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Reservoir
No full textReservoir is a collection of original poems organized into three interconnected sections. Section one focuses on a particular location, rural Northwest Georgia, as a fictionalized place for the speaker to study personal and collective memory, storytelling, and the tension between humans and their natural environment. Section two moves beyond this geographical location to incorporate travel, art, genre, and found poetry. The third section returns primarily to individual female experience as it relates to parenting, teaching, gardening, loss, change, and how factors of location influence each of these themes. Poetic influences include the compressed language of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Southern Gothic humor of Flannery O’Connor, the regionality of Robert Frost, William Wordsworth’s approaches to the restorative visions of nature, theories of the imagination from Wallace Stevens to Terrance Hayes, and the deep imagery of Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Emerson, and Ada Limón. Some of these poems are funny.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Happy Are They: Stories
No full textHAPPY ARE THEY is a collection of linked short stories that adapts and resets the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners to late 20th century and early 21th century Detroit. Like those in Joyce’s collection, these stories consider cultural identity in the context of empire, the artist’s relationship to exile, and most of all, place as influence of character. The collection strays from Joyce’s in terms of format. While it sustains Joyce’s vision to include stories that depict a city’s citizens by childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and political strife, HAPPY ARE THEY follows three major characters that reappear throughout these stories, which take place over four decades. They culminate in the final adaptation of “The Dead,” hereby entitled “The Resurrected,” and ultimately allow the reader to consider how the short story’s form and subject matter have evolved over the past century. These stories are not direct translations, but loose adaptations, and in their best forms, take on a storytelling life of their own.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Threshing Floor: Poetry Inspired by the Black Arts Movement
No full textThis dissertation represents the culmination of my doctoral studies and demonstrates my development as a poet. The dissertation begins with a critical introduction of my studies of the Black Arts Movement, which serves as a prologue to my full-length poetry manuscript. Deeply influenced by poetry written by African Americans from the Harlem Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement, I recognize the importance of poetry’s response to cultural and political change. In the introduction, I explore the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Michael Harper, Nikki Giovanni, and Claudia Rankin. These poets inspired me with their poetic approaches to Black love, Black history, and Black culture. Their poems taught me lyrical techniques and a willingness both to adhere to and break from traditional poetic forms and language. Within this discussion, I intersperse segments of my own work to represent their influence.
The poems selected for this manuscript draw on themes such as family heritage, African American history and culture, social justice, womanhood, religion, and the natural world. The poems are written in free verse, blank verse, and forms such as sonnet variations, and they experiment with stanza formation and visual form to reflect content and tone. Therefore, this project exemplifies my dedication to the craft, my community engagement teaching pedagogy, and my focus on modern American poetry of the Black Arts Movement and beyond.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
A Syzygy of Snails
No full text“A Syzygy of Snails” is a story collection comprised of seven short stories. The stories operate within the realm of literary fiction, but the author incorporates elements of genre fiction, such as horror, crime, gothic fiction, and even the castaway narrative, in order to meditate on genre and the boundaries between fiction and reality. To that end, stories within stories and metafictive inquiries populate this collection. Although the subject matter varies, from domestic drama grounded in reality to internal conflicts that question reality, fear and disorder thematically bind the stories together as a collection. Each of the stories work to uncover human truths and illustrate that these truths are as present in fiction as in our perceived reality.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Englis
Discourse and Network Analysis of Iran Expertise in the U.S.
No full textThere have been many studies on media (mis)representations of the Middle East and Iran. However, the experts and analysts who serve as major sources for those representations (and for government policy making) have not been systematically studied. This project studies discourses and networks of widely published Iran experts during the first year of the presidency of Iran’s Hassan Rouhani (2013-2014), the period during which unprecedented direct U.S.-Iran diplomacy paved the way for the historic nuclear agreement with Iran. Norman Fairclough’s three dimensional critical discourse analysis method and Peter Haas’s Epistemic Community approach are employed to study discursive as well as non-discursive (networked) characteristics of the most widely published U.S. Iran experts during this time period. Results identify five major epistemic communities that, altogether, represent the spectrum of U.S. Iran experts: neoconservatism, liberal interventionism, containment (tactical engagement), strategic engagement, and rapprochement. These five epistemic communities are described in detail throughout the five results chapters. Findings show that these experts influence the terms of media representations as well as the foreign policy making process. Findings also show that experts operate in a web of discursive as well as networked affiliations (i.e., epistemic communities) in order to be able to develop and circulate their discourses. It is however important to recognize that epistemic communities are not uniform in terms of formation stage, cohesion and level.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Communicatio
Is Cognitive Fatigue a symptom of Mitochondrial Dysfunction?
No full textAxial viewCoronal viewSagittal [email protected]
At a Rest Stop on the Road to Heaven
No full textThis is a creative writing manuscript of poetry. It contains original poems and a creative introduction to the project as a whole.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Fiction, History, Feelings: American Africanism and the Market of Feelings in US Historical Novels, History Textbooks and Teaching Methods, 1892 – 1998
No full textThis dissertation primarily examines US historical novels and textbooks that shaped sentiments about race in the United States during the twentieth century. Its four chapters analyze some of the most popular writing about US history, specifically US history textbooks published before and after some of the most popular US historical novels of the twentieth century: The Clansman (1905), Gone with the Wind (1936), Roots (1976), and Beloved (1987). A comparative analysis of these novels and textbooks reveals that sentimental writing about US history, which this dissertation calls sentimental historiography, fundamentally shaped US historical writing and teaching of the twentieth century. The first half of the dissertation establishes that sentimental historiography appears in predominantly white authored US novelists’ and historians’ engagement with literary devices, such as the descriptive mode that Toni Morrison calls American Africanism, which often renders white figures the central protagonists of American literature and history while rendering Black figures as marginal characters or antagonists. The second half of the dissertation argues that Black writers of history and literature successfully contested sentimental historiography before, during, and after the Black US civil rights movement. It illustrates they did so by developing a form of historical writing that this dissertation calls counter sentimental historiography, which revised the sentimental form of US history with “counter-American Africanism” and also became popular in mainstream historiography. Despite its popularity, however, counter sentimental historiography waned towards the end of the twentieth century. The dissertation concludes by considering how conservative activists and market factors caused counter sentimental historiography to fall out of favor and sentimental historiography to resurge during the 1980s and 1990s.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Targeted Molecular MR Imaging of HER2 and EGFR Using De Novo Designed Protein Contrast Agents
No full textThe application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to non-invasively assess disease biomarkers has been hampered by lack of desired contrast agents with high relaxivity, targeting capability, and optimized pharmacokinetics. We developed a novel MRI probe which targets HER2, a biomarker for various cancers and a target for anti-cancer therapies. This multimodal HER2-targeted MRI probe integrates a rationally designed protein contrast agent with a high affinity HER2 affibody and near IR dye. Our probe can differentially monitor tumors with different HER2 levels in both cells and xenograft mice. In addition to its 10-fold higher dose efficiency compared to clinically-approved agent DTPA, our developed agent also exhibits advantages in crossing the endothelial boundary, tissue distribution, and tumor tissue retention as demonstrated by even distribution of the imaging probe across the entire tumor mass. Additionally, a second series of protein contrast agents that included affibody against EFGR developed with the capability to specifically target EGFR. These contrast agents have been utilized to monitor drug treatments and quantitatively analyze biomarker expression level. Furthermore, we anticipate these agents will provide powerful tools for quantitative assessment of molecular markers, and improved resolution for diagnosis, prognosis and drug discovery.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Chemistr