Graduate student in art and art history - intermedia, winner of Best Presentation in the Fine & Performing Arts Division at the 2007 James F. Jakobsen Graduate Conference. more...
Ballard Seashore
Dissertation Year Fellows 2008-2009
The University of Iowa Graduate College is pleased to announce winners of the 2008-2009 Dissertation Year fellowships. The Graduate College has awarded three Ballard Fellowships and twenty-seven Seashore Fellowships for a total of thirty dissertation year fellowships.
These fellowships are for doctoral students completing dissertations in the humanities. Students are nominated by their departments. The Graduate College provides stipends of $1,500/mo for up to 12 months.
Click here for details regarding this fellowship.
2008-2009 Ballard Seashore Fellows (click for dissertation abstract)
AMERICAN STUDIES
Erica Hannickel
ANTHROPOLOGY
Andria Timmer
ART HISTORY
COMMUNICATION STUDIES
Aaron Sachs
Zachary Stiegler
ECONOMICS
John Hejkal
Latchezar Popov
ENGLISH
Amit Rahul Baishya
Joshua Gooch
FILM STUDIES
Claudia Pummer
Dennis J. Hanlon
FRENCH
GEOGRAPHY
Kirsten Beyer
HISTORY
HISTORY
Meghan Warner
INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES-PHD
MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONS
In-Sue Oh
MUSIC
NURSING
OCCUPATIONAL & ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH
POLITICAL SCIENCE
PSYCHOLOGY
Ashleigh Richard
Robin Barry
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Denise D Kettering
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
WOMEN S STUDIES
Erica Hannickel – American Studies
Sharon Lake – American Studies
The Accidental Feminist: Iowa’s Breastfeeding Firefighter and the Struggle Against Sex Discrimination in the Heartland, 1970-1985
Iowa’s most controversial sex discrimination case began in 1979 when a female firefighter, who was threatened with dismissal for breastfeeding her baby in the fire station, used the law to fight for her rights in the workplace. The high-profile case of Iowa City’s first female firefighter, Linda Eaton, forms the central narrative of my dissertation. I explain why this case elicited intense and surprising responses locally and nationally, and explore its impact on the legal and social struggles against sex discrimination in Iowa during the 1970s and 1980s. By focusing on the ways in which law and society reshape each other, I reveal how the local women’s movement played a pivotal role played in Eaton’s case and in the development of sex discrimination law in Iowa and in the nation. I also analyze the meaning of the various forms of resistance encountered by Eaton, and women like her, who dared to enter the profession of firefighting.
The Boston "T" Party: Testosterone Therapy and Masculinity in the Aging Male and Transgender Male Communities
While all healthy male and female bodies produce testosterone, in North America testosterone is thought to be the substance that makes men masculine. Testosterone therapy, the use of synthetic testosterone as a hormone replacement therapy, produces physical effects attributed to masculinity, such as increased facial hair and muscle tone.
Masculinity is a cultural construct that imparts a set of prescriptions of what it is to be, and look like, an ideal man. Testosterone is at once a symbol of cultural notions of masculinity and a tangible commodity, a metaphor and an object. Testosterone therapy at once establishes, maintains, and enforces a coherently embodied gender. This research analyzes multiple discourses of testosterone and disparate usages of testosterone therapy in two intriguingly divergent populations in North America. Aging men (ages 40-70) and transgender men (male-identified, though not born biological men), illuminate the extent to which masculinity is a cultural construction, influenced by culture, biology, and technology.
This project explores how masculinity is pursued, not just through the accumulation of culturally sanctified behaviors, but also through technological modifications of the natural body. The first group is aging men, whose natural decline in testosterone production has recently been pathologized and labeled a testosterone deficiency.
Testosterone therapy in aging men seeks to restore testosterone levels to those of young men. A second group of potential users of testosterone therapy is transgender men, who often use testosterone to transform their phenotypically female bodies. In these men, testosterone produces secondary sex characteristics seen as markers of masculinity, such as lowered voice pitch, facial hair, and increased muscle mass. For these men, testosterone therapy enables individuals to make their physical bodies more culturally masculine. This project presents a biocultural synthesis of masculinity, exploring how men perform, challenge, redefine, and dis-identify with embodied masculinity. This research therefore has significance for anyone attempting to elucidate the complex relationship between gender and sex.
Andria Timmer – Anthropology
Re-Imagining Hollywood: An Anthropology of Concepts and Community
This dissertation re-imagines three core concepts of anthropology in the unconventional setting of present-day Hollywood. Using the discursively circulating concepts of community, place, and time, I reconsider each as it relates to Hollywood, and each as it may be understood in the field of anthropology in this context. Hollywood is an ideal site for this reexamination because it consistently defies categorization and destabilizes traditional anthropological concepts. I approach Hollywood from a conceptual perspective, understanding "Hollywood" to be as much a concept, as a geographic locale and a significant American industry.
Elizabeth Sutton – Art History
Economics, Ethnography, and Empire: The Illustrated Travel Series of Claesz, 1598-1603
The travel series published by Cornelis Claesz in Amsterdam between 1598 and 1603 exemplify early European ethnography of peoples from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In their textual and especially pictorial formats, Claesz’s travel series influenced the depiction and reception by Europeans of various peoples in the world. The production and reception of the engravings within throw light on the early modern confluence of past intellectual tradition and the development of modern science. Considering the engraved illustrations within the context of emerging scientific empiricism and method, I explore how newly rigorous classification processes affected European differentiation and the emergence of the concept of “race.” My thesis is a contribution to the study of early modern intellectual history, and with its pre-colonial focus, it is a much-needed addition to post-colonial discourse. These book illustrations demonstrate the significance of visual culture in the formation and communication of ideas in the early modern period.
Aaron Sachs – Communication Studies
Zachary Stiegler – Communication Studies
My dissertation reconstructs the history of US radio, arguing that if radio is to serve the public interest (as mandated by Congress), one particularly important aspect of such service is localism: serving the broadcast needs of local communities as well as providing a forum for local expression. As corporate entities such as Clear Channel continue to dominate the US radio market, localism dissolves from the airwaves. Corporate owners maximize profits by downsizing radio station staffs and increasing reliance on homogenized syndicated content rather than vibrant, locally produced programming. As ownership and operations consolidate, independent and locally owned stations disappear, depriving communities of a valuable means of enacting and maintaining their local identities. Throughout, I argue that current concerns about the loss of localism in US radio broadcasting invite us to reinterpret US radio history from a local perspective. In doing so, I present four case studies: the low-power Class D license established in 1948, public broadcasting, the current low-power fm (LPFM) license, and the misuse of LPFM by certain religious groups. Each of these cases constitutes an attempt by broadcasting policy to serve localism and the public interest. Yet to date, each has failed to meet this goal. In examining these forms of broadcasting in the US, I aim to determine the reasons for their failure, and what we may learn from these past failures to provide a basis for educating ourselves in the continuing battle to regain access to the airwaves, an allegedly public resource currently in the firm grip of commercial interests.
My research involves the exploration of the causes and consequences of the mortality decline that began in northwestern Europe around 1800 and has continued to the present day. In particular, I am studying the extent to which mortality decline played a role in and interacted with the economic growth that occurred in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Latchezar Popov – Economics
Rewriting Nation-State: Spectral Remainders and the Question of Ethical Responsibility.
A persistent feature of modernity is the implementation of state technologies in the interest of “nation-building.” State technologies, such as those of scientific mapping, census, standardized money and the institutionalization of “national” time paved the way for the imagination of a homogenized, abstract measure of time and a bounded space within which the national principle was delimited. The particular nation-state in question thus emerged as a concrete and determinable “geo-body.” This finite geo-body was marked off, almost eternally it seemed, from other such spatial entities. Ostensibly, the “reality” and destiny of a particular nation-state was contained within the self-perpetuating enclosure of its demarcated boundaries. Yet, however much state technologies tried to describe and fix “reality,” some elements invariably slipped out of their grasp and lingered as unsettling remainders. My dissertation titled “Rewriting Nation-State: Spectral Remainders and the Question of Ethical Responsibility,” seeks to account for the spectral forms of these remainders that still haunt the structures of the nation-state’s present. The particular “locale” I concentrate on is the Indian nation-state. My central claim is that the institutionalization of the concept of the nation-state, especially in decolonized locales like India, disrupts plural forms of socio-cultural organization. The consolidation of the nation-state in such formerly colonized regions institutes a rigid and oftentimes brutal system of exclusion and inclusion that does not recognize the divergent and complex notions of space and time that structure the multiplicity of communitarian and socio-political forms in these areas. I argue that post-independence Indian literary fictions by writers like Amitav Ghosh, Parag Das, Raktim Xarma and Mahasweta Devi enable encounters with those “remainders” whose representational schemas are gradually being obliterated because of the consolidation of the dominant narrative forms of the nation-state. In my approach, I eschew a politics of nostalgia that looks backwards to “pure,” invented spaces that are contaminated by the discourse of modernity. However, I also ask what is at stake when heterogenous formations are forcibly subordinated to the concept of the “many-as-one”—the classic raison d’être of the modern nation-state.
Joshua Gooch – English
Claudia Pummer – Film Studies
Dennis J. Hanlon – Film Studies
My dissertation argues that contemporary French literature is entering a new phase of understanding in its extended remembrance of World War II. In 2006, two highly acclaimed novels were published that featured protagonists who were the perpetrators of wartime atrocities. Previously, fictional works had not been primary means of remembering France during the war years and, in particular, the nation’s involvement with the Holocaust. Also, those few authors that did fictionalize those years, did so by narrating events from the point-of-view of victims. My dissertation will examine if this re-analysis is indicative of a change in understanding or merely an anomaly.
Kirsten Beyer – Geography
Cross-border movements, epidemiology, and public health: A history of Colonial Medicine in central Mozambique and eastern Zimbabwe and the African response, 1890-1980
This dissertation asks why colonial governments in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) failed to created comprehensive public health systems. It also asks whether the failure of public health interventions inadvertently undermined colonial efforts to eradicate African practices which Europeans regarded as superstition. A major cause of the failure of public health in colonial southern Africa was the inability of health systems to cope with the extraordinary mobility of the region’s populations. Their inability to monitor health conditions in highly mobile populations stemmed from the fact that public health measures in each of the region’s colonies were confined within its territorial boundaries. Rather than introducing an effective pan-regional system of public health, the separate colonial governments created many inconsistencies and gaps in the region’s public health coverage. Thus the dissertation explores the relationship between mobility and health, asking not only how movements of people spread infections, but also how these movements altered disease ecologies by changing the sizes of and interaction among various populations involved in the transmission of diseases – humans, their livestock, wild fauna, vectors and pathogens. Ultimately, however, my work concentrates on how the nature of colonial rule had the unintended consequence of diminishing confidence in biomedicine and public health interventions. Among he unintended consequences is the present reluctance throughout the region to accept public health measures, including those intended to control HIV-AIDS. Ignoring prior history thus blurs these experiences that shaped people’s attitudes towards biomedicine. Such attitudes are also connected to social memory and to the way people perceive the state, and its legitimacy. Indeed, to some people, it was the rejection of the imposition of colonial authority, not resentment of the medicines, which led them to reject western medicine. These reactions varied according to geography, class, race, and gender. I therefore explore the problem of perceptions of public health policies, looking specifically at how colonial government intervention shaped the way people think about health. I hope to make a significant contribution to the growing body of studies of health and medicine on the social reception of European medicine and epidemiology.
Meghan Warner – History
Jennifer Lee – Ph.D. Interdisciplinary Studies
Pain is a highly debilitating condition affecting millions of Americans each year. Despite its emotional and financial toll, relatively little is known about why certain individuals are more likely to develop painful conditions, yet others remain insensitive to pain. Research suggests that certain psychosocial factors, particularly personality and gender, play an important role in the development and persistence of pain. However, few known studies have directly examined multiple psychosocial constructs simultaneously in non-patient groups, providing an incomplete picture of how these variables interact to influence pain perception in the general population. The purpose of my dissertation studies is to examine how baseline, higher-order personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion), lower-order psychological constructs (fear of pain, pain catastrophizing, somatosensory amplification), and gender influence pain perception in healthy individuals using three models of experimentally-induced pain. An increased understanding of the impact of psychosocial factors on pain will provide a basis for development and advancement of successful pain assessments and treatment programs that take into account the biological, psychological, and social aspects of health and illness.
In-Sue Oh – Management and Organizations
Spectralism in Acoustic Music
This dissertation explores the application of the techniques of a recent school of music composition known as spectralism. This dissertation consists of two parts: a research paper and an original composition for large ensemble to be premiered at the University of Iowa by the University of Iowa Center for New Music in the Spring of 2009. Although spectralism allows for a vast range of different styles, all spectral music shares a central belief that music is ultimately based on the progression of evolving timbres or sound colors. The research conducted for the written portion of my dissertation will be directly applied to my musical composition and in keeping with the ideology of spectralism; I will strive to create a piece that is perceptible and able to connect to a wider audience. Although the techniques of spectralism are scientifically complex, in the end these techniques are simply ways of constructing beautiful and engaging sounds that mimic the physical properties of sound as it occurs in a natural setting.
Meghan McGonigal-Kenney – Nursing
The Lived Experience of Uncertainty Among Intimate Partners of Persons Who Have Tested Positive for Huntington Disease
Knowledge of genetic predisposition to future illness and disability creates uncertainties that will shape and influence life decisions about reproduction, career, health behavior, and eventual caregiving needs among those who are predisposed as well as their families. Intimate partners in particular are faced with these uncertainties well in advance of illness onset. It is unknown, however, how uncertainty is experienced and what the meaning of that lived experience is among intimate partners of persons who 1) have an increased likelihood of inheriting a chronic condition, 2) have undergone predictive DNA testing for the condition and tested positive, 3) have not yet been diagnosed, and 4) are presymptomatic, or in the pre-illness phase. The purpose of the dissertation research, therefore, is to understand the meaning of uncertainty experienced by intimate partners of presymptomatic persons who have tested positive for the mutation in the Huntington disease (HD) gene and will, subsequently, be diagnosed with HD. HD is a progressive, incurable, neurodegenerative disorder typically diagnosed in early- to mid-adulthood. Hermeneutic-phenomenological methodology will be used to describe the lived experience of uncertainty. The significance of the research is that it will: enhance and expand understanding of aspects of uncertainty requiring nursing assessment; add to the empirical and conceptual literature on areas of uncertainty and chronic, debilitating conditions with particular focus on the pre-illness stage of disease trajectory; and contribute to the development of interventions designed to assist persons to live with uncertainty.
Florin Oprescu – Occupational and Environmental Health
With the increasing penetration of Internet, patients and caregivers have more options for generating and seeking information, providing and receiving support and becoming agents of change. Information and social support are generally pursued to manage uncertainty. This is particularly visible in the world of birth defects such as clubfoot, where caregivers (parents) of patients (children) are generators and consumers of health information, providers and receivers of support and agents of change. Given geographical distances between caregivers, a large number of exchanges occur today in on-line environments and outside hospitals. As a result, health professionals have a limited understanding of the caregivers’ experiences, activities and communication patterns. The purpose of the dissertation is to explore caregiver’s experiences of uncertainty and social support with a focus on Internet based interactions.
James Krueger – Political Science
This dissertation examines the effects of issue frames and individual-level mediating factors on attitudes towards same-sex marriage and civil unions. It employs three survey experiments to test both competing and non-competing frames, an advance which will clarify the effect of these environments on public opinion. It will also help unify the literature on factors which mediate the reception and processing of these frames by citizens. Finally, the dataset collected for this research will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences who are studying the factors affecting public opinion on highly divisive issues like same-sex marriage.
Ashleigh Richard – Psychology
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), psychiatric diagnosis requires both pathological psychological symptoms and impaired psychosocial functioning. Despite the importance of assessing psychosocial functioning, however, research endeavors in psychopathology have been focused primarily on symptoms rather than functional impairment. Therefore, the proposed project is designed (1) to enhance our understanding of psychosocial functioning, beginning with a comprehensive examination of existing measures and (2) to examine the utility of simultaneous assessment of psychosocial functioning and personality traits in personality disorders diagnosis. The current project seeks to improve the diagnostic system of mental disorders by clarifying the concept of psychosocial functioning and testing the construct’s utility in the diagnostic system.
Robin Barry – Psychology
Denise D Kettering – Religious Studies
Nathan Eric Dickman – Religious Studies
Divinities in Dialogue: A Hermeneutics of Open Questions in Religious Discourse
Open questions, questions that invite the contribution of others, take listening to task as a key way in which we seriously consider what another person thinks. Anyone who neglects to ask or who is incapable of asking such questions merits our suspicion insofar as they forgo participation in dialogues wherein we reach an understanding with one another. The ways in which ultimate religious authorities speak to their audiences, in literature held sacred and often considered an historical record, correspond to the highest forms of relationship conceivable within their respective traditions. Given these premises, one might reasonably expect to find a plethora of scholarship on the topic of open questions in sacred narrative; however, not a single work systematically explores this topic. While I will examine open questions in education and other everyday circumstances as well as draw out some theological implications of my findings, the heart of my project performs two vital functions: first, developing an adequate hermeneutical account of open questions; and second, extending their domain of application to instances of sacred speech. The appearance of open questions, unnoticed by practitioners and scholars alike, breaks out of the interrogative structure by modifying questions in the direction of a dialogue, one that brings interlocutors into a play of mutuality and fusion of horizons. Are open questions in sacred speech merely ironic or do they tend toward a dialogue that brings the ultimate authority and the ordinary human into reciprocity? Rather than reinforcing the absolute difference between the divine and the human, open questions imply a shared horizon of commonality. In other words, open questions humanize the divine.
Takako Nakakubo – Second Language Aquisition
The Effects of Planning on Second Language Oral Performance in Japanese: Processes and Production
For more than two decades, researchers in second language acquisition have explored how the opportunity to plan for the task affects language students’ speaking performance. There are two primary purposes for my research: (a) to investigate the effects of different types of planning on Japanese language students’ performance in a speaking task, and (b) to explore the processes of planning to determine what strategies students use while planning what to say and how to say it. I will examine four planning conditions: no planning, planning before the speaking performance, planning during the performance, and planning both before and during the performance. The participants are college students who are studying Japanese as a second language, either in a college classroom in the United States or in a study abroad program in Japan. Students were randomly assigned to one of the four planning conditions, and they told the story depicted in a sequence of pictures. For the first objective, the students’ speech will be compared in terms of fluency, complexity, and accuracy. For the second objective, a small number of participants from each planning group were interviewed immediately after their speaking performances. I will document what and how students plan, then compare and analyze any differences in behaviors depending on the planning conditions. The results of this study will suggest how planning should be implemented in language classrooms to produce more proficient speech and facilitate language acquisition. While the majority of past studies have examined performance of English language learners, by targeting Japanese language learners, this study will uniquely contribute to understanding the effects of planning across languages.
Natalia Chernyayeva – Women’s Studies
Child-Care Manuals and The Construction of Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Russia
Manuals to teach parents how to care for their children have long become an indispensable part of childrearing in the Western world. Since at least the end of the nineteenth century mothers were increasingly taught to dismiss their supposed natural instincts and to rely instead on the advice of experts. Parent education campaigns were part of a social engineering ethos, which, according to many historians, constitutes the very essence of modernity.
Typically considered only at the margins of the Western world, Russia followed a unique pattern of modernization, dissimilar from Western European countries and the United States. My dissertation seeks to examine advice literature on mothering and childrearing in Russia and of the role this literature played in the construction of normative motherhood and womanhood in Russian and Soviet culture. This work situates Soviet motherhood in a cross-cultural perspective. It expands the understanding of motherhood as a social institution and tests the relevance of this Western feminist model of motherhood in a non-Western context, highlighting both norms that transcend national boundaries and features unique to one particular historical, national setting.