Showing 191 - 200 of 583 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.
Los trucos debajo de la mesa: Juegos y simulacros en la cultura y literatura argentina Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
- 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
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
Non-genomic effects of steroids on teleost fish olfaction: behavioral and anatomical approaches Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
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
Does the neuropeptide GYS modulate stretch feedback pathways in the lobster cardiac neuromuscular system?
Date: 2014-08-01
Creator: Tricia Hartley
Access: Open access
- In many animals, there are groups of neurons, known as central pattern generators (CPGs), which are capable of controlling major everyday life functions. CPGs are responsible for functions that require patterned rhythmic activity, such as the heartbeat, digestion and locomotion. A CPG called the cardiac ganglion, consisting of only nine neurons, controls the rhythmic beating of the heart of the American lobster, Homarus americanus, by stimulating the muscle cells of the heart.My summer consisted of two separate projects in Patsy Dickinson’s neurophysiology lab, both studying the interaction of the cardiac ganglion with neuropeptides. These neuropeptides, GYSDRNYLRFamide (GYS) and SGRNFLRFamide (SGRN) are released hormonally into the cardiac neuromuscular system. The overarching goal of both projects was to determine the role of these neuropeptides in the lobster’s cardiac neuromuscular system.For my first project, I studied the interaction of the neuropeptide GYS with the stretch receptors of the lobster heart. Previous research has found these stretch receptors to be a form of excitatory feedback from the lobster heart to the cardiac ganglion, as heartbeat amplitude and frequency increase as heart is stretched. Further, the dendrites along the cardiac ganglion have been found to be stretch-sensitive, meaning when these dendrites were cut, this excitatory response is no longer observed. By stretching the heart with the dendrites intact and with GYS and next when the dendrites were cut and with GYS, the goal of this project was to determine if GYS would alter the feedback of the stretch receptors back to the cardiac ganglion to change heartbeat frequency and amplitude. Unfortunately, the intricacy involved in being able to cut the dendrites while allowing the heart to continue to beat proved very difficult and I moved on to my next project.The goal of my next project was to examine the interactions of the neuropeptides GYS and SGRN with the decreased and increased presence of nitric oxide, the second form of feedback from the heart muscle to the cardiac ganglion. Previous research shows nitric oxide as having an inhibitory effect, decreasing heartbeat amplitude and frequency. By applying both GYS and SGRN to both the isolated cardiac ganglion and the whole heart in the presence of both a nitric oxide inhibitor and donor, the hope is to be able to determine the interaction of these peptides with and without the presence of the feedback of nitric oxide. Because I started this project later in the summer, with the assistance of Sophie Janes’ data, I have been able to look at the effects of GYS on the whole heart, in addition to the combination of GYS with L-NA, a nitric oxide inhibitor. So far, the data has shown that the combination of GYS with L-NA causes less of a decrease in heartbeat frequency than GYS alone, which shows a significant decrease. We predict this is because GYS enhances the nitric oxide pathway, while L-NA is blocking the nitric oxide pathway, thus giving insight into the role of GYS within the lobster’s cardiac neuromuscular system. For my senior independent study I hope to continue this research and be able to continue to compile data for both SGRN and GYS on the isolated cardiac ganglion as well as on the whole heart, with a nitric oxide inhibitor and donor. Final Report of research funded by a Doherty Coastal Studies Research Fellowship.
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.”