Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Ella Marie Schmidt

Access: Open access

I wrote Divinity School, an Honors Project for the Department of English, under the auspices of my project advisor, Professor Anthony Walton, and my readers, Professors Marilyn Reizbaum, Ann Kibbie, and Aaron Kitch. Divinity School is a novel whose conflicts are religious, generational, and familial. Set mostly in Hoboken, New Jersey with vignettes in Manhattan, Vienna, the west coast of Ireland, and an anonymous New England college town, it is the story of one family and the open secrets that keep them apart. Hal Macpherson is a Divinity School professor uged into premature retirement by allegations of misconduct; his wife, Annie Price, is a withdrawn would-be actress. They are parents to Amelia Macpherson, a woman in her twenties who rejects her father’s righteous claims of innocence and her mother’s exhausted but unwavering devotion to him. This project is concerned with sex and pedagogy, youth, want-it-all politcs, parenthood, getting old, Protestantism, and domestic life. Using third-person free indirect style, I traverse the public-private planes of literature. As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, I have enjoyed the privilege of a great English education in literature, creative writing, and independent work. Divinity School is the culmination of these studies.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Uriel López-Serrano

Access: Open access

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (c. 1648-1695) was a Mexican nun, poet, playwright, and scholar from the colonial era. She has become an icon for various global, social, and political movements. This project looks at four dramatic works created by Sorjuanistas who reimagine Sor Juana’s story for contemporary audiences living in the United States. The works included in this essay are Estela Portillo-Trambley’s Sor Juana (1986), Karen Zacarías’s The Sins of Sor Juana (2001), and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s “Interview with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (1998/2014) and her newest work, Juana: An Opera in Two Acts (2019), libretto by Carla Lucero. In addition to reimagining Sor Juana’s story, these dramatic works expose the sexism, racism, and xenophobia perpetuated by U.S institutions of power that discriminate against Latin@ and Chican@ individuals. By shedding light on the social injustices that existed during the colonial era, an embodied Sor Juana teaches audiences how to resist and mobilize against such oppressive powers. Sor Juana’s narrative on stage is necessary because she is a role model for Latin@s/Chican@s. Sorjuanistas remind us that the body can be used to retell the narratives of the silenced individuals who are victims of oppression. By developing heritage performances, Sorjuanistas challenge histories that silence and overlook social injustices. Witnessing Sor Juana on stage triggers emotional responses to the past which allow historical actors to obtain intellectual, emotional, and political agency in an effort to affirm and remember particular contemporary and future commitments to fighting social injustices.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Ryan Supple

Access: Open access

This thesis examines the complex relationship between religiosity and voting behavior in the United States. In a country where religion has diminished in importance over time, it seems rather fascinating that it still plays such a large role in the inner-workings of American politics. Chapter One analyzes the varying ways in which scholars have approached emergent political trends between religious groups, particularly with regards to political parties, voting behavior, and government representation. Chapter Two extends this analysis to the American National Election Studies (ANES), a national survey distributed to random samples of Americans during election seasons. The information from the ANES facilitated a more in-depth analysis of how individuals with varying levels of affiliations have interacted with politics, such as ideologies, affiliations, and feelings towards religiously salient political issues. Lastly, Chapter 3 focuses on college-aged students, using both the UCLA's CIRP Freshman Survey and the Bowdoin College Polar Poll, to evaluate how America's educated youth are interacting with politics. These data allowed for a more proper investigation into how a historically unreligious portion of the population interact with religion today, and how this may affect America's religious climate in the future, as students eventually grow into educated professionals and further immerse themselves into politics. Ultimately, this paper suggests that a growing political polarity has coincided with polarization in religion, with two coalitions-- a religious and non religious one moving in opposite directions, thus amounting to further divisions and misunderstandings between the American public.

• Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Lia F. Kornmehl

Access: Embargoed