This paper is a creative work that explores the relationship between psychological healing and the writing of poetry. Primarily creative, the paper presents poetry written in a variety of contemporary styles, from French surrealism, to contemporary American poetry, in particular an imitation and homage to the poet Joe Brainard and his poetry book I Remember. Given the profound place of Chinese culture in the life of the poet, the paper includes explorations of Chinese poetic traditions. In each poem, the poet sought to describe some aspect of an overarching quest to both become a better poet, and to understand the origins of the poetic process. Surrealism’s interest in dreams and the unconscious is a significant part of the paper, as is various writing procedures taken up to further explore the relation of inner and outer reality. In keeping with this ambition, the essay formulates a poetics, a way, that is, to think about the nature of poetry in its possible relation to psychic wholeness and recovery from trauma. The paper both brings to the surface suppressed pains in the life of the poet, and sets these pains in a therapeutic context, one inspired in part by Carl Jung, and in part by the growing field of Poetry Therapy. Written to reflect the power of words, the poems spotlight self-relations and self-growth, they embody the interconnections among self, other and the world, and awaken one’s inner creativity in the healing of body, mind and soul.
Past Master's Projects
The variety of master's projects produced by our students testifies to the interdisciplinary nature of the Duke GLS program. Some take the form of a traditional master's thesis, but explore issues from a perspective that requires stepping back from disciplinary boundaries or combining the methods of different disciplines. Others combine traditional academic analysis with other modes and genres -- whether creative, documentary or practical. Each of them represents the culminating efforts of a student in achieving the MALS degree.
From 2014-22, a few projects each year were awarded the designation of "Exemplary Master's Project," and marked as such in these records. Search for the word "exemplary" to find them. Exemplary projects were highlighted as particularly good models for students contemplating master's projects of their own. A video showcase featuring some of our 2019-20 winners may be found here.
Starting in 2022-23, all students completing projects are invited to present their work in a public year-end Master's Project Showcase. Projects whose authors choose to present at this event are designated "Showcase Projects."
**Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2018-2019**
This essay discusses how in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the stories of I.1, III.3, VI.7, and VII.5 subvert the fundamentally religious and juridical activity – confession – to serve a wholly different and erotically-charged function. In these stories, Boccaccio unveils the mechanism of confession, establishes a new theology, creates new laws, and brings about a reversal of discourse, which is a possible solution to the discourse of sexuality in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. In this way, narratives in the Decameron confessions, not only rebel again the repression of sex in middle ages, which is achieved by putting sex into silence or nonexistence, but also resist the will and consensus of knowingness – Scientia Sexualis – of modern times.
**Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2018-2019**
Lauren Resnick, an educational psychologist, claims, “all students can learn to be ‘smart’" through a process called educational nurturing. In this paper, I explore the central question: Is it feasible that policies can be designed and introduced that will eradicate the achievement gap? I identify racism as the root cause of the systemic problems in the United States, and name the achievement gap as the most inequitable outcome in the education system. Because the achievement gap is racial between white students and Students of Color, countertheories of cognitive inferiority are debunked. Next I explore previous literature on what has worked in past efforts to close the achievement gap. The research shows that anti-bias training that raises educators’ expectations of Students of Color, followed by detracking homogeneous (racial) grouping are both effective methods to close the achievement gap, but they cannot be sustainably successful alone. A third support structure needs to be in place to tie the strategies together: AVID, a program that complements detracking, aiding students as they transition from less challenging to more challenging classes. AVID is a program that emphasizes equity, and is beneficial to use while detracking, because while students are tackling rigorous course work, AVID teaches academic skills for students to learn how to “be smart,” as Resnick mentioned. I analyzed the three different programming site options for AVID and uncovered that the schoolwide and district-wide AVID implementations are the most effective, with transformative results in closing the achievement gap in both types. My conclusion is that the achievement gap can close with the dismantling of institutionalized racist thinking which must happen through anti-bias training for people within the system and for those who will enter it in the future. This training eliminates stereotype threat and raises teachers’ expectations for Students of Color. After anti-bias training has shifted the culture of the school, the school will be prepared to implement a system of detracking with a structure in place, like AVID, to teach academic soft skills. Therefore, my central question is confirmed, and the title of the paper is explained: “Yes, All Students Can Be Taught How to be Smart”: How Anti-Bias Teacher Preparation Paired with Scaffolding of Rigorous Curriculum Can Eradicate the Achievement Gap.” For reform efforts to persist when the “groundwater” is still contaminated, there are logical steps to follow in order to overwhelm and shake the system. 1. Analyze, influence, write, and change policy 2. Train the people within the system 3. Train the people about to enter the system The implications concluding the paper include a policy brief with suggestions to change K-12 policy in the US to include anti-bias training, detracking mandates, with AVID scaffolding. Furthermore, included are ways to impact the system present-day and in the future: a professional development plan for in-service teachers and a syllabus for pre-service teachers.
Central to the decision of filmmaking and a film’s success is the consumer response to a film. Specifically, in a market with multiple varied alternatives based on genre, plot, and other film attributes, the subject matter and the preference of the movie going public becomes paramount to attempt to predict. The performance of films is unique in that results vary widely, and, like most art mediums, consumer response is assumed to be largely unpredictable. The research undertaken in this study used past box office returns across difference genres to project whether an expected return can be predicted with relative confidence.
This study attempts to uncover a pattern of film performance correlated by genre to understand if these correlations can be relied upon over time and into the future. The method employed in this study examines the 100 largest film releases as measured by box office performance for each year over a 20-year period, their economic performance and the trending returns over time by genre. This study then charts these performances by genre and by year, then employs a regression analysis for each to confirm if these trends are reliable. The results of this approach show a statistically significant result indicating that consumers do have an expected response to certain genres over others. Chapter six illustrates correlations of performance in some genres that are over twice as strong as alternatives. The resulting correlation coefficient scores are as follows: adventure had a score of .667, action had .780, comedy had .358, thriller/suspense had .681, and drama had .457. This study, the approach and these results conclude that a predictable measurable performance can be applied to something as abstract as “film genre” to forecast a consumer response.
This project argues that time travel functions as a literary device represented through the Black body in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Wild Seed. This project includes four parts. The introduction begins with an intensive examination of the representation of Black women’s sexuality and identity in American popular culture. Popular culture is essential to discussing the impact of Octavia Butler’s work. Each of her protagonists operates against stereotypes of Black female physicality and identity. Specifically, this chapter explores Black female sexuality, and Black feminist and womanist theory to culturally ground the shift that Butler’s work creates in the prescribed notions about Black women’s physicality. Chapter 1 begins with a brief personal history of Octavia Butler. Chapter I is an examination of Butler’s impact on the science fiction genre. Chapter 2 explores the genre of science fiction, its history as a white male-dominated field, and the shift that Butler’s work makes due to her centering Black women. Butler presents characters that are non- white, and ungendered into the science fiction genre. Before Butler, race and gender were not discussed in science fiction. Characters that were identifying as something other than white males were voiceless background characters or incoherent aliens. Chapter 3 discusses time travel in Octavia Butler’s novels Kindred and Wild Seed, focusing on the effects of slavery and violence. This chapter will discuss how the protagonist in both novels is the physical embodiment of the past. Chapter 3, specifically, explores how Butler’s work on time travel and in historical context transforms the Black body. My conclusion ties together the works of Octavia Butler as a lineage for Black female writers from the past, present and future.
My motivation for writing this paper is based on a twenty-five-year observation of the decline of North Carolina’s public school system. I witnessed an aggressive and reactionary North Carolina state legislature reducing the investment for the education of the state’s children. As a result, North Carolina has lost its progressive reputation in education. The purpose of this paper is to address the questions of how and why a socially conservative agenda realigned the direction of education in North Carolina. Through my research, I identified sources of tension between social conservatism and progressive liberal values pertaining to education over the past one hundred and fifty plus years. I discovered that there was a socially conservative faction that regained power through the United States Supreme Court rulings, out-of-state political funding, and right-wing super-lobbyists. The result is institutionalized segregation of North Carolina public education through the rapid expansion of charter schools, the support of private school voucher payments, and the defunding of public schools. These actions reflect the ongoing history of racial discrimination in North Carolina’s public schools.
**Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2018-2019**
In the seventeenth century a minimum of one hundred thousand English indentured servants emigrated to the Chesapeake Bay of North America. Virginia and Maryland plantations used indentured servitude in the production of one important colonial crop: tobacco. Compared to their countrymen and women at home, the English suffered extremely high mortality rates. To understand possible causes and material conditions, my method involved reviewing both historical literature and material evidence. I interviewed the Director of Education of the Godiah Spray tobacco plantation at the historic colonial capital of St. Mary’s City, Maryland. The Godiah Spray is a working seventeenth century plantation that replicates the work and management of tobacco. I also drew information from archaeological studies of skeletal remains in Chesapeake colonial graves examined by forensic anthropologists of the Smithsonian. This study examines three promotional emigration tracts written by Englishmen in that century. I also examine other monuments of literary promotion that came to embody the myth that anyone could succeed in the New World: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Why was there such a large disconnect between the high mortality rates in the Chesapeake and the supreme confidence of immigrant success authored by Defoe? I will argue that in his novels Defoe was handing his audience a script which demonstrated how to work and become rich in the New World. Robinson Crusoe, along with many other of Defoe’s works, functioned as propaganda to counter the dismal reputation of the colonies and to convince the English to emigrate.
**Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2018-2019**
This is a personal chronicle about a small stone church in Camden, New Jersey. St. Wilfrid’s Episcopal Church has survived de-industrialization, corruption, racist policies, and apathy over its one hundred-thirty-three years. The vulnerability and resiliency of the church enticed me into its sphere and motivated me to join the effort to preserve it. The pure beauty of the sanctuary touched me, and I was saddened to think it might be lost. I wanted to honor the spirit within the sanctuary by describing it before it was destroyed. I discovered old church records with delicate pages and elegant handwriting. I was able to talk to people who loved the church and worked to keep it alive. I worked beside volunteers who supported the church’s open door clinic and attended Sunday services with them. The spirit of the church captured my heart. This experimental documentary knits fragments of the past together with visual images, and personal accounts from the present to illuminate the story of the church and its people. Thousands of small churches have experienced the same travails, hundreds of cities have abandoned their neighborhoods and lost their places of worship. Only a few congregations, like St. Wilfrid’s, have survived. They have been able to reinvent themselves and find a mission that is meaningful. This is a hybrid visual narrative documenting the faith, resiliency, and resurrection I witnessed at St. Wilfrid’s Church.
Southerners can easily be picked out by their thick accents and their choice of rhetoric, such as “Hey, Ya’ll” and “Bless your heart.” My southern rhetoric is more than the reason why I stand out in most crowds, but is the foundation of who I am, how I think, and how I navigate the world around me. As a native of rural Alabama, I grew up in a world of etiquette, red dirt, and gender roles. The experiences I share are those of upper-middle-class, white sorority women in Alabama who were the product of the South’s cultural silencing. The pervasive gender differences made between boys and girls by southern culture and the education system, has helped the ideology of sacred womanhood live on. This ideology leads women to believe their task in life is to remain clean of sexual impurity and be subservient to men. This submissive stance has affected the way these women communicate sexual violence and in turn deal with its long-term effects. This is a glimpse at the balancing act that is being a southerner, a woman, and a survivor. This work, nor my journey, is complete, but rather a work in progress.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects people around the world, and there is no cure. Not only is AD a significant contributor to health care costs, it also has a deep emotional impact on society. There is a seemingly universal fear of AD which contributes to stigma against those who have this disease, a stigma that prevents people from seeking a medical diagnosis or help. There are modifiable risk behaviors that may delay the effects of AD for those who have the disease, one of which is educational attainment. Educational attainment appears to have an impact on an individual’s cognitive reserves, a phenomenon which becomes a significant factor in delaying the effects of AD. In this paper, I review current research on AD and educational attainment. With the research literature as a base, I then develop a public health campaign targeting younger people that stresses the importance of delaying Alzheimer’s disease by continuing educational activities throughout life.