Love, Lieder, and the Gendered Poetics of Musical Transcendence, c.1780-1850

This dissertation examines the poetics of musical transcendence in German art songs (Lieder) ofthe early nineteenth century. For the German early-Romantics, musical transcendence became a central metaphysical concern, since it was through music that one could experience a unity with the “Absolute,” a higher realm of reality. Studies of this phenomenon so far have focused almost exclusively on instrumental music and the prestige of “ineffability,” assuming that only music’s sublime transcendence of earthly language enabled a glimpse of the Absolute. Yet this scholarship fails to account for the larger histories and poetics of transcendence that informed early-Romantic musical thought. This dissertation challenges the orthodox historiography of nineteenth-century music aesthetics through the analysis of contemporaneous Lieder. I argue that the metaphysics of musical transcendence was in fact predicated on sexual difference and desire, as revealed by the literary and musical poetics of the idealized beloved. Increasingly depicted with musical metaphors and auditory imagery, this forever-distant beloved, I demonstrate, represented the prospect of transcendence thematized in thousands of songs. In each chapter of this dissertation, song, as a forever-incomplete unity of words andmusic, exposes the irresolvable dialectics that drive the desire for transcendence. I move from the sonic aporias in the German reinvention of Petrarch’s Laura, through a re-evaluation of the ironic desires that underwrite Hoffmann’s famous essays on Beethoven, to the gendered re-encoding of floral poetics in the Lieder of Clara Schumann. These chapters are interspersed with “interludes”, which consider how the male-authored poetics of love and music impacted the music and careers of Maria Theresia Paradis and Fanny Hensel. In the conclusion, I reflect on the intellectual legacies of transcendence in light of the renewed reckoning with classical music’s racist and sexist patterns of exclusion. Transcendence, after all, is the metaphysics of German musical universalism that annihilates acceptable difference while excluding incommensurable otherness. Through a discussion of three recent approaches to performing Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, I consider how we can continue to love this music without making that love toxic

Storytelling on the Mosaic Floors of Late Antique Sepphoris

This dissertation investigates how visual narratives on Late Antique floor mosaics prompt both visual reception and physical engagement. Sepphoris, an archaeological site in the lower Galilee of present-day Israel, serves as a key site for understanding mosaic narratives. The ability to examine the material remains in its original architectural and urban placement allows for an exceptional opportunity to understand Late Antique mosaics within their spatial context. In addition, as a multicultural urban hub that transitioned and flourished from the classical era to the rise of Islam and housed Jewish, pagan, and Christian populations, Sepphoris’s range of mosaics showcasing narratives from both Greco-Roman mythology and the Bible in a variety of types of spaces, from private homes to communal buildings, offers unique access to analyzing the role of narratives on mosaic floors. Throughout the study, I elaborate on the importance of the field of narratology for mosaic studies, both in terms of attention to the details of the scenic composition as well as the experience of navigating a mosaic within its spatial context. Each of the central four chapters introduces a methodological approach for understanding floor mosaics through centering on a monument at Sepphoris, from the third-century Orpheus House and the House of Dionysos to the fifth-century Nile Festival House and synagogue. In addition to the Sepphoris floors, this study incorporates a wide range of literary and visual sources to demonstrate how mosaic floors serve as a point of departure for Late Antique cultural trends that exceed a particular medium. Through this integrated approach, beyond bridging art historical and archaeological work on floor mosaics, this dissertation contributes to the cultural life of the Late Antique Mediterranean region, addressing the continued presence of Greco-Roman mythological content, mapping place within a larger geographic network, creative developments in biblical interpretation, and the activities of the dining room and the synagogue. Combined, the visual and literary material uncovers the complexity of how narratives functioned on the mosaic floor within the cultural dynamics of Late Antiquity

Vessels of Social Critique: Poetry and Humor During Franco's "XXV Años de Paz"

Vessels of Social Critique: Poetry and Humor During Franco’s ‘XXV Años de Paz’ delves into the often-overlooked postwar period in Spain's to interrogate both the alleged postwar peace that existed from 1939 to 1964, the year of Francisco Franco's "XXV Años de Paz" celebrations, and Spain’s alleged status as a cultural dessert. The dissertation commences by exploring how social poetry produced by writers in inner exile, employing Miguel Salabert's terminology, served as a vessel to denounce the social ills of the era, including but not limited to famine, the black market, and mass graves. It investigates the challenges of forming a reading public in the face of continued wartime vigilance and examines how poets in inner exile established an intellectual sphere at Vicente Aleixandre's home, a site of cultural resistance. Additionally, I analyze poetry by female and less-studied male poets who moved from Spain's provinces to Madrid, shedding light on regionally unique representations of social ills. It then examines the deaths and memorializations of the poets, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Vicente Aleixandre. Particularly, I explore how the homage paid to Antonio Machado at his grave in Collioure, France, in 1959 was a contemporaneous criticism of Franco's "XXV Años de Paz," highlighting the social poets' questioning of the regime's official narrative. The dissertation concludes by deconstructing Franco's "XXV Años de Paz" celebrations through an analysis of film, press coverage, and art, underscoring the regime's obsession with its origin narrative and its efforts to erase dissent.Collectively, this dissertation enriches Spanish cultural studies by exploring connections between social poets in inner exile and subversive conservatives' social critique, and by shedding light on the representations of postwar famine, the black market, and mass graves. It uncovers critical postwar cultural production that persisted despite the Franco regime’s attempts to control the historical narrative, offering insights that remain relevant in light of contemporary challenges to historical memory

Top Hats and HashTags

Many magicians consider secrets a vital part of doing magic. In fact, one of the most well-known rules in magic is to never reveal how a trick is done to anyone who is not a magician. However, in our increasingly online world this has become more and more difficult to accomplish. This has been especially the case as the magic community has moved onto social media more, as many accounts on both Instagram and TikTok have appeared with the sole purpose of exposing magic tricks. In this thesis, through looking at the four different ways in which magic secrets are disclosed on social media— tutorials, reveals, exposures, and debunks—I examine the consequences that occur when an art form that seems to require secrets exists on a platform that actively discourages secrets from existing

Shaders in Modern Video Games: Rendering Dynamic 3D Objects in GLSL

The recent growth of the computer graphics industry, specifically in the realm of gaming, has resulted in the desire for more realistic graphics. The initial assumption is that realistic graphics mean that object meshes should be more detailed—that they should have more vertices, edges, and faces, but this would lead to increased latency because of the file size and rendering demands on the GPU. The current solution to this problem is to use graphical shaders which implement graphics inside of the GPUs rendering pipeline, making them fast and efficient. This report details the implementation of the video game Space Otterssey, a desktop game with graphics that mostly rely on GLSL shaders. Space Otterssey proves that graphic shaders can be used to create a visually pleasing game that prioritizes the user’s gameplay experience

The Impact of Imperfection: How Race, Leadership Style and Job Performance Influence the Perception of Female Leaders in the Workplace

Prior studies have demonstrated that a leader’s race, leadership style and job performance affect the perception of their leadership. This effect is heightened for women, who are stereotypically incongruent with typical leadership, and specifically for Black women, who are multiply incongruent with leadership. Though there has been significant research on how the intersection of these factors impacts the perception of female leaders, there has been little research on the specific intersectional impact of race, leadership style and suboptimal job performance on the perception of female leaders. This thesis aims to not only fill this gap in the literature, but also contribute to literature about Black female leaders, a group underrepresented in psychological research. Specifically, this study investigates the intersection of race, leadership style and job performance’s effects on the perception of female leaders. Significant results showed that Black women who made a mistake were penalized more when they were Agentic rather than Communal, and White women who did not make a mistake were penalized more when Agentic rather than Communal. Potential explanations for these results as well as possibilities for future research are discussed in this thesis. key words: female leadership, race, agency, communality, mistake, perception, workplac

Gaming Retrieval Augmented Language Models for Agentic, Thoughtful Wordplay

Agentic-like uses of language models for domain-specific tasks have grown substantially on the precipice of rapidly improving closed and open-source pre-trained models. Techniques such as retrieval augmentation further enhance model performance by efficiently imputing relevant context from which to perform prompt completion. However, there are still elusive goals in this research area: producing a convenient model architecture that is adaptable to ever-shifting generation of foundational model; AI systems that are highly interpretable by human observer; and performing well in games that require nontrival thinking executive decision making to solve the problem. I approach all three problems through the development of an agentic cryptic crossword solver. A decision model is implemented that carefully resembles that of a human crossword solver: retrieving relevant context, generating thoughts, voting on the best thoughts, and making executive decisions though the game. A standalone application is also developed the visualise this process. To put this solver into practice: I leverage state-of-the art closed language models, local ensemble models, dense retrieval, two-stage fallback online retrieval, reranking, and LM-supervised contextual learning. Without relying on validity of the crossword board or domain specific fine tuning, the model effectively solves crosswords through seemingly coherent justification and decision making