For my thesis, I explore how South Sudanese refugees in central Iowa imagine a utopic South Sudan amidst contemporary inter-ethnic tensions emanating from their recently independent country. In central Iowa and in particular Des Moines, South Sudanese refugees subtly reproduce t…
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The book of Chronicles is examined using the methodology of utopian literary theory. From this innovative perspective, Chronicles is interpreted as a utopian work that critiques present society and its status quo by presenting a “better alternative reality.” My analysis contends…
Through a study of the efforts of the rabbis of the Movement for Progressive Judaism in Israel to build and lead value-based and participatory communities, this dissertation attempts to expand our theoretical understanding of authority. It attempts to develop Weber's elusive fou…
The decade of the 1990s has seen the rapid rise of the Internet as a technological, social, economic, and cultural phenomenon. The medium's development has generated significant debate over its potential to reform Western, and especially American, society. An extensive review of…
I here hypothesize a causal relationship between the conditions of oppression and expressions of utopia. Roughly: the more a people, culture, and/or ethnicity experience physical space as a site of political, cultural, and literal encroachment, the more that distinct cultures ut…
Applying utopian theory to the Bible reveals a number of issues surrounding the biblical text within academic disciplines such as biblical studies, which study the Bible as an ancient cultural artefact, and among religious readers of the Bible. The biblical passage Numbers 13 wa…
This dissertation is a reevaluation and interpretation of St. Thomas More’s most famous work Utopia (1516). Utopia is a notoriously opaque work, and hence no scholarly consensus has formed around its meaning, much less around its implications for political theory. Yet, despite i…
This project seeks to highlight the necessity for differential spatial critique within academic and utopian discourses by asking the question: “How can Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space help us understand Frederick Douglass’ history-changing escape from slavery, given the…
In Toward the Horizon: Contemporary Queer Theatre as Utopic Activism, I pursue two intersecting goals. First, I offer close readings of theatrical representations of queerness that expand beyond the shallow representations of the not-so-distant past, including the trope of the g…
It should not be surprising that many African-American writers have written in the utopian genre. As novelist Walter Mosley wrote in a 1998 essay titled “Black to the Future,” “Science fiction and its relatives (fantasy, horror, speculative fiction, etc.) … speak most clearly to…
In 1962, Aldous Huxley, one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, published a utopian novel titled Island. During his career, Huxley wrote eleven novels; Island was his final novel and the most important to Huxley personally. Island was not Huxley’s most famous or acclaim…
In the 17th and 18th century, a form of novel known as the voyage imaginaire gained tremendous popularity, portraying fantastic worlds at or beyond the margins of known spaces. These texts portray societies set anywhere from the mythical Southern Continent (now Australia and New…
This dissertation examines how three contemporary Mexican intellectuals confront the cultural milieu and political economy of the neoliberal era by revising the utopian imaginaries of Mexico’s major 20th century student movements. Building on recent scholarship on Mexican histor…
Pilot Town is a former commune-style settlement in Alabama that began around the 1830s. This community, described by many as utopian, consisted of generations of outer bar boat pilots and their families. For nearly a century this community occupied a small peninsula and cove nea…
Borges’s literary production, particularly between 1923 and 1955, drastically changes in its depiction of Buenos Aires. The city that Borges considered his home was the center of various political and cultural changes in Argentina during those years, and the more that Argentina …
This study integrates the literature and correspondence of such Inklings authors as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien into the arc of Commonwealth utopian and dystopian literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because utopian authors such as Samuel Butler, Willi…
This dissertation employs a theoretical framework rooted in utopian studies to examine the role of utopia, dystopia, and related concepts in literary and cinematic depictions of Brasília and São Paulo since 1980. By centering the concept of utopianism, understood broadly as “soc…
Many American and Iraqi cultural reactions to Gulf War I and Gulf War II, including the texts selected for this story, expressed the dystopian consequences of these wars. However, this study focuses on exploring the utopian dimensions of the selected texts and investigates how t…
Exploring the use of fiction—and science fiction—as an opportunity for "Scientific Outsiders" to present their knowledge and questions about the natural world by analyzing the themes presented in Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World.