PhD – 2017-18
2017-2018
Nicholas Emmanuel
Music
“This Age of Repressive Collectivization: Case Studies in the Ethics of Late Musical Modernism”
Nick’s dissertation engages the moral discourse undergirding efforts at political, spiritual, and aesthetic resistance in Soviet satellite states during the final years of the Cold War, as a means of understanding the continued engagement with modernist strategies among prominent Eastern and Central European composers of the period and socio-political climate.
Montgomery Hill
Linguistics
“A Description of the Tuscarora Language”
This project aims to formulate Language Revitalization as a field of study unto itself, to open the way for new intellectual and interpersonal collaborations between language activists and linguists. Notions of authority, expertise and scientific research, as well as ideologies about language and language change are a source of tension in the community-academy relationship. Hill’s dissertation proposes and illustrates how this tension can be eliminated.
Natalia Pamula
Comparative Literature
“Collective Intimacy and the Promise of Invulnerability, Disability in Polish Literature, 1945-1989”
Natalia’s project focuses on literary representations of disability in Polish literature from 1945 through 1989 in order to rethink notions of work, family, and citizenship in socialist Poland. She posits that using disability as an analytical tool affords an opportunity to recognize the tensions and paradoxes within the socialist system in Poland.
Marissa C. Rhodes
History
“Body Work: Wet-Nurses and Politics of the Breast in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia and London”
Marissa’s dissertation explores and compares the worlds of wet-nurses, their bodily experiences and the public’s perception of their bodies during a time when their occupation was maligned, and maternal breastfeeding was encouraged. Marissa employs methodology from several disciplines including history, literary scholarship, and political science for her research of Revolution-era London and Philadelphia.
