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This study examines the birth of television and the modern media corporation that launched it, through the archives of the designer of the "first" set, John Vassos, a Greek-born American industrial designer, interior decorator, and illustrator (1898-1985). Vassos's early career is used as a case study to analyze the historical and cultural forces that shaped the emergence of this new media and the new profession of industrial design, through archival materials housed in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and at Syracuse University. Specifically, this thesis unites various parts of Vassos's early career, from his modernist illustrations to industrial design, through the aesthetics and practices of modernism. As RCA's lead industrial designer for over 40 years, Vassos was involved in the design and promotion of RCA's electronic products, including radios and televisions and studio equipment. Vassos also designed the new spaces carved out for their use in the home including the "living room of the future" featured at the 1939 World's Fair. Drawing from his skills as an illustrator, designer and display expert, Vassos helped develop RCA's public image at a time of its greatest expansion in radio and television manufacturing and broadcasting. This reading of Vassos's work is both diachronic, taking into account his work over the early part of his career to analyze his specific contribution and synchronic, in relationship to other designers working contemporaneously. Thus, this thesis explores Vassos's double role as a participant, with active agency within the emergence of the new field and as a subject, constrained by social roles and forces. Ranging from turnstile to the transmitter, Vassos along with other industrial designers used the streamlined aesthetic to create visual unity among mechanical and electronic products, from home to office, from subway to skyline.

This thesis is about the mobilities of geographical knowledge in the material form of lantern-slides and the forces exerted on these by technological and human factors. Owing to its concern with matter, human- and non-human, and its circulation, the thesis addresses the physics of geographical knowledge. The chapters below investigate the Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS) ongoing tradition of telling stories of science and exploration through words, objects and pictures in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and as geography professionalized and geographical science developed. These processes occurred within the context of a plethora of technological innovations, including the combination of the older medium of the magic lantern and photographic lantern-slides, integral to a wide range of entertainment, scientific and educational performances across Britain. In 1886 the RGS began to engage with the magic lantern. Via this technology and the interactive lecture performances in which it featured, I argue that the Society embraced the medium of photography, thereby engendering transformations in methods of knowledge making and to the RGS collections. I study how these transformations influenced the discipline of Geography as it was re-established at the University of Oxford in 1887. I demonstrate the evolution of the RGS’s Evening, Technical and Young Persons’ lectures, their contingent lantern-slide practices and, consequently, how these moulded, and were moulded by, the RGS Fellowship between c. 1885 and 1924. The chapters below explore how these innovations in visual technologies and practices arose, how they circulated knowledge and their effect on geographies of geographical knowledge making. By harnessing the lantern the RGS attracted an expanding and diversifying audience demographic. The thesis demonstrates the interactive nature of RGS lantern-slide lectures and audiences' important role in shaping the Society’s practices and geographical knowledge. The chapters below argue that it was via the use of the lantern that geography was disseminated to new places. The thesis therefore brings additional perspectives and dimensions to understandings of the circulation of geographical knowledge.

The thesis investigates the interpretation of some of the most problematic passages of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, i.e. passages involving the concept or practice of herem. The texts under consideration contain prima facie divine commands to commit genocide as well as descriptions of genocidal military campaigns commended by God. The thesis presents and analyses the solutions that Christian interpreters through the ages have proposed to the concomitant moral and hermeneutical challenges. A number of ways in which they have been used to justify violence and war are also addressed. For the patristic and early medieval eras the thesis aims to be as comprehensive as possible in identifying and analysing the various interpretative options, while for later periods the focus lies on new developments. In addition to offering the most comprehensive presentation of the Wirkungsgeschichte of herem texts to date, the thesis offers an analysis and critical evaluation of the theologico-hermeneutical assumptions underlying each of the several approaches, and their exegetical and practical consequences. The resulting analytical taxonomy and hermeneutical map is an original contribution to the history of exegesis and the study of the interplay between religion and violence. The cognitive dissonance herem texts cause for pious readers is introduced as an inconsistent set of five propositions: (1) God is good; (2) the bible is true; (3) genocide is atrocious; (4) according to the bible, God commanded and commended genocide; (5) a good being, let alone the supremely good Being, would never command or commend an atrocity. If proposition (4) is assumed, at least one of the deeply-held beliefs expressed in the other four must be modified or given up. The introduction is followed by four diachronic chapters in which the various exegetical approaches are set out: pre-critical (from the OT to the Apostolic Fathers), dissenting (Marcion and other ancient critics), figurative (from Origen to high medieval times), divine-command-ethics,(from Augustine to Calvin) and violent (from Ambrose to Puritan North America). A concluding chapter presents near contemporary re-iterations and variations of the historic approaches.

Thesis analyses the reception of Augustine of Hippo's (354-430) ontological discourse on the soul in late antiquity and the early middle ages, more specifically in the sixth and the ninth centuries. Since Augustine never wrote a 'De anima', nor always presented his readers with definite answers to questions, there was room for later authors to interpret and improvise. This thesis focuses on 4 texts: Cassiodorus Senator's 'De anima', Eugippius of Lucculanum's massive florilegium the 'Excerpta ex operibus Sancti Augustini', both from the sixth century, Gottschalk of Orbais' letter 'Quaestiones de anima', and John Scottus Eriugena's apologetic 'De divina praedestinatione liber', both from the ninth century. This thesis establishes that, apart from Cassiodorus, the author's main interest in Augustine's ideas on the ontology of the soul rests on the way it impinges on their contemporary predestination debates. Cassiodorus consciously wanted to produce a Christian De anima in a classical vein. Especially the question of the origin of the soul takes the interest of Eugippius and Gottschalk. This is an important question for predestination debates, since it is supposed to explain technically how original sin came to be universal. Augustine never found a satisfactory answer to this thorny question. Eriugena's genius lies in building an original ontology of the soul on Augustine's own foundations which sidesteps this problem of the origin of the soul entirely.

It has been said that Pythagoras discovered the perfect musical intervals by chance when he heard sounds of hammers striking an anvil at a nearby smithy. The sounds corresponded to the same intervals Pythagoras had been studying. He experimented with various instruments and apparatus to confirm what he heard. Math, and in particular, numbers are connected to music, he concluded. The discovery of musical intervals and the icon of the musical blacksmith have been familiar tropes in history, referenced in literary, musical, and visual arts. Countless authors since Antiquity have written about the story of the discovery, most often found in theoretical texts about music. However, modern scholarship has judged the narrative as a myth and a fabrication. Its refutation of the story is peculiar because modern scholarship has failed to disprove the nature of Pythagoras’s discovery with valid physical explanations. This report examines the structural elements of the story and traces its evolution since Antiquity to the early modern period to explain how an author interprets the narrative and why modern scholarship has deemed it a legend. The case studies of Nicomachus of Gerasa, Claudius Ptolemy, Boethius, and Marin Mersenne reveal not only how the story about Pythagoras’s discovery functions for each author, but also how the alterations in each version uncover an author’s views on music. / text

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This is the study of Engelbert of Admont's unique and practical take on Aristotelian political theory post-rediscovery of Aristotle's ethico-political works. Through the methods of reception theory and a comparative analysis of his first major political treatise, De regimine principum, with those of his contemporaries similar political treatises (i.e., St. Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Marsilius of Padua) and their use of Aristotelian sources and concepts--e.g. lex animata--I have shown not only Engelbert's more original, unique, and practical approach to political philosophy within the Aristotelian political tradition of the later Middle Ages, but also a more comprehensively eclectic nature of this tradition. Engelbert's political philosophy as espoused in his De regimine principum is thus a watershed in the development of the use of practical political science.

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Animal art is one of the more mystical aspects of Scandinavian Iron Age culture. It has foremost been regarded in the light of art and style history. Interpretation has also – mainly from the 1990s and onwards – been made through iconographic analysis. But the problem here is that iconography requires textual analogy, something that the Scandinavian Iron Age lacks. The purpose of this paper is to lift some of the ”mystical fog” that engulfs the scandinavian animal art, by developing a method for interpretation of pre-historic images that evades the flaws in the iconographic method. This by doing an interpretation of the gripping beast motif on Gotlandic Viking Age animal-head brooches. The study is divided into three parts. Part one focuses on reception within research history and how the use of language and methodological approaches shapes the perception of animal art within it's own time, it also discusses animal art in the light of style, motif and communication. Part two aims to outline a method for pre-historic image interpretation, a structuralistic iconology with addition of contextualization and anthropological theories of agency. The chapter also discusses the cosmological order through means of ”structuralistic iconology”. Finally part three contextualizes the gripping beast to the object – the animal head-brooch – through notions of use, combination and age. Concluding that the gripping beast should be understood as a hybrid creature closely linked to ancestry, odal and the fatalistic worldview of Iron Age Scandinavia.