Honors Projects

Showing 181 - 190 of 564 Items

Reading & Teaching Chaucer: the "Good Wif"?

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Sophie Friedman

Access: Open access

This two-chapter project applies formalist and feminist thinking to the thirty-line description of the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval, British work The Canterbury Tales. It is an interdisciplinary project; it studies how to read and teach Chaucer at the secondary level based off of these two approaches. In this formalist chapter, I study narrative voice, rhyme, irony, and ekphrasis, writing about the history and function of each of those tools and their role in the passage. I argue that the formalist close reading approach is an excellent teaching tool that generates thorough, rigorous, and joyful reading. In this feminist chapter, I compile a critical literary history of scholarly feminist and pre-feminist engagement with the passage over time. I read into an underlying genotype text, arguing that the Wife of Bath was a female entrepreneur who used textiles as a means of social, professional, and aesthetic expression and empowerment. Then I advocate for a feminist ethical teaching approach—one where we use the text as a non-ethical space in which to explore ethical questions surrounding gender. Ultimately, I argue that feminist and formalist approaches are interdependent and complementary; for both reading and teaching Chaucer, they stand stronger together.


Miniature of Los trucos debajo de la mesa: Juegos y simulacros en la cultura y literatura argentina
Los trucos debajo de la mesa: Juegos y simulacros en la cultura y literatura argentina
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  • Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01

    Date: 2020-01-01

    Creator: Eliana Miller

    Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



      Church Space as Queer Place? LGBTQ+ Placemaking, Assimilation, and Subversion within Progressive Faith-Based Spaces in Maine

      Date: 2023-01-01

      Creator: Salina Chin

      Access: Open access

      In popular discourse, understandings of queerness and religiosity as antithetical proliferate. However, the political involvement of Portland, Maine’s First Parish Unitarian-Universalist Church in Maine’s queer political movement points to a more complex relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and progressive religious institutions. Through participant observation, archival research, and semi-structured interviews with nine LGBTQ+ community members and informants, I reveal the crucial role of Portland’s First Parish Unitarian-Universalist Church in Maine’s queer political movement from the late 1980s into the present day. On the one hand, progressive faith-based spaces across Maine provide safe spaces for queer political organizing. On the other hand, “ephemeral placemaking” in progressive faith-based spaces represents an assimilationist political strategy that stresses LGBTQ+ respectability. Thus, I argue that queer placemaking in progressive faith-based spaces reflects both subversive and assimilationist politics. LGBTQ+ activists utilize ephemeral placemaking strategies within progressive faith-based spaces to challenge political opposition from the religious Right while also reinforcing what Mikulak (2019) terms “godly homonormativity”: the normalization of LGBTQ+ identity and the upholding of heteronormativity by emphasizing respectability and monogamy. My analysis of queer political organizing within progressive faith-based spaces “queers” religion and LGBTQ+ politics, disrupting dominant narratives of religion as homophobic and LGBTQ+ politics as radical.


      Stretch Feedback in the Lobster Heart: Experimental and Computational Analysis

      Date: 2016-05-01

      Creator: Katelyn J Suchyta

      Access: Open access



      Miniature of Wnt Signaling is Dispensable to Formation of the First Tooth in <i>D. Rerio</i>
      Wnt Signaling is Dispensable to Formation of the First Tooth in D. Rerio
      This record is embargoed.
        • Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14

        Date: 2020-01-01

        Creator: Zachary C. LeBlanc

        Access: Embargoed



          Miniature of Non-genomic effects of steroids on teleost fish olfaction: behavioral and anatomical approaches
          Non-genomic effects of steroids on teleost fish olfaction: behavioral and anatomical approaches
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              Date: 2020-01-01

              Creator: Leah B Kratochvil

              Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



                Classifying Flow-kick Equilibria: Reactivity and Transient Behavior in the Variational Equation

                Date: 2020-01-01

                Creator: Alanna Haslam

                Access: Open access

                In light of concerns about climate change, there is interest in how sustainable management can maintain the resilience of ecosystems. We use flow-kick dynamical systems to model ecosystems subject to a constant kick occurring every τ time units. We classify the stability of flow-kick equilibria to determine which management strategies result in desirable long-term characteristics. To classify the stability of a flow-kick equilibrium, we classify the linearization of the time-τ map given by the time-τ map of the variational equation about the equilibrium trajectory. Since the variational equation is a non-autonomous linear differential equation, we conjecture that the asymptotic stability classification of each instantaneous local linearization along the equilibrium trajectory indicates the stability of the variational time-τ map. In Chapter 3, we prove this conjecture holds when all of the asymptotic and transient behavior of the instantaneous local linearizations is the same. To explore whether the conjecture holds in general, we ask: To what degree can transient behavior differ from asymptotic behavior? Under what conditions can this transient behavior accumulate asymptotically? In Chapter 4, we develop the radial and tangential velocity framework to characterize transient behavior in autonomous linear systems. In Chapter 5, we use this framework to construct an example of a non-autonomous linear system whose time-τ map has asymptotic behavior that differs from the asymptotic behavior of each instantaneous linear system that composes it. Future work seeks to determine whether this constructed example can arise as a variational equation, and thus provide a counterexample for our conjecture.


                Characterization of O-Linked Glycosylated Neuropeptides in the American Lobster (Homarus americanus): The Use of Peptide Labeling Following Beta Elimination

                Date: 2020-01-01

                Creator: Edward Myron Bull

                Access: Open access

                Neuropeptides are a class of small peptides that govern various neurological functions, and the American lobster (Homarus americanus) provides a model system for their characterization. Neuropeptides are commonly post-translationally modified (PTM), and one common PTM is glycosylation. Past research in the Stemmler lab has found glycosylated neuropeptides in H. americanus; however, the extent and biological role of this modification has not been well characterized. This study was undertaken to determine the number of glycosylated peptides in the sinus glands of H. americanus and to develop an approach to tag the site of glycosylation using beta-elimination chemistry. LC-MS paired with high pH reverse phase fractionation was used to survey for glycosylated neuropeptides and beta elimination with an amine tag was used as an approach to characterize the site of glycosylation. Our results indicate that high pH fractionation is a useful approach to simplify complex mixtures of neuropeptides and improve glycopeptide detection. Efforts to use beta elimination and tagging to characterize glycosylated neuropeptides have been less successful. Beta elimination of full length peptides resulted in peptide degradation. An approach utilizing chymotrypsin to reduce peptide size coupled with beta elimination and labeling with 2-dimethylaminoethanethiol showed less evidence for degradation, and this approach yielded data isolating two potential serine residues for the site of glycosylation; however, the data was not sufficient to distinguish the two sites. Work to optimize reaction conditions using a glycopeptide standard showed that multiple isomeric products were formed during beta elimination. With the goal of optimizing reaction conditions, future work will further examine reaction kinetics to eventually apply the approach to the entire sinus gland


                Guarding Whiteness: Disability, Eugenics, and Rhetorical Agency in Southern Renaissance Fiction

                Date: 2023-01-01

                Creator: Philip Carl Bonanno

                Access: Open access

                This project explores fiction from white authors in the Southern Renaissance, specifically William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. By examining their work alongside some of the performers that appeared historically in freak shows of the South, chapter one investigates how physically enfreaked individuals (usually phenotypically white) have access to power and the powers of whiteness. Chapter 2 interrogates how the South pathologizes promiscuity as mental illness with words such as moronic or feeble-mindedness, and the ramifications it has for the stratification on class divides among Southern elites and “White Trash.” The chapter seeks to answer the question of why, for a short period in the 1940s, white women were more likely to be punished with forced sterilization than Black women. Chapter 3 uncovers the rhetorical agency used by Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, looking at how he resists the powers of whiteness through crip time and his trauma responses to his family that seeks to reinsert the Antebellum South. Using an intersectional approach of critical whiteness studies, disability studies, crip theory, and queer theory, relies on a variety of scholars including, but not limited to; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Richard Dyer, Matt Wray, Jasbir Puar, Ellen Samuels, and Allison Kafer. The primary works examined include promotional materials of historical freaks, McCullers’ The Ballad of a Sad Café, William Faulkner’s The Hamlet and The Sound and the Fury, and Flannery O’Connor short stories “Good Country People” and “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”


                Miniature of Phenotypic divergence between sites in photosynthetic thermal response despite low genetic differentiation in Gulf of Maine <i>Ascophyllum nodosum</i>
                Phenotypic divergence between sites in photosynthetic thermal response despite low genetic differentiation in Gulf of Maine Ascophyllum nodosum
                This record is embargoed.
                  • Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18

                  Date: 2023-01-01

                  Creator: Olivia Bronzo-Munich

                  Access: Embargoed