It may be uncommon to associate Christianity with spoken word poetry (poetry that is recited aloud, usually involving a dynamic, theatrical, and urban feel) and dance (esp. street dance). However, several young artists are using urban art forms as a means of cultivating and sharing their faith. This project explored the relationship between the Christian faith and spoken word poetry and dance via the ethnographic research process. Questions that guided my research included: How can the faith and art forms be used together as impactful forms of outreach? Why is poetry and dance valuable to the church? How can Christian poets and dancers successfully engage their audience? The ethnography consisted of interviews and public observations of eight Christian spoken word poets and dancers in addition to reflections on the researcher’s own performance practice. As ethnography is described to be an “encounter of differences”, I have come across new findings that revealed my own biases about how Christianity and the two art forms intersect. Even as an insider to Christian spoken word poetry/dance, my views have been challenged, deepened, and broadened by this work. For instance, I have gained a greater understanding for certain ways a Christian performing artist can be successful in outreach by: 1) clearly conveying how the faith has enabled their own life changes 2) "being real" in sharing important, yet difficult aspects of one's life to others 3) performing with excellence and 4) reaching out to the audience offstage. In this presentation, I will strive to acknowledge and represent the many different findings I have come across in seeking to develop a more comprehensive and evolving understanding of the relationship between the Christian faith and spoken word poetry/dance.

Like their Victorian forebears, Modernist authors have always placed keen emphasis on women’s hair, often presenting their luscious locks in vivid and scrupulous detail. Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow (1920) uses hair as a tool of social commentary and trope of the fairytale epic to challenge and even reverse traditional Victorian gender roles and sexuality norms. The tension between the private and public self is also explored; what Modernist women could not say aloud, they expressed through the style, color and length of their hair. Crome Yellow constantly alludes to the hair of the female protagonists Jenny Mullion and Mary Bracegirdle, yet the intentions behind the loaded descriptions of their physical appearance are left up in the air. The characterization of an infamous Fallen Woman and modern flapper girl allows distinctions to be made between the Victorian and Modernist eras that determine the emergence of new gender ideals. This paper will use a close reading of Crome Yellow and Freudian theories on sexuality to explore the multifaceted significance of hair in the Victorian era so we may fully appreciate the past’s influence on modernist eras. A woman’s hair became a phallic image used to engender fear in men, which posits a move towards gender equality and the emergence of the suffragette. Hair was no longer just a physical attribute but a body politic that reflected changes taking place in modernist British society of the entre deux guerres period.

The idea of poetry as a literary practice that is concerned with its own ontology has developed through the device of the ars poetica poem—poetry about poetry. Beginning with Horace’s ancient treatise Ars Poetica, published in c. 18 BCE, poets throughout history have sought to explain the nature of their craft through the medium of their craft. In the past century, ars poetica poems have morphed into examples of metalanguage, in which the poems work as vehicles to carry the defining characteristics of poetry itself. In order to track the movement of metalanguage, I examine the progression of the ars poetica poem from the Classical era to the Enlightenment to Modern twentieth and twenty-first century works. My research traces and analyzes the trajectory of poetic modes that discuss language itself. Shifts from didactic to introspective to aesthetic have marked the rhetorical turn of ars poetica, thus exemplifying how poetry as heightened language creates the need for metalanguage. In poetry more than any other literature, each component element is significant, so the elements of a poem inevitably turn in on itself. Ars poetica poems demonstrate how images, rhetoric, narrative, and linguistic mechanisms can all be self-referential. The presence of metalanguage in poetry suggests that the types of poetic knowledge—sensory, emotional, and imaginative—are more than externally meaning-making about “aesthetic” and “ethic” subjects, but that they are intrinsically expressing the nature and value of poetic theory.

Many have demonstrated that Edmund Burke and other male writers contributed to, if not constructed, a gender binary in which males perpetually subdue and dominate the feminine. For instance, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft deconstructs passages from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, demonstrating that his ideal world is one in which sublime, masculine authority usurps the rights of women. For Wollstonecraft, Burke's efforts to counter revolutionary ideas are of no benefit to women. While these readings are certainly valid, some scholars have expressed the concern that in limiting our understanding of masculinity to its being a fixed institution determined to maintain power over women, we are grossly over-simplifying individual as well as collective masculine experience(s). Thus, I hope for this project to contribute to a more complex portrait of masculinity particularly in the late 18th century. Limiting my discussion to Burke's Reflections and Thomas Paine's Common Sense, I argue that however much these two literary works convey opposing ideologies, elements of their rhetorical strategy reveals that both writers understood that the success of their arguments largely depended on how effectively they controlled the semantic value of manliness. In order to provoke revolution, Paine seeks to assure his readers that engaging in revolution is an indisputable reflection of manhood. But unlike Paine, Burke wrote in order to prevent revolution. In the Reflections, Burke argues that the failure to sustain the pre-established order would result in the failure to retain masculinity. Ultimately, that Paine and Burke fought to control the meaning of manhood suggests masculinity was a loosely defined social institution--one consisting of males who lived in perpetual fear of losing, or failing to perform their masculinity; who were ever in need of affirmation that they were, indeed, men.

Matthew G. Lewis' Gothic novel The Monk (1796) has often been read as a representation of England's disapprobative response to the violence and chaos of the French Revolution.  The novel's subtle treatment of paranoia, which was a common theme during the Reign of Terror, and clear defilement of the virtuous feminine icon of ancient European government indicates a strong ambivalence toward revolutionary sentiment.  It is perhaps a result of its proximity to the events of the French Revolution that its location within the latter years of the Age of Enlightenment is often overlooked.  During the Enlightenment, reliance upon God as a source of meaning had dissipated in favor of understanding humanity through itself. I will argue that The Monk's depiction of intensely oppressive, Godless religious societies suggests the consequences of this shift.  Without a connection to the sacred, humanity spirals toward damnation; the extremes of unconscious desire are inseparable from the individual and activate supernatural forces within the novel.  Lewis creates a scene akin to that of Original Sin in the Book of Genesis, wherein the consequences of succumbing to temptation are not only inevitable but inescapable: the fall of humankind is unavoidable, and God's absence renders redemption impossible.  Ultimately, the novel offers a reconstruction of the Biblical parable in a way that expresses ambivalence about a secularized, post-Enlightenment world from which events like those of the French Revolution can only be expected.

A vast amount of research exists in the field of education psychology concerning topics such as brain-based learning, teacher-directed versus student-centered learning, the impact of social and individual factors on the learning experience, and more. Despite this wealth of information, there is often a striking disconnection between the current educational research and the actual experience of students in the classroom. Undergraduate classes, modeled on teaching practices that have been the norm for decades, are often out of sync with contemporary research addressing the scientific and social realities of the learning process. An exception to this phenomenon is observable in dance technique classes in the University of Washington Dance Program. Dance instructors at the UW implement many education theories successfully in their classes, and students reap the positive benefits of these teaching techniques. In order to better understand the teaching methods at work in these learning environments, I conducted observations of UW dance classes and interviewed dance students. Through my research, I have identified key factors that combine to create a classroom environment conducive to learning theory application in everyday teaching. Although the physicality of dance sets it apart from most academic classes, I argue that these same factors could be replicated and utilized in academic classes with similar success. This research is a critical step towards closing the gap between what we know to be effective education theories (and related teaching techniques) and the reality of student experience in many academic classrooms.