Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Racial Identity In Horror: The Fear Of Black Female Sexuality, Charniece D. Bacon

Honors College Theses

The Jezebel stereotype is a racial stereotype with biblical ties that portrays black women as seductive, sexually insatiable beings. The horror genre explores humanity’s biggest fears and anxieties by looking at subgenres such as blaxploitation and vampirism. In this essay, I'll explore the intersectionalities of race, gender, and religion through the portrayal of black female sexuality in the horror genre. In films such as Ganja & Hess (1973), Abby (1976), and Def by Temptation (1990), they all depict the Jezebel stereotype. In an in-depth analysis of these films, I'll go over the ways in which they reinforce the Jezebel stereotype, …

Compositional Techniques For Horror Film Soundtracks, Malia L. Hernandez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

With this paper, I aim to explore the history of horror film soundtracks and discover the various compositional techniques that are used to trigger physical responses from a viewer. I also intend to describe how horror scores have adapted and changed over time as our social and political climate continues to evolve by examining several different kinds of sources including academic studies, articles, and film reviews. While every viewer is different, a film scorer can properly build suspense by using specific compositional methodologies to briefly alter responses of the human mind and body.  This type of research would provide useful …

Res Historica, Volume 5, Alpha Rho Epsilon Phi Alpha Theta, Lindsay Rae Smith Privette Phd

Res Historica

The 2026 journal of historical research by Anderson University students, Res Historica.

The editorial team for this edition of Res Historica was Dr. Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, Julia Ackerman, Callyn Wright, Logan Davis, and John Hinton. Cover art by Mary Beth Lee.

‘Politics! Not My Thing!’:The Misrepresentation Of Anne Boleyn In Six: The Musical, Natalie M. Bowen

UROP Posters

With the rise of Hamilton and Come From Away, stage musicals have become the next hottest form of historical reenactment, and the six wives of Henry VIII are no exception. These modern spins on Tudor history are typically riddled with inaccuracies that leave audiences with a skewed idea of Tudor England. The wives of Henry VIII, in particular, are the victims of centuries of historically inaccurate fictional media. Six: The Musical is a modern musical spin on this centuries-old story, following the six wives of Henry VIII as they reclaim their narratives in a pop concert competition on who had …

“A Couple Days In The Life Of What It’S Like In Washington Heights:” The Representation Of Latine Immigrants In Lin-Manuel Miranda’S In The Heights, Natalie M. Bowen

UROP Posters

The United States of America is a nation built by and made up of immigrants, being home to one-fifth of all migrants across the world. Anti-immigrant prejudice and xenophobia have long defined the American people and national policy, but the target demographic is constantly changing to reflect current narratives and fears. In recent years, Latine immigrants have been a prominent topic of concern in American politics. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2021 movie musical In The Heights aims to celebrate the existence of immigrants in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in New York City. Using peer-reviewed scholarly sources and movie reviews, this comprehensive literature …

Sermons And/In/As Literature, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

Five of the nineteen contributors to Preaching and the Sermon in the Twentieth Century are members of English departments, so it is somewhat ironic that none of their chapters could be categorized as “literary studies” (they are instead in the sections for history, book history, media studies, and digital humanities). This presentation is intended to offer a perspective that is not represented in that collection.

In about five minutes each, I will survey the three elements mentioned in my title:

1. Sermons and literature. This section will address how sermons can be influenced by other forms of literature, and influence …

Representations Of Queer Cowboys In History, Literature, And Film, Olivia Black

History & Classics Undergraduate Theses

My senior thesis focuses on showing the existence and erasure of queerness in American cowboys. The first chapter uses two journals from two different cowboys as well as an article from a Denver newspaper to establish what being queer looked like to cowboys and how that queerness continued after the end of the Frontier. Chapter two focuses on interpretations of cowboys in literature using two fictional cowboy stories which included the queer aspects of cowboy life as well as autobiographical and fictional cowboy poetry that confirmed explicit homosexual activity and revealed a shift in public views on being queer. The …

The Tales Of Maruni, Sikuma Rai

Theses and Dissertations

Sikuma Rai journeys into the fading indigenous genre of Maruni—an eastern Nepali song and dance form—narrating letters to her late grandfather. Accompanied by her father, and a devoted folk musician from an upper-caste background, she traces echoes of memory, identity, and the fragile inheritance of indigenous culture.

History And The Teaching Of Dialect And Slang In Screenwriting, Mitch Olson, Chris C. Palmer

Faculty Articles

This article explores academic and industry perspectives on the use of dialect, slang, and historical language in screenwriting. It offers a chronological overview of major screenwriting manuals’ treatment of dialect and slang (or lack thereof) 1946-2020. It then presents survey data of 53 currently-practicing screenwriters’ views on working with dialect and historical language in scripts, as well as their sense of possible changes in the industry regarding attitudes towards diverse voice representation on the page. It concludes with examples from a teaching sequence that illustrates strategies for writing with dialect, researching it, and ethically considering its usage in scripts. Situating …

Marvelous Bodies: Italy's New Migrant Cinema, Vetri Nathan

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

Historically a source of emigrants to Northern Europe and the New World, Italy has rapidly become a preferred destination for immigrants from the global South. Life in the land of la dolce vita has not seemed so sweet recently, as Italy struggles with the cultural challenges caused by this surge in immigration. Marvelous Bodies by Vetri Nathan explores thirteen key full-length Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. In it, Nathan argues that Italy sees itself as the quintessential internal Other of Western Europe, and that …

Past * An Introduction To The Problem, Zelimir Zilnik, Boris Buden, New Media Center Kuda.Org, Olivera Jokic

Publications and Research

Who can know what is in the past? Is it what historians can tell us? Should we also trust what we can remember? Past • An Introduction to the Problem proposes that the problem of the past now concerns everyone. Visions of a different, brighter future defeated in the Cold War and its heated afterlives, we are being offered the past as the only horizon of possibility. And what are we supposed to find in that past? Philosopher Boris Buden considers these questions in a series of essays and conversations with filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, one of the most prominent filmmakers …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

A Taste For The Distasteful: The Aesthetics Of Gore In The Giallo And Horror Films Of Mario Bava, Thais Casado Bignardi-Engstrom

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Italian experience with horror in cinema in both psychoanalytic feminist and cognitive Marxist critical film theories through a study of visual renderings of excessive violence and sex in gothic and thrillers known as giallo films created by the film director Mario Bava. This is an art historical study that looks at Bava’s work against the Italian cultural landscape in the post war period.

How Design Depicted In Film Contributes To The Evolution Of Cultural Narratives, Catherine Vanhoose

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

Interior Design and its trends have had significant influence on pop culture and the general public through the course of human history. Acting as a universal language, design is a tool often used to help communicate ideas. The different interpretations of these ideas are what help to create cultural narratives. This capstone explores the relationships between film and design as creative arts, how they are affected by the current times and trends throughout the history of women, and as a result how women throughout history are influenced by these relationships. Findings provide insight on how interior design is used to …

May The Soil Be Everywhere: Portraying A Family's Love And Revolution Through Oral History, Performance, And Film From A Granddaughter's Perspective, Yehui Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

May the Soil Be Everywhere is a feature-length documentary film that tells an intimate four-generational family story about farming, survival, and regeneration. Set against a backdrop of war, famine, and rapid urbanization, May the Soil Be Everywhere delves into oral history, trauma, family heritage and generational love. It represents a community’s collective effort to preserve its identity.

Reframing Space: Religion, History, And Memory In The Early Documentary Film Of The Yugoslav Space, Milja Radovic

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper examines cinematic representations of religion and religious communities in the early cinema of the Yugoslav space. This paper introduces the readers to the rich heritage of the cinema of the Yugoslav space by providing 1) the first study of the representations of religion and the concepts of faith in the early film, and 2) novel approaches in reading religion and history through film. Film is used as a primary rather than supplementary source in historical research on diverse religious and ethnic communities in this part of the Balkan Peninsula. This is the first study that investigates the importance, …

Sembène Ousmane, Un Cinéaste En Guerre, Léthicia Obono Ngou-Milama

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

If he is mobilized, enlisted in the corps of “Senegalese Riflemen” of the French army during the Second World War, the war inflicts a deep wound to Sembène Ousmane. This shocking and traumatic experience will tirelessly inspire his literary and cinematographic work. With his camera and his acerbic gaze, the Senegalese filmmaker will address the tragic fate of African soldiers and will restore the indelible imprint of war and colonialism on Africa in his films Niaye (1964), Emitaï (1971) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988).

Collaborative Constructions: Designing High School History Curriculum With The Lost & Found Game Series, Owen Gottlieb, Shawn Clybor

Articles

This chapter addresses design research and iterative curriculum design for the Lost & Found games series. The Lost & Found card-to-mobile series is set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the twelfth century and focuses on religious laws of the period. The first two games focus on Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a key Jewish law code. A new expansion module which was in development at the time of the fieldwork described in this article that introduces Islamic laws of the period, and a mobile prototype of the initial strategy game has been developed with support National Endowment for the Humanities. The …

Masculinity In American Movie-Musical Films, Christopher Sparks

Fall Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

My presentation explores the relation between American masculinity and film musicals. I demonstrate how the dominance of the musical at the box office in the middle of the 20^th century reflects historical events and technological change. Drawing on both scholarly and popular criticism, I show how the images of masculinity that Americans once encountered on the silver screen have transformed as musicals became marginal to popular culture in the United States. My research considers both classic 20^th century musicals, such as Wizard of Oz (1939) and 42^nd Street (1933), and more recent experiments with the genre, including …

Trauma, History, And Terror In The Poetry Of Yusef Komunyakaa And Sinan Antoon, Reema Binghadeer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Reema Binghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined …

Seeing And Interpreting Visions Of The Next Age In Interstellar, Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) uses multiple styles of cinematography – documentary, painterly and expressionistic – to guide interpretation of its apocalyptic review of history. Within the prologue and epilogue of the science fiction film, clips from interviews originally filmed for Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl (2012) invite questions about how to interpret documentary, revisionist and eschatological reviews of history. Cinematography functions as a self-reflexive cue to spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène to engage in eschatological interpretation. The representation of spectatorship and vision reveals the challenge of interpreting prophetic visions of the last things and the next age, which are …

Age Of Exploitation: Teen Sex Comedy Films Of The 1980s, Thyra Chaney

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

The teen sex comedy film genre is representative of dominant cultural factors which influenced the film industry in the 1980s. Films in this genre have been traditionally described as mindless, dumb, and exploitative. This article seeks to understand the distinction between teen sex comedy and traditional teen films, as well as the social and cultural influences which lead to the development and popularity of the teen sex comedy genre. Teen sex comedies are a document of mainstream society and popular culture in the 1980s.

When Saeed Betrays Fuad: Laughing At The Mechanized Occupation, Ezgi Demirors

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comparatively explores the emergence of the comic in the novel The Secret Life of Saeed The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi and the film The Time That Remains directed by Elia Suleiman, by building on Bergson’s theory of mechanization. By tracing Bergson’s idea that comic effect is created through the creeping up of the mechanical on the living, the establishment of the “mechanical occupation” as a source of the comic will be elucidated. The comic will be explored in terms of the ways in which both texts offer a new historicizing operation, being works that focus on the narration …

Public History: An Effort To Increase Indonesian Historical Consciousness During Covid-19 Pandemi, Abdurakhman Abdurakhman, Syahidah Sumayyah Rahman

International Review of Humanities Studies

The writing of public history has become one of the methods of history that have developed and are in great demand. The difference between history in general and public history is the selection of groups that are used as research sources. Through this research, the author find that public history can be used as a way to raise historical consciousness in Indonesia. Historical Consciousness relates to thinking of ourself in time as historical beings and being aware of belonging to a specific group with a particular history and identity. The current global pandemic presents a challenge for historians. Documenting the …

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story? A Marxist Analysis Of "Hamilton" And Its Relationship To The Broadway Economic System, Alana Ritt

Honors Projects

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s mega-hit Hamilton: An American Musical has been both a critical and academic darling since its premiere in 2015. A historical retelling of America’s inception through the eyes of an oft-ignored founding father, the musical weaves together a diverse cast and hip-hop musical stylings in order to tell the story of “America then, as told by America now.” While many critics and scholars alike have praised the musical for putting an exciting and accessible twist to American history, others have argued that the musical is not nearly as “revolutionary” as it claims to be. This essay is designed to …

Testimony, Narrative, And History: The Plague And Some Issues Of Literature As Testimony, Dongfeng Tao

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Albert Camus's The Plague establishes a mode of“literature as historical testimony”and demonstrates a profound shift in the relationship between history and narrative, and it implies that literature ( narrative) is inevitably embedded in history. Literature as a testimony to the Holocaust does not record the Holocaust but also offers a new perspective to understand it. This actualizes the transformation of history as it changes the nature of historical knowledge. The history in The Plague is written in the mode of an allegory, and it establishes a profound metaphorical relation between the plague and the Holocaust. As both the plague and …

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Screening Southeast Asia: Film, Politics, And The Emergence Of The Nation In Postwar Southeast Asia, Darlene Machell Espena

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Time Machine Research And Approach, Tarek Bouraque

Theses and Dissertations

Time Machine is a hybrid documentary that explores the logics of enslavement, colonialism, eurocentrism and their interconnectedness in our globalized world. Mustapha Azemmouri, born in 1502, undertakes a journey to the 21st century to recount his own story of enslavement and exploration, and reflects on a collective puzzle of 500 years of hidden history.