Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

Titles of Recent Theses

2020—2023

  • 1619 Or 1776?
  • A Cracker Jack of a Corporation: How Candy Covered Popcorn Influenced America
  • Domination and Justice in the Allegorical Story "La Reunion De Ayer" By Adela Zamudio (1854-1928), Bolivia
  • Performance as Verbatim Data: Predicting Movements of Social Change in the American South Through the Intersection of Applied Theatre and Sociology
  • The Conditions of Exile: Memory, Movement and Trauma in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin

2015—2019

  • Amazon Alexa: An Investigation
  • An Examination of How and Why Divided Political Allegiances Destroyed the German Community in the Mohawk Valley of New York During the Revolutionary War
  • Before, During, After Brown: a Default On Democracy
  • California’s Healthy Soil Program: a Policy History of America’s First Attempt At Carbon Sequestration Through Farming and Ranching
  • Consciousness: Where We Are Now
  • Corporeal Texts: Writing, Bodies, and Identities in Kafka's Short Fiction and Fin-De-Siecle Prague
  • Distorted Consciousness and the Reading Experience in Kafka’s Amerika and The Trial
  • Dreaming of Diaghilev: Dance History Explored Through Three Exhibitions Devoted to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
  • Early Modern Science as an Institutional Project: Insights From Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667)
  • Homer Is Where the Heart Is: Emergence of Character Through Intertextuality in the Similes of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica
  • How Many Mothers Is Too Many Mothers?: Women’s Education, Non-Continuous Mothering, and How the Emergence of Attachment Theory Changed Home Economics
  • Manche Irene Langley (1883-1963): Early Oregon Woman Lawyer and Political Activist With a 'Bachelor’s Soul' Illuminates Conflicts With Gender Roles and Progressive Politics
  • Potato Guns: Farm Wars and the Rise of Agri-Business in the Magic Valley of Southern Idaho
  • Smelter Pollution, Environmental Health, and the Narrative of American Progress in Butte, Montana, 1880-1910
  • The "New" Superhero Film Genre as Cultural Response to Post- 9/11 Political Crises
  • "Words? Music? No, It’s What’s Behind": Communication Affect in Joyce’s Ulysses

2010—2014

  • "A Plausible Witness": Helen of Troy and the Problem of Truth and Representation in Early Greek Literature
  • A Close Reading of Varlam Shalamov's "On Tick" From Kolyma Tales
  • An Abundance of Deficits
  • Anti-Immigration Legislation in Alabama: Comparing House Bill 56 to Jim Crow Segregation
  • Arendt's Empirical Theory of Judgment
  • Bob Moses's Voter Registration Work and the Algebra Project: Organizing to Create Political and Economic Access For All Citizens
  • False Fathers: Marlen Khutsiev's "Ilich's Gate" and the Myth of Soviet Paternity
  • From Banned to Celebrated, Yet Regulated and Segregated: the Struggles of the Female Footballer
  • From the Garden to the Atelier: the History of Eco Fashion in America, 1960-2010
  • How Can Feedback Increase Self-Determined Motivation to Keep Writing?
  • Images of Muteness: a Reading of Anne Carson's "Nox"
  • Labor Unions, Community Organizing, and a Liquor License: William H. Mcclendon's Early Years of Activism in Portland, Oregon, 1938-1955
  • Magazine as World in Miniature: How "S.M.S." Makes Visible the Invisible Frames of Perception
  • Minsky, Behavioral Economics, and the Long Trend Toward the Great Recession
  • Mirrors and the Grotesque in David Altmjed's The Index
  • Muslim Nationalism: Allama Muhammad Iqbal and the Origins of an Ideal
  • Mythological Wine: Australia, Terroir, and Whiteness
  • "Planet of the Apes" and the Destruction of the Earth: Visions of Post-Apocalypse, Eden, Wasteland, and Wilderness
  • Plato's Lost Lecture "On the Good.": Normative Ethics and Intellectual History.
  • Redemption Songs, Rebel Music: Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, and a History of Reggae as Resistance
  • Rethinking the Imperial Archive: the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC) Digital Photographic Archive
  • Selfhood and the Problem of Authenticity: the Politics of the Personal in Rousseau's Second Discourse
  • Small Cabbage and Little Weasel: a Memoir
  • The Cracks Between the Binaries: "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" as a Work of Iconoclasm
  • The Mormon Stories
  • Utopia, Allegory, and Palimpsest: Trajectories of Intercultural Exchange in Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Word For World Is Forest"
  • "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught": Messages of Tolerance in Rodger's and Hammerstein's Broadway Musical "South Pacific"

2005—2009

  • American Frontiers: Historical and Literary Representations of Gauchos and Cowboys
  • And Now, We Look Ahead to the Past: the Specter of Slavery in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Octavia Butler's Kindred
  • Arms of the Sea
  • Character, Content & Context: an Account of Natural Kind Terms and Proper Names
  • Claude Lefort and the Illegitimacy of Modernity
  • Death and Wellbeing: a Reply to the Epicurean Puzzle
  • Documenting Louisiana: Rural and Industrial Photographs of Elemore Morgan 1942-1952
  • Du-Partzufim: Androgyny in Antiquity and Early Midrashic Literature
  • Elevators For Freight and Disabled Only: Making the Case For a Strong Disability Culture in Defining the Disability Experience
  • Engaging Music: the "Ernste Gesänge" of Hanns Eisler and How One Cycle Affects Another
  • Faculty Salary Policies At Small Liberal Arts Colleges: Has Market-Driven Differential Pay Replaced the Equity Principle?
  • Faust in Film and the Persistence of the Romantic Impulse
  • Female Rulers in Aristophanes' "Ecclesiazusae" and Plato's "Republic V"
  • Feminism and the Daughters of the American Revolution: 1890-1920
  • Lecture Versus Nurture: Platonic Eros as an Integral Component of the Teacher/Student Relationship
  • Looking For Homosexuality as 'Disease' in Thomas Mann
  • "Lucifer Joy": Complexities of Tone in Gregory Corso's Poetry
  • Moral Imagination and Compassionate, Just Attention in Iris Murdoch's "The Good Apprentice"
  • Putting the Faust Back in Faustus: Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus" and the Court of the Faust Myth
  • Re-envisoning the Marketplace: a Radical Redesign of the Modern Supermarket
  • Still Unredeemed: On the Centennial of Herbert David Croly's "The Promise of American Life"
  • Storytelling in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy
  • The "Xianglian Run Se": a Late Ming Beauty Manual
  • The Black and Blue Collar Blues: Examining Notions of Labor in Langston Hughes's Poem "Good Morning Revolution"
  • The Domestic Roles of the "Flax Mother of Oregon": Juliette Montague Lord and the Politics of the Oregon Fiber Flax Industry
  • The Language of the Making: Nominative Conflict in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea
  • The Southern Oregon Chautauqua Association: Building the Foundation of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
  • The Winners and Losers of French Agricultural Subsidies
  • The Work of Art in the Age of "Nuclear Enchantment"
  • "These Two Emerge Together But Have Different Names": Chuang-Tzu Meets Nagarjuna in the Excluded Middle
  • Transgressing the Boundaries: South Seas Hybridity in the Work of Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Ursa Minor: an Exploration of the Present Moment, the Personal Essay, and Virginia Woolf
  • Virna Haffer: Regional Artist and Photographer
  • Wrestling Shakespeare: Excerpts From a Novel
  • "You’re So Known to Me": Construction of Lesbian Identity in Two Novels By Gale Wilhelm

2000—2004

  • A Sense of Doubleness in Twentieth Century Literature By Two Jewish American Writers
  • Form of One's Own: a Study of Playwright Maria Irene Fornes Accompanied By an Original Play
  • Furious Feminist: the Riotous Radicalism of Dr. Marie Equi
  • Galileo: His 17th Century Trials and 20th Century Rehabilitation
  • Image and Controversy: Brother Elias and the Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi
  • Inca Garcilaso De La Vega's Incas as Civilizers of the Andes and Quasi-Christians: Defending the Incas Through Reason and Natural Law
  • Industry Competition and Cooperation: Assessments of the Reserve Rule and Player Free Agency in Major League Baseball
  • Not Just Black and White: the Complexities of Race and Femininity in Seventeenth Century English Discourse
  • Observations of Resilience and Defeat in Arthur Runquist's Paintings of Labor and the Land
  • Orphan of the Camus Storm: the Poetics of Bob Kaufman
  • Paracelsus and the Decline of Galenism
  • Pessimism and Enlightenment in the Philosophy of Schopenhauer
  • Queer Ecology: a Theory of Identity and Ecological Ethics
  • Reflections On Violence, Working Through the Past, and the Literature of Post-World War Ii Austria: Adorno and Ingeborg Bachmann's 'Among Murderers and Madmen' and "Malina"
  • Ritual Dance: Primary Social Text
  • The Decline of Wild Salmon and the Industrialization of Aquaculture: How the Trend Toward the Adoption of Transgenics in Aquaculture Threatens Wild Salmon With Extinction
  • The History of the Portland Story: Looking For Native Americans in the Popular Historiography of Portland, Oregon
  • Theaters and the Urban Environment: Portland, Oregon 1880-1910
  • Third Wave Feminism and Rural Maine: an Exploration of an Interdisciplinary Course

1995—1999

  • A Creative Approach: Using Social Psychology Research and Works of Art to Reduce Racism and Sexism
  • Art Criticism and Practice in the Post-Historical Age: a Reading of Arthur C. Danto's "After the End of Art"
  • Beyond "Chromos and Cheap Literalism": C.E.S. Wood's Contribution to the Cultural Life of Early Portland
  • Cultural Identity and Property in Sherman Alexie's "Reservation Blues" and "Indian Killer"
  • Hold My Hand, Lest I Fall: the Salvation Army and Temperance Principles as Lifeline and Roadmap, 1898
  • Interpreting Women's "Privileges" After the Fourteenth Amendment: Ideas, Litigation, and Politics in the "New Departure," 1868-1875
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne Community and the American Novels
  • Negotiations to Mitigate Climate Change: Economic Perspectives and Experience From International Environmental Agreements
  • Red Machine 4.0: Dziga Vertov and the Kino-Eye
  • Rites of Passage and the Autobiography of Malcom X as Told to Alex Haley: Who Writes Whom?—Revolutionizing the Potentialities of Both Self and Text
  • Riverdale High School: an Experiment in Public Education: a Deliberation On the Use of Tuition in Public High Schools
  • Serbian and Slovenian Media Campaigns and the Demise of Yugoslavia
  • The Bean Counter: Three Auto/Biographies in Exploration of a Community
  • The Bridge Between Epic and National Identity: Ivo Andric's "The Bridge On the Drina"
  • The Magic Mountain: an Experience in Time
  • The Right of Privacy, Equality and Women's Reproductive Freedom
  • The Role of Women in "The Grass Dancer": Utopia Or Realism For Sioux Women?
  • Vibroacoustic Technology and Transformation: Parsing the Musical Syntax of Healing
  • Women in the Theater: Euripides' Female Characters in Their 5Th Century Context