This thesis is the story of two housing projects designed by architect Ralph Erskine. The first building, Lassaskog in Växjö built in 1954, is one of the earliest examples of industrialized concrete housing in Sweden. The other one, Kv. Ortdrivaren in Kiruna was built some eight years later following Erskine’s utopian ideas for The Arctic City. Despite their architectural and historical significance, these two buildings are threatened today: Ortdrivaren will be demolished and Lassaskog will be hastily densified.   This thesis is a reaction to these threats, and it is a call for preserving and reusing. Looking towards the near future of circularity, I want to praise for never demolishing a building again.   This leads me to the overarching question of my thesis; how could I sustainably save these two buildings?   The only solution I thought worthy of their architecture was to unite them. Rather than demolishing Ortdrivaren, I propose to deconstruct it and reuse it in Växjö. Thereon, started the project of densifying the Lassaskog estates with new student housing made of repurposed concrete elements from Kiruna.   My objective for this quirky enterprise is to find a methodology for preserving post-war housing estates and for conducting a circular architecture project.

John Erskine was the leading Evangelical in the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Educated in an enlightened setting at Edinburgh University, he learned to appreciate the epistemology of John Locke and other empiricists alongside key Scottish Enlightenment figures such as his ecclesiastical rival, William Robertson. Although groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer, Erskine changed career paths in order to become a minister of the Kirk. He was deeply moved by the endemic revivals in the west of Scotland and determined that his contribution to the burgeoning Evangelical movement on both sides of the Atlantic would be much greater as a clergyman than a lawyer. Yet Erskine was no ‘enthusiast’. He integrated the style and moral teachings of the Enlightenment into his discourses and posited new theories on traditional views of Calvinism in his theological treatises. Erskine’s thought, however, never transgressed the boundaries of orthodoxy. His goal was to update Evangelical Calvinism with the new style and techniques of the Enlightenment without sacrificing the gospel message. While Erskine was widely recognised as an able preacher and theologian, his primary contribution to Evangelicalism was as a disseminator. He sent correspondents like the New England pastor Jonathan Edwards countless religious and philosophical works so that he and others could learn about current ideas, update their writings to conform to the Age of Reason and provide an apologetic against perceived heretical authors. Erskine also was crucial in the publishing of books and pamphlets by some of the best Evangelical theologians in America and Britain. Within his lifetime, Erskine’s main contribution to Evangelicalism was as a propagator of an enlightened form of Calvinism.

Après un séjour en Irlande de 1846 à 1850, le peintre écossais Erskine Nicol (1825-1904) représenta les Irlandais dans la plupart de ses tableaux. Il remporta un franc succès à la Royal Scottish Academy (Édimbourg), puis à la Royal Academy (Londres). Nous analyserons les raisons d’une telle popularité en adoptant, entre autres, une méthode issue des études culturelles, montrant que Nicol adapta les préjugés scientifiques de son temps ainsi que les clichés sur les Irlandais afin de créer son iconographie de l’Irlande. Au-delà des portraits flatteurs des paysannes irlandaises, Nicol peignit aussi de nombreuses caricatures, suggérant qu’il était tributaire des idées impérialistes de l’époque. Pourtant, sa peinture demeure ambivalente : certaines toiles, soulignant les injustices du système agricole irlandais géré par les Britanniques, expriment la compassion du peintre. Cette remise en cause de l’autorité gouvernementale au sein d’un genre artistique aussi normé que la peinture fut rendue possible par le style de Nicol, inspiré par les peintres hollandais du XVIIe siècle, par les tableaux de David Wilkie (1785-1841), par l’école écossaise et par celle du réalisme social, un courant qui exerça une grande influence sur la peinture narrative de Nicol. Cependant, le réalisme de sa peinture fut limité car l’artiste devait vendre ses toiles pour vivre. On tentera de cerner les motivations de Nicol, pour comprendre si elles sont liées à un goût particulier pour les stéréotypes, à sa compassion pour les Irlandais ou à ses ambitions commerciales. La circulation de ses œuvres dans des expositions locales et internationales était souvent facilitée par les marchands d’art qui investirent dans ses toiles pour les revendre, ou même les reproduire sous forme d’imprimés, qui furent produits par milliers entre les années 1850 et la mort de l’artiste, ce qui contribua à faire de Nicol un peintre majeur de son époque. / After a stay in Ireland between 1846 and 1850, the Scottish painter Erskine Nicol (1825-1904) represented the Irish in most of his artworks. He was particularly successful at the Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh), and at the Royal Academy (London). This work investigates the reasons for his popularity, using methods that are mainly derived from cultural studies, and showing that Nicol adapted the scientific prejudices of his time, as well as the clichés on the Irish, in order to create his iconography of Ireland. Beyond his flattering portraits of Irish peasant girls, Nicol painted numerous caricatures suggesting that he complied with prevalent imperialist ideas. Yet, his paintings are ambivalent: a few canvases, highlighting the injustices generated by the British regulation of Ireland’s agricultural system, convey the painter’s compassion. This questioning of British authority through painting, a highly codified artistic genre, was enabled by Nicol’s style, inspired by the Dutch Old Masters, by the artworks of David Wilkie (1785-1841), by the Scottish School, and by social realism, an artistic movement which had an important influence on Nicol’s narrative painting. However, his realism was limited because he needed to sell his paintings to survive. This work will try to understand his motivations and to see if they were linked to his fondness for stereotypes, to his compassion for the Irish or to his commercial ambitions. The circulation of his artworks in local and international exhibitions was made easier by the work of art dealers, who invested in Nicol’s canvases and in their reproductions. Thus, thousands of prints reproducing his artworks between the 1850s and his death in 1904 made Nicol a major artist of the Victorian era.

Seward Hiltner has written that 'to a greater degree than in any other theological discipline, we lack in pastoral theology a sense of identification with our pastoral roots and heritage. This situation demands that we inquire into some significant orders of shepherding data from the past as well as from the present. My desire to understand the image and practice of the pastoral ministry in history and my interest in the heritage of Presbyterianism was heightened by the quadricentennial of the Scottish Reformation, which was being observed when I considered beginning research in church history. After the Very Rev. Principal Emeritus Hugh Watt suggested reading about Scottish pastors in the eighteenth century, I realized that there was an opportunity to explore the thought of men whose conception of the ministry influenced and was like that of Scotsmen, such John Witherspoon, who contributed much to the establishment and growth of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., of which I am a minister.

Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White traveled to the U.S.S.R. in 1941 on their and their editor's hunch that something newsworthy was in the offing. The couple went in part to add to their library of phototext books (three had been published since 1936), but more to advance the agenda of the anti-Fascist, anti-isolationist Leftist Popular Front, whose goals coincided with those of the Roosevelt administration. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, they immediately immersed themselves in the enterprise of bringing war news to the American listening and reading public. Through the portals of CBS radio, Life magazine, PM newspaper, and other journalistic outlets, and despite stultifying censorship, they made it clear that the Red Army was a formidable anti-Hitler force that wanted only financial and material assistance from the U.S., and that the Russian people, steeped in patriotism and family values not very different from American ideals, were worthy allies. Stalin, they hinted, was a well-intentioned and well-organized autocrat, but nothing worse. Upon returning to the United States, Bourke-White traveled extensively to promote a Russian-American alliance, and published a photo-chronicle of their Russian trip, Shooting the Russian War. Caldwell published two very different books, All-Out on the Road to Smolensk and All Night Long, that also advocated this coalition. I argue that Caldwell composed Smolensk as a heroic quest to report on the war firsthand, while All Night Long, a popular and sensational story about Russian guerillas, bears all the characteristics of a Socialist Realist novel touting the Soviet cause. Both books were successful in endorsing Soviet objectives in the West. Their individual and collaborative literary products have been largely forgotten, but Bourke-White's photographs continue to inform our memory of that war.

This dissertation examines a curricular approach at an institution that claims to maintain a liberal arts focus – that of the canon of Great Books as implemented as a formal curriculum at St. John’s College. My research question is: what enabled the Great Books program at St. John’s College to survive for over seventy years? The significance of this question can be seen by noticing that St. John’s College is the only college in the United States to have exclusively adopted reading the Great Books as its four-year curriculum. Other institutions that have experimented with a Great Books program prior to and since its introduction at St. John’s College have continued their existing programs as well, but many have limited their Great Books efforts to an honors course or general core requirement, if their Great Books effort survives at all. My dissertation is historical starting with the influencing factors leading to this curriculum’s introduction at St. John’s College in 1937. I then outline the implementation and document the changes to the list of Great Books comprising the program as it was updated over the subsequent seventy years as documented in St. John’s College’s academic catalogs from 1937 through 2008. I show that the list of Great Books required to be read by every student over the years has contained a consistent core while making slight adjustments.

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Segregation och social exkludering har på senare tid ökat allt mer i Sverige, både i storstäderna och i de mindre kommunerna. För att motverka detta har stor del av segregationsforskningen fokuserat på att bryta homogena boendeformer i segregerade stadsdelar genom exempelvis kompletterande ny bebyggelse eller förändrade upplåtelseformer. Men hur fungerar det i särskilt känsliga kulturmiljöområden där det finns svårigheter med kompletterande bebyggelse och där ändrade upplåtelseformer riskerar att förvanska den arkitektoniska kvaliteten?  I detta mastersarbete undersöker jag hur segregation kan motverkas i områden som är särskilt känsliga ur kulturmiljösynpunkt. För detta har jag valt Nya bruket i Sandviken som undersökningsområde, ritat och planerat av Ralph Erskine. Området omfattas idag av riksintresse för kulturmiljö samtidigt som området är det mest segregerade i Sandvikens kommun. Arbetet är ett kombinerat vetenskapligt och konstnärligt arbete i två delar, en uppsats (del 1) och ett projekt (del 2). Del 1 består av en kartläggning av platsens historia, de vandrade observationerna samt intervjuer av två tjänstepersoner och åtta olika personer som är boende på Nya bruket. Den insamlade empirin visar bland annat att alla de tillfrågade trivs på Nya bruket men att det finns flertalet negativa föreställningar om området, oftast formade från de mer socioekonomiskt starka områdena som inte rör sig på Nya bruket. Empirin visar också att det finns barriärer runt området och att platsens historia och riksintresse inte uppmärksammas alls. Bland annat visar intervjuerna att endast 2 av 8 av de tillfrågade vet om att området omfattas av riksintresse för kulturmiljö.   Baserat på analysen av den insamlande empirin utformades ett kunskapsunderlag som ligger till grund för projektet i del 2. Kunskapsunderlaget består av de tre olika åtgärdsstrategierna lyfta historien, bryta barriärer och skapa målpunkter samt de sex olika platserna för vilket åtgärderna lämpar sig bäst: kanalrummet, diagonalen, förskolan, parkeringarna och garagen, centrala kvarteret och gröna torget.  I del 2 som består av projektet testades och utvecklades kunskapsunderlagets strategier vilket skapade konkreta förslag på en bättre integrering av Nya bruket i Sandviken. Designkonceptet som användes var urban akupunktur vilket har som syfte att punktvis göra precisa åtgärder och på så vis lyfta stadsdelar (Nya bruket i detta fall) som helhet. Åtgärderna som utformades i projektet sammanställdes i fem övergripande kategorier: ny stadsgata, omvandling av centrala kvarteret, Gröna torget som multi-funktionell yta, kanalen som historisk plats och förlängning av parkstråket. Genom urban akupunktur skapade dessa åtgärder det nyaste Nya bruket - Nya bruket 3.0.

This thesis explores fin de siècle theories of decadence, degeneration, criminology, and evolutionary biology, and their contemporary application to invasion literature written between 1871 and 1915. While there is significant criticism on early invasion narratives, there is little extant on Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895) and Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), especially in discussing the importance of their militaristic “calls to action” to convert weak, aesthetically-inclined men into hard-working patriotic soldiers and public servants. Through this conversion, the characters of Chambers and Childers serve as important role models that exemplify Max Nordau’s ideal “all-American boy” and “right-living Englishman,” convincing decadent, unprepared governments to properly prepare for an imminent Great War. However, as much of Anglo-European society ignores these signs, the warnings outlined by Chambers and Childers predict the destructive consequences of World War I and the psychological disassociation of the Modernist period. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

ABSTRACT This study focuses on twenty-one particular texts published in 1925 as contemporaries of The Great Gatsby. The manuscript is divided into four categories—The Impressionists, The Experimentalists, The Realists, and The Independents. Among The Impressionists are F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, Willa Cather (The Professor’s House), Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain), Elinor Wylie (The Venetian Glass Nephew), John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer), and William Faulkner (New Orleans Sketches). The Experimentalists are Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans), E. E. Cummings (& aka “Poems 48-96”), Ezra Pound (A Draft of XVI Cantos), T. S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men”), Laura Riding (“Summary for Alastor”), and John Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy). The Realists are Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Edith Wharton (The Mother’s Recompense), Upton Sinclair (Mammonart), Ellen Glasgow (Barren Ground), Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith), James Boyd (Drums), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time). The Independents are Archibald MacLeish (The Pot of Earth) and Robert Penn Warren (“To a Face in a Crowd”). Although these twenty-two texts may in some cases represent literary fragmentations, each in its own way also represents a coherent response to the spirit of the times that is in one way or another cognate to The Great Gatsby. The fact that all these works appeared the same year is special because the authors, if not already famous, would become famous, and their works were or would come to represent classic American literature around the world. The twenty-two authors either knew each other personally or knew each other’s works. Naturally, they were also influenced by writings of international authors and philosophers. The greatest common elements among the poets and fiction writers are their uninhibited interest in sex, an absorbing cynicism about life, and the frequent portrayal of disintegration of the family, a trope for what had happened to the countries and to the “family of nations” that experienced the Great War. In 1925, it would seem, Fitzgerald and many of his writing peers—some even considered his betters—channeled a major spirit of the times, and Fitzgerald did it more successfully than almost anyone.