Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In identifying ways to create inclusive spaces in the classroom, instructors should not be limited by singular modes of discourse to engage students. Particularly when teaching first-year students who seek to invent the university and claim their intellectual space within it, these considerations must be deeply integrated into the course curriculum and not seen as an extended project to be optional or added at the end of a semester. Rather, instructors must find ways to integrate multimodal discourses in the first-year composition course as a foundation of learning.
One way to do this is to engage students in multimodal practices of rhetorical appeals. This dissertation examines the theories and practices of emotional appeal, namely pathos, to construct meaning-making opportunities that transcend gatekeeping endeavors of singular modes of persuasion.
Through the transmission of affect, students can be given the opportunity to affectively respond through various modes of discourse in applying emotional appeal to practices of persuasion.

I examine Donna Barba Higuera’s The Last Cuentista to not only continue discourse on Latinx SF, but also extend it to Latinx Children’s SF. Barba Higuera highlights themes of colonialism and cultural erasure found within SF novels before disrupting them with a Latinx protagonist. She blends Anglo-Western tropes and themes with Latinx folklore and technology, creating a new canon that sees and treats both as important. Her work also allows for a story centered on providing hope in the face of trauma and erasure. I argue Barba Higuera disrupts the themes of racism and erasure in science-fiction and dystopian CYA and instead incorporates Latinx traditions of oral storytelling and Trickster figures with more common tropes found in CYA literature to ground readers in a potential world that is as culturally diverse as our present one.

A collection of stories exploring the intersection of queerness, latinidad, spirituality, and the generational impact of storytelling. This collection aims to examine the relationships between religion, tradition, politics, and the concept of culture as it crosses borders through a fictional mythos. Many of these stories reflect the hopes, desires, and anxieties of young Latinx individuals across the Americas while expanding and evolving the definition of Latin American literature.

Animalization is a creative nonfiction manuscript comprised of essays which are able to stand on their own, yet gain complexity as they inform one another. Each essay epitomizes the narrator’s attempt to reconcile with emotional instability, self-destructive behaviors, dangerous relationships, the ethics of who has to suffer, and a masochistic brain disorder. This manuscript follows its narrator’s young life as she attempts to understand herself through lived experience, as well as the lives of some extroadinary family members. The narrator’s lifelong fascination with animals supports her desire to understand pain as an applied ethical consideration and an enactment.

On August 11, 1868, Thaddeus Stevens died. He left behind him an unfinished and unjust nation. In his 76 years, he attempted to articulate a vision of American society as a raceblind meritocracy where the rights of individual citizens were safeguarded by a state they directed in common regardless of race, class, or gender. This thesis traces the intellectual path Stevens blazed through politics, economics, and religion as he tried to craft a version of American liberalism equal to the fundamental problems of racism and economic inequality exposed by the Civil War, also treating his unorthodox personal and religious lives. It concludes with a survey of radical remembrances and reassessments of Stevens by activists seeking to follow in his footsteps and remold American society between the counter-revolution of 1877 and the appearance of Eric Foner's revisionist opus Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution.

This thesis seeks to explore the misconception that arises when viewing Christianity as the source of enslavement or White supremacy. Focusing specifically on the nineteenth-century Antebellum era, This Thesis investigates the primary texts of Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Fredrick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself—two prominent Christians of their time—to juxtapose the teachings and practices of their captors with the actual Biblical text. This thesis seeks to explore and complicate the common narrative that has falsely implicated Christianity as a tool of oppression.

This thesis, drawn from my experience as a visual designer who recently moved to the United States, focuses on design expression as a means to bridge cultures. My aim is to clarify the complex connection between design expression and cultural integration, emphasizing the essential part that design plays in promoting significant cross-cultural interactions. To reveal the complex relationships that exist in design and cultural identity, I go beyond aesthetics and investigate how design may be used to comprehend and communicate cultural identity. Language serves as a means of expressing cultural identity, values, and traditions. Using poetry, quotes, and idioms in both Farsi and English as inspiration, I create interactive messages that illustrate the difficulties of bridging two languages and cultures. My overarching goal is to promote inclusive and culturally aware design approaches, fostering meaningful communication and cross-cultural understanding.

The purpose of this study is to understand how the relationship between generational cattle ranchers and conservation efforts is changing given rapid development and urbanization within the state of Florida over the past decade. To understand this relationship, the author used participant observation in conjunction with ethnographic interviews to work with ranchers and individuals from the Green Paths Foundation to draw a comprehensive picture of how development has affected ranching and conservation efforts in Florida. With the help of cultural consultants, I was able to make additional connections within the ranching and conservation communities that helped to provide further context to the question being investigated in this thesis and to understand how Florida’s Conservation Corridor mediates between ranchers and conservation imperatives.

This thesis examines the skeletal remains of two disabled adults collected from the Bogoz archaeological site (1100-1700) in Mugeni, Romania. Mugeni (in Hungarian, Bogoz) is home to an ethnic culture known as the Szekely, whose history has been lost (Bethard 2019, p. 254). This thesis conducts a microhistorical bioarchaeology of caregiving behaviors for Burial 13 and Burial 150 to concurrently reinsert disabled individuals into the historical narrative and to contribute to Szekely history.
Four theoretical backgrounds- microhistory, social bioarchaeology, osteobiography, and the Bioarchaeology of Care- are synthesized to organize analysis. First, this thesis documents biological identifiers, pathologies, mortuary treatment, and the physical, socio-cultural, and economic lifeways (Tilley & Schrenk 2017, p. 2). Then, models of care are developed to analyze multiscalar intersectionalities to understand the broader implications of medieval and early modern Transylvania (Peltonen 2001, p. 348; Walton 2008, p. 6). This approach will serve as an example for the continued investigations of care provisions for disabled and/or impaired persons, contributing to the historical narrative (Bethard et al. 2019, p. 267; Hosek 2019, p. 47).

This project examines some of the ethical consequences of posthumous publication of authors' unfinished works, private correspondence, and other materials, with the central example being the extensive catalogue of J.R.R. Tolkien published in the decades after this death by his son Christopher Tolkien. It builds a moral and philosophical framework for understanding the "posthumous harm" that can impact the deceased, for example when the desires they expressed in life are frustrated, or their reputations suffer damage when draft or private materials become public, especially for a wide audience. In the case of J.R.R. Tolkien, his Beowulf translation shows how an author's intentions for a work may actually be to not publish, as doing so contradicts their beliefs and values. Both literary executors and the consumer public that creates a market for such "new works" should more carefully evaluate the posthumous harm that posthumous publication can bring.