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Tiy Reed Oral History Interview Records
No full textTiy Reed of Washington D.C. was interviewed by Kaleb Seay, a Sewanee student, on November 30th, 2023 on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included discussing Reed’s athleticism and upbringing in New Orleans, Louisiana. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.Dr. Andrew Maginn, Visiting Assistant Professor of Histor
Fernando "Dito" Van Reigersberg Oral History Interview Records
No full textFernando “Dito” van Reigersberg of McLean, Virginia was interviewed by Eli Baastiansten, a Sewanee student, on November 25th, 2023 in person. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included race relations in the arts. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.Dr. Andrew Maginn, Visiting Assistant Professor of Histor
Just War in the Harry Potter Series: The Choice of Self-Defense and the Power of Self-Sacrificing Love
No full textDespite its trappings of both children’s literature and the adolescent Bildungsroman, the Harry Potter series presents a grave conflict with repercussions beyond prompting the title character’s personal growth. Far from contenting herself with mere descriptions of teenage rites of passage, J.K. Rowling raises and explores weighty ethical questions of consequentialism and moral autonomy by assaying the limits of virtuous conduct during wartime. At the same time, Rowling does not abandon the individuals engaged in this conflict for abstract theorizing. Instead, her treatment of characters’ moral development is set fixedly within her broader critique of war and its potential justifications.
In this critique, Rowling places herself alongside classical and medieval scholars of just war theory like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. But rather than conforming to the latter’s strict method of disputed questions, Rowling allows her heroic characters to transgress the conventional boundaries of ethical behavior in warfare. Such transgressions not only illuminate Rowling’s particular interpretation of just war theory, but are also reflected in her characters’ psychological maturation and the traumatic wounds that shape it. Ultimately, while Rowling does condemn the inescapable brutality of war, she argues in favor of the existence of justly started and justly fought wars
Shawnta Freeman Oral History Interview Records
No full textShawnta Freeman of Oxon Hill, Maryland was interviewed by Lizzy Ray, a Sewanee student, on October 26th, 2023 on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, they also discussed the variation of the amount of Black History taught in public schools between various localities. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interviewDr. Andrew Maginn, Visiting Assistant Professor of Histor
Vera Avery Oral History Interview Records
No full textVera Avery of Cleveland, North Carolina was interviewed by Lizzy Ray, a Sewanee student, on October 15th, 2023 on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included Segregation during the Jim Crow era, and Vera’s childhood in Cleveland, NC. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.Dr. Andrew Maginn, Visiting Assistant Professor of Histor
Analysis of heavy microplastics in five tributaries of the Danube River, Germany and the Cumberland River, Tennessee
Get PDFThis study on five tributaries of the Danube River was conducted as part of the CLEANDANUBE project, which aims to characterize the water quality of the Danube River from the Black Forest of Germany to the Black Sea. Water was sampled for microplastics in Germany on the Isar, Lech, Regen, Altmühl, and Naab Rivers near their respective confluences with the Danube River. Two 1-liter samples were collected from bridges near the center of each tributary using a Wildco depth sampler. Samples were obtained 1-2 meters above the riverbed. 500 ml from each tributary was filtered through a 10-micron stainless steel filter disk and then visually inspected under a microscope to determine a count of the microplastics present. Microplastic fibers were more prevalent than other forms. The preliminary results suggest that the concentration of microplastics is much lower than that of waters found at depth in the Cumberland River and reflects different attitudes and policies towards plastic recycling and littering in the two countries. Quantified results are expected to be presented during Scholarship Sewanee
From Flights of Telos to Cycles of Nostos in the Labyrinth of James Joyce
No full textOn June 16, 1904, Stephen Dedalus has returned to the labyrinth of Dublin and his past, and is haunted by the world of linear, well-ordered history that confronts him and moves towards a single goal. On this day, Stephen is depressed, wandering wayward, and belligerently drunk, and it gets him punched in the face. But he emerges from his catatonia to commune with Leopold Bloom, and perhaps their meeting marks a meaningful ending for James Joyce’s Ulysses to move towards. However, as the two men meet, Joyce thwarts this hope for a satisfying narrative telos. Instead, Bloom stands in as a model of acceptance and equanimity within the labyrinth, understanding its nature as a space of cyclical returns. Bloom accepts the past, and he builds his home in the labyrinth instead of trying to fly from it, providing an alternative to the prideful, flight-based notions of teleological escape prized by Stephen as a young man. This Joycean labyrinth is characterized by cycles of return and paradoxical time where past, present, and future commingle, and this anti-teleological aesthetic encompasses Joyce’s work from Dubliners to A Portrait to Ulysses. Joyce does not progress along lines of increasing Modernism, as critics have traditionally interpreted, but repeats in each work the very cycles of repetition and return that define his labyrinth
Rooting into the Earth, Branching into the Sky: Willa Cather’s Vision for Life Among the Trees
No full textIn her introduction to Willa Cather’s Ecological Imagination, a volume of Cather Studies devoted solely to ecocritical essays about Willa Cather’s writing, Susan Rosowski asserts that the fundamental question driving debate in and around today’s environmental movement—“What is the right relation between human beings and nature?”—is a question that interested Cather deeply, a question that Cather’s stories frequently ask and occasionally, if incompletely, answer. This thesis aims to add to the ecocritical conversation surrounding Cather’s work by drawing attention to the important, albeit largely overlooked, ways that Cather’s beliefs about the relation between human beings and nature are encapsulated in the relationships between her human characters and the trees around them.
To illustrate the consistently-important, if not entirely consistent, role that trees play in Cather’s writing, this paper offers an illustrative pairing of two of Cather’s best-known novels: My Ántonia (1918) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). This pairing is uniquely instructive because the two novels are at once very similar and very different from one another. Because both novels tell stories about characters who, when forced to adapt to new, unnervingly-bare environments, forge intimate connections with their new homes primarily through their attention to, and care for, trees, we come to understand that Cather sees trees as the primary mediators of humans’ relationships with the places they inhabit. On the other hand, because of the essential differences between the Midwestern plains of My Ántonia and the Southwestern deserts of Death Comes for the Archbishop, and, even more importantly, the essential differences between the personalities of the two novels’ titular characters (Ántonia of My Ántonia and Archbishop Latour of Death Comes for the Archbishop), we come to understand that exactly how trees mediate the relationship between humans and nature can vary.
This thesis’s central argument posits that the trees of My Ántonia draw Ántonia’s spirit downwards into the Nebraska earth, rooting her more deeply in the immediate community, while the trees of Death Comes for the Archbishop draw Latour’s spirit upwards, making the Southwest a place where Latour feels a unique, transcendent connection to all of creation. Thus, although trees in both stories play a vital role in helping characters find meaning, and a sense of belonging, in a new place, the meanings that Ántonia and Latour find in their new homes, and the types of belonging they feel, are very different from one another.
The paper concludes by examining Cather’s own relationship with the landscapes of Mid- and Southwest America. The thesis ultimately contends that although Cather’s own relationship with the natural world is likely to have been more similar to Latour’s than to Ántonia’s, the illustrative pairing of My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop reveals that Cather rejected the idea of a single “right” relation between human beings and nature. Instead, Cather’s stories suggest that each individual must discover their own “right” relationship with the natural world around them—a seemingly long and difficult task, but a task that may be made a bit easier if one knows where to begin: beneath a tree