of hobby board gaming in the last 25 years, their usefulness to studying adult engagement in literacy has emerged as a new avenue of exploration. Although there has been a large amount of research into how board games can be designed and played with learning in mind, the study of recreational board games in the context of literacy and community is lacking. This thesis explored the means through which board games played in recreational settings act as tools of literacy. Through direct gameplay of 36 games across 6 months, qualitative data was gathered in pursuit …

The Process Of Othering: Grief And Shame In Kanafānī’S “The Land Of Sad Oranges”, Eman M. Ahmad

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how “othering” shapes Palestinian experience through Ghassan Kanafani’s fiction and Frantz Fanon’s theory. It argues that othering produces grief, survival, and resistance rather than assimilation, and proposes a model centered on power, dehumanization, and identity to explain how domination is sustained and challenged.

The Alembic - International Literary Journal, Sara Mackinnon, Finn Heller, Sarah Debian, Kate Blackwell

English Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Landshark Literary Review, Hanny Zermeno

Landshark Literary Review

The poems of this selection delve into the complexities of familial relationships as well as the internal battles of insecurities brought on by the complications of a lack of harmony and love primarily displayed in families. Other poems in this selection describe the love between two people and the physical and emotional effects of yearning and their human connections.

The Enduring Need For Literature: Cognitive Benefits And The Prospect Of Its Disappearance, Imane Labiad

Department of French Studies Graduate Student Association Conference

One would think that defending the usefulness of teaching literature in schools and universities should no longer be a matter of debate. However, with the emergence of new media and technologies such as AI, this discussion resurfaces. This presentation argues that literature will not disappear from educational settings for two main reasons: the scientific evidence demonstrating its impact, and a fictional scenario that warns against its extinction. Numerous empirical studies have shown the wide range of benefits literature has fostered for centuries. One significant finding concerns the persuasive power of fiction reading (Braddock & Dillard, 2016). Research demonstrates that through …

The Rhetorical Agency Of Student-Parents: Assembling, Archiving, And Naming Practices And Interpretations That Transform Worlds, Dhipinder Walia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that uses interview data collected from six student-parents attending Bronx Community College during 2024 to 2025. Using rhetorical and critical discourse analysis, this dissertation argues student-parents enact their rhetorical agency to transform their college experience. Specifically, student-parents use their rhetorical agency to interpret time and place in a way that centers their own wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of their children. This dissertation focuses on interpretations and ordinary practices that reimagine what time and place can look and feel like on a college campus. Additionally, student-parents enact their rhetorical agency through ordinary practices …

Formulaic Sequences: Teacher And Student Perceptions And Teaching Strategies, Ali Sayed Muhammad Abd Allah

Theses and Dissertations

Formulaic Sequences (FS), common word combinations stored and used as single units, are crucial for achieving oral fluency yet remain underrepresented in pedagogical materials. This study explores this gap by examining teacher and student perceptions of FS and the teaching techniques within an online Egyptian EFL context. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, data were gathered via teacher interviews (n=4), student questionnaires (n=100), a student focus group (n=4), and classroom observations. Results indicated that teachers unanimously perceived FS as essential building blocks for fluency, accuracy, and learner confidence, and they utilized a spectrum of techniques ranging from explicit instruction to incidental exposure …

Natureculture: Interdisciplinary Ecologies And Place-Based Writing For Student Success, Kerry Neville, Hedwig Fraunhofer

Academic Affairs

The NatureCulture collaborative study abroad course represents a central outcome of the Collaborative Research Grant and has undergone substantial conceptual, curricular, and pedagogical development. While finalization of a site-specific itinerary has been delayed due to unanticipated challenges in securing a stable and academically viable location, the collaborative course itself is fully designed and pedagogically complete. Grounded in interdisciplinary, team-taught instruction, the NatureCulture model integrates environmental humanities, creative writing, intercultural learning, and eco-pedagogy to foster place-based, experiential, and critically reflective learning. Within this framework, faculty have developed complementary courses that collectively serve students across multiple stages of the curriculum.

Dr. Neville’s …

Children Past Curfew: Surveillance, Resistance, And Childhood In Philippine Martial Law Children's Literature, Krisna Marie T. Balolong

Children's Literature (MA) Theses

This paper examines how two Philippine children's books depict state surveillance and its effects on a child's perspective of family, authority figures, and childhood. Through analysis of Augie Rivera's Isang Harding Papel and Sandra Nicole Roldan's At the School Gate, this project makes a connection between children's literature and surveillance studies, offering new framework to engage with children’s literature depicting authoritarian regimes and state violence, especially in cases where children were targets of their governments. Each book is examined by their representations of state surveillance during the Martial Law era of the Philippines, as well as each characters’ individual …

Unmasked And Unprotected: An Autistic Poet's Journey Of Imperfect Confession, Cynthia Short

Theses and Dissertations

Cynthia Short’s thesis analyzes the consumption and contortion of neurodivergent experience across the clinical, personal, and artistic stages. Combining intersectional memoir with clinical research, traditional poetics, and spoken word experience, she weaves a first-person narrative of consumption and redefinition by systems that did not understand her. Yet, she argues that imperfect confession -done without self-knowledge, resources, or proper self-worth to resist consumption – still has its place. Her collection of twenty-nine self-authored poems serves as a testament to the growth her imperfect confession allowed, outlining her struggles with identity, clinical experimentation and economic survival in a world not meant for …

When To Bite Back: Queerness, Resistance, And Reclamation Of The Monstrous Identity In Andrew Joseph White’S Hell Followed With Us, Aster J. Mehigan Mx.

English

Who gets the right to define morality? Who gets to define what is monstrous? Frankenstein’s Creature, the vampires of Lost Boys, The Craft’s head witch Nancy Downs; these characters follow a pattern through the decades of those alienated from society, in this case being written with queer subtext, being deemed as monstrous. These queer monsters become the villains of the story, causing chaos, death and destruction in their wake, seeking revenge against a world that ostracizes them. The 2022 dystopian YA horror of Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White challenges the villanized monstrous identity through its transgender protagonist …

Phantasmagoria: A Novel, Miran Bogedain

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Fragmented Minds And Fractured Selves: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis Of Mental Disturbance In Leaves Of Narcissus, Sarah M. Fayed, Amany M. El-Shazly, Fatma Ismail Dr.

Computer Science

What readers encounter in literature directly affects their views and impressions of the world. Hence, it is essential to acknowledge this effect and analyze it to understand how readers identify and pass judgment about significant issues. One important issue to investigate is the depiction of mental disturbance in modern fiction. The present work reconceptualizes the depiction of mental disturbance in Arabic fiction through an analysis of Somaya Ramadan’s Leaves of Narcissus. To this effect, Leaves of Narcissus (Awraq al-narjis) the depiction of mental disturbance is examined. The stylistic devices Ramadan uses, such as schema alterations to convey the content are …

Provenance In The Book Lab Library, Regan Spangler

Undergraduate Research Posters

For my Distinguished English Major project, I am designing and implementing a catalog of the books in the Book Lab (VCU Campus, Hibbs Hall room 408). This consists of three major components. One, I am compiling a digital catalog of the collection, including book title, author, editor(s), Library of Congress call number, and provenance (in other words, previous owners and users). Two, I am adding corresponding physical cards to each book. Both the digital catalog and the cards include all information previously stated. The third component includes research into provenance of the Book Lab collection. Using David Pearson’s Books as …

Reconstructing The Medieval Palette: Making Paints And Inks Using Medieval Recipes, Cael Sinclair

Graduate Research Posters

When considering the medieval period, most people imagine brilliantly painted and gilded manuscripts but not many people actually imagine the labor behind making those manuscripts. Similarly, modern perception of a scribe tends to be a single, solitary person slaving away at the entire manuscript. Contrary to these beliefs, the process of producing a manuscript was a highly collaborative and, more importantly, highly documented process. Throughout the period, numerous treatises (or handbooks) were created documenting instructions and advice for making ink and paint, for drawing and painting, and everything in between. While it is possible for one to just read these …

Bonny And Read: Navigating The Waters Between Truth And Tale, Fiona J. Faccilonga

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis examines piracy, cross-dressing, gender fluidity, and ambiguous identity in the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read as represented in A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson. This thesis argues that Johnson’s narrative reshapes their piracy through feminine frameworks to align them with patriarchal expectations of womanhood and fixed identity. Specifically, he uses the breast and the belly as sites of gendered truth, attempting to reduce their masculine presentation as mere performance rather than intrinsic identity.

However, despite Johnson’s attempt at narrative authority, Bonny and Read ultimately resist such containment. Through close readings of both …

Resistance And Innovation: The Cultural Work Of Popular Romance Novels, Chelsee M. Niebergall

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Popular romance fiction is the highest-grossing genre in contemporary publishing, yet it remains one of the least examined in academic scholarship. As this thesis argues, while texts of this genre have been marginalized and stigmatized for their perceived lack of literary sophistication, they prove to be some of the most radical in terms of cultural impact. Their dismissal is not incidental but symptomatic of the very systems of oppression the romance novels work to disrupt. This thesis will examine these radical texts and uncover the cultural work they perform on their readers by using an analytical framework newly developed here, …

Translating The “Preposition + Which” Construction In English Legal Texts Into Indonesian, Doni Jaya

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Legal text translation is challenging because of its emphasis on semantic and syntactic faithfulness, while ST structures do not always have correspondent TL equivalents. One of such structures is the English “preposition + which” (PW) construction. This construction can be difficult to translate into Indonesian because the language does not always have ready-to-use connectors to produce a structurally faithful translation, often forcing translators to take the easy way of using ungrammatical and unnatural connectors which becomes the hallmark of the Indonesian legalese style. This research seeks to examine various ways to translate PW constructions in a more grammatical and …

Ai Image Generation Study Assignment, Pamela Jean Stemberg

Open Educational Resources

This assignment examines bias and stereotyping in AI image generation systems while teaching students the conventions of scientific genre writing through a formal lab report. Working in interdisciplinary groups, students generate image datasets using gender-neutral professional terms and analyze representations of gender, race, and age. Findings are compared with real-world labor demographics to assess discrepancies between AI outputs and existing data. Students practice core lab report conventions, including hypothesis formation, methods documentation, results presentation, and discussion, while integrating analysis and scholarly research. By combining empirical investigation with structured academic writing, the assignment strengthens students’ ability to communicate complex findings clearly …

From Clicks To Consequences: A Map Of Your Data, Pamela Jean Stemberg

Open Educational Resources

This assignment approaches digital platforms as texts to be read, analyzed, and revised using methods drawn from English studies, such as interpretation, argument, and revision. Students examine the language of user interfaces, compare on-screen promises with formal policy documents, and trace the relationships between design choices, language, and real-world outcomes. Through close reading, students practice core skills of literary and rhetorical analysis while engaging contemporary digital systems. In doing so, the assignment connects traditional writing practices to critical inquiry about power, authorship, and accountability in digital environments.

Beyond The Human–Animal Transformation In Hasan Aourid’S SīRat ḤImāR And Rawi Hage’S Cockroach, Noha Hanafy

English Language and Literature

The paper examines the human-animal transformation as a marker of identity explo-

ration in Moroccan writer Hassan Aourid’s Sīrat Ḥimār (2014 سيرة حمار) and Lebanese

Canadian writer Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008). The two texts employ the concept of

the human-animal transformation to highlight the complexity of the marginalized

existence in the world. Both texts present nuanced versions of the human-animal

transformation which renders the experience both emancipatory and destabilizing at

the same time. Using the theoretical framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s work on

becoming-animal and the deterritorialization of existence along with Derrida’s discus-

sion of the anthropocentric limit, the paper …

Digital Text And Communication Literacy Of English Language Teachers: Implications From A Reconstructive Study On Teachers’ Professional Development, Annika Janßen, Jan-Erik Leonhardt, Alexandra Kemmerer, Britta Viebrock

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In this contribution, we will introduce the concept of Digital Text and Communication Literacy (DITECOL), which was developed as part of the DigiNICs project. It contains subject-related, functional, critical, and methodological competences to deal with and teach digital texts and communication forms in foreign language education. We will present first results from a qualitative interview study with six English language teachers who participate in the DigiNICs project. The study examines how they perceive their usage of digital texts and communication forms a) in their lessons and b) in the context of in-service teacher training. The interview data was analysed using …

A Children’S Rights Approach To Critical Media Literacy In Language Education: Developing Children’S Agency In A Digital Networked World, Frauke Matz, Jeff Share

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Children are growing up in a culture of digitality, one infused in digital communication in and out of school (Faverio & Sidotti, 2024; Stalder, 2018). They are immersed in a digital networked world, which plays a significant role in how they develop their literacies and identities (Cannon et al., 2022) across languages. To help them participate as “active thinkers and citizens in their own right” (Wall, 2016, p. 86), educators could consider the potential of critical media literacy in language education as a pedagogical response to the commercial exploitation of information, and the liberatory potential of critical thinking and creative …

The Creation And Continuation Of The Elvish Language, Megan Gables

Student Scholar Symposium

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, published in the 1950s, stands apart for its use of Constructed Languages. Tolkien graduated from Oxford University and pursued a career as a professor of philology and linguistics. Tolkien loved using his linguistic expertise to create realistic cultures and communities within his fantasy worlds. One of Lord of the Rings most famous Constructed Languages is Elvish. Tolkien’s inspiration for the sound of Elvish with Welsh and Finnish as both languages are highly phonetic. Welsh inspired the stress syllables, while Finnish influenced Elvish’s sound and writing. Since Tolkien’s death in 1973, the Tolkien estate …

Victims Playing Villains: Subjects Of Blame In Elie Wiesel's "Night", Naomi Hollans

Student Scholar Symposium

Many readers who are familiar with the Jewish Holocaust are also familiar with Elie Wiesel’s Night. While many tragedies testify of villains and victims, Night’s testimony on these two elements is unclear. Night is riddled with shame, and Elie often sees himself as a perpetrator in his own suffering. With this misplaced shame, Wiesel partakes in a “confession” at the end of Night. This paper explores each of Wiesel’s “villains” and theorizes the psychological motivations behind each indictment. It gives special interest to the prevalence of victim shame in Holocaust survivor testimony, building on existing research about …