The Honors College

The immediate, reactionary images conjured by the words medieval or Middle Ages are not unfamiliar to anyone who has been exposed to the tales of kings and knights and damsels in distress. The king sits proud and tall on his throne, bathed in the sunlight of glory, surrounded by his faithful subjects. Or perhaps the king is leading his army of knights into battle, each of them astride a noble steed, clad from helm to foot in a suit of armor, gleaming in the daylight.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often rendered as Shakespeare’s “green” play, what with the woods and the fairies and the large amounts of species wandering on and off the stage.  This thesis seeks to explore that “green” nature and reconsider its meaning and context, especially as it relates to constructs of ecology and the “ecological self,” to use the modern parlance.  I examine how a queer ecological philosophy can apply to a Renaissance drama and how that application lends both to new considerations of the modern &l

From September 11111, 2001 up through the present3, the War on Terror has impacted the United States and world order in unique and unprecedented ways. Although this war adds another chapter to the history book of international wars, it changed, and is changing aspects of domestic and global society and the way in which powerful figures talk about war. This paper examines the rhetorical nature of President George W Bush's War on Terror and the addresses made by the president to joint sessions of Congress in the two years and four months following the events of September 11th, 2001.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks shocked the world and indelibly altered attitudes toward Muslims and Islam. Immediately following the attacks, suspicion toward Muslim individuals became widespread, catching the attention of many pollsters. Scholars began collecting data in order to observe poll trends regarding public opinion toward Muslims and Islam. In this study, I update research by Panagopoulos (2006), which covered a five-year period after the attacks, by examining polls conducted from 2001 to 2011, a full decade after 9/11.

This written component functions as an academic addition to my Senior Saxophone Recital.  It includes a description of how the program was selected, a brief look at the pieces and their composers, a reflection on the preparation required, and some closing thoughts on the final performance itself. There is much more that goes into a musical performance than most listeners realize.  The goal of this thesis is to reveal some of what is not necessarily discernible from simply attending a performance.  A DVD of the performance has been included.

In this essay I will critically assess the concept of “discipline” that is invoked in mainstream economic development. Beginning with a narrative prelude designed to contextualize myself in such a discourse, I will seek to show how my personal experiences have informed my analysis. I will move on to discussing how the logic of mainstream development economics incorporates discipline. I call this logic “developmentality,” and argue that it progresses under a rather predictable pattern when instantiated in the world.

This thesis project’s purpose was to examine the feasibility of using a fusion protein system consisting of organophosphorus hydrolase (OPH) and enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) for the rapid and accurate determination of organophosphates (OPs).  OPs are well known neurotoxic inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase (AChE).  OPH is a hydrolytic enzyme of bacterial origin (Pseudomonas diminuta) capable of catalyzing the hydrolysis of a wide variety of OPs. EGFP is a red-shifted variant of the wild type green fluorescent protein extracted from the jellyfish,

The Atlantic Slave Trade brought millions of Africans to the Americas, and the slaves that were transplanted carried their religious figures with them and adapted them to their new environments.  In Brazil and Cuba the West African slaves continued practicing their religion and devotion toorishas, the gods and goddesses, underneath the guise of Catholic saints and symbols.  Yemanjá in Brazil and Yemayá in Cuba share their origins in Yemojá, the goddess of the Ogun River in West Africa, and were transformed into goddesses of the sea by the slave

When a query is typed in a search engine it has to have a way to rank those pages from best to worst. Google uses a system called PageRank to rank the pages in order of relavency. This system relies on applications of linear algebra such as Markov chains and eigenval- ues. This paper explores the specifics of the process involded in the PageRank system, and looks at another application of PageRank to college baseball.

This thesis looks at the charges of heresy brought against Margery Kempe by the church in her autobiography,The Book of Margery Kempe.  Kempe attributes these charges as a direct result of her frequent bouts of public weeping, an intense symptom of her religious piety. This thesis first examines what it means to be a heretic in the fourteenth century.  It then exhibits the reasons for her weeping and compares this behavior with other contemporaries of Kempe’s time, thereby demonstrating that because this behavior was in many ways traditional, there must be ot