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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
“The dislocation of man in the modern age”: The Pilgrim Condition and Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholic Literature highlights the ways in which the major Catholic voices in mid-twentieth century America—Flannery O’Connor, Walker...
In the natural world there are things we call 'syndromes'. Depression is an example of a syndrome. There are many forms of depression, but generally, people with depression suffer from a subset of several unpleasant symptoms, such as...
Control-based theories of moral responsibility are premised on the idea that agents are morally responsible only for that which is within their control. The connection between control and responsibility is quite intuitive. However, it is...
The Emperor of Shoes follows a long tradition of 20th century Jewish-American writers--Bellow, Roth, Paley and Olsen, to name a few--addressing issues of work and commerce in America. My novel, however, carries this tradition into the...
Talk about what people are able or unable to do is ubiquitous. Despite that fact it's unobvious just what it comes to to be able to do something. For that reason alone it would be worthwhile to explore what our abilities consist in, but...
Research on attentive publics has worked towards identifying who is considered attentive, how the attentive public is different from the general public, and how policy makers should take their views into consideration (Devine, 1970;...
His Visible Bones follows its speaker from active illness and addiction through recovery and into a long-term relationship. The poems focus on lived experiences of queerness, mental illness, addiction, recovery, and romance. They operate...
Researchers have explored two competing ideas as to why people obey the law. Some research has taken the instrumental approach--the belief that the prospect of rewards and punishments drive behavior. Others have taken the normative...
Do humans lack character? Or if they possess it, is it very different from what most people think it is? While it has long been held that character plays an indispensible role in moral theory, recent work from social psychologists...
Women Under the Stars is a creative dissertation in poetry. It follows a series of female speakers as they examine the ways in which their identities have been informed, complicated, and, at times, determined by the narratives they have...
This manuscript is a collection of poems that relies in part on an unavoidable lineage of Southern poetics, while simultaneously asserting a divergence from that poetic and reimagining how reconciliations with that lineage may be reached...
This dissertation will explore the topic of disposition ascriptions. A disposition ascription is any statement that ascribes a disposition to an object. The statement ‘Glass is fragile’ is one example. A popular account – called the...
I proceed according to a skeptical, Pyrrhonist inspired metaphilosophy to address two perennial issues: the nature of human agency and our culpability in acting. After unpacking this approach, as well as offering some initial remarks...
This dissertation both surveys contemporary work in metanormativity and argues for a position that I call moderate normative skepticism. I begin by evaluating efforts to characterize the normative domain and conclude that while some...
For my creative dissertation I have written a memoir, titled Approaching Rapture. The memoir is a somewhat traditionally structured coming-of-age story. In particular, it details the long ordeal of coming to terms with my sexuality and...
This dissertation examines how the implementation of Enlightenment ideas in the French Revolution gave birth to a new secular conception of the state and the invention of a new religion. I argue that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, representing...
A Wedding of Jackals is a creative dissertation in poetry. It follows a queer speaker who, after the end of his marriage, tries and fails to restore a relationship with his estranged father. In evaluating and moving through these...
It seems well accepted that agents can only be morally responsible for what they voluntarily control. Yet as a matter of practice, we seem to hold agents responsible for items outside of their voluntary control, blaming others for...
This dissertation considers several topics in the philosophy of action. After the introduction, which is the first chapter, the second chapter argues in favor of a causal approach to reasons-explanations by considering what I call ex...
The central thesis of the following dissertation is that we should understand moral worth as the practical corollary of knowledge. I therefore agree with those standard accounts of moral worth which maintain that moral worth requires us...
Moscow is a State of Mind explores the psychological landscape of a Dark Night of the Soul the narrator worked through between 2011-2023. Excising the roots of personal trauma by means of poems that describe personal events too intense...
The dissertation manuscript Beer League Outros is, among other things, an investigation of contemporary masculinity. Roused by uncertainty regarding gender roles in post-modernity, the poems elegize via arranging male attributes into a...
Over the past century, career development centers across the nation have evolved from the vocational and placement centers of the 1920s towards an interdisciplinary operational model of today (Herr, 2013). The interdisciplinary model...
The following poems focus upon fundamental experiences with technologies, physical forms, obsessions, and ideas in order to reveal an inherent unity in humanity. These “artifacts” are found in ancient, but also contemporary, contexts, ...
Finding Elvis: Stories - a creative dissertation - is a collection of ten short stories divided into two parts: Bad Jews and Song of Songs. The five stories comprising the first section of the manuscript - Bad Jews - follow, in part, the...
In Via Dolorosa, The Way of Sorrows, a collection of poems, the speakers undertake a spiritual pilgrimage characterized by suffering and hope. The title is based on the devotional route in Jerusalem, also known as the Stations of the...
In this dissertation, I draw from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and applied behavior analysis in order to present what I take to be a necessary condition for morally responsible agency, the Integrated Mental Status condition (IMS...
Seeing while Blind: Disability, Theories of Vision, and Milton's Poetry demonstrates that Milton used his blindness as a literary trope to represent blindness and vision in his poetry. It also addresses how blindness affected the way...
Intuitively, it seems that we can easily distinguish which norms are moral and which are not. For example, regulations on killing clearly belong in the moral category while rules governing "casual Fridays" do not. Moral norms seem to...
The Senegalese writer Léopold Sédar Senghor is known for being a proponent of the cultural métissage, the Civilization of the Universal, the dialogue of cultures and the concept of humanism. He notably suggests the complementarity of...
Vanity Limbo is a full-length poetry collection about growing up as a non-heteronormative individual, contending with that realization into adulthood, and ultimately embracing oneself. Distinct voice, vivid imagery, playfulness, self...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
