While critics have argued that the Gothic moments in Emily Brontèe's Wuthering Heights merely illuminate the psyches of her characters, I show that these moments allow Brontèe to reveal a unique tension and overflow of emotion that arises between her two main protagonists. Blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, these displays --scenes of ghostly hauntings, bloody violence, and excessive emotion--create a desirable uncertainty about the limits of life and love in this novel. This uncertainty constitutes an escape from and an alternative to the conventional romantic relationship prescribed by social and narrative standards in which two people fall in love, get married, have children and die. In my thesis, I argue that the revelation of this desired uncertainty is made possible by Brontèe's use of Gothic devices and could not have been as successfully achieved by any other literary mode.

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court found the execution of juvenile offenders to be unconstitutional, based in part on a "national consensus" against the death penalty for juveniles. The purpose of this project was to demonstrate the flaws in existing methods of measuring public opinion and to determine the correlation between the age of an offender and the sentencing recommendation received. It was the hypothesis of my project that there would not be a statistically significant correlation between the offender's age and sentencing recommendation. To test this hypothesis, I asked 156 Florida Atlantic University students. This method of analysis was considered the best way to accurately determine public sentiment towards the juvenile death penalty, after a thorough review of existing methods revealed significant flaws. My results suggest that there is no correlation between the age of an offender and sentencing recommendations.

The heroine of Charlotte Brontèe's Jane Eyre is torn between her physical desire to remain close to Mr. Rochester and her psychological need for distance from him. Jane's need for distance tends to dominate her desire for closeness, and this internal conflict is reproduced externally in her relationship with Rochester, with Rochester's desire for physical proximity conflicting with Jane's desire for distance. These internal and external power struggles create a healthy sense of tension necessary both to Jane, and to her relationship with Rochester because it prevents either of them from being fully satisfied, and ensures that both remain in a perpetual state of self-inflicted suffering. The suffering these characters impose on themselves and each other is necessary for the preservation of desires, which would be destroyed by fulfillment. Through my reading of the novel we gain a greater understanding of how the pain of unfulfilled desires becomes synonymous with pleasure, and the beneficial role pain, tension and unfulfilled desires plays in the text.

Talin is a ubiquitous, high-molecular-weight, flexible protein that plays a critical role in focal adhesions by activating, as well as connecting, integrins to the actin cytoskeleton. Talin's inactive auto-inhibitory state is speculated to be one of its modes of regulation inside the cell and is achieved through its head-tail interactions. In order to decipher the stability of this interaction, the head domain (residues 206-405) was cloned into a modified pET28m vector while the tail domains (residues 1654-2344 and 2225-2344) were cloned into the pET32a vector to obtain octa-histidine tagged and un-tagged peptide, respectively. Neither co-expression nor pull-down using the His-tagged head domain was successful in purifying a stable head-tail complex. Our results indicate rather weak interactions between the talin head and rod domains and hence, under our experimental conditions, do not lead to a stable auto-inhibitory complex that can be purified for further studies.

In this paper, I ask how members of Japanese society are able to remember naming practices in which some of the traditions are no longer in use. Members of Japanese society perpetuate their collective memory through the utilization of Japanese media to include past and present Japanese name alterations. I explain the reasons behind name alterations, and how knowledge and use of the naming rituals continue through the collective agency of contemporary Japanese media such as anime and manga. Each anime and manga example correlates to past and present naming rituals. Social name alterations occur at birth, genpuku, marriage, and changes in levels of skill. Political alterations occur from hostage exchange or adoption, change in ideologies, occupational change, or the assumption of new roles from a higher-ranking member of society. While members of Japanese society learn naming traditions from daily interactions with other people, media such as anime and manga reinforce expected behavior and customs.

This project examines politicization of the university. Critics have long charged that politics, and specifically identity politics, has infiltrated the classroom via radical professors. Scholars who lament the decline of the western canon claim that a massive wave of new untested works - largely written by women and people of color - have replaced the works of dead white men leaving our students ill-prepared. While most of the scholarship in this area has been written in the area of English literature departments, this project focuses on the field of Hispanic Literature. If identity politics has challenged the canon in the university, it is expected that within identity-based disciplines the infiltration of politics should be substantial. To test the politicization of the university, I examined 38 Hispanic Literature survey courses from a variety of American universities. I found a high degree of consistency among these syllabi and concluded that critics of the university have in many cases overstated their case. However, the results to suggest that changes are taking place in regards to the inclusion of more diverse authors in the curriculum, though not a complete take over as suggest numerous critics.

This project examines politicization of the university. Critics have long charged that politics, and specifically identity politics, has infiltrated the classroom via radical professors. Scholars who lament the decline of the western canon claim that a massive wave of new untested works - largely written by women and people of color - have replaced the works of dead white men leaving our students ill-prepared. While most of the scholarship in this area has been written in the area of English literature departments, this project focuses on the field of Hispanic Literature. If identity politics has challenged the canon in the university, it is expected that within identity-based disciplines the infiltration of politics should be substantial. To test the politicization of the university, I examined 38 Hispanic Literature survey courses from a variety of American universities. I found a high degree of consistency among these syllabi and concluded that critics of the university have at best overstated their case.

The purpose of this paper is to break through the complexity of the NAFTA negotiations in order to reveal some of the contentious issues from three stages of the NAFTA bargaining process: the fast track agreement, the negotiations under President Bush, Sr., and the side payments under President Clinton. Putnam's two-level game theory will help describe how the interests of business, environmental groups, and labor unions influenced the outcome of the NAFTA through their respective win-sets, domestic and international power relations, and side agreements. Extrapolating from Putnam's model and the success in NAFTA bargaining, we can predict that the ongoing Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations are more likely to succeed if international representatives strategize to create favorable conditions for domestic ratification through understanding the domestic constituencies and win-sets of the players.