For most of the twentieth century, opera singers were not beholden to the ideal physical standard of women dictated by popular culture, but rather focused on serving the music and perfecting their artistry. Unprecedented sociocultural changes throughout the twentieth century exposed the shifting ideals of each generation and how they were promoted through mass media and advertising. This thesis surveys the time period of the 1890s to the present day for the purpose of analyzing cultural trends, philosophies and technologies that shaped the century. Societal pressure to make the body a project and the focus of one's own intense attention now reflects back onto the opera stage where audience members expect to see what society has dictated to be an acceptable female form. Artistic and stage directors are influenced by society's decree that only thin is beautiful, imbedding into the mindset of the art form notions that now affect how female professional opera singers are depicted and even employed.

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This dissertation, All Things Commune: The Communal Imaginary in Twenty-First-Century French Fiction & Poetry, is animated by two fundamental questions: How can life be led differently, together? And, what is French literature’s radical political potential? Over the course of this project, I argue that twenty-first-century French literature is a site of radical political imagination, and, in certain cases, a veritable form of radical political practice. Through close readings of works by a diverse set of authors – including Jean Rouaud, Yannick Haenel, Virginie Despentes, and Jean-Marie Gleize – I reveal a countercurrent of twenty-first-century French literature bound up in a radical politics that is invested in imagining alternative forms of community that are autonomous from the French state, capitalism, governance, and traditional political structures. I read these literary works in light of theories of community developed by collectives such as Tiqqun and Le Comité invisible and critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière. All Things Commune demonstrates how reading these authors and theorists together reveals a shared imaginary of alternative communal life and radical Leftist politics, which I place under the rubric of destituent power. All Things Commune insists on the profound continuities between contemporary French literature, history, and politics. Overall, this project questions the narrow political frameworks through which twenty-first-century French literature continues to be read and demonstrates how radical politics appear in unexpected ways in a period of literature sometimes reduced to the reactionary or the apolitical.

Certain disjunctions exist between the structure, courses, and practices of current textile curricula on the one hand, and the demands of students for entry into diverse creative professions and the demands of the creative industry for qualified new talents on the other. Thus, this research will explore the history, current issues, and emerging trends of academia and the creative professions as these shape the qualifications, aspirations, and expectations of students, academia, and the textile-related fields. The ultimate goal of this study is to comprehend the contemporary issues—social, economic, and cultural shifts—that may impact textile education within art and design colleges, and propose an efficient and engaging BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) textile curriculum suitable for the era of interdisciplinary education and the fourth industrial revolution. Since scholarly study of the effectiveness of art school curriculum is limited and little research has examined the challenges of BFA education, and in particular BFA textile education in the context of 21st century college education, the researcher begins with a survey of existing literature from adjacent fields, including higher education, sociology, business, marketing, apparel, and art education, in particular, adolescent artistic development. The existing literature also includes statistics from government, consulting firms, colleges ranking sites, and annual reports published by each school. This qualitative case study examines how stakeholders in BFA textile education—students, faculty, and professionals—from five selected art colleges in the U.S. perceive their educational experiences and post-college careers. The data were collected through 1) a review of existing literature pertaining to perspectives of general college education, creative industry, and current student generation, and 2) qualitative data gathered through initial surveys and verbal interviews, including two pilot studies. Stakeholder perspectives obtained through interviews are interpreted through the following theoretical frameworks: 1) the business perspective aiming at the success of all stakeholders; 2) the marketing perspective aiming at improving stakeholder satisfaction as a means of enhancing the operational efficiency of organizations; and 3) the educational perspective aiming to create effective teaching and engaging learning environments for the success of today's young creative talents. The researcher contends that the findings strongly suggest curricular and pedagogy change in accordance with societal changes and demands of the stakeholders—current student generation, creative industry, and academia—while at the same time informing the significant value of college education, BFA education, and textile education in the 21st century.

This dissertation analyzes several topics related to political life in ethnically divided societies. In chapter 2, I study the relationship between ethnic social conflict, such as protests, riots, and armed inter-ethnic violence, and bloc partisan identification. I find that protests have no effect on bloc support for political parties, riots increase bloc partisan identification, and that armed violence reduces this phenomenon. In chapter 3, I analyze the factors that influence the targeting of ethnic groups by ethnic parties in social conflict. I find some empirical evidence that conditions favorable to vote pooling across ethnic lines reduce group targeting by ethnic parties. In chapter 4, I analyze the effects of ethnic demography on ethnic party behavior. Through a qualitative analysis of party behavior in local elections in Macedonia, I find that ethnic parties change their strategies in response to changes in ethnic demography. I find that co-ethnic parties are less likely to challenge each other for power under conditions of split demography. In fact, under conditions of split demography, I find that co-ethnic parties have political incentives to unite behind a single party because intra-group competition jeopardizes the group's hold on power.

This dissertation is about economic resilience of local governments to natural disasters. Specifically, the dissertation investigates resilience on regional level. Moreover, the dissertation also investigates growth in the green job sector in local governments. The findings indicate that local governments working with each other helps green job creation. In addition, the dissertation finds that green jobs, following disasters, experience three percent growth. This dissertation is important because it investigates the relationship between climate- related disasters and green jobs, which is an area that is under-investigated.

The screen, as recent studies in a number of fields indicate, is a cultural object due for critical reappraisal. Work on the theoretical status of screen objects tends to focus upon the materialisation of surface; in other words, it attempts to rethink the relationship between the supposedly 'superficial' facade and the 'functional' object itself. I suggest that this work, while usefully chipping away at the dichotomy between the 'superficial' and the 'functional', can lead us to a more radical conclusion when read in the context of subjectivity. By rethinking the relationship between the surface and the obverse face of the screen as the terms of a dialectic, we can ‘read’ the screen as the vital component in a process which constitutes the Subject. In order to demonstrate this, I analyse productions of subjectivity in literary texts of the twenty-first century — in doing so, I assume the novel as nonpareil arena of the dramatisation of subjectivity — and I propose a reading of the work of Jacques Lacan as hitherto unacknowledged theorist par excellence of the form and function of the screen. Lacan describes, with the function of desire and the formation of the screen of fantasy, the primary position this ‘screen-form' inhabits in the constitution of the Subject. Lacan’s work forms a critical juncture through which we must proceed if we are to properly read and understand the chosen texts: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber; The Tain by China Miéville; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. In each text, I analyse the particular materialisations of the screen and interrogate the constitution of the subject and the locus of desire. By analysing the vicissitudes of subjectivity in these texts, I make a claim for the study of the screen as constituting a central question in the field of contemporary literature.

This thesis analyses 21st century filmic, televisual and comic “Snow White” adaptations. The research is interdisciplinary, bringing together scholarship on gender, childhood, ageing, adaptation, media and fairy tales. The first half of the thesis contextualises the broader historical and sociocultural conversation “Snow White” tellings are immersed in by nature of their shared culture and history. It also identifies the tale’s core and traces the tale’s formation as a tale type from the seventeenth to the twenty–first century. The second half of this thesis moves to an analysis of two films (Mirror Mirror, 2012; Snow White and the Huntsman, 2012), a television series (Once Upon a Time, 2011–present) and a comic book series (Fables, 2002–2015). It considers the kinds of stories about female growth and ageing different media adaptations of “Snow White” enable, and contemplates how issues of time and temporality and growth and ageing play out in these four versions. In analysing the relationship between form and content, this thesis illustrates how a study of different media adaptations of “Snow White” can enrich fairy–tale scholarship and the fairy–tale canon. It also details the imaginative space different media adaptations of “Snow White” provide when engaging with dominant discourses around female growth and ageing in the West. Using “Snow White” as a case study, this thesis centrally facilitates a dialogue between ageing, childhood, fairy–tale and adaptation studies.