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The Death and Ghost of "Sweeney": An Analysis of Limitations of Modernist Verse Drama Through T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Motif
No full textThesis advisor: Joseph NugentIn this paper, I unite scholarly understanding of T. S. Eliot’s recurring character, Sweeney. I present the origin of Sweeney through Eliot’s knowledge of classical and Irish myth as well as his contemporary views surrounding Ireland, Catholicism, Africa, and Afro-modernism. In discussing dramatic Sweeney, I incorporate an understanding of Eliot’s contemporary works on Senecan tragedy to unravel the fragmented nature of “Sweeney Agonistes.” I conclude my first chapter by discussing Sweeney’s “death” by analyzing Eliot’s recent conversion to Anglicanism and emerging views of poetic metaphysics. My second chapter unveils the ghost of Sweeney in Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” through the metaphor of stencil art, discussing “Sweeney Agonistes” as an outline. Further, I find Sweeney’s ghost in the work of Samuel Beckett’s "Waiting For Godot" through analysis of themes drawn from an article by Rick De Villier, as well as new studies on technique and characters. I conclude with my explanation of Sweeney as a “new” Senecan Tragic Hero based on the terminology of semper idem - always the same.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Morrissey School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: English.Discipline: Departmental Honors
"The Ties Which Unite Us": A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Expressed Purposes of the Fulbright Program
No full textThesis advisor: Gerardo BlancoThe Fulbright Program is the US’ flagship international exchange program. Given its continued prominence in international higher education from its postwar inception to the present day, this study uses critical discourse analysis methods to analyze power, mission, and purpose in the history of the Fulbright Program. The analysis demonstrates several overarching ideas. First, throughout the program’s history, the concept of promoting mutual understanding between nations has been conflated with mutuality in the exchange of resources. Second, while the program’s efforts have often promoted the idea of a singular US identity, critics have consistently challenged this argument. Third, while the program grapples with its relationship to Senator Fulbright, the influence of his ideology remains throughout history. Scholars and practitioners of educational diplomacy may consider these findings as they pursue ways to promote equitable and mutual educational exchange.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Treatise of Stoic Value Theory & Corresponding Understanding of Emotions
No full textThesis advisor: Sarah ByersIn this thesis, I argue that the Stoic value theory and understanding of emotion is a theoretical abstraction of human agency over values and emotions that has limited pertinence to empirical human life. Towards this effort, I discuss the Stoic ethical naturalism that relies on oikeiôsis to illustrate their notion of eudaimonia. Moreover, I discuss Stoic epistemology and action theory to illustrate how the Stoics can place well-being completely within human agency. Drawing on their understanding of both human nature and agency, the Stoics derive a value framework and corresponding understanding of emotions that proposes a radical detachment and devaluation from all that lies beyond the moral character. However, I show through empirical evidence and logical reasoning how human agency is restricted and therein, disallows for the proposed radical detachment. Nonetheless, their philosophy on ethics can still be applied in a limited capacity to achieve therapeutic benefit and value.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Morrissey School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Philosophy.Discipline: Departmental Honors
TheDebt of Love in the Theology of Richard of St. Victor:
No full textThesis advisor: Boyd Taylor CoolmanRichard of St. Victor is known primarily for two arguments from his book On the Trinity. The first is that the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can be understood from the logic of love, which tends toward sharing with others. The second is that a divine person (persona) is an “individual existence of a divine nature,” a revision of the definition of personhood given centuries earlier by Boethius. Fewer contemporary theologians are familiar with the third major innovation Richard makes in this work. In his description of love among the trinitarian persons, Richard organizes the three loving divine persons according to three modes of loving: gratuitous love (amor gratuitus) identical with the Father, owed love (amor debitus) identical with the Holy Spirit, and love mixed from both (amor permixtus) identical with the Son. The most striking—because the most apparently problematic—part of this scheme is the nomination of amor debitus, owed love, as a mode of loving proper to the Trinity. Presenting the apparently contradictory combination of owing and loving as a love proper to God as God, the conundra raised by Richard’s use of this phrase were interpreted away by his scholastic readers in a way that buried the potential of his insight for discussions about the nature of love called divine. My dissertation analyzes the meaning of amor debitus to reframe and re-present Richard’s arguments in On the Trinity with Richard’s radical claim about the nature of intra-trinitarian love in clearer view. I argue that the notion of owed love represents a class of experience which is distinct both from the obligation of a command (typically associated with debitum) and from the freedom of an unaffected choice (typically associated with amor). Amor debitus fuses the quality of the command or commanding conditions with a freedom that is not intrinsic to these prior conditions, but does not leave them behind. Richard’s link between owed love as a personal property in the Trinity and as the norm of human love for God gives Richard a fresh approach to the idea that “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5), and therefore also to the longstanding Christian claim that human love is owed to God, ordered to neighborly service, and free.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Theology
Finding its Place in the World: The Federal Republic of Germany, the United States, and the Vietnam War, 1963-1969
No full textThesis advisor: Devin O. PendasThis dissertation assesses the Vietnam War’s effect on the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and its relationship with the United States in the 1960s. In the name of alliance solidarity, the West German government provided economic, technical, and humanitarian assistance to South Vietnam. The Federal Republic would have quietly continued this support and thought little more about Vietnam if not for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s mounting demands that Bonn share more of the burden of the defense of the so-called “Free World.” In the most dramatic example of this effort, Johnson and his advisers attempted in late 1965 to pressure Chancellor Ludwig Erhard into sending West German support troops to Vietnam. Erhard ruled out sending military personnel, but the episode – combined with a series of foreign policy and economic failures – led to his resignation in November 1966. At the heart of this setback in West German-U.S. relations was a dispute over the Federal Republic’s place in the world. West German leaders largely agreed that it was only a matter of time before the Federal Republic got out from under the shadow of the Third Reich and returned to the world stage, but they disagreed about how this goal could best be achieved. By comparison, the Johnson administration had a clear vision for the Federal Republic’s return to the world stage. Looking to co-opt German economic power to maintain American hegemony around the world, Johnson expected Bonn to play the role of America’s junior partner. Although Erhard proved incapable of filling the role intended by Johnson, he helped to establish the Federal Republic’s characteristic political culture, combining military reluctance with a strong preference for economic stability. After Erhard’s resignation, Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and his Vice-Chancellor, Willy Brandt, established a genuine and productive partnership with the United States, even as they made the limits of their solidarity clear.
Like the government, West German civil society struggled to come to terms with the Federal Republic’s evolving place in the world. This dissertation shows that "regular" Germans' grappling with the Vietnam War was linked to their attempt to define the Federal Republic’s place in the world and, perhaps even, early efforts to come to terms with their collective responsibility for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. For the German Red Cross, the West German Catholic and Protestant churches, and private "pacifist" organizations like Hilfsaktion Vietnam, humanitarianism and human rights was an important outlet for this endeavor. The West German government, for its part, learned that it could employ the language of humanitarianism and human rights to distance itself from the most controversial or morally dubious parts of American foreign policy without sacrificing its formal alliance with the United States. In the late 1960s, then, government pragmatism, civil society interests, and public (moral) outrage converged to bring humanitarianism and human rights to the forefront of the Federal Republic of Germany.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: History
CRISPR-Hybrid: A CRISPR-mediated intracellular selection platform for RNA aptamers
No full textThesis advisor: Jia NiuIn the last ten years, programmable CRISPR-Cas systems have been widely-used as genome editing tools for gene manipulation, epigenetic functionalization, and transcriptional regulation. Among them, fusing effector proteins directly to the Cas protein allows the resulting CRISPR machinery to direct these effector proteins to multiple sites of the same gene or multiple genes at once. Although they can be used to target multiple genetic loci simultaneously, these methods are often limited to applying one regulatory function (e.g., activation or repression) at a time. On the other hand, recruiting effector proteins via RNA aptamer-RNA-binding protein (RBP) recognition enabled multiplexed and multi-modular gene manipulations simultaneously. However, there are only a limited set of aptamer-RBP pairs that can function orthogonally and intracellularly, e.g., MS2 RNA aptamer with MS2 coat protein (MCP), and PP7 RNA aptamer with PP7 coat protein (PCP). The scarcity of orthogonal intracellular aptamer-RBP pairs imposes severe constraints on the CRISPR-mediated multifunctional manipulations of the genome and the epigenome. We established an intracellular selection platform for RNA aptamers, named CRISPR-Hybrid, and expanded the scope of aptamer-RBP toolkit for CRISPR transcription regulators. Using CRISPR-Hybrid, we successfully identified a highly active and specific aptamer for bacteriophage Qβ coat protein (QCP) in vivo, and characterized its binding affinity and specificity in vitro. We further validated the orthogonality of selected aptamer with QCP to other available intracellularly functional aptamer-RBP pairs including MS2-MCP and PP7-PCP in mammalian cells. Finally, we demonstrated the utility of this orthogonal pair in multiplexed and multi-modular regulations of endogenous genes.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Chemistry
Educating Anxious Minds: Locke and Montesquieu on Civic Formation
No full textThesis advisor: Ryan P. HanleyThis dissertation looks to the philosophy of John Locke and Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu to clarify the role anxiety should play in the political culture of liberal democracies. It argues that Locke and Montesquieu offer related but competing visions of how a restive civic spirit can be made compatible with limited government. Chapter One surveys a range of 20th century concerns that liberal democracies are endangered by the presence of widespread popular anxiety. At the intersection of psychology and political science, many theorists in this era worried that an anxious populace will be uniquely tempted by the order and regularity promised by totalitarian governments and authoritarian institutions. On this view, anxiety’s affinity with paranoia and conspiratorial thinking makes it an exclusively destructive force. The remainder of the dissertation proposes that Locke and Montesquieu address themselves to these concerns and that, in contrast to 20th century liberals, they see a constructive role for anxiety in politics. In Chapter Two, I examine Locke’s analysis of psychological “uneasiness.” He proposes that passions like disquiet typically cause citizens to seek relief in the beliefs that most comfort them, thereby leading them into intellectual submissiveness at best and into fanatical superstition at worst. In Chapter Three, I consider Locke’s suggestions for how this politically destructive response to uneasiness might be reversed. Paradoxically, he thinks the best response to disquiet depends on amplifying, and then redirecting, disquiet. It is only by becoming anxious about anxiety that Locke thinks citizens will develop the motivation to become “masters of [their] own minds.” Locke thus develops what I call the ideal of “skeptical citizenship”: the disposition of a wary and apprehensive populace perpetually on the look-out for threats to its independence. Chapters Four and Five turn to Montesquieu’s simultaneous appreciation of and ambivalence to this Lockean ideal of civic life. Chapter Four deals with Montesquieu’s writing on the English constitution, his analysis of a political culture that closely mirrors the one Locke endorses. In this examination, Montesquieu acknowledges the advantages—in terms of individual security and social stability—that come from a political culture characterized by “inquiétude” and suspicion toward authority. However, he worries that this civic culture also generates excessive individualism and that such societies will fail to make concrete use of the liberty they are at such pains to secure. Chapter Five considers Montesquieu’s response to this problem. In contrast to Locke’s ideal of skepticism, Montesquieu proposes a counter-ideal: “humanity.” Whereas Locke sought to cultivate a form of disquiet that grows suspicious of all authoritative customs and institutions, Montesquieu seeks to channel inquiétude through the various social activities linked with commerce, which he suspects will lead citizens to better appreciate their dependence on one another. The conclusion maps the overlap between these two visions, using them to reflect on a tension still running through liberal thought. In their divergent suggestions for how free states might manage civic anxiety, Locke and Montesquieu sow the seeds of competing elements in the liberal tradition.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Political Science
The Icon of Divinity: Sophia, Trinity, and Creation in Sergii Bulgakov
No full textThesis advisor: Andrew PrevotFr. Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1944) produced an extensive theological corpus exploring the concept of “Sophia” in Eastern Orthodox thought, practice, and spirituality. Writing from within the school of modern Russian religious thought, his “sophiology” has been the subject of controversy and misconception since his exile from the Soviet Union in 1922. Although there has been a renaissance of sorts in the 2020s of Bulgakov’s thought in Orthodox and ecumenical spaces, there has been little explicit treatment of his sophiology or its significance in shaping his dogmatic theology. The primary goal of this dissertation is to elucidate the concrete role of Sophia specifically within Bulgakov’s doctrines of the Trinity and creation. Tracking how Sophia operates in both her divine and creaturely roles within Bulgakov’s conception of the God-world relationship, the project demonstrates the essential role she plays not only in understanding Bulgakov’s dogmatic theology on its own terms but also in how one might consider retrieving Bulgakov for more constructive theological ends. To this end, the final chapters of the dissertation explore how Bulgakov’s theology creation is fundamentally shaped by his understanding of a sophianic Trinity while placing such sophiological conclusions into conversation with a constructive theology of the icon, French psychoanalytic philosophers Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, and ecofeminism. In this way, the dissertation looks to Bulgakov’s use of Sophia as a potential source for the development of an Orthodox ecofeminist theology, critically and charitably exploring the feminine character of Sophia in Bulgakov, her relationship to the earth, “feminine” subjectivity, and the Eastern Christian iconographic tradition. Within his doctrines of Trinity and creation, Bulgakov discusses (1) the divine Sophia as the divine world, ousia of God, and her hypostatic relationship to the Father, (2) the hypostatsization of divine Sophia as the Son and the Holy Spirit, as well as her kenotic participation in both divine and creaturely worlds through the second and third divine persons, (3) how Sophia operates in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and how her presence shapes different definitions of divine and creaturely “nothing,” (4) Sophia, divine “femininity,” and her significance for theological anthropology, and (5) the connection between Sophia and “mother Earth” and humanity’s relationship to the organic world. Each of these points are treated in depth as the argument of the dissertation develops in the order of chapters.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Theology
Sounding the Alarm on the Disproportionate Distribution of Sirens on Students of Color
No full textThesis advisor: Tara GareauNoise pollution is highly consequential to children’s learning and general well-being (Klatte et al., 2013; Balk et al., 2023; Masud et al., 2020). Sirens emanating from emergency services pose particularly adverse consequences to students’ well-being and academic performance (Gheewalla et al., 2021). As signals of danger, sirens are shown to induce psychological and physiological reactions, including emotional distress, changes in blood pressure, and increased heart rate and blood glucose (Lapid Pickman et al., 2021; Manor et al., 2023). Prior studies have shown that schools with higher proportions of students of color are disproportionately exposed to noise pollution. Through this study, I employ a multi-phase, mixed methods approach to examine whether students of color in Massachusetts are disproportionately exposed to sirens in the classroom, potentially compounding existing stressors and contributing to academic disparities. In Phase One, I draw upon spatial data science to determine which schools and students in Massachusetts are at risk of experiencing sirens frequently throughout the school day. In Phase Two, I build upon the results from Phase One to survey students and educators attending a school my initial findings deemed were at risk of exposure to emergency sirens to determine how sirens impact the learning environment. I find that students of color and schools in urban areas in Massachusetts are disproportionately exposed to sirens. Furthermore, I find that the majority of students report being distracted for at least ten seconds when they hear sirens in the classroom. Finally, I find that sirens can serve as a trigger of past traumatic events in both students and educators, potentially adding additional stressors to the learning environment.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Morrissey School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Environmental Studies.Discipline: Scholar of the College
Managing for our Future: Using a Sensemaking Framework to Support Student Affairs Employee Outcomes Through Supervision
Get PDFThesis advisor: Christopher R. GlassThis executive dissertation assumes a sensemaking lens to investigate how Assistant and Associate Vice President (AVP)-level administrators in student affairs approach their supervisory roles within the current climate of higher education and employment. The study’s primary goal is to identify how leaders can prepare for changing employment trends and transitions to facilitate and support positive outcomes and satisfaction within their departments and for their staff. The COVID-19 pandemic cast an unforgiving spotlight on longstanding issues within employment in the student affairs profession, which ruptured under the pressures of the outbreak, socio-political upheaval, and massive demographic shifts. Though turnover trends have plagued the student affairs profession for years, COVID-19 demonstrated the inability of traditional human resource practices to meet the changing needs of employees and institutions. This study addresses the following research questions: 1) how do AVP-level student affairs administrators make sense of employment data and trends to inform their supervisory practice? and 2) how do AVP-level student affairs administrators make sense of their role (relationship + actions) in supporting staff members beyond university-wide HR efforts? To answer these questions, this dissertation employed a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews. The main results of the study identified five themes, including issues of recruitment, retention, and resignation; shifts in worker norms; considerations of the identity of a supervisor; changing workforce trends; and institutional priorities. These themes notably revolved around the need for AVPs to navigate various forms of tension. These findings have substantial implications for enhancing supervisory approaches to support positive outcomes for student affairs professionals, supporting recommendations for new pathways to the profession, and creating space for proactive versus reactive approaches to employment trends. Ultimately, the goal is to support increased satisfaction and retention in the field of student affairs. The findings contribute to research by addressing trends in an increasingly multigenerational workforce, supervisory approaches in student affairs, and strategies for navigating societal and demographic shifts.Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2024.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education