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Beyond World War I: Post-War Trauma in Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Full text linkThis thesis reexamines Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles as a literary response and representation to World War I, arguing that it deserves recognition as a novel of wartime trauma rather than being confined solely to the realm of popular detective fiction. Influenced by Christie’s firsthand experiences as a wartime nurse, the novel subtly weaves themes of personal wartime experience and trauma into its plot, characters, and setting. Christie’s protagonist, Mr. Hastings, represents the returning soldier attempting to reintegrate into society, while Hercule Poirot—a Belgian refugee—embodies the war’s broader displacement and disruption. Set during World War I in a countryside estate that has been forced to function as a “war household,” the novel quietly reflects the impact of rationing, loss, and uncertainty on everyday life. These elements, though understated, serve as key narrative devices and shape the literary text as a whole. While Christie’s contribution to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction is well established, this thesis explores how her fiction also serves as a historical document of wartime experience. The clue-puzzle format is not only entertaining, but it also mirrors a cultural desire for order, logic, and meaning following the chaos of war. Christie’s meticulous attention to detail—especially regarding poisons and human behavior—derives from her medical training and provides authenticity to her narrative. Her frequent use of poisoning as a murder method reflects a deeper familiarity with suffering and death, grounded in personal experience rather than detached imagination. Despite often being excluded from conversations about war literature, Christie’s early work challenges traditional, male-centered portrayals of the soldier’s experience by highlighting the domestic, medical, and psychological aspects of wartime life. This thesis calls for Christie to be brought into the broader literary discourse on World War I. Her work not only reshaped detective fiction but also preserved a unique perspective on the war’s cultural and emotional legacy, revealing the quiet resilience required to move forward in its aftermath
Autonomous, Yet Anchored: Exploring the Interplay of Self-Reliance and Personal Spirituality on Employee Outcomes
Full text linkThe modern workplace increasingly requires employees to function autonomously while managing limited psychological resources, presenting a tension between the benefits of self-reliance and its potential costs to well-being. This dissertation examined how self-reliance simultaneously influences task persistence and emotional exhaustion, and explores whether personal spirituality moderates these relationships. Drawing on the Strength Model of Self-Control (SMSC), I develop and test a theoretical framework investigating the relationships between self-reliance, work overload, task persistence, emotional exhaustion, and workplace spirituality.
Through a time-lagged field study with 453 working professionals across three measurement waves, I found that self-reliance positively predicted task persistence, supporting the strength-building principle of the SMSC. Contrary to hypotheses, self-reliance did not significantly predict work overload, though supplemental analyses revealed a significant direct relationship between self-reliance and emotional exhaustion. This finding suggests that self-reliance operates through parallel pathways - simultaneously enhancing task persistence while creating vulnerability to emotional exhaustion through direct psychological mechanisms. Perceived work overload strongly predicted emotional exhaustion, but objective work hours did not, highlighting the primacy of subjective experiences over objective conditions. The proposed moderating effects of workplace spirituality were not supported, though supplemental analyses revealed that specific dimensions of spirituality - particularly engaging work - directly influenced perceived overload and emotional exhaustion.
This research contributes to organizational theory by revealing the dual pathways through which self-reliance influences workplace outcomes, demonstrating the importance of subjective experiences over objective conditions, and establishing the multidimensional nature of workplace spirituality. The findings further highlight the complex interplay between individual traits, showing that conscientiousness moderates the relationship between self-reliance and perceived overload. The findings suggest that organizations should leverage the performance benefits of self-reliance while implementing strategies to mitigate its emotional costs through fostering meaningful work experiences and helping employees constructively manage their perceptions of workplace demands
Bringing Life to Our Mission and Vision: A Problem of Practice
Full text linkThis study leveraged principles of improvement science and a mixed methods approach to evaluate the impact of an intentionally designed professional learning cohort for teachers. The intended aim of this study was to equip teachers with the knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy necessary to effectively utilize instructional technology to meaningfully engage all learners. As one part of a collaborative dissertation in practice, this study explored the broad impact of teachers’ participation in a cohort implementing the seven elements of effective professional development (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017) and framed around the ISTE Standards for Educators (Crompton, 2017). The companion study (Britton, forthcoming) provided a deep dive into the role of student-centered coaching with a small group of cohort participants.
Through analyzing data from several pre- and post- surveys completed during the journey, the improvement team took an iterative approach using the PDSA cycle to guide planning through seven modules. Based on analysis of data provided by 25 cohort participants, the team discovered that cohort participation had a statistically significant positive impact on teachers’ knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy. Significant growth was particularly strong for the analyst, facilitator, and collaborator standards, as well as self-efficacy for learning new technology.
The hypothesis that these positive increases would have a significant impact on teachers’ perspectives on using digital learning tools and resources in the classroom was supported by the findings