Rooms of Their Own: The Spatialized Consciousness of Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs Dalloway

The feminist critique on the politics of space was central to Virginia Woolf’s conception of the private space in many of her works. Scholars have discussed at length Woolf’s interrogation of the private space as “the site of middle-class female domestic confinement” and its duality as “the site of dynamic female potential” in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and her later works The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). Beyond Woolf’s preoccupation with gendered spaces, what is perhaps less widely addressed is her portrayal of “the imbrication of space and individual consciousness” and the complex relationship between physical space and the identity one manifests within it.

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The Black Janus

I am a man of two faces. A question that we as humans all ask ourselves throughout the course of our lives is “Who am I?” The answer to that query is never concrete, but rather dynamic as it is always developing and changing as we navigate our way through the tempestuous hurricane that is life. For each person the answer will have its metaphysical variations based on the many intricate components that (make up who they are) or delineate their being. As I’ve journeyed through my four-year liberal arts education here at a predominantly white University, very sparingly I have been presented with the academic tools to introspectively examine myself within the framework of that question.

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The Case for Soviet Prison Tattoos as Art

The fields of anthropology and art history have long been intertwined. Symbols are at the core of human communication and in order to decode a set of esoteric images, overlapping practices within the fields of anthropology and art history can be employed. The discovery of the remote practice of human bodily inscription by non-European people ignited a desire to uncover and understand the nature of the inscribed symbols.

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The Philosophy of Pragmatism in the Politics of Democracy: A Method of Overcoming Dualism?

In his seminal lecture, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy," William James described the history of philosophy as that of a clash of certain human temperaments. This clash is also reflected in the history of the philosophy of democracy. Attempts at outlining the form of democracy have most prominently taken either of the two definitions: procedural or substantive, minimal or maximal, thin or thick.

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Unsex Me Here: How Removing Markers of Eroticism Alters the Status of the Female Nude

Atop a pile of boulders, an unclothed figure sits at the base of a tree. The tree’s upper branch reaches across the top part of the frame—the curve of the bough mimicked in the hunched shoulders of the human shape. The figure, with limbs folded so as to obscure their identity, blends in with the background rocks in both color and size. The stones dominate the composition; there is but a hint of geographical space suggested on the right side of the arrangement through a small, light, triangular shape indicative of a mountain in the distance. Although the figure is nude, the human body is not sexed, an important fact once we learn the shape is a woman.

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The Dead Walking Behind Us: Queer 'Elegy,' Classical Eros, and Desire as Translation in Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman

By Kit Pyne-Jaeger, Cornell University

Using Anne Carson's characterization of classical "eros as lack" in Eros the Bittersweet, this paper will explore the queer resonance of depictions of eros directed at an inaccessible or unresponsive love object in Wilde and Housman's poetics, focusing specifically on the positioning of death as a component of, rather than an obstacle to, eros.

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Was One Franc Enough to ‘Buy Your Way In’ to the Belle Epoque?

By Xavier Reader, The University of Western Australia

La Belle Epoque — translated as the good times or the beautiful era — was a phenomenon that took place throughout pre-war Western Europe, but is no better preserved than in metropolitan Paris, where the feeling and conceptualisation of Belle Epoque existed in a highly concentrated form.

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The Use and Abuse of Philosophy in History: James Warley Miles and the Dangers of Racist Dehistoricization

By Patrick Wohlscheid, College of Charleston

Over the course of his life, the prominent South Carolina philosopher James Warley Miles addressed students at the College of Charleston at least three times: general commencements in 1851 and 1863, and a Chrestomathic Society commencement in 1874, one year before Miles' death.

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“The Real Jews”: Defining Israeli Identity in Politics and Cinema

By Sophia Hernandez Tragesser, University of St. Thomas

In 1933, a Zionist film crew produced a cornerstone Israeli film, Oded Hanoded, depicting a child’s adventures in the Jezreel Valley at the forefront of Jewish civilization amidst Arab Bedouins. This film embodied the Zionist struggle for an ethno-religious homeland by presenting strong European-Jewish characters engaged in a life-and-death battle for survival against hostile land.

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Unconventional Mothers and Absent Fathers in Latin American Films

By Arianna Tartaglia, Fairfield University

Complex female characters are few and far between in Hollywood blockbusters, and those representations often come scantily clad as objects for the masculine gaze rather than as figures for women to relate to. The traditional male lens of Hollywood commercial film has influenced the cinematic representation of women, especially when it comes to female character portrayal and development.

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Saturday Night Lear: "SNL” Cast as Today's Shakespearian Fools

By Jack Wolfram, Emory University

Recently finishing its forty-fifth season, NBC’s live television variety show Saturday Night Live (SNL) has developed a reputation for disregarding the comedic boundary “lines” that are rarely crossed when discussing certain issues concerning the sociopolitical world, current events, and pop culture. Over the past several years, SNL casts predominately focus the majority of their satirical skits and sketches on the inherent character of powerful, high-profile entities. Due to the live broadcast nature of the show, SNL actors are notorious for taking full advantage of this unique comedic platform where very little dialogue is censored. These comics’ performances every Saturday night resonate far beyond the simple guffaws of entertainment.

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Johann Sebastian Bach and the Style Galant: Progressive Elements in the Italian Concerto

By Maggie Lu, University of British Columbia

As one of the most preeminent composers of the early eighteenth-century, Johann Sebastian Bach is associated most strongly with the height of the Baroque Era. Intricate polyphony and harmonic complexity remained defining characteristics of his style even toward the end of his life – features that were at times the subject of criticism from his own contemporaries. However, despite the view that Bach remained committed to the musical styles of the past during the emergence of the style galant, opuses from the composer’s mid-to-late career suggest that he was both capable and willing to adopt elements of the new fashion into select compositions.

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A Case Study of Small Press Success in "The Rumpus" and "McSweeney’s": How Valuing Experimental Work and the Avant-Garde Generates Community

By Tamiya Anderson, Pfeiffer University

The publishing industry is in a time of continuous change. Small presses, or independent publishing houses, sustain an independent or fully staffed publishing team that manages a smaller enterprise than big-name publishers. As the industry moves in a direction that endures several transitions and developments, this paper works to catalog the efforts of certain small presses in this time of technological, operational, and structural flux. Since the fifteenth-century development of the printing press, the publishing industry has endured several core operational shifts.

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The Principles of Trauma Informed Care in the Context of Childhood Domestic Violence

By Shefali Golchha, NMIMS University, Mumbai

With the global discussion surrounding human rights constantly expanding, people express continued concern about their own safety, vulnerability, and agency. This is reflected in the number of crimes against children, women, and minorities that surface each day and the scholarly work that is derived from these experiences. Patricia Uberoi, known for studying family, marriage, and kinship systems in India, mentions that, while the family is imagined as a safe space, it is also a site of exploitation and violence.

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A Battle, Two Buildings, and One City During the Crusades

By Lauren Wilbur, the University of Texas at Austin

Historical archaeology attempts to understand cultures of antiquity by studying written primary sources in conjunction with archaeological analysis. The Crusades present a challenge in using this method because many physical spaces have not been excavated due to political strife, or they had only been excavated in a biblical context with little regard to any other period. However, the discipline has recently started to see some success in the areas that the Latin Christians occupied and material evidence is more readily available to fill in the holes of Crusader history.

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Misunderstood: A Cultural History of Eating Disorders in the West 

By Meera Shanbhag, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN

Over 30 million people in the United States are plagued by eating disorders, with at least one death related to eating disorders occurring every 62 minutes.[1] These serious illnesses, which have the greatest mortality rate of any psychological disorder, are characterized by abnormal eating patterns.

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“I Deserve Everything”: The Role of Confidence in 21st Century Women’s Sports 

By Sabeehah Ravat, University of South Florida

Professional sport is one of the most highly consumed entertainment products in the world, making it both an accessible and unstable foundation for engaging in activism and championing sociopolitical change. Throughout its history, the foundation of heteropatriarchal white supremacy that sports is built on has been challenged, renegotiated, and reinforced.

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