The impact of socioeconomic status on the diagnosis, treatment, survival, and overall quality of life in persons with cancer has been well documented. Yet, many studies overlook the relevance of socioeconomic factors when measuring the impact of...
Rap (Music)--History and criticism; Music trade--United States
This thesis is a historical analysis of the narratives of rap music and their relationship to hegemony. I view the trends outlined in this thesis as a microcosm of large-scale social trends in the world of popular culture. A world dominated and...
Southern States--In literature; Southern States--Religion; Wilcox, James; Religion in literature
The following paper is a discussion of religions themes in the novels of James Wilcox, a contemporary Southern author. Through closely examining four of Wilcox's nine novels (along with excerpts from a few others), this project explores the ways in...
Pattern recognition systems; Cluster analysis; Data mining
Despite the large number of existing clustering methods, clustering remains a challenging task especially when the structure of the data does not correspond to easily separable categories, and when clusters vary in size, density and shape. Existing...
Professional ethics does not differ in its essential nature from general ethics; both are concerned with problems of human conduct. The difference between the two is a difference of scope but not of nature. The scope of general ethics is as broad...
Friel, Brian--Criticism and interpretation; Friel, Brian. Translations; Friel, Brian. Philadelphia, here I come; Friel, Brian. Aristocrats
This thesis is a literary examination of three plays from Irish playwright Brian Friel, Translations, Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Aristocrats , all of which feature a family of the O'Donnell name and all set in the fictional Donegal village of...
This thesis is about graphic representations of violence and subjectivity. Simply stated, the violence in many recent horror films is motivated by a nihilism resulting from frustration with the inadequacy of contemporary subjectivity. I want to...
Amish--Books and reading; Amish--Ohio--Social life and customs; Literacy--Ohio
Following in the tradition of scholars who treat literacy in context such as Deborah Brandt, Shirley Brice Heath, and David Barton and Mary Hamilton, I conducted my dissertation research not in an academic classroom but in the valleys of Hanley, a...
Human-animal relationships in literature; Coetzee, J. M., 1940---Criticism and interpretation; Coetzee, J. M., 1940---Characters--Elizabeth Costello; Animals (Philosophy); Animal rights
For the past four decades, scholarship on the relationship between human and
nonhuman animals has been growing inside the academy and sprouting ontological and
epistemological concerns about the status of the Humanities as an institution....
Nontraditional college students--Kentucky--Louisville; English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching (Higher); College freshmen--Kentucky--Louisville
This dissertation explores the role first-year composition (FYC) courses play in the academic lives of working-class adult students in the University of Louisville, an institution that, during portions of its long history, has been a valuable...
Writing centers; English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching (Higher); Tutors and tutoring
Using Gloria Anzuldula's text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Bruce Homer and Min-Zhan Lu's 2000 article, "Expectations, Interpretations and Contributions of Basic Writing" as conceptual framework, I conducted my dissertation...
Given a metric space (K, d), the hyperspace of K is defined by H(K) = {F c K: F is compact, F ≠ 0}. H(K) is itself a metric space under the Hausdorff metric dH. Hyperspaces have been extensively studied by topologists since the 1970's, but the...
This dissertation examines popular periodicals in the late 19th- and early 20th-century America as pivotal artifacts in the history of literacy education. It first reviews current histories of literacy, writing instruction, and magazines at the...
Sleep disorders in children; Children--Sleep; Blind children
Research has confirmed that individuals with blindness have an increased risk of
developing sleep problems; this is especially problematic for families with young
children who are blind. Not only does the lack of sleep impact the growth...
I will report the development of a semi-empirical self-consistent and environment-dependent model Hamiltonian, which is intended to treat large systems in the order of 10000 atoms. This covers a range of important physical phenomena that are too...
For complex classification systems, data is usually gathered from multiple sources of information that have varying degree of reliability. In fact, assuming that the different sources have the same relevance in describing all the data might lead to...
This paper explores issues of identity and difference in art and its institutions through a historiographic study of two landmark exhibitions, "The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain" (1989) and the 1993 Whitney Biennial....
Sociology, Urban--California--Los Angeles; Urbanization--California--Los Angeles; Ontology--Social aspects; Social epistemology
Noir Ontology: Existing in the Fragmented Urban Spaces of Los Angeles explores the role of decentered urban geography within the body of noir texts set within Los Angeles. By focusing on the development of the idea of Los Angeles in early to...
Plague--History--Europe; Black Death--Social aspects--Europe; Erotica--Europe--History; Idols and images--Europe--History; Superstition--Europe--History
This thesis examines a large corpus of enigmatic pilgrimage badges dating from
roughly 1350-1500 CE. The badges were brought to light during archaeological
excavations of water sites throughout the Schelde Estuary in the Netherlands, the
riverbanks...
Cynicism--Kentucky--Louisville; Public opinion--Kentucky--Louisville; Metropolitan government--Kentucky--Louisville
The government's ability to gain and hold a high proportion of citizens' trust is essential to the functioning of an efficient and successful administration at the federal, state, and local levels. This thesis is a quantitative study aimed at...