"This study examines the importance of space for the way contemporary novelists experiment with style and form, offering an account of how British writers from the past three decades have engaged with landscape description as a catalyst for innovation. David James considers the …
"Space is a central topic in cultural and narrative theory today, although in most cases theory assumes Newtonian absolute space. However, the idea of a universal homogeneous space is now obsolete. Black holes, multiple dimensions, quantum entanglement, and spatio-temporal disto…
For centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the land of Iran was Persian, and Persians l…
This dissertation engages the concept of resonance in order to explore how Chilean feminist activists, musicians, industry leaders, and audiences have used popular musical practices to create space for themselves and their communities. Centrally, this study asks, how are feminis…
Using a geographic framework, this dissertation explores immigrant experiences by examining how Algerian immigrants and their descendants perform identity and negotiate belonging in French society. Bringing together critical theorizations of race, identity, space, and place, thi…
This dissertation examines how racism structures the lives and emotions of communities of color in Portland, Oregon. As the U.S. becomes more racially diverse, Portland remains the whitest U.S. city with a population over 500,000. It is also a site where African Americans, Latin…
Precarious paradise: Toolesboro, Iowa tells a tale of a very small but extremely significant place on a river bluff in southeastern Iowa, site of both 2,000-year-old Native American burial mounds and an ancestral farm dating back to early white settlement in 1835. Through poems,…
This dissertation seeks to provide a framework for engaging with two spatial concepts that have been foundational to theorizing literacy across time but have often been taken for granted as passive backdrops to the social action of literacy practice: the notions of “the local” a…
The grand landscapes of the American West are iconic and critical to the history of environmental conservation, yet they are also highly conflicted. A history of destructive extraction has left many of these landscapes in a state of disrepair, worsened by an increasingly variabl…