PARADIGMS FOR FREEDOM: HALE WOODRUFF, THE NEW NEGRO AGENDA AND LANDSCAPE
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Katherine Manthorne
During the 1920s and 1930s, the painter Hale Woodruff practiced New Negro portraiture and landscape painter. Would he be a "race man" or an individualist that followed his interest in modern landscape, and not a racial art? This dissertation follows Woodruff's career (from 1900 to 1940) as he negotiated the influence of his early mentors (Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois) in his search for an authentic identity.
Paradigms for Freedom: Hale Woodruff, The New Negro Agenda and Landscape
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Katherine Manthorne
The painter Hale Woodruff was the product of New Negro communities in Nashville, Tennessee, and Indianapolis, Indiana. During the 1920s and 1930s, the artist created portraits of New Negro architypes. After visiting France (1927-1927), the artist took a serious interest in painting modernist landscapes. This dissertation examines the artist's navigation of the New Negro ideals of his early mentors (Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White) and his painterly interest in landscape and non-figuration as well as his tenure at Atlana University.
The Role of Homophobia and Gender Role Beliefs in Judgments of Same-Sex Intimate Partner Violence
Year of Dissertation:
2011
The primary purpose of this study was to examine whether straight and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals differ in their perceptions of same-sex and opposite-sex IPV, and whether gender-role beliefs and homophobia can help explain any differences. We were also interested in whether factors such as the type of violence depicted and participants' gender moderated perceptions of intimate partner violence. Using a 2 (type of violence: situational couple violence vs. intimate terrorism) x 2 (gender of batterer: male vs. female) x 2 (gender of victim: male vs. female) between-groups design, 240 straight and 240 LGBT participants were randomly assigned to an experimental condition and asked to read a vignette of a domestic altercation. Participants completed a questionnaire designed to assess how they perceived the batterer's and victim's responsibility for the situation, the seriousness of the situation, how likely the abusive behavior was to reoccur, and how likely the abusive behavior would get worse over time. Participants also completed a demographics survey and measures of gender role beliefs and homophobia / internalized homophobia. Overall, both straight and LGBT participants attributed less blame to batterers and more blame to victims, and perceived the abuse as less serious, when the scenario involved a same-sex couple. However, contrary to our hypotheses, participants' gender role beliefs and homophobia / internalized homophobia did not fully account for these findings. Participants' gender and the type of violence depicted were significant moderators for several of the relationships examined; however, these effects were relatively small and inconsistent. Social, clinical and legal implications of these findings are discussed - along with directions for future research.
Teaching style: an investigation of New York City public high school teacher dress practices
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Advisor:
Nicholas Michelli
In recent decades there has been increasing interest in regulating teacher appearance in the schools. While there is a great deal of anecdotal data available about what dress standards for teachers should be, to the best of the researcher's knowledge no one has undertaken scholarly research to investigate teacher attitudes towards their constructions of self, self-as-teacher, and educational philosophies as expressed by dress practices.
Children's Tolerance of Word-form Variation
Year of Dissertation:
2010
This study compared children's (N=96, mean age 4;1, range 2;8-5;3) and adults' (N=96, mean age 21 years) tolerance of word-onset modifications (e.g., wabbit and warabbit) and pseudo affixes (e.g., kocat and catko) in a label extension task. Trials comprised an introductory phase where children saw a picture of an animal and were told its name, and a test phase where they were shown the same picture along with one of a different animal. For `similar-name' trials, participants heard a word-form modification of the previously introduced name (e.g., introduced to a dib, they were asked, `which animal is a wib?'). For `dissimilar-name' trials, participants heard an entirely new word (e.g., introduced to a dib, they were asked, `which animal is a wuz?'). Specific types of modifications were repeated within each experiment to establish productive inflectional patterns. Across all experiments, children and adults exhibited similar strategies: They were more tolerant of prefixes than onset-modifications involving substitutions of initial consonants, and they were more tolerant of suffixes than prefixes, which may reflect a statistical tendency for inflections to adhere to the ends of words. Additionally, participants parsed novel productive inflections from stems when choosing targets. These findings point to word learning strategies as being flexible and adaptive to morphological patterns in languages.
War Baby: Race, Nation, and Cultural Conceptions of Lesbian Motherhood
Year of Dissertation:
2012
The Interwar period was a time of exaggerated social anxieties about gender, race, class, and sexuality. One of the primary vehicles for expressing this agitation was through a pronatalist cultural focus on maternity that posited women as gatekeepers of racial purity, traditional gender roles who perform a specifically patriotic duty--akin to men's military service--through reproduction. Concurrently, thanks to the ubiquity of Radclyffe Hall's image after the obscenity trial for The Well of Loneliness in 1928, the general public in England and the USA had a visual, collective idea of "the lesbian" for the first time. "The lesbian" was in many ways a foil for the idealized, domestic mother, and three novels from this period that are frequently considered classics of lesbian literature all place a heavy, yet currently under-explored, emphasis on the embattled relationship between lesbianism and maternity: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show (1936), and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929). Despite her notoriety, Hall's novel places a deeply conservative value in women's reproductive capacity; a driving force in the plot is the female invert Stephen Gordon's need to compel her "normal" lover Mary Llewellyn to heterosexual reproduction--to prevent Mary from using lesbianism as contraception--over Mary's protestation. Warner's novel takes a more politically radical stance, tracing its protagonist Sophia Willoughby's disillusionment with white, aristocratic motherhood, ultimately having her reject not just marriage and maternity, but other forms of kinship in order to focus on her personal and solitary process of political radicalization. Larsen's novel focuses on the domestic and racial entrapment of bourgeois marriage and motherhood. Larsen conjoins the paranoia of racial and sexual passing through metaphors of pregnancy; Clare Kendry's paranoia about producing a black baby is recapitulated in Irene Redfield's anxiety about her attraction to Clare. These themes are reinvigorated and retold in contemporary narratives about lesbian mothers. The final chapter focuses on the lesbian television soap The L Word (2004-2009), which problematically posits the lesbian nuclear family as a locus of social protest and, along with gay military service, a primary conduit for fighting institutionalized homophobia.
The Seventeenth-Century Singer's Body: An Instrument of Action
Year of Dissertation:
2009
In the seventeenth century, singers relied both on their voices and movements of their bodies for affective expression. This study investigates the close relationship between the body and voice in the seventeenth century from a variety of viewpoints, both theoretical and practical, offering an interdisciplinary approach to this connection. The work of natural philosophers such as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Hooke, Huygens and Newton demonstrates sight's role as the fundamental sense through which the world was processed and understood during the seventeenth century. In this context, it is imperative to elevate the role of sight in sung performances to a position comparable to that of sound, an idea corroborated by contemporary descriptions of singing by Marino, Monteverdi and Tillet. I reexamine singing manuals and oratory, acting and iconography treatises published during this time--such as Mersenne's Harmonie Universelle, Butler's Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting, Tosi's Opinioni de' cantori antichi e moderni, Le Faucheur's Traitté de l'action de l'orateur, Hobbes's Briefe of the Art of Rhetoricke, Bulwer's Chirologia and Ripa's Iconologia--uncovering a wealth of information on how gestures of the face and hands and postures of the body may be used in song. Medical studies completed in the present and in the seventeenth century, such as Bartholin's Anatomy and Browne's Compleat Treatise of the Muscles, reveal that there are both physiological and psychological connections between the body and voice. The body plays an integral role in vocalization, which suggests that posture, movement and gesture may assist the singer in creating vocal sounds appropriate to the texts and music at hand. This research is applied to three pieces of music written for performance in different contexts: Strozzi's cantata Moralità amorosa (1654), the famous Act II recitative from Lully's Armide (1686) and "Morpheus, Thou Gentle God," a mad song by Daniel Purcell. (1699). A close reading of both music and text suggests that the composers wrote physical movement into these works, providing musical clues regarding the way that singers could manipulate their bodies in sung performances. These readings offer a new methodology for performers and historians seeking to investigate seventeenth-century performance circumstances.
Are Sisters Doing It (All) For Themselves? Elderly Black Women And Healthcare Decision Making
Author:
Carlene Buchanan Turner
Year of Dissertation:
2009
ABSTRACT
Qualitative and Quantitative X-Ray Diffraction Analysis for Forensic Examination of Duct Tapes
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Duct tapes are an increasingly important class of forensic evidence. This research has studied the value of using x-ray diffraction (XRD) to extend the ability of evidence examiners to gain additional information about a duct tape specimen.
Knowledge Ascription and Traditional Epistemology
Year of Dissertation:
2013
The principle thesis of this dissertation is that understanding the psychological factors that underlie epistemic judgment through knowledge ascription is essential for progress in traditional epistemology, and that the tools developed across the cognitive sciences are necessary for collecting accurate evidence concerning the nature of these factors. Chapters are displayed as cumulative proof of concept for this thesis. Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of the role of ascription and ordinary language practices in epistemic arguments. The subsequent sections of the dissertation then present experimental evidence advancing new understanding of the judgments we ordinarily make about knowledge ascription, together with a discussion of how this understanding comes to bear on a series of significant and ongoing debates in contemporary epistemology. Chapter 2 displays evidence for the claim that the ordinary concept of knowledge is factive. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which pragmatic factors like stakes, error salience, or attributor accommodation influence knowledge ascription, and subsequently, the implications these findings have for adjudicating between certain arguments given in support of contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. Chapter 4 gives evidence for a moral component of knowledge attribution, and shows how this effect of normative judgments on epistemic judgments may provide new insight into enduring philosophical puzzles like Gettier problems. Lastly, Chapter 5 surveys recent evidence suggesting that epistemic judgments are prone to performance errors and demographic variation, that may well threaten to undermine a substantial set of epistemic projects unless the empirical study of epistemic intuitions is incorporated into methodological approaches to the study of knowledge. Chapter 6 is a brief conclusion suggesting areas for further study, as well as how applying these new methods may relate to larger research programs in psychology and cognitive science.