<italic>Latina/os in Rhetoric and Composition: Learning from their Experiences with Language Diversity</italic> explores how Latina/o academics' experiences with language difference contributes to their Latina/o academic identity and success in academe while remaining connected to their heritage language and cultural background. Using qualitative data (interviews with ten new and established Latina/o academics), Cavazos addresses how the participants became self-aware of their resilient qualities, such as problem-solving, autonomy, and sense of purpose, which assisted them in identifying strategies to effectively merge identities and languages in academia. One of the major findings in this study focuses on how the participants' knowledge of language difference and their ability to see their identities and languages as merged in academia contributes to their success as Latina/o academics. In order for Latina/os to achieve success in higher education, this study suggests that institutions of higher education and pedagogical approaches must view language and cultural difference as valid ways of making knowledge in the academy. Institutions should not only create spaces that convey a genuine sense of community for Latina/os (i.e., an academic community that values their language strengths and background) but also make efforts to train and hire mentors who recognize the strengths of multilingual students. A better understanding of how Latina/o academics merge identities and languages and how language difference enhances academia results in a multilingual pedagogy that increases faculty and students' understanding of language, rhetoric, and rhetorical strategies. A multilingual pedagogy aims to not only help students become successful writers in academic English, but also encourage them to identify the resilient, rhetorical, and linguistic strategies that will assist them in negotiating diverse contexts. In order to increase the success of Latina/o students in higher education and academia, Cavazos argues that institutions, faculty, and programs should invest in creating opportunities that will help everyone learn from multilingual students' language strengths in order to challenge language hegemony and expand knowledge-making in academia.

By piecing together the lives of numerous Indian voyagers to Spain, this study explores the role of indigenous peoples of the Andes in the formation of the early modern Atlantic world. The research focuses on these journeys from the kingdom of Peru to the court of the Spanish Habsburg king during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This project continues recent developments in colonial Andean historiography in three main areas. First, it aligns with current works revisiting the problem of Indian acculturation or Hispanization by tracing the emergence of a new class of Indian legal specialists in colonial Peru. Second, this work shifts the emphasis from rural native communities to the urban milieus in which most of these travelers and specialists lived by analyzing new power structures and novel forms of articulating legal and political discourses within the lettered city. Finally, it explores the role of Indians in the development of a legal culture linking distant scenarios of the Spanish Atlantic. Indian participation in solicitation and litigation across the ocean played a significant part in the outcomes of Habsburg state building. Through a series of strategies displayed at the king's court, Indians were generally successful in securing royal decrees ordering viceroys, judges, defenders, and other American authorities to administer justice to native claimants and petitioners. These transatlantic journeys, as any other form of reliance on royal justice and patrimonial power, Indian or Spanish, partially reinforced the hegemony of the Crown. In the process of so doing, however, this sophisticated form of political negotiation helped create and recreate the nature of the Habsburg Atlantic Empire. Travelers were state makers of a very special kind.

The rise of women's higher education in the United States began in the late nineteenth century, but in many institutions, especially in Texas, women did not receive the same caliber education as men. However, Add-Ran College, established in Thorp Spring, Texas in 1873 by brothers Addison and Randolph Clark, was a remarkable exception. Coeducational from its beginning, Add-Ran College offered female students the opportunity to follow the same curriculum alongside their male peers, when most other institutions in the country segregated their students by sex, one way or another. Over the next three decades, Add-Ran's policies towards women and coeducation continued to become more liberal, providing a place for women to experience higher education free from many of the constraints of other schools.

Shaping the Thesis and Dissertation: Case Studies of Writers across the Curriculum concentrates on how writers learn to conceptualize and produce texts during the high-stakes transition from graduate school into the profession: writing the thesis or dissertation. Using a theoretical framework informed by rhetorical studies of genre and a methodological approach of case studies, González describes the writing histories and writing processes of five students as they begin crossing the textual bridge between writing as a graduate student to writing as a professional. The five writers featured represent different fields of study including art history, biblical interpretation, composition and rhetoric, journalismadvertising/public relations, and literature. These stories demonstrate the ways that multiple contextsthe individual, local, and disciplinaryimpact thesis and dissertation writing. Shaping the Thesis and Dissertation presents four major findings. First, advanced graduate students need the guidelines, direction, and models they previously received when encountering new genres in undergraduate and graduate courses. Second, graduate faculty across the curriculum increasingly acknowledge the need for explicit writing instruction. Third, graduate students seek support primarily from those they consider experts, resisting or rejecting potential help from peers, writing center staff, or other non-specialists. Fourth, thesis and dissertation writers rarely pursue non-disciplinary sources of support and instruction for their writing despite that the university has made multiple sources available to them. However, some writers seek mentors who are not sanctioned by the university (i.e. professional editors or industry professionals) because the writers do not receive the mentoring and/or support they need from their advisors. These findings indicate that academic advisors provide the political position in the local institution and the insider knowledge in the discipline that thesis and dissertation writers need to help them navigate the thesis and dissertation process. Although non-specialists such as writing center consultants and professional editors cannot replace this invaluable advisement. As a result, this study demonstrates that the once seemingly tacit forms of advanced disciplinary writing are teachable, and that these forms are, in some cases, taught out of necessity by non-specialist or non-disciplinary sources.

During the Middle Ages, authors of such works as Piers Plowman and the Canterbury Tales employed allegorical characters and situations to correct problematic behavior through religious instruction; they utilized the behavior of flat allegorical figures to highlight individual sins and institutional problems in social behavior. More specifically, one can find the allegory of the Seven Deadly Sins appearing in literature throughout history. It is the aim of this text to illustrate the way that Charles Dickenss David Copperfield is situated within allegorical tradition, and, particularly, it is the purpose of this study to examine the relation of Chaucers use of allegory to Dickenss text. Dickens novel David Copperfield reflects the influence of medieval allegory, popularized by the morality play, in the English literary tradition, by employing an allegorical use of the Seven Deadly Sins parallel to Chaucers and to use these allegorical figures to urge social and individual reform. Dickenss text also provides evidence of a connection to Chaucers Canterbury Tales; Micawber notes For myself, My Canterbury Pilgrimage has done much (David Copperfield 738). Throughout the pilgrimage, David learns to temper his emotions through his struggles with those Vices that he encounters, and he comes to recognize, though he loved Steerforth, the imbalance that caused his heros fall. This study compares textual evidence and examines the Victorian readers familiarity with Chaucer and medieval allegory; these avenues of inquiry come together to bolster the notion that Dickens was indeed impacted by Chaucers allegorical use of the Seven Deadly Sins.

My dissertation concentrates on an important but still largely unexplored area of rhetorical and cultural history: the Young Wales nationalist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I recover three Welsh miscellany magazines of this era: the Red Dragon (1882-87), Wales (1894-97), and Young Wales (1895-1904). I demonstrate how these magazines construct Welsh identity using editorials, poetry, serial fiction, biographies, folklore, correspondence, and illustrations. My analysis illustrates how these Anglophone periodicals functioned not merely as entertainment but as an available means for Welsh writers and editors to re-imagine their nations identity in response to English cultural dominance. My aim in studying the nationalist rhetoric of Welsh magazines is, in part, to enlarge our understanding of how the practice of epideictic rhetoric has evolved from its oral and classical roots to circulation in mass-produced texts such as periodicals. Among the many other changes brought on by the invention of the printing press, this technology powerfully affected the relationship between rhetor and audience in ways that have not yet been sufficiently studied. This heightened degree of interaction challenges the mere spectator function that Aristotle affords to epideictic audiences and indicates that classical theories of epideictic rhetoric need to be reassessed to account for literate modes of communication. Engaging in this reassessment, my dissertation extends the epideictic theories of Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman, Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and others to better account for the community-building functions of periodical texts. In addition to contributing to our understanding of the epideictic functions of periodicals, my dissertation helps reveal the particular forms of epideictic rhetoric that emerge within contexts of disempowerment, particularly colonization. Drawing on recent scholarship in womens rhetorics, minority rhetorics, and postcolonial discourse, I illustrate how these magazines use narratives, icons, revivalism, and gender to champion Welsh communal agency. In foregrounding the epideictic tactics of Welsh miscellany magazines, I also connect these texts with a transnational tradition of politicized fiction and verse that repeatedly emerges within postcolonial scenes. As a whole, my dissertation reveals the ways in which cultural disempowerment both shapes and fuels epideictic rhetoric.

For nearly forty years, the poetry manuscript of Ethel Berger Pack, written by Pack in 1961 as she worked as wife, mother, and full-time employee in West Texas, was kept from public view. In this master's thesis, I use both academic and creative writing to discuss how researching Pack's manuscript functioned in my personal artistic development, a process deeply embedded in several generations of female creative expression. Using Emily Dickinson as a comparative literary model, I explore how ordinary women write in extraordinary contexts and how theses contexts impact and shape their artistic development. I also examine ways in which individuals or circumstances influenced the creative development of both Pack and Dickinson. Also, this thesis argues for Pack's manuscript as an exercise in profane creativity, a type of expression able to spiritually empower the creator in ways that transcend the positive or negative influence of sponsors.

Comparisons between theoretical predictions and experimental measurements of vibrational fundamentals and isotopic shifts represent a method for the identification of new molecular species. For molecules with near-lying vibrational fundamentals, experimental and theoretical factors complicate the interpretation of isotopic spectra where isotopic shift measurements are recorded. Experimentally, a large number of absorptions in a small region of the spectrum are observed. Theoretically, two factors affect the calculation of isotopic shifts in the harmonic approximation: i) the sensitivity of the calculations due to the interaction of vibrational fundamentals and ii) the sensitivity of the calculations due to the anharmonicity of the interaction potential. The study of vibrational spectra of long carbon chains exhibits these problems. The present work is an investigation of the theoretical issues that affect the calculations. As a consequence of this investigation, two theoretical methods were developed in the framework of perturbation theory in order to aid in the interpretation of isotopic spectra of homonuclear molecules. Both theoretical methods are presented in this work. The first method, called the isotopic deperturbation method, is introduced in order to aid dealing with the complications regarding the sensitivity of simulated spectra due to the interactions of vibrational fundamentals. The second method is introduced here in order to estimate the anharmonicity of vibrational fundamentals from isotopic shift measurements. The isotopic deperturbation method is applied to the infrared isotopic spectra of linear Cn (n = 3 12, 15, 18) and confirms our hypothesis regarding the high sensitivity of the isotopic shift calculation for molecules with near-lying vibrational fundamentals. The method to calculate anharmonic contributions is applied to the experimental spectra of linear carbon chains C2n+1 , n=15 as well as to cyclic C6 and C8; the results are compared with the calculated anharmonicity using a density functional theory (DFT) perturbative approach and existing calculations in the literature.

This project examines U.S. womens diverse literary contributions to the social settlement movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with Jane Addamss Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and examining other fictional and non-fictional considerations of the settlement project, I explore the ways in which the authors in my study individually and collectively confront a Progressive-Era ideal of societal regeneration. Working with well-known authors such as Addams and Anna Julia Cooper, as well as with rare and archival texts by writers such as African American activist Fannie Barrier Williams, Social Gospel writers like Vida Scudder, and regional novelists such as Elia Peattie, I analyze the writers use of social, scientific, and religious arguments in service of urban reform work. I consider the interrelationships between text, activism, and identity for these women writers, and I argue that in writing about the settlement movement, each middle-class author in this study offers her own vision of what a Woman Reformer is and should be. Though Addamss memoir identifies the female activist as a singular, individualistic, and somewhat masculine figure along the lines of Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy, other writers challenge this identity even as they refer and defer to Addams and her dominance. Most of the writers emphasize the importance of factors such as community, partnership, and religion through their texts, but ultimately, the literature as a whole largely relies on an image of a (usually white) middle-class heroine who will help save industrial America, and the final text I examine, Peatties The Precipice, extends that idea to a eugenics-based reform program. The People in the Neighborhood shows thatfor its pervasiveness, its position at the nexus of Progressive-Era culture, and its discourse over gender, race, and classthe settlement movement and its literature is a crucial area of study that provides an avenue for scholars to examine the long and sometimes subtle history of prejudice in radical movements.

This dissertation investigates the contentious advocacy rhetorics which are associated with the surge of autism diagnoses over the past decade, a phenomenon which some refer to as an "autism epidemic." The primary aim of this study is to describe why autism advocacy is controversial and to suggest ways in which a "rhetorical" approach might be instrumental in helping advocates move beyond "stalemate." This dissertation employs Krista Ratcliffe's notion of "rhetorical listening." Chapter 2 explores intersections between scientific and public discourse about autism, particularly the movements that have emerged around the vaccine-debates. Discussion centers around the emergence of the vaccine controversies and around the rhetoric on the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Generation Rescue, a high-profile anti-vaccine advocacy organization. Particular attention is given to the rhetorical strategies Generation Rescue uses to convince parents that autism should be treated as a form of mercury-poisoning despite the medical establishment's nearly unanimous disavowal of such beliefs. Chapter 3 shifts the discussion to the to the personal-public rhetoric on autism-parent blogs. Attention is first given to the particular affordances and genre-conventions of blogging. Then, two specific parent-blogs/bloggers are studied: one who promotes the idea of "autism acceptance" and another who rejects "autism acceptance" and deems it irresponsible. Particular attention is given to how each parent blogger engages with public discourses about autism and associates him/herself with larger autism advocacy movements. Chapter 4 focuses on the online self-advocacy of autistics and the burgeoning "neurodiversity" movement, which is, in many respects, a web-enabled phenomenon. The discussion focuses on the genesis of this "Autism Rights" and Autism Self-Advocacy and shows how it is rooted in but also extends previous disability rights movements. Two specific online self-advocacy organizations are studied: Autism Network International and Aspies For Freedom. Chapter 5 turns briefly to a debate within College English about autistic students in writing classroom. I show that the "rhetorical stalemates" of autism advocacy also pervade professional discourses in Rhetoric and Composition and also warrant a rhetorical listening approach.