In their respective novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and
Passing (1929), both Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen utilize racial
passing, the process of a mixed-race individual living as "white," to
explore the relations between black and white people during early-twentieth century America. This thesis specifically argues that
Chesnutt...
This thesis is arranged in three main chapters, each of which focuses on a particular type of Anaїs Nin text, and each of which is intended to enlarge Nin's complexities through distinct but overlapping perspectives. The idea connecting these three chapters is that Nin, who has been radically misrepresented by...
Haiti's political and economy history has led to a maternity care system that lies out of reach, geographically and financially, of most Haitians, resulting in excessively high maternal and infant mortality. The most common birth practitioners are homebirth midwives (matwòns), who attend roughly three-fourths of all births in Haiti (UNICEF),...
In her 2016 article “Beyond Rights as Recognition, Black Twitter and Posthuman Coalitional Possibilities,” Pritha Prasad argues that the hashtag, one of the decade’s most omnipresent features of digital communication, functions as “a performative composing medium that not only demands relationality” and “call[s] for the recognition of both the Black...
The sudden and unexpected death of a seemingly healthy infant sets in motion a number of linked processes with potentially complex and far-reaching ramifications. While individuals, families and communities grapple with the shock and heartbreak associated with the loss of a young life, a chain of multidisciplinary investigative responsibilities is...
Recent demographic studies have revealed a greater diversity in settlement patterns among Mexican immigrant families resulting in rapidly climbing populations of immigrants in new areas of the country, particularly in rural areas, while growth in established destinations has slowed. Host communities play an important role in families' acculturation processes and...
Recent scientific studies show that framing climate change as a health issue rather than an environmental issue were more persuasive with American audience members (Maibach et. al., 2010; Maibach et. al. 2014). Also in 2014, a survey on respiratory healthcare providers and found that a large percentage believed that climate...
The purpose of this study was to identify and examine risk and protective factors associated with residential instability within a sample of rural low-income mothers. Residential instability was defined as two or more residential moves within the course of a year. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to compare residentially...
A light and electron microscope study of Corylus avellana L.
vegetative buds infested with the eriophyoid mites, Cecidiophyopsis
vermiformis Nal. and Phycoptella avellanae Nal., is reported. Descriptions
are given of changes in infested stipule tissue. The
nipple-like proliferations (enations) which arise on the infested
stipule surface are covered by a...
This thesis examines the characterization of the femme fatale and the implications of this trope for late-Victorian gender and sexuality in the ghost stories of female aesthete Vernon Lee. In her treatment of the femme fatale figure, Lee both reinforces and complicates the image of the sexualized, often bestialized woman...
Within the U.S. there is a growing interest in the case of female adolescents being coerced into the sex industry (Bernstein, 2010; Estes & Weiner, 2001; Soderlund, 2010; Williams and Frederick, 2009). This interest, which emerged due to U.S. involvement in the international trafficking phenomena and grassroots organizing, has resulted...
This research explores the experiences of Iraqi women during and after the 2003 U.S.-led war (2003-2011). The aim of the project was to provide an occasion for a group of Iraqi women to give voice to their lived experiences of war and to document these voices, adding their subjective perspectives...
This thesis examines two cultural productions of the Harlem Renaissance: Aaron Douglas's mural series, Aspects of Negro Life, and Nella Larsen's novel Passing. I read these works together because, more than their shared time period, they showcase an attention to the visual. Both Larsen and Douglas's works are concerned with...
School is a hostile environment for many LGBTQ youth. Teachers participate, consciously or unconsciously, in perpetuating oppressive heteronormative expectations in the classroom both through the overt and covert curriculum. Yet, pre-service teachers are under-trained about questions related to gender and sexuality during their teacher preparation. This qualitative study explores the...
This research is an exploration of empathy in the classroom from the standpoint of how instructors experience it and understand themselves to communicate it to their students, particularly students from different cultural backgrounds. The research method used was ethnographic analysis of a classroom observation and a one-hour semi-structured interview with...
This study examined the social and contextual factors that lead to differences in
the way biracial adolescents interpret their racial identity. Using 11 interviews with a sample of biracial youth between the ages of 14 and 17-years-old, this study also explores
the strategies these individuals use to achieve social validation...
Over two million people experience homelessness in the United States, but homeless people are often marginalized by invisibility and stigmas surrounding poverty within their local communities. This research seeks to amplify the voices of Corvallis area homeless women as a means to understand their everyday lived experiences. Six women residing...
This thesis examines the representation of consumer culture in Fight Club within the context of Frederic Jameson's theory of postmodernism. I propose that the film represents consumer culture as a totalizing system. This representation is evident in the setting of the film and in the Narrator's attempt to escape from...
Despite apparently supportive national policies, including nation-wide legalization of home birth and coverage by the national health care system of the costs associated with that option, these births account for less than 1% of all births in the Republic of Ireland. Using data collected during participant observation, both in person...
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a multimodal adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, released from 2012-2013. As a media event, the show proved how effective transmedia storytelling can be, eventually winning an Emmy for Original Interactive Program. In creating an intensely immediate narrative world, the series adapted more than Jane Austen’s...
This paper focuses on Satan as a sympathetic figure in Paradise Lost, and it argues that readers' sympathy for Satan drives them to pursue God's grace in order to avoid falling into the same fate as Satan. It uses Reader Response theory to show how readers connect with Satan, and...
The Syrian civil war generated waves of refugees who flow into neighboring countries. These refugees have been creating excess supply of labor in host countries. This study involves a series of interviews in which respondents shared their perceptions of their involvement in the labor market in Iraq. These interviews provide...
This thesis examines depictions of medievalism in three central texts: Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Each of these texts provides an entry point for exploring the ways in which English and American writers have...
Recent conflicts in America concerning the environment (the harvesting of old growth timber in the Pacific Northwest, or the proposed opening of public lands in southern Utah to mining interests, for instance) have precipitated a personal examination of "historical others" (Jensen 64), individuals that possess very different sensibilities from a...
Recent changes in the historiography of American Transcendentalism
have inspired a reappraisal of the relationship between the Transcendentalist
movement in New England and the pietistic wing of the Unitarian church. This
thesis explores this reappraisal through a close reading of selected writings by
Henry Ware Jr. in juxtaposition to the...
Being an Eastern Shawnee Tribal member I understand the importance of documenting oral histories of Tribal elders to ensure that our cultural history is passed on to future generations. Therefore, the focus of this project is the collection, of oral histories and folklore in order to document traditional knowledge and...
Substantial research has shown deficits in the quality of end-of-life care in the U.S. In response to evidence of these deficits, efforts have been made to improve quality of end-of-life care. One approach has been to ask the question, "What is a good death?" Data on views of a good...
Gothic literary works are characterized as such by their ability to represent and evoke terror. The form this representation takes is varied; often terror originates in the atmospheric effects of settings, in the appearance of mysterious, supposedly supernatural phenomena, and, perhaps most significantly, in the behavior of villainous characters. Shakespearean...
Implementation of. the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of
1976 affords opportunities for fishery expansion and economic development
in the Oregon otter trawl fishery. The changes stimulated by the
Act should occur, according to social science theorists, by the
diffusion of innovations from innovative fishermen to less innovative
fishermen, with...
Tennyson and Hopkins scholarship is dominated by a focus on antithetical dichotomies. Tennyson's speakers are fractured selves focused on the gap between matter and spirit, faith and reason, solitude and community. Likewise, Hopkins' doubled vocation as priest and poet is presented as a contradiction to the point that the transition...
This thesis undertakes an examination of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, as a layering of genres. A futuristic dystopia that imagines late twentieth-century America as having fallen into neo-Puritanism and totalitarianism following widespread infertility and violence, The Handmaid’s Tale invites contemplation of various forms of fundamentalism, radicalism, and...
This research addresses the relationship between television
programming and body image. It specifically investigates what the Music
Television network's (MTV) dance show, "The Grind," communicates
about female body image. Two studies were conducted. Study one used
seven coders from a western United States high school to record female
body images...
The purpose of this study was to document vegetation on "The Island", a
Research Natural Area at the confluence of the Crooked River and the Deschutes River in
central Oregon's Juniperus occidentalis Zone and to compare the results with an earlier
study reported in 1964 from 1960-'61 data. Present-day comparisons...
My thesis explores the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth as emblematic of Western philosophy and literature's longstanding preoccupation with the relationship between mind and matter. The poets' attempts to mediate their languages and sensibilities with "real nature" have a complicated legacy for today's readers, as Romantic literature...
This thesis traces the relationship between the First World War, constructions of masculinity, and the life and poetry of T.S. Eliot. Central to this relationship is a study of homoeroticism, which the author characterizes as different from homosexuality but not exclusive of it, in late 19th and early 20th century...
There is a fundamental distortion in our understanding of Native people, especially Native women. This distortion is rooted in imperialism and the colonization of Native lands and has created a dominant/subordinate relationship between Non-Native/Native people. Anthropological life history research has traditionally reflected this relationship. As a Native woman, the author...
Research shows that women's lives are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change. While the topic of women is largely absent from climate discourse overall, the representations of women that occur reveal underlying structures of power rooted in imperialism and colonial dominance. This thesis presents an analysis of the...
France's universalistic idea of citizenry has been complicated by a history of colonialism, racialization, and selective acceptance of difference. Although Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood) is France's motto, the consequences of colonial rule continue to impact the lives of non-autochthonous French citizens today. Since the colonial days, immigrants and...
Similar to other spectacular scenic areas in the American West, Idaho’s White Cloud Mountains have been a contested landscape since the beginning of the 20th century. Although, legislation was introduced in Congress as early as 1913 to protect the towering mountains of south-central Idaho as a national park, the issue...
Following a history of tensions surrounding concubinage in medieval and early modern Spain, the Church sought greater control of religious life, particularly over the sacrament of marriage, via the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The Church exercised its strengthened restrictions and prosecuted these relationships with more frequency, as did civil...
This thesis explores the evolving purposes for the teaching of first-year English composition in Belize. Starting from an analysis of the underlying cultural assumptions of U.S. composition pedagogies, this thesis argues that American composition pedagogies need to be rethought when applied in a Belizean context to fulfill the country's unique...
Traditional interpretations of James Joyce's Dubliners have often focused on the pervasive "paralysis" of the city, covered in the stories' range of "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life." However, these approaches have limited their focus on the women in the stories, often spotlighting the male characters--and the author--through a Freudian...
Caribbean women authors, in an attempt to reclaim their voices lost to patriarchy and colonialism, are creating a new literary tradition by expanding the boundaries of the Bildungsroman genre. Many have challenged the conservative male Bildungsroman's deeply entrenched gender bias where female transcendence was impossible due to cultural prescriptions that...
This thesis examines the postmodern confrontation of representation throughout the oeuvre of Martin McDonagh. I particularly look to his later body of work, which directly and self-reflexively confronts issues of artistic representation & masculinity, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of his earliest and most controversial plays. In...
In India, globalized flows of bio-medical discourse, practices and technologies are reshaping the field of reproductive healthcare, and the performance of childbirth more specifically. These projects aim to produce institutional delivery rooms that are "safe and modernized" by equating the utilization of westernized, obstetric techniques for managing delivery with better...
Nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) owners control a significant portion of forestland nationwide. Even though women own or manage NIPF lands, we know very little about how women manage forestland and what barriers women face in forest management. In addition, while there are several forestry organizations available to NIPF owners, few...
This thesis focuses on the application of the cosmogenic nuclide Beryllium-10 (10Be) in an effort to better constrain the thickness history of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet (FIS) at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and into the Holocene, as well as begin to answer the long-standing question regarding the age
and...