History Commons^™

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

Impossible Communities In Prague’S German Gothic: Nationalism, Degeneration, And The Monstrous Feminine In Gustav Meyrink’S Der Golem (1915), Amy Michelle Braun

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation investigates the contribution of Gustav Meyrink’s best-selling novel The Golem/Der Golem (1915) to the second revival of the international Gothic. While previous scholarship suggests that this genre disappeared from the German literary landscape in the 1830s, I interpret The Golem as a Gothic contribution to the “Prague Novel,” a trend in Prague-based, turn-of-the-twentieth-century German-language literature that found inspiration in the heated sociocultural and political tensions that characterized the milieu.

Structured around the demolition of Prague’s former Jewish ghetto under the auspices of the Finis Ghetto plan, a historic Czech-led urban renewal project that leveled the district of Josefov/Josephstadt …

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Re-Writing English Identity: Medieval Historians Of Anglo-Norman Britain, Teresa Marie Lopez

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation uses post-colonial and narrative theories to examine the historiographic tradition of twelfth-century England. This investigation explores the idea of nationhood in pre-modern England and the relationship between history and romance in post-Conquest historical writings. I analyze how Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry of Huntingdon Geffrei Gaimar, and Laʒamon imagine and narrate the explicit changes to the ruling elite in twelfth-century England, and how this process constructs their idea of “Englishness.”

Striving For Salvation : Margaret Anna Cusack, Sainthood, Religious Foundations And Revolution In Ireland, 1829-1899, Sean Heather K. Mcgraw

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Margaret Anna Cusack, later Sister Mary Frances Clare, and also known as Mother Clare, (6 May 1829 - 5 June 1899) was an Anglo-Irish Protestant who became a Catholic Nun and the foundress of a still existent Catholic religious order, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. She was also a vociferous champion for the poor, for Irish political rights, for Irish nationalism, and was the first Irish nationalist woman historian and a prolific writer who wrote more than one hundred works. She was a radical, a revolutionary, a champion and hero, a source of conflict and …

Discovery Of Timbuktu: Geopolitical Rivalries And Myths, Katherine Van Meter

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the exploration and discovery of Timbuktu primarily focusing on the travels and narrative of René Caillié the first European to publish his successful journey to Timbucku in 1828. Timbuktu since the thirteenth century had become a romantic mystery for Europeans and stimulated massive interest in its discovery by major geographical Societies. Through a mixture of primary and secondary sources I am able to analyze the geopolitical rivalries and myths surrounding Timbuktu that would instigate the travels of twenty-five English, fourteen Frenchmen, two Americans and one German which the majority of resulted in death. Examining Caillié’s published narrative …

Sway Of The Ottoman Empire On English Identity In The Long Eighteenth Century, Emily Kugler

Department of English Faculty Publications

Within popular culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the intermingling of Islamic and English Protestant identity was a recurring topic of debate and anxiety in the English cultural imagination. Examining the shifting representations from Early Modern Era to nineteenth-century concepts of race, nation and empire, Sway presents the eighteenth century as a turning point in public perceptions, the moments when English subjects began to believe British imperial power was a reality rather than an aspiration.

Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company And The Construction Of British India, 1757-1857, Nida Sajid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis investigates the discursive strategies employed by the East India Company during the early colonial period to legitimize mercantile imperialism as an act of preservation for the fast-disintegrating political order that was the Mughal empire in India. By arguing that the interrelationship of myth, history and archive was essential to networks of trade and the establishment of political domination, my thesis offers a new reading of the representations of the political debates surrounding the Company’s scandals and imperial ambitions in the English public sphere. It further demonstrates the centrality of the India question in defining the contours of some …

The Problems Of Treason And Tyranny: The Effect Of The Gunpowder Plot On Artistic Expression, Jessica K. Spevak

Summer Research

Most people today probably recognize the term “Gunpowder Plot”. They may know it was some sort of assassination plot against the King of England; they might also have heard that there are bonfires in England every November the 5^th; they might also have seen the numerous movies, poems, and plays dealing with the Plot. However, many do not know how the Plot was perceived in the years immediately following the failed 1605 attempt to blow up Parliament building with King James I inside. How was the Plot perceived by the English people compared to how we perceive it …

Medieval Philology And Nationalism: The British And German Editors Of Thomas Of Erceldoune, Richard Utz

Richard Utz

The reception of the late fourteenth-century romance/lay/ballad Thomas of Erceldoune by romantic enthusiasts, antiquarians, modernist philologists, and twentieth-century medievalists reveals the dangerous indebtedness of a quasi-sciencific medieval philology to competing national paradigmatic constructions (German, English, Scottish) on the one hand and the ongoing foundational value of philological work for current medieval textual scholarship on the other. Thus, while debunking the disinterestedness claimed by modernist philology, the essay attests to the enduring success of philological editorial practice regarding this specific late medieval poem.

The Voice Of The Phi Sigma -- 1937 --, Phi Sigma

The Voice of the Phi Sigma

This item is part of the Phi Sigma collection at the College Archives & Special Collections department of Columbia College Chicago. Contact archives@colum.edu for more information and to view the collection.