A Canada in the South: Marronage in Antebellum American Literature

This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self-exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the sectional geography of freedom and mobility as they were tied to conceptions of liberalism in the antebellum United States. Whereas previous scholars, especially those whose work focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, have tended to regard forms of marronage in relation to their potential for large-scale emancipatory schemes like those made famous by the maroons of Jamaica, Suriname, and Brazil (among others), I am less interested in the concrete or imagined connections between marronage and enslaved revolt and more interested in those between marronage and freedom-seeking practices via flight in their many possible forms and manifestations. In this sense, marronage becomes an optic through which I investigate the production of alternate formations of community, sociality, belonging, space, and ultimately geography and freedom that primarily African American writers in the 1850s were exploring through literary discourse. The texts I examine ultimately form a constellation which articulates a black-centered politics of resistance based on a freedom of movement disarticulated from liberal conceptions of citizenship and the nation state. The emphasis on the 1850s reflects a rise in attention to marronage after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which effectively nationalized the institution of slavery in the eyes of the law. The mobility exhibited by runaway enslaved people who sought freedom by heading north, sometimes via the Underground Railroad, has been made to comport with the teleological narrative of the liberal subject in US history so as to appear as an example of those wrongfully denied liberal subjecthood valiantly striking out in search of it. The mobility exhibited by maroons, on the other hand, has been largely ignored in the US context because it does not comport with racial ideologies of assimilation and integration. This dissertation aims to demonstrate the extent to which marronage engages with contested, complicated, often nonliberal meanings of freedom for enslaved and fugitive African Americans in the antebellum United States as they were explored and articulated through representations of maroons in literary texts

The Cost of Culture The Impact of National Culture on the Pass-Through of Commodity Shocks

This study analyzes the impact of national culture on the pass-through of commodity price shocks to retail goods. In particular, this study explores the commodities of coffee, cotton and steel. Through the use of regression analysis, this study looks to determine the relationship between two key predictive variables: risk tolerance of a country and commodity shocks within a company’s associated commodity market, and their impact on the value of companies within that country. Additional factors are explored at the firm financial level and the firm country level. The purpose of this study is to examine if consumers of one country will pay more overall for retail goods than consumers of another country, based on the culture of companies involved in the supply chain of that good. An analysis of firms in countries with varying levels of risk tolerance will indicate which countries absorb or pass more of the shock to consumers. Findings indicate that national culture and commodity shocks do not have an overall influential effect on the price that consumers are paying across the commodity chains explored. Culture, in terms of the level of uncertainty avoidance in the country of incorporation, plays no significant role in the pass-through of commodity price shocks. While it was seen that culture does not have significant implications on commodity price shocks, it does begin to suggest that the recent globalization phenomenon has taken a formal standing in the way that businesses are performing internationally. Implications for global managers are found within the context of this research and its application henceforth in the field of international finance

The Impact of Capsid Proteins on Virus Removal and Inactivation During Water Treatment Processes

This study examined the effect of the amino acid composition of protein capsids on virus inactivation using ultraviolet (UV) irradiation and titanium dioxide photocatalysis, and physical removal via enhanced coagulation using ferric chloride. Although genomic damage is likely more extensive than protein damage for viruses treated using UV, proteins are still substantially degraded. All amino acids demonstrated significant correlations with UV susceptibility. The hydroxyl radicals produced during photocatalysis are considered nonspecific, but they likely cause greater overall damage to virus capsid proteins relative to the genome. Oxidizing chemicals, including hydroxyl radicals, preferentially degrade amino acids over nucleotides, and the amino acid tyrosine appears to strongly influence virus inactivation. Capsid composition did not correlate strongly to virus removal during physicochemical treatment, nor did virus size. Isoelectric point may play a role in virus removal, but additional factors are likely to contribute

Extending the Arc of Learning: Infusing Information Literacy Throughout Students\u27 Academic Careers

The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education describes information literacy as extending the arc of learning throughout students\u27 academic careers and as converging with other academic and social learning goals (ACRL, 2015). Ensuring that information literacy supports learning throughout a student\u27s academic career and beyond is difficult to achieve by only embedding information literacy instruction in early general education courses such as freshmen-level composition and providing the occasional one-shot instruction session. In this panel discussion we will explore what information literacy instruction might look like when thoroughly integrated throughout the curriculum as part of gateway courses that are required for entry into a major and senior capstone courses in the different disciplines. How can we best familiarize students with the information ecosystem and knowledge practices specific to their future professions? What are ways in which we can teach students to effectively use information for learning in their fields of interest and for individual growth