I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE

I AM ADELE BLOCH-BAUER, I AM HESTER PRYNNE is a compilation of fiction and nonfiction. This cross-genre thesis includes two excerpts from historical novels with female protagonists, and an essay on women’s historical fiction. For the study and creation of female-centered historical fiction I researched and wrote in a wide range of areas, both intellectual and temporal. First, I read and traced the emergence of female-focused American historical fiction that began with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and continues today with historical fiction based in fact such as Lily King’s Euphoria and Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun. Second, I examined the origin of American feminist thought and literature from Margaret Fuller’s Women of the Nineteenth Century to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and beyond. Third, I researched fin-de-siècle Jewish Vienna at the dawn of the twentieth century to write and re-envisioned the life of the modern art patron Adele Bloch- Bauer (1881-1925) for the novel Stolen Beauty. Finally, I researched 19th century Concord, Massachusetts and the roots of Transcendentalism, as well as the 1848 Italian revolution, to draft a new novel in which I re-envision the relationship between Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne as it drives the creation of The Scarlet Letter in the years 1840-1850. This new novel is titled I Am Hester Prynne, and a small selection is included herein

A Captive Care Guide, Teaching Curriculum and Animal Care References for Amphibians and Reptiles in a Secondary Education Classroom

The objective of this project is to create teaching curriculum as w ell as ancillary resources regarding the use of native, captive bred and/or commonly used pet trade amphibian and reptile species in a secondary education classroom. The project will include a detailed list of reptile and amphibian veterinarians from around the state, a discussion regarding disposal of captives and rescues, information on housing, life expectancy, adult size, nutrition, good and bad choices of species to have in classrooms and/or nature center (both wild and captive list), and disclaimers (school policies, state and regional permits and policies, health and safety for your protection and the protection of the animal) all with emphasis on the instructor being the advocate for the animal as well as an emphasis for common or captive bred species being used instead of rare species.Master of ScienceBiologyUniversity of Michigan-Flinthttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143442/1/HarrisE.pd

Fedco Seeds and Supplies 2020

When is a seed catalog more than a seed catalog? When it is the Fedco Seed catalog. Fedco, founded in 1978, is a worker-consumer cooperative in Maine known for promoting the ideals of cooperation, transparency, and the common ownership of seeds. These archives contain thousands of pages of Fedco’s seed catalogs. As one of its editors noted, “We give our readers things to think about.” Annual themes have included the role played by soil bacteria—the microscopic heroes that make life on this planet possible; the contributions of plant breeders and seed keepers; poetry by Walt Whitman, Vergil, and Russell Libby, among others. Editorials often stress the negative impact multinational corporations have on the genetic diversity of food crops, and provide annual updates on genetic engineering and the consolidation of the seed industry. Bits of humor are throughout, some of them in possibly the catalogs’ best feature: original art, and engravings from old seed catalogs and horticultural books. It is, in the words of Fedco’s founder CR Lawn, “More than a marketing tool.

Intimate terror: gender, domesticity, and violence in Irish and Indian novels of partition

My dissertation argues that contemporary novelists writing about partition and the post-partition state in India, Pakistan, and Northern Ireland create alternative social histories that reframe our understanding of these newly created spaces and the ways in which the intrusion of public violence into private homes and neighborhoods was constitutive of the partitioned borders. Rather than presenting partition as a bureaucratic solution to ethnic or religious conflict, the novelists I study use the framework of childhood and family to situate their novels—and these questions of national space—firmly in the world of the private home. This shift in focus from the national to the private writes against the belief that, through the act of partition, discord and trauma are pushed to the borders and large-scale civil war is avoided. In four chapters considering nine novels, I examine the ways in which the reconstruction of national borders—and national identities—takes place through violence that is frequently gendered, targeting women’s bodies as sites of reproduction in order to validate sectarian identities. In these texts, the border cannot be understood as a distant location where the lines of a battlefield—and the nation itself—can be easily delineated, but instead must be envisioned as the construction of countless smaller boundaries, each of which might contain part of the battlefield’s violence

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, showing the operations, expenditures, and condition of the Institution for the year ending June 30, 1887

Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. [2581-2582] Research related to the American Indian