Intellectual History Commons^™

Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo

Theses and Dissertations

A study analyzing the roles of rationality, parapsychology, and artificial intelligence in military and intelligence research by the United States Government in the Cold War. An examination of the methodology behind the decisions to pursue research in two fields that were initially considered irrational.

History In Collaboration: Equalizing The Arts And The Humanities In San Francisco, Nicole C. Meldahl

Master's Projects and Capstones

Historically, there has been a critical imbalance in the way history and preservation organizations are civically supported in comparison with the amount of funding that is available to arts organizations in the United States. To correct this imbalance in San Francisco, I propose the creation of a San Francisco Department of Culture that would place the San Francisco Arts Commission equally alongside a San Francisco History Commission within a department that absorbs responsibilities currently managed by other divisions with in city government, such as the Planning Department and the Office and Economic and Workforce Development. City government necessarily takes time …

The Prince And The Prophet Of Florence: Investigating The Impact Of Savonarola's Anthropology On The Political Philosophy Of Machiavelli, Mikah Sauskojus

Senior Honors Theses

This study seeks to investigate a connection between the political thought of Machiavelli and the philosophy prevalent in the work of Girolamo Savonarola. In this consideration, it will be necessary to examine the works of Savonarola. After considering Savonarola, the study focuses on Machiavelli and apparent similarities between the two men’s writings. In addition to cross-referencing Machiavelli and Savonarola, it is necessary to cross-reference the work of Machiavelli with other humanist sources to determine whether or not Machiavelli’s alternative perspectives of human nature can be synthesized into the larger context of the scholarship of his day. For this purpose, the …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Interpretations Of Revolution In Partitioned Poland, Jonathan Dean

Research Papers

The nineteenth century was a time of chaotic politics in Europe, a time that saw Poland broken into pieces and partitioned out to its neighbors. This article examines three different works on Polish history, using their authors' contexts to illustrate how the partitioning of Poland has been interpreted by historians throughout time, and how the status of Poland at the time these histories were written affects that interpretation.

The French Revolution In The French-Algerian War (1954-1962): Historical Analogy And The Limits Of French Historical Reason, Timothy Scott Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the use of the French Revolution as an explanatory device for discussing the French-Algerian War (1954-1962). Anticolonial intellectuals in France invoked the French Revolution to explain their reasons for supporting colonial reform as well as their solidarity with Algerian nationalist aims. Through an examination of intellectuals’ public interventions alongside French and Algerian historical narratives, I examine the ways in which historical alignment signaled political and cultural distance between France and Algeria. Making an independent Algeria analogous to eighteenth-century revolutionary France lent political and conceptual legitimacy to Algerian claims to an independent national identity while also reinforcing the …

The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11^th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …

Edwin Fischer And Bach Performance Practice Of The Weimar Republic, Bradley V. Brookshire

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Edwin Fischer (1886-1960) provided a synthesis of approaches to Bach pianism that resolved dialectical tensions of long standing between schools that opposed one another throughout the nineteenth century. I argue that Fischer’s synthesis––which permits exegetical interpretation while maintaining a preservationist stance toward the integrity of the text––resembles both Felix Mendelssohn’s bifurcated approach to Bach’s music and Moses Mendelssohn’s description of a similar duality within modern Judaism. Such resemblance may not be coincidental or superficial, given that Fischer married into the Mendelssohn family at the height of its cultural influence in Weimar-Era Berlin. Although pieces of the Mendelssohnian construct were in …

Contributors To Indian Catholicism: Interventions And Imaginings, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Contributors to Indian Catholicism: Interventions and Imaginings, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism.

Authority, Representation, And Offense: Dalit Catholics, Foot Washing, And The Study Of Global Catholicism, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

In reflecting on a sharp scholarly exchange at a conference, this article explores issues of authority, representation, and offense in global Catholic and South Asian Studies. Focusing on the act of foot washing by Dalit Catholics, the article examines how scholarly offense is linked to particular claims of representational authority. The article also puts this discussion within the context of contemporary debates about Western portrayals of Indian culture and society.

The Tying Of The Ceremonial Wedding Thread: A Feminist Analysis Of “Ritual” And “Tradition” Among Syro-Malabar Catholics In India, Sonja Thomas

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article presents a feminist analysis of patriarchy persisting in Catholicism of the Syro-Malabar rite in Kerala. The article specifically considers the impact of charismatic Catholicism on women of the Syro-Malabar rite and argues that it is important to interrogate this new face of religiosity in order to fully understand how certain rituals are allowed to change and be fluid, while others, especially concerning female sexuality, are enshrined as “tradition” which often restricts the parameters for women’s empowerment and may reinforce caste and patriarchal hegemonies preventing feminist solidarity across different religious- and caste-based groups.

Dalit Catholic Home Shrines In A North Indian Village, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines three Catholic home shrines in a Dalit community in North Indian and argues that it is misleading to think that home shrines and other collections of material objects are somehow static conveyors of meaning. “Meaning” can mean many things or nothing at all, depending upon the terms we are using and the scholarly methods we deploy. The crucial aspect of Dalit Catholic home shrines is that they are literally open to interpretation and reinterpretation, to touching and being touched. Their significance—their meaning—depends not on decoding their structure or symbolic logic, but interacting with them as part of …

The Grace Of God And The Travails Of Contemporary Indian Catholicism, Kerry P. C. San Chirico

Journal of Global Catholicism

This essay discusses the challenges faced by Indian Catholicism, particularly as it seeks to adapt to and in contemporary, post-colonial India through the process or program of what is called inculturation, a self-conscious program of adaptation to Indian religion and culture. Since Indian Catholicism is constituted by so many irreducible persons-in-relation, the article focuses on the life of the Catholic priest, Swami Ishwar Prasad in whose life we may chart something of the inculturation movement and the Catholic tradition as it is found in North India region, in one rather long and rich lifetime connecting two centuries. The article seeks …

In Continuity With The Past: Indigenous Environmentalism And Indian Christian Visions Of Flora, James Ponniah

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article considers whether Indian Christianity can be said to have a distinctive ecological vision. The first two parts of the article examine Christian environmentalism in two native forms of Indian Christianity: Tamil Christianity and Tribal Christianity. Continuing with the theme of conformity to the local culture—though of the elite—the third part of the article investigates how Christian Ashrams function as dynamic centers for ecological praxis. The last part of the article considers how contemporary Indian Christian communities can respond to the ecological challenges confronting them.

Antoniyar Kōvil: Hindu-Catholic Identity At The St. Anthony Shrine In St. Mary’S Co-Cathedral, Chennai, Pj Johnston

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article combines ethnographic description of the practices of Hindu and Christian visitors of the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai with the observation that this material cannot be understood using the standard world religions paradigm that essentializes Christianity as exclusivistic. Drawing upon the visual and material culture of the shrine in light of premodern and Vatican II templates for inculturation and the negotiation of religious difference, the article highlights overlap between Tamil Hinduism and the Tamil Popular Catholicism of the site to argue that the beliefs and practices documented should inform descriptive and normative accounts of Catholic Christianity. Because Tamil …

Pharaonic Occultism: The Relationship Of Esotericism And Egyptology, 1875–1930, Kevin Todd Mclaren

Master's Theses

The purpose of this work is to explore the interactions between occultism and scholarly Egyptology from 1875 to 1930. Within this timeframe, numerous esoteric groups formed that centered their ideologies on conceptions of ancient Egyptian knowledge. In order to legitimize their belief systems based on ancient Egyptian wisdom, esotericists attempted to become authoritative figures on Egypt. This process heavily impacted Western intellectualism not only because occult conceptions of Egypt became increasingly popular, but also because esotericists intruded into academia or attempted to overshadow it. In turn, esotericists and Egyptologists both utilized the influx of new information from Egyptological studies to …

Virgil In Virginia: Eighteenth-Century Pastoralism And The Novus Ordo Seclorum, Alley Jordan

Theses

This work examines classical reception in early America. Specifically, it addresses the role of classical ideas on pastoralism in the thought of one of America’s founders, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is best known for his role in the forming of United States government, but he was also influential on developing the idea of “America.” As such, his political theory on agrarian republicanism has strong ties to how the classical poets, such as Virgil and Theocritus, likewise thought about the relationship between land and government.

Rethinking Greece: Despina Lalaki On Hellenism, State-Building, Archaeology And The "Democratic West", Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

History Of Visual Communication Design: The Bezelel Academy Of Art, Jerusalem, Shayna Tova Blum

Faculty and Staff Publications

Supported by the modern European Zionist movement, the Bezelel Academy of Art, Jerusalem, was founded in 1906 by Lithuanian artist and Zionist Boris Schatz. In the early years of the academy, work produced by students exhibited the political complexities presented in the Jewish return to Eretz Israel. The expression of concepts addressed in modern Jewish identity and Zionist ideologies were utilized in creative processes of visual communication and design. As most faculty and students were immigrating to Mandatory Palestine from Europe, the academy’s curriculum was developed through the culmination of styles and materials reflective of both European art and design …

Our Lady, Queen Of Undecidable Propositions, Hugh C. Culik

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Boundary systems take many forms: personal, historical, mathematical, and in the case of an elderly Jesuit and a young mathematician, a struggle to identify the larger boundary that both connects them and provides their separate identities. Their ragged conversation is couched in a pastiche of historical, popular, and personal notions of mathematics; however their language is simultaneously natural and mathematical so that it points to the irremediable gaps that the multitude of our languages attempt to "solve." Father McMann pages through his list of such incommensurables: female/male, young/old, parabola/limit, rational/surd and “all the other 88 asynchronies that plagued his dreams …

Western Classics In Modern Japan (German), Frank Jacob

Publications and Research

A presentation paper (invited guest lecture) delivered at the Institute of Ancient History at Marburg University, Germany, July 12, 2016.

Per Axel Rydberg’S Botanical Collecting Trips To Western Nebraska In 1890 And 1891, Robert B. Kaul, David M. Sutherland

Zea E-Books Collection

In the summer of 1891, Per Axel Rydberg and his assistant, Julius Hjalmar Flodman, collected plants in western Nebraska for the United States Department of Agriculture. They collected many first-records for Nebraska as well as some that became type specimens of Rydberg’s and other botanists’ names. In the following autumn and winter, Rydberg made a detailed, typewritten, carbon copied 35-page Report and 37-page List of specimens from that trip; one carbon copy is in the Bessey Herbarium (NEB) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. It is these documents that we present here, extensively annotated with our geographic clarifications, original and updated …

Unconfessing Transgender: Dysphoric Youths And The Medicalization Of Madness In John Gower’S “Tale Of Iphis And Ianthe”, M W. Bychowski

Accessus

On the brink of the twenty-first century, Judith Butler argues in “Undiagnosing Gender” that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defines the psychiatric condition of “Gender Identity Disorder” (or “Gender Dysphoria”) in ways that control biological diversity and construct “transgender” as a marginalized identity. By turning the study of gender away from vulnerable individuals and towards the broader systems of power, Butler works to liberate bodies from the medical mechanisms managing difference and precluding potentially disruptive innovations in forms of life and embodiment by creating categories of gender and disability.

Turning to the brink of the 15 …

Ambroise Kom : Ce Que S’Indigner Veut Dire. Notes Provisoires Sur Une Figure De La Résistance, Valentin Siméon Zinga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The purpose of this contribution is to gauge the originality, consistency and coherence of the approaches that underpin the specificity of Ambroise Kom’s intellectual trajectory. Thus, it questions the theoretical basis of this posture, by examining the articulation of his theoretical positions and his praxis. Drawing, among other benchmarks, on the experience of the Université des Montagnes in Cameroon, the study establishes that beyond the prevailing taxonomies, the academic escapes the fixity that would otherwise sever his deployment from a decisive part of his approach.

The Evolution Of Cryptology, Gwendolyn Rae Souza

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

We live in an age when our most private information is becoming exceedingly difficult to keep private. Cryptology allows for the creation of encryptive barriers that protect this information. Though the information is protected, it is not entirely inaccessible. A recipient may be able to access the information by decoding the message. This possible threat has encouraged cryptologists to evolve and complicate their encrypting methods so that future information can remain safe and become more difficult to decode. There are various methods of encryption that demonstrate how cryptology continues to evolve through time. These methods revolve around different areas of …

Peasant Revolts As Anti-Authoritarian Archetypes For Radical Buddhism In Modern Japan, James Mark Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

The late Meiji period (1868-1912) witnessed the birth of various forms of “progressive” and “radical” Buddhism both within and beyond traditional Japanese Buddhist institutions. This paper examines several historical precedents for “Buddhist revolution” in East Asian—and particularly Japanese—peasant rebellions of the early modern period. I argue that these rebellions, or at least the received narratives of such, provided significant “root paradigms” for the thought and practice of early Buddhist socialists and radical Buddhists of early twentieth century Japan. Even if these narratives ended in “failure”—as, indeed, they often did—they can be understood as examples of what James White calls “expressionistic …

How Liberal Korean And Taiwanese Textbooks Portray Their Countries’ “Economic Miracles”, Frances Chan

Student Work

A 2015-2016 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Frances Chan (Timothy Dwight College '16) for her essay submitted to the Department of History, “How Liberal Korean and Taiwanese Textbooks Portray their Countries’ “Economic Miracles”.” (Peter C. Perdue, Professor of History, advisor.)

Frances Chan’s essay “How Liberal Korean and Taiwanese Textbooks Portray their Countries’ “Economic Miracles,” is a fascinating exploration of the creation of historical memory as seen in textbooks on the history of postwar economic development in Korea and Taiwan. Drawing on her remarkable linguistic skills in both Korean and …

Adam Smith For Our Time, I: Necroeconomics, Patrick G. Scott

Studies in Scottish Literature

Reviews a wide-ranging new American study of the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith (1723-1790), examining its treatment of Smith as critic and rhetorical theorist, as well as of his better-known writings on moral philosophy in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and economic theory in The Wealth of Nations (1776), and discusses briefly the value for Scottish cultural history of interpretative practices developed originally in other national traditions, concluding that the book is "important for scholars of 18^th century Scottish literature... because it approaches Smith’s work through disciplinary practices that are common enough in other literary fields but …

‘Our Responsibility And Privilege To Fight Freedom’S Fight’: Neoconservatism, The Project For The New American Century, And The Making Of The Invasion Of Iraq In 2003, Daniel D. Mccoy

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative Washington, D.C. foreign policy think tank, comprised of seasoned foreign policy stalwarts who had served multiple presidential administrations as well as outside-the-beltway defense contractors, that was founded in 1997 by William Kristol, editor of the conservative political magazine The Weekly Standard, and Robert Kagan, a foreign policy analyst and political commentator currently at the Brookings Institution. The PNAC would shut down its operations in 2006. Using The Weekly Standard as its mouthpiece, the PNAC helped foment support for the removal of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein beginning in 1998, …

“Art Had Almost Left Them:” Les Cenelles Society Of Arts And Letters, The Dillard Project, And The Legacy Of Afro-Creole Arts In New Orleans, Derek Wood

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In 1942, in New Orleans a group of intellectual and artistic African-Americans, led by Marcus B. Christian, formed an art club named Les Cenelles Society of Arts and Letters. Les Cenelles members both looked to New Orleans’s Afro-Creole population as the pinnacle of African American artistic achievements and used their example as a model for artists who sought to effect social change. Many of the members of Les Cenelles wrote for the Louisiana Federal Writers’ Program (FWP). A key strategy the members of Les Cenelles used to accomplish their goals was gaining the support of white civic leaders, in particular …