Humanities and the Arts

Nominal and Agreement Systems in Under-Documented North-Western Edoid Languages: Oloma and Akuku

Olawale Akingbade, Linguistics

Humans organize objects in their languages, often through systems that classify nouns. Well-known languages like German and Spanish categorize nouns by grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), while others use more semantic categories such as shape and animacy, demonstrating diverse approaches to organizing nouns. Many lesser-known languages remain understudied, limiting our understanding of how people worldwide categorize concepts. This dissertation investigates noun classification and agreement systems in Akuku and Oloma, two North-Western Edoid languages spoken in Nigeria. While both are understudied, Oloma is also endangered due to emigration and language shift. Through direct work with Akuku and Oloma communities, my dissertation documents how nouns are classified and how this influences agreement—the way related words (adjectives, determiners) change form to “match” co-occurring nouns. This study aims to provide empirical data to preserve valuable linguistic knowledge, highlight unique structures found in these languages, and broaden our perspective on how humans organize ideas through language.

Domesticating Difference: Race, Sexuality, and Citizenship in Chinese America, 1875–1965

Henry Chen, American Culture

My dissertation draws on archival material to examine the sexual politics of Chinese Exclusion in the United States between 1875 and 1965. At the close of the nineteenth century, as U.S. lawmakers debated the “Chinese Question,” they routinely drew on rhetoric that cast Chinese migrants as sexual deviants, lascivious sex workers, and family-less bachelors. By the postwar era, however, these stubborn sexual-racial tropes had been displaced by popular representations of Chinese Americans as “model minorities”—law-abiding, family-oriented citizen subjects. My dissertation traces this transformation by showing how merchant- and middle-class Chinese Americans critiqued immigration exclusion and racial barriers to citizenship by appealing to American sensibilities around gender, sexuality, and the family. At the same time, I surface dissident histories of Chinese migrant sexuality—including interracial common-law marriages, sex work, and same-sex intimacies—that threatened the politics of sexual respectability promoted by U.S. lawmakers, progressive social reformers, and Chinatown elites.

Incest, Knowledge, and Sexual Difference in Biblical Narratives

Tomi Drucker, Comparative Literature

My dissertation reads narratives of incest in the Hebrew Bible, focusing on three Genesis narratives that link incest and the formation of knowledge: the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah and his sons, and Lot and his daughters. Close reading the biblical narratives alongside contemporary and modern Hebrew texts that revisit the literary forms of biblical incest, I argue that incest narratives impose binary structures of inside/outside, covering/uncovering in a linear logic that they also disrupt. That is, I show that incest—the Hebrew word literarily translates as “the revelation of nakedness”— is an epistemological problem through which the Bible theorizes knowledge as the organization of distinctions between bodies, generations and authorities, while the representations of the relationship between incest and knowledge cracks open the binary and linear structures that would otherwise define it, pointing to alternative ways of knowing already embedded in the biblical text itself.

Enchanting Otherworld at Empire’s Edge: Hawaiʻi in Early 20th Century U.S. Popular Culture

Briand “Brinni” Gentry, Film, Television, and Media

“Enchanting Otherworld at Empire’s Edge” examines how early 20th-century U.S. popular culture transformed Hawai‘i into a fantastical paradise that naturalized imperial domination. Drawing on film, vaudeville, World’s Fairs, news reporting, trade press, advertising imagery, music, fashion, and other ephemeral media, I analyze how Hawaiian performance and visual culture were recast into a commodified Otherworld of leisure, exotic femininity, and racial difference. This mediated paradise obscured political violence, reconfigured working-class whiteness, and offered Americans an alluring escape from the anxieties of modern consumer life. By tracing how these transient media circulated, my dissertation shows how imperial fantasies of Hawai‘i endure in U.S. cultural memory, shaping contemporary visions of place that both appropriate Indigenous aesthetics and mask Indigenous presence. In revealing the entanglement of popular culture, racial formation, and empire, my project advances interdisciplinary understandings of how visual and performance cultures craft enduring narratives about belonging, desire, and power.

Narcophobia: Drugs, Stigma, and Resistance in Russian Culture

Ryan Hoaglund, Slavic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation investigates cultural production about and by people who use drugs in Russia. It is guided by an ethical commitment to restore the agency of this severely marginalized social group. In the first part, I introduce the activist concept of “narcophobia,” i.e., stigma toward drugs and drug users, and posit its utility as a scholarly category of analysis. I then trace a genealogy of this prejudice in canonical and non-canonical literary and cinematic texts, from the nineteenth century to the present. In the second part, I explore methods of resistance to narcophobia. In particular, I read the works of a literary collective of drug users, “The Remissionaries” as an effort to establish a drug-user counterpublic and protest their subordinate social status. I show how their artistic strategies developed over time, moving from overt conflict with authorities and mainstream discourse to more subtle forms of everyday resistance.

Voice Transforming Technology: Digital-Human Entanglements in 21st Century U.S. Pop Music

Kelly Hoppenjans, Music (Academic): Musicology

This dissertation interrogates the impact on popular music of “voice transforming technology,” or techniques that alter a recorded voice’s timbre, pitch, and distinctive characteristics such that it becomes fundamentally different, unrecognizable from its source, or even nonhuman. For many artists, this is perhaps the point. Technologies like Auto-Tune, vocoder, chipmunking, distortion, and AI voice clones have become potent artistic media through which to explore what voices can do and mean, expand beyond physical bodies, play with identity, and blur binarized distinctions between humans and machines. Through ethnography, musical analysis, and historiography, I trace several transformative vocal effects and how producers, vocalists, and engineers create personal and emotional work through them. Developing an understanding of these effects helps us grapple with the artistic potential and existential threat that AI voice clones present to vocalists and imagine alternative, more reparative futures.

“Give Me Solitude, Give Me Nature:” Green Solitude in 19th-Century America

Patricia Jewell, English and Women’s and Gender Studies

Reading across a variety of nineteenth-century American literary traditions, I enlarge our sense of solitude in the period: To whom did it matter, how was it expressed, and what were its cultural and political contexts? Tracing a wide-ranging and sustained literary engagement with what I deem “green solitude,” I argue that this affective stance and its aesthetic expression grew out of the creaturely language developed through and popularized by American natural histories and Transcendentalist philosophy. Instead of connoting solipsistic individualism, green solitude multiplies relationality. This alternative vision of sociality responds to contemporary debates about abolition and women’s rights—both of which centered on subjects who lacked political recognition by the state. Green solitude, by contrast, projects arrangements of and rights to relational forms that extend beyond the human, imagining forms of enfranchisement secreted within the experience of the socially marginalized subject.

Modeling Arab-Islamic History for Television: Seriality, Nostalgia, and Audio-Visual Aesthetics in Egyptian Religious Drama (1962–2007)

Egor Korneev, Middle East Studies

The dissertation examines how Egyptian television reimagined the “Islamic golden age” through the popular genre of historical-religious serials. Produced each Ramadan between 1962 and 2007 and watched across the Arab world, these shows offered audiovisual portrayals of premodern Islamic history, featuring biographies of prominent scholars, rulers, and saints. Combining approaches from media and memory studies, the project investigates how the affordances of historical television drama—its serial narrative form, visual vocabulary, and linguistic conventions—forged popular imagery of the Islamic past for modern Arab audiences. Drawing on newly digitized archives, periodicals, and on-site research in Egypt, the study further examines how creators, religious institutions, and diverse viewers envisioned and publicly debated these televisual representations. Ultimately, the project identifies Egyptian historical-religious drama as a prominent site for re-imagining the Arab-Islamic premodern history, thus contributing to broader comparative discussions of mass-mediated memory and “global medievalisms” beyond the West.

Sanctuaries After Dark: The Experience of Nocturnal Ritual Practices in Classical Attica

Ginevra Miglierina, Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology

Classical archaeologists regularly study Greek ritual practices, but have seldom questioned why so many religious performances occur at night-time. My dissertation investigates how night and darkness were actively incorporated and experienced in religious contexts in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. I integrate architectural, material, and iconographic evidence to reconstruct the actions of worshipers in the sanctuaries at Brauron, Oropos, and Eleusis, contextualizing these practices within a broader discussion of night-time rituals derived from Greek literature. Drawing on practice, sensory, and embodied approaches, I define the worshipers’ physical perceptions, engagement with artefacts, and range of activities at night. My research shows that by shaping objects, space and sensations, the night was integral to the creation of the ritual assemblage and the definition of religious experience. These findings affirm archaeology’s ability to inform us about night-time practices, and recenter the nocturnal element within ancient Greek religion and our understanding of it.

Competence and Performance at Prosodic Boundaries: How Linguistic Structure and Speech Planning Interact in the Production and Perception of Boundaries

Jungyun Seo, Linguistics

Prosodic boundaries (perceived as breaks in the flow of speech) mark the edges of syntactic units and signal meaning. They are expressed through variation in pitch, tempo, and pausing. Disfluencies, which occur due to planning difficulties, are also realized with pausing and modulation in pitch and tempo. My dissertation tests how these different cognitive processes, namely prosodic structure (competence) and speech planning (performance), are reflected in speech. Acoustic and kinematic properties of prosodic boundaries with different amounts of planning are compared in various environments such as different (i) syntactic structures and (ii) pragmatic meaning. An EEG (electroencephalogram) study will test whether listeners differentiate these boundaries at the neural level. The dissertation will provide a deeper understanding of the representation of boundaries and will develop a more ecologically valid model of prosodic structure by integrating speech planning (performance) with abstract linguistic structures (competence).

Americana in the German Imagination

Laura Stahl, Germanic Languages and Literatures

Germany has long been infatuated with an image of American culture that centers cowboys, Indians, and the Wild West. In contemporary Germany, America-themed theme parks are popular venues in which Germans act out the fantasy of Americana. I argue that these theme parks serve as spaces where white Germans play out explicitly racial — and racist — versions of American history, which stand at odds with the “raceless” manner in which Fatima el-Tayeb argues that Germans envision their own present. I explore this America-enthusiasm through three case studies, each of which follows a specific strand of this subculture: Wild West fans, including cowboy and “Indianer” reenactors, Civil War reenactors, and German clubs emulating US mid-century car culture. I cast the collective symbols and narratives from this exploration as a multifaceted—and fundamentally generational— response to white German anxieties surrounding what it means to be German in an increasingly diverse national landscape.

On Being Conflicted: Living and Loving with Internal Division

Margot Witte (Lipschutz Fellow), Philosophy

This dissertation argues that internal conflict is not only compatible with strong intimate relationships, but can be essential to their flourishing. In close relationships, being unsure what one wants, torn between values, or divided in one’s commitments can enable relational goods such as trust, attunement, and shared plans. This runs against dominant views in the literature, which frame internal conflict as a defect —something that undermines agency, self-understanding, or commitment, and thereby threatens our relationships. Drawing on cases involving ambivalence, tragic choices, and deep disagreement between partners, I show how internal conflict is actually well-suited to making our relationships richer and more loving. Rather than something to eliminate as quickly as possible, we should take internal conflict seriously. In my view, loving someone sometimes requires leaning into our ambivalence, recognizing it as a sign of care, responsiveness, and moral seriousness in our relationships.