This thesis begins by situating the work of Walter Benjamin in its historical complexity and examining the conceptual underpinnings of his phantasmagoria. Benjamin's Arcades Project is considered in light of his attempts to resituate primary structuring dichotomies in a fluid and dynamic configuration. These dichotomies include the political and the apolitical, the material and the immaterial, and the past and the present. The phantasmagoria-as-metaphor is then employed as a methodological framework for analyzing the ever-circulating images of John F. Kennedy. / This thesis is primarily concerned with the conceptual tools necessary to argue that an image is more "real" than its real-life counterpart, that is, real enough to carry resonances that extend beyond both its diminutive "artifice", and its original context. The relations between the immaterial image and its material referent are discussed as complementary and shifting, rather than oppositional and static. This thesis explores the possible and the actual convergence of the image and its material counterparts.

This thesis examines the impact of Soviet anti-religious policies on the Muslims of Central Asia from 1917 to 1938. The long struggle of the Bolsheviks to come to the power, their attempts to perpetuate the Russian hegemony in Central Asia, and the reactions of the Central Asian people towards the new regime will all form part of this thesis. Having successfully brought about the revolution, the Bolsheviks faced many challenges. One the famous slogans of the revolution, recognition of each nationality's right of self determination, boomeranged on the Bolsheviks, with the European proletariat deserting from the path of the revolution and proclaiming their own independence. In this situation, the Bolsheviks endeavored to gain the support of the Muslims. The government made many promises to the Muslims but, at the same time, dissolved the Kokand government established by the Muslims, causing Muslium revolts throughout the Central Asian region. The Muslim threat was met with measures of appeasement. The government's promises succeeded in attracting the modernist Muslims to cooperate with the regime. A strategy of "divide and rule" and of indirect attacks on Islam was employed, aiming at the annihilation of Islam. Conservative Muslims continued to vehemently oppose the Soviet regime and its policies. But, given the success of the regime in the civil war, and the lack of unity and the strength among Muslims, the Soviet anti-religious policies in Central Asia succeeded at the institutional level, to do great damage to Islam. However, these policies proved ineffectual in destroying the influence of Islamic teachings on the Muslims of Central Asia.

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I conduct a series of experiments culminating in a gallery exhibition, I Never Stopped Being A Curator, which investigate and reinterpret what it means to ‘care’ and ‘profane’ in the context of an expanded notion of curatorial practice. I call what I’m doing ‘performative micro-curating,’ a playfully performative practice with precedents dating back to Marcel Duchamp and The Richard Mutt Case. More specifically, I’m interpreting and practising performative micro-curating as a relational, meta-conceptual art practice that uses mirroring and repetition as a method for posing questions, making knowledge and forging social bonds, while, at the same time, dissolving the boundaries that customarily distinguish artmaking from curating.

Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt had unique visions of the Paris Opera House. Thus each artist perceived and portrayed the pageant of fashionable contemporary life at the Opera from diverse perspectives. Manet rendered a singular image of this world, that of a masked ball, which elicits an extraordinary insight into the manners and mores of an era. The focus by Degas on the dancers on stage invites a penetrating look into the spectacle of the performance from exceptional viewpoints. Mary Cassatt's depictions, exclusively of the female spectators in the audience, intimate a serious reflection of her earnest feminist attitudes. / From the costumed revellers in the foyer, to the brilliant presentation on stage to the elegant spectators in the loges, these images inspired by the Opera endure as remarkably distinctive.

Part A traces back the origins of the conflicting claimsto sovereignty over the area now called the West-Bank. The analysis shows that a sovereignty vacuum ensued after Turkey relinquished by treaty its rights and title over Palestine and that subsequently that vacuum remained in the area earmarked for an Arab Palestinian State. Part B peruses the constituent elements for the legality or illegality of the sovereignty claims invoked by the parties concerned: the use of force and the act of selfdefence. Part C demonstrates that Israel has eroded the law of belligerent occupation through a system of military orders, which virtually precludes the West-Bank Palestinians from exercising their valid claim to sovereignty. Part D reviews feasible options for a solution of the conflicting claims to sovereignty over the West-Bank. The last chapter proposes a solution which, taken in consideration the legally correct view, would entitle the Palestinians to fill up the sovereignty vacuum through an internationally guaranteed exercise of self-determination / La partie A retrace les origines des revendications contradictoires de souveraineté sur la région de l'actuelle Rive occidentale. L'analyse démontre qu'il existe un "vide" de souveraineté après l'abandon par la Turquie par traité de ses droits et titres sur la Palestine. Ce vide juridique persiste dans la régiondesignéepourla création d'un EtatPalestinien.LapartieBpasseenrevuelesélémentsconstitutifsdelalégalitéoul'illégalitédesrevendicationsdesouverainetéprésentéesparlespartiesconcernées:lerecoursàla forceetl'acte d'auto-défense.La partie C tend à prouver que Israël a vidé de son sens le régime juridique du droit d'occupation militaire par le truchement d'un système d'ordres militaires empêchant les palestiniens de la Rive occidentale d'exercer leur revendications légitimes de souveraineté. La partie D discute la gamme des solutions se référant aux revendications contradictoires de souveraineté sur la région de la Rive occidentale. Le chapitre final esquisse une proposition, qui autoriserait les Palestiniens, compte tenu de la position juridique correcte, à combler ce vide de souveraineté par l' intermédiaire de l'exercice, garanti au plan international, du droit à l'autodétermination.

This dissertation examines the Christ-centered homiletics of Edmund Clowney and Sidney Greidanus in contrast with the human author-centered hermeneutics of Walter Kaiser. Chapter 1 frames the dissertation by presenting the consequence of preaching and the marks of redemptive-historical preaching. Chapter 2 presents Walter Kaiser's author-centered hermeneutic. Kaiser's hermeneutic is presented because it is used as a plumb line to assess if and how redemptive-historical preaching drifts from an author-centered hermeneutic. Chapter 3 introduces Edmund Clowney as one of the seminal thinkers in redemptive-historical preaching. It considers Clowney's Christ-centered biblical theology and how that informs his use of symbolism and typology to preach Christ. Chapter 4 juxtaposes Greidanus' seven ways of preaching Christ from the Old Testament alongside Kaiser's author-centered hermeneutic. Attention is also given to Greidanus' sermons from the Old Testament. Chapter 5 presents summary conclusions, documenting some of the frequent cleavages between Kaiser and redemptive-historical preaching. It concludes with ways to implement the dissertation findings for preaching the Old Testament.

I conduct a series of experiments culminating in a gallery exhibition, I Never Stopped Being A Curator, which investigate and reinterpret what it means to ‘care’ and ‘profane’ in the context of an expanded notion of curatorial practice. I call what I’m doing ‘performative micro-curating,’ a playfully performative practice with precedents dating back to Marcel Duchamp and The Richard Mutt Case. More specifically, I’m interpreting and practising performative micro-curating as a relational, meta-conceptual art practice that uses mirroring and repetition as a method for posing questions, making knowledge and forging social bonds, while, at the same time, dissolving the boundaries that customarily distinguish artmaking from curating.

This study concerns the sources of the revolutionary Bolshevik elite's social and ethnic origins in Late Imperial Russia. The key finding is that the Bolshevik leadership of the revolutionary years 1917--1924 was highly ethnically diverse in origin with non-Russians---Jews, Latvians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians---constituting nearly two-thirds of the elite. The 'Russian' Revolution was led primarily by elites of the empire's non-Russian national minorities. This thesis therefore considers the sources of their radicalism in the peripheries of the multinational empire. / Although the 'class' language of socialism has dominated accounts not only of the causes of the Revolution but also of the sources of Bolshevik socialism, in my view the Bolsheviks were more a response to a variety of cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic social identities than they were a response to class conflict. The appeal of a theory about class conflict does not necessarily mean that it was class conflict to which the Bolsheviks were responding; they were much more a product of the tensions of a multi-ethnic imperial state than of the alienating 'class' effects of an industrializing Russian state. / How 'peripherals' of the imperial borderlands came to espouse an ideology of the imperial 'center' is the empirical focus. Five substantive chapters on Jews, Poles and Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Transcaucasians, and Latvians, consider the sources of their radicalism by contextualizing their biographies in regional ethnopolitics and in relationships to the Tsarist state. A great attraction of Russian (Bolshevik) socialism was in what it meant for ethnopolitics in the multi-ethnic borderlands: much of the appeal lay in its secularism, its 'ecumenical' political vision, its universalism, its anti-nationalism, and in its implied commitment to "the good imperial ideal". The 'elective affinities' between individuals of different ethnic strata and Russian socialism varied across ethnic groups, and often within them. One of the key themes, therefore, is how a social and political identity is worked out within the context of a multinational empire, invoking social processes such as nationalism, assimilation, Russification, social mobility, access to provincial and imperial 'civil societies', linguistic and cultural choices, and ethnopolitical relationships.

The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg as a royal collection and cultural treasury reveals the aesthetic preferences of a nation that has always stood on the cultural and geographical periphery of Europe. Initially an imperial collection under Peter I, patrons of the Hermitage focused attention on collecting canonical European paintings and also emulating Western models of display. In this way, the Russian aristocracy superimposed itself on Europe's culture through the construction of a collection to rival its great European contemporaries. / The development of a standardized practice of display has widely been studied in relation to Western museums but similar attention has not been extended to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. I argue that Nicholas was able to use objects of art and strategies of display to assert a greater role in the European state system of the mid-nineteenth century. While the supposed transparency conveyed by the collection's public opening was meant to make Russia seem less threatening to Western powers, in reality the yolk of autocracy was as tight as ever.