GLS Symposium 2015

Capitalizing on an Image: Queen Elizabeth I's Influence on the Lives and Works of Anne Bradstreet and Aphra Behn
In this presentation I utilize the disciplines of history, comparative literature, and women's studies to explore how seventeenth century women authors' lives and works, in both England and America, were impacted by and reflected their social surroundings. My work focuses on the authors Anne Bradstreet and Aphra Behn, and examines how Queen Elizabeth I's decision to rule independently and write her own speeches influenced the lives and works of these two women.

The Female Orphan Archetype in Anne of Green Gables: Beauty, Imagination & Community
Modern individuals' facility with imagination, more often than not, lies dormant. The orphan Anne Shirley of Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel Anne of Green Gables is an example of how to cultivate imagination. A healthy imagination is necessary for experiencing the true beauty in the world, which lies in the interconnections between things. Only with a healthy imagination can this web of "betweeness," as it is described in Celtic thought, become visible. Imagination thus becomes the basis for forming true community.

Men Feel Patriarchy is Still Influencing the Sexes
This presentation will take a transdisciplinary look at how patriarchy, as the long running social system that subordinates women to men, still defines men's and women's identities in the United States. Men as breadwinners and women as dependent housewives perpetuate ancient patriarchy's sex roles in today's culture. From the perspective of men working for liberation from the life-draining role as breadwinner, this presentation will use transdisciplinarity to gain a better understanding of men's flight from commitment.

Attenuation of Japanese Identity: A Rise to Terrorism
Murakami, Haruki, through his novels 1Q84 (2009) and Kafka on the Shore (2002), does his best to relate why incidents of terrorism arose in Japan. His book Underground (1997), a nonfiction of testimonies and interviews, gives a sense of what has transcended upon the victims. Japan, in a post-World War II state of identity crisis, forsakes tradition in favor of a Westernized society. Murakami's works point to this Westernization, giving terrorism a place to surrogate tradition.

Visual Culture & Violence
Violence is a distinct form of propaganda. The resounding nature of violence elicits complex layers of understanding from its viewer who is forced to draw reference from the visual form in order to discover the underlying truth/significance of a specific work of art. The fundamental idea of violence therefore lays in the process of change whereby the intersection of political, economic, religious, social, and intellectual dimensions give rise to the volatile act of reshaping an individual, culture, or society.

What Happened when Anna Jumped out the Window: The Domestic Slave Trade in Antebellum Washington, D.C.
The enslaved woman known as Anna awakened at daybreak in November 1815 and jumped from the third floor window of the Washington, D.C. tavern where she was being held. She miraculously survived her "frantic act." The publicity that followed turned the slave pens and taverns in the capital city inside out, exposing the multiple ironies of a thriving domestic slave trade in the capital of a republic founded on principles of equality and liberty.

Edith Wharton - Rethinking Race in the House of Mirth.
In 1905 Edith Wharton published the The House of Mirth. In the novel she captures the contemporary attitude towards social mobility and race through the character of Simon Rosedale. Much has been made of Wharton's seemingly anti-Semitic depiction of Rosedale. However, is it possible that she uses his Jewishness to illustrate deeper problems such as the economic issues and social hypocrisies on her strata of New York society? This presentation attempts to answer these questions.

Remembering the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 in Light of the Agricultural Crisis of the 20s
Many economists today remember Smoot-Hawley as a paradigm moment for modern world trade, which affirmed current economic norms, such as the World Trade Organization. But I will argue that the Agricultural crisis of the 20s, which was precipitated by a shift towards big and laissez-fair (hands off) policy, questions the popular narrative some influential economists and politicians command regarding the bill's history.

Ten Years Gone: Hurricane Katrina and the Late September Dogs in the City that Care Forgot
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina became one of the most deadly and costly hurricanes in United States history. My account of events as an animal rescue volunteer immediately following the storm is emphasized through the collection and examination of oral narratives and personal experiences. My analysis emphasizes the important role of the New Orleans region's celebration of its historical folklore in these narratives, and draws conclusions about the common experiences of animals and humans before, during and after Hurricane Katrina.

The Experience of ātman; How the Manifestation of Brahman Perceives the Corporeal World
This paper was written as an exploration of the Brhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad. The essay puts one section of the Upaniṣad in conversation with Vedic theology as well as contemporary notions of conscious and unconscious experience. Working through the dialogue between  Yājñavalkya and Janaka of Videha in Chapter 4, I endeavor to follow the experience of ātman through these conscious realms and worlds of existence in order to explore the question of how Ātman perceives the material world.

Helen's Autopsy: A Forensic Approach to Myth in Herodotus's Histories
"Father of History," Herodotus investigated the past using a 3-step method of 'autopsy' (recording what he actually witnessed), interviews, and judgment. Using this method, he determined that Helen never went to Troy. Helen's autopsy is thematically important for the work as a whole, deconstructing both mythic and epic authority. However, as a deeply ambivalent symbol of memory and mourning, Helen also allows Herodotus to introduce a subtext questioning the glorification of war in a militaristic political climate.

Graven Images: the Power of Sign and Signified
Modern theories of response discuss the power of image to move us. History is replete with fierce debates as to the use of image for religious and political purposes. Does spirit live in image? When, and if, an image is worshipped, what is being worshipped? And who has control over the creation and use of the image? The recent destruction by ISIS of ancient images in Syria's Nineveh is modern context for this discussion.

From Anna Karenina to To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Response to Tolstoy's Portrayal of Motherhood
In To the Lighthouse Woolf deliberately included elements of Anna Karenina. For instance, the still-born marriage proposal between Varenka and Sergei is a template for the suspended courtship between William Bankes and Lily, just as Paul and Minta's passionate glow at the Beauf en Daube dinner replicates that of Levin and Kitty during the central, soupe Marie Louise banquet. By comparing Mrs. Ramsay to Dolly, my talk will examine how Woolf used her novel to explore Tolstoy's ideas about motherhood.

How Many Ways Do I Love Thee?: The Parafictions of Nanni Balestini's Tristano
Taking as its basis Nanni Balestrini's Tristano, an experimental narrative such that no two iterations (or copies) are the same, this paper intends to examine two editions of the book. Tristano arguably functions as an example of virtual parafiction (the latter term coined by Carrie Lambert-Beatty in 2009)— narrative strands with different internal mechanisms and significations that nonetheless creative an ontological whole.

Improving Patient Health Outcomes through Increased Patient Health Literacy and Healthcare Provider Structural Competence
Obesity is a public health concern associated with increased medical costs, poorer outcomes, and minority social status. To identify weight loss barriers, ten interviews were conducted; health literacy and agency emerged as key themes. Health literacy includes both the healthcare system and the weight-loss industry, as these are often indistinct. Agency, a component of structural competence, impacts resource access and the patient-provider relationship. Therefore, provider structural competence and patient health literacy may improve patient health outcomes.

"Girl Who Married a Bear:" Story, Ritual, and Belief in Circumpolar Hunting Cultures
In approaching the tale, "Girl Who Married a Bear," hermeneutically, one begins to understand how story, ritual, and belief are intertwined within indigenous hunting peoples of the Arctic. The tale cannot be fully understood without examining several aspects that formulate the cultural horizon in which the story resides. Bear is ancestor, protector, father, brother, and husband. Variations of "Girl Who Married a Bear" explores these roles, the influence on the Bear Ceremonial, and the Bear Ceremonials influence on the tale.

The Pathway of a Healing Planet: Awakening to the Wild Within.
Due to the extreme level of degradation that humanity's relentless drive to progress has had and continues to have on the Earth's species and systems, major shifts must be made in how humans relate to themselves and the Earth in order to salvage a healthy future for all beings on the planet. Using the lens through which ecopsychologists, psychologists and anthropologists examine the relationship between humanity and the Earth system, solutions emerge as to how this broken relationship can and should be healed. This thesis explored such solutions, and introduced and discussed traditional nature-based rite of passage work as a path to healing the human psyche as well as the relationship between humanity and the natural environment.

Shifting Identity/Shifting Discourse: Re-Naming in Contemporary Literature by Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Salman Rushdie
Re-naming one's self is an empowering act of self-definition; re-naming others is an attempt to codify, contain and censure identity. Re-naming emerges as a compelling theme in contemporary literature, appearing in three notable texts: Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000), Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2002), and Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton (2012). This presentation discusses how fictional and personal acts of re-naming among communities of diaspora call for more plural epistemologies of belonging in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world.

Exploring a Meritocratic Alternative to Democracy
Do our current representative democracies truly deliver the freedom for which they are celebrated? Is providing the same opportunities to everyone, regardless of ability, truly fair? This presentation asks whether our commonly-held assumption that democracy is essential to human liberty can be reasonably challenged, and explores the benefits and drawbacks of an imagined meritocratic political alternative. This presentation will draw on the work of Aristotle, Rousseau, Michael Ignatieff, and Charles Taylor, among others.

"Life in Continuous Present:" Sharing the Story with a New Audience
Exploring the idea that the readers of a text are also its authors, my MA capstone project crafted a dialog with a text as a way to illustrate the connection between author and reader. Inspired by the diary of 19th century Iowan Emily Hawley Gillespie, my novel A Continuous Present tells the story of a writer who finds herself playing audience to the diarist, re-envisioning the identities of both through the creation of her own text.

Daughters of the Sun
I will read an excerpt from my novel, Daughters of the Sun, which retells the narrative of the Gospels from a new perspective: Jesus's twin sister, Alleluia. She writes from present day back to Biblical times, reinserting herself into the narrative. She has one night, Saturday into Sunday morning, to get her side of the story told, for people to finally hear her voice. As her brother rises to prominence, Alleluia finds herself pushed to the shadows.

Racing with Copepods
I will present a 10 minute segment of my educational, environmental film Racing with Copepods and discuss the "ocean movement," one that challenges our land based minds, effectively opening up our awareness to all of the planet. Our oceans are suffering from acidification, pollution and overfishing. This ocean movement is tantamount to John Muir's Wilderness Cult 100 years ago which moved people to think differently about wild lands.

Carbon Dioxide: An Invisible Link Between Stress and Disease
Carbon dioxide is emerging as an important link between stress, mental health, disease, and the environment. Humans generate large quantities of carbon dioxide internally, and must efficiently remove it to maintain a healthy pH balance. Disrupted exhalation may predispose the body to a wide variety of chronic conditions and diseases. Changes in air quality, industrial design, and social expectations can impose constraints upon breathing. To maintain good health, awareness is vital to identify and remove potential breathing constraints.

The Role of Practice Babies in Home Economics Education during the Great Depression
For over fifty years, home economics programs in colleges and universities throughout the United States adopted children from local orphanages. These infants served as practice babies in home economics programs, where they were "reared by science" and prepared women for lives as mothers, and teachers. While this seems bizarre and unsettling today, at the time it was met with delight. Adoptive parents clamored for these babies after their tenure was complete; happy to adopt babies raised with innovative scientific methods.

The Rich Dead and Strange Ghosts of Rupert Brooke's War Poetry
The first well-known English poet to die in World War I, Rupert Brooke captured the sense of hope and purpose characteristic of the war's early days. In his five war sonnets, Brooke re-invented classical and mythological conventions to offer a version of immortality that would honor those of his generation who would die defending civilization. However, his final poem, written en route to Gallipoli and never finished, explores uncharted conceptual ground, resulting in a hauntingly different vision of death.

African Colonization On Its Own: The Black Emigration Movement's Distinct Role in Early American History
The African Colonization Movement is largely absent from a modern-day retelling of America's early historical narrative. In part, this is due to the movement's equation with the kinds of overt racism experienced in twentieth-century America, as well as its association with famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. On its own, African colonization has a distinct nature that speaks to the profound complexity of this country's early slave history and its ongoing issues with race and equality.

A Tribal Perspective on Maastricht's Student Subculture
The city of Maastricht in the Netherlands happily presents itself as a cultural city, but only in terms of prestigious events such as the art fair TEFAF or local-hero André Rieu's epic concerts. However, the rest of the year a lot of cultural initiatives are taken by Maastricht's squatting community. In this presentation, I consider the role of the student subculture involved in the squats in order to determine their influence in revealing Maastricht's tribal and creative potential.

Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives: A Jewish-American Novel
The Stepford Wives is a disturbing vision of America as a country where men destroy women and replace them with robots in order to simulate a lifestyle they believe existed in the past but which never existed. The author is Ira Levin, a Jewish American, and the novel reflects the Jewish traditions of witnessing and employing dark humor as a tactic of resistance: the result of a memory of the Holocaust and of being the "other" in American society.

In the Hopes of Helping the Students of St. Jude Primary School
This project is situated within a frame of public service and is concerned with beginning a community garden for St. Jude Primary School in Rubongi Village, Uganda; whose most desperate issue is lack of nutrition. The project will be carried out under the scrutiny of the ethnic studies and constructivist paradigms. These paradigms will ensure that the local community has the loudest voice in carrying out this endeavor and that their needs are met with respect and dignity.

Narrative Symmetry in Jorge Luis Borges
What is symmetry, and how might it manifest itself in the narrative act? The narrators of Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ascribe the "symmetrical" to divine language, to a promise based in our intuition. Through the act of speaking/writing, we attempt to fulfill that promise. In these stories, Borges not only comments upon but enacts a narrative symmetry that asks us to reconsider the distinction between mind and body with respect to language.

Representation of Technology and Place in Leslie Ragan's New 20th Century Limited
In 1938 the American painter Leslie Ragan produced a poster of New York Central's New 20th Century Limited, a quintessentially modernist piece of technology, in a decidedly non-modernist manner. Eschewing the Machine Age styles then in currency, Ragan offered an image of the train steeped in Romantic preoccupations with nature, locality, and nostalgia. We will explore how Ragan's choice reconciled his client's desire to express its modernity with the need to evoke for prospective passengers the transformational enchantment of travel.

The Romantic Revolt
Last autumn, hundreds of Dutch students occupied the administrative center of Amsterdam University. Their revolt against the so-called "management-thinking" which ruled the university and threatened the humanities was profoundly romantic, Dutch journalist Olaf Tempelman wrote. A strange thing to say. This presentation explains his statement by exploring the notion of contemporary romantic thought and applying it to student protest and the underlying crisis in the humanities it embodied.

Voltaire and the Jews
The idea of religious tolerance engendered by the Enlightenment led to a change in the legal and economic status of the Jews in Western Europe. Yet beneath this external acceptance there existed a virulent undercurrent of anti-Semitism based not on theological, but racial grounds. Rooted in bogus biology, this racial anti-Semitism was given authority and popularized by the celebrated Enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire. My paper discusses Voltaire's anti-Semitism, the historical developments that influenced it and its influence on modern society.

Brian Kent's Reflection in Eudora Welty's Moon Lake
In Moon Lake, Eudora Welty refers to popular culture including: the game called mumblety-peg; a children's rhyme found in "readers" of the era; and the novel The Re-Creation of Brian Kent by Harold Bell Wright. Welty places the novel in the hands of characters whose interactions comment on the novel. Is this a metatextual act, or a precursor to the postmodern appropriation of popular culture as a form of irony? A close reading of Moon Lake suggests the latter.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Modernity
In this presentation, I seek to interject Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s point of view in the important public debate about the ethics of modernity and its attributes, such as scientific rationalism, technological progress, and economic growth. First, I contrast King's views on modernity with those of Mahatma Gandhi. Then, I explore some of the underlying values and narratives that shaped King's views on modernity. I argue that King viewed modernity as fundamentally emancipatory for African-Americans.

Driving With the Dead: Stories of Loss, Journey, and Wonder
W.H. Auden wrote: "Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." My presentation explores the experience of bereavement through the metaphors of journey and travel. I will read a selection of short nonfiction stories and/or essays which consider the creative and complex ways in which we humans respond to loss, interact with our dead, and grapple with our own mortality.

Plato's Cave: A Vision to Overturn Homer's—and Why it Matters Today
The Allegory of the Cave has inspired philosophers and scientists with its sunlit world of truth if only we free ourselves from the dark cave of illusions. In fact, this eternal world is outside our senses, and Socrates, reversing light and darkness, has made the invisible bright. He created this brilliant metaphor using means and references from the Odyssey, point by point, to overturn Homer's influence: to make the eternal non-bodily world as alluring as Homer makes this mortal one.

Hannah Arendt's Empirical Theory of Judgment; Or, How to Understand the "Banality of Evil"
During Adolf Eichmann's war crimes trial, Hannah Arendt introduced her controversial concept, the "Banality of Evil." Eichmann, she claimed, was not a "monster," sociopath, or inherently evil. But rather, he suffered from a lack of conscience, and a general stupidity. Since then she has received much flack in academia and from the media, from a wide range of voices. In my presentation I will defend her concept by connecting it with her unfinished magnus opus, The Life of The Mind.

Making No Compromise with the Public Taste: Writing and Performing the Non-acquiescent Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Writing and performing Dadaist artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in a graduate seminar challenged me to re-animate this important modernist cultural figure through performance. Baroness Elsa's early artwork Fountain, 1917, credited to Marcel Duchamp, was a turning point in Modern art and cited as the source of conceptualism but for some reason her name is not mentioned in history books. 1.I DARE SAY -- IF THIS WHERE SIGNED "WILLIAM CHEAKESPEARE" [sic] YOU WOULD "LIKE IT." (MAYBE NOT!)!!!!!! E.V.F.L. (1920's)

The Bahá'í System of Translation and Its Decision Tree
Translation of Bahá'í Scripture may be unique in its methodical system to limit variations. Initiated by Baha'u'llah, and developed through the Religion's history, this now established system is a set of choices and decisions available to determine the text to be used in scholarly work, such as exegesis and hermeneutical review. Based on these choices, in this presentation a "decision tree" model is introduced as a way for scholars to determine which variation of Bahá'í Scripture to study.

The Role of All-Female Battlefield Hospitals During WWI on the Vote for Women in Britain
When the British War Office spurned her offer to work as an Army surgeon in WW1, Scotswoman Elsie Inglis took her fight for women's rights to the battlefield. She privately funded battlefield hospitals staffed and run entirely by British women. The efforts of Dr. Inglis and hundreds of women who worked with her in France, Serbia and elsewhere offered crucial proof to their countrymen that women could and would pay the cost of citizenship with their work and their lives.

Speaking Up for the Spoken Word: An Exploration of Live Poetry's Place within Academia
This presentation seeks to explore the current state of live poetry within the United Kingdom, and the attitudes towards it. The history of live poetry shall be expounded, in order to help explain the recent revival and facilitation of the oral tradition. There is a distinct lack of academic documentation of the live poetry phenomenon; as a result, justification for why live poetry is important shall be provided, as well as suggestions for how best to approach it.

The Politics of Culture: Multiculturalism and Ethnic Discrimination in Germany
What guided Western European democracies' development from an era of multiculturalism to current notions of right wing populism?
The development of Germany and its integration policy will exemplify how a discourse of cultural difference in multiculturalism opens up space for the emergence of new forms of discrimination. This presentation will discuss the effects of "cultural discrimination" on the successful integration of immigrants. As a possible answer to the problem institutionalized anti-discrimination work and its preventive potential will be discussed.

Faith and Empirical Investigation in Buddhism
How do we encounter Buddhism as Westerners? Is it really as empirical as it's said to be or are we just looking for a spirituality that will allow us to bridge the gap between faith and reason that has developed in our own tradition? Focusing on the early Discourses, I will look at the role faith plays in early Buddhism, and discuss how Buddhism responds the kinds of existential questions that are revealed by the empirical inquiry.