Mount Carmel in the Commune: Promoting the Holy Land in Central Italy in the 13th and 14th Centuries

The Carmelite friars were the last of the major mendicant orders to be established in Italy. Originally an eremitical order, they arrived from the Holy Land in the 1240s, decades after other mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, had constructed churches and cultivated patrons in the burgeoning urban centers of central Italy. In a religious market already saturated with friars, the Carmelites distinguished themselves by promoting their Holy Land provenance, eremitical values, and by developing an institutional history claiming to be descendants of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. By the end of the 13th century the order had constructed thriving churches and convents and leveraged itself into a prominent position in the religious community. My dissertation analyzes these early Carmelite churches and convents, as well as the friars’ interactions with patrons, civic governments, and the urban space they occupied. Through three primary case studies – the churches and convents of Pisa, Siena and Florence – I examine the Carmelites’ approach to art, architecture, and urban space as the order transformed its mission from one of solitary prayer to one of active ministry.

My central questions are these: To what degree did the Carmelites’ Holy Land provenance inform the art and architecture they created for their central Italian churches? And to what degree was their visual culture instead a reflection of the mendicant norms of the time?

I have sought to analyze the Carmelites at the institutional level, to determine how the order viewed itself and how it wanted its legacy to develop. I then seek to determine how and if the institutional model was utilized in the artistic and architectural production of the individual convents. The understanding of Carmelite art as a promotional tool for the identity of the order is not a new one, however my work is the first to consider deeply the order’s architectural aspirations. I also consider the order’s relationships with its de facto founding saint, the prophet Elijah, and its patron, the Virgin Mary, in a more comprehensive manner that situates the resultant visual culture into the contemporary theological and historical contexts.

Adapting Arthur: The transformations and adaptations of Wirnt von Graffenberg's Wigalois

The stories of King Arthur and his noble knights have fascinated audiences for many centuries and continue to being retold and fashioned to attract modern audiences. Amongst these stories is the tale of Wigalois, the son of the reputable Gawain. This dissertation traces the story of Wigalois across different languages, cultures, and media in order to show how this is a shared German-Yiddish narrative. Furthermore, this dissertations challenges traditional understanding of adaptation within a diachronic and teleological framework by uncovering dialogical and dynamic processes inherent in this narrative tradition. Using the theoretical framework of a combined Adaptation Studies and Medieval Literature Studies’ notions of unstable texts my argumentation focuses on eight specific examples: Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois (1st half 13th ct.), Italian murals from the fourteenth century, Wigoleis von dem Rade (1483/93), Viduvilt (Yiddish, 16th ct.), Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s Belehrung der Jüdisch-Teutschen Red- und Schreibart (Yiddish and German, 1715), Gabein (Yiddish, 1789), the illustrations by Ludwig Richter (before 1851), and Die phantastischen Abenteuer der Glücksritters Wigalois (Comic, German, 2011).

Flow stabilization with active hydrodynamic cloaks

We demonstrate that fluid flow cloaking solutions, based on active hydrodynamic metamaterials, exist for two-dimensional flows past a cylinder in a wide range of Reynolds numbers (Re's), up to approximately 200. Within the framework of the classical Brinkman equation for homogenized porous flow, we demonstrate using two different methods that such cloaked flows can be dynamically stable for Re's in the range of 5-119. The first highly efficient method is based on a linearization of the Brinkman-Navier-Stokes equation and finding the eigenfrequencies of the least stable eigenperturbations; the second method is a direct numerical integration in the time domain. We show that, by suppressing the von Kármán vortex street in the weakly turbulent wake, porous flow cloaks can raise the critical Reynolds number up to about 120 or five times greater than for a bare uncloaked cylinder. © 2012 American Physical Society.

The Enlightening Supernatural: Ghost Stories in the Late Eighteenth-Century Germany

This dissertation explores the place of ghosts in late eighteenth-century German texts, where they appear with surprising frequency despite widespread disbelief in their ontological reality. These ghosts could simply be lingering remnants of superstition in an age where they no longer belong, but my project argues that they play a central role in the Enlightenment and its ideal of progress. The key texts analyzed in this context include three versions of the story of the Weiße Frau, as well as works by Immanuel Kant, Karl Philipp Moritz, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In various ways, these texts demonstrate how the presentation of a ghost creates new possibilities in philosophy and aesthetics, as well as opportunities for critique. For some, the ghostly encounter produces an “Enlightening” suspense, disrupting the normal conditions of one’s understanding and creating a demand for resolution that propels one towards the future. Some recognized a dangerous manipulative potential in such suspense, and they used ghost stories to critique Enlightenment thought or imagine alternative aesthetic models. In all of these works, the ghost does not function simply as a relic of the past that needs to be left behind; it features prominently as a means of considering the present and imagining the future.

The relationship between the Enlightenment and superstitious beliefs has either been oversimplified as a basic opposition, or complicated by the recognition that the commitment to reason works as a new form of superstition. Prior scholarship has recognized the German ghost story as a primarily nineteenth-century phenomenon. This dissertation uncovers the roots of the German ghost story in unlikely texts from the eighteenth century and suggests that the relationship between ghostly apparitions and the Enlightenment was more complementary than oppositional. Ghosts do not only represent the persistence of the past, they also disrupt the normal conditions of the present in a way that enables progress towards new possibilities in aesthetics and thought.

The Diary of Mary McKeon, an Irish American Domestic Servant in Nineteenth Century America

What did young, single, unaccompanied Irish women experience when immigrating to the United States in the late nineteenth century? In this final project, I will explore primary and secondary sources that address their experiences, focusing on a diary written in 1883 by a young Irish domestic servant working in New Haven, Connecticut. Mary McKeon, a sixteen-year-old girl from County Leitrim, Ireland, recorded her experiences as a domestic servant for two different families, as well as her own personal thoughts. Mary wrote down her personal experiences, providing a glimpse of what her life was like both inside and outside of her employer’s home. Though much of my research will show that many young women like Mary would be subjected to prejudice and discrimination due to their lack of understanding middle-class American values, which would give rise to the “Bridget” stereotype of a brutish, ill-mannered and incompetent domestic servant, not all Irish women experienced that discrimination and prejudice. Mary is one example of a domestic servant that was treated kindly by her employers and her story documents a more positive and supportive environment for this newly arrived young, single immigrant. Her diary also reveals her to be a young woman who worked to improve her language skills and her situation. And, through her diary, we get a glimpse of her strategies for ensuring an active social life, including access to courtship and marriage. By analyzing Mary’s diary and sharing my results in this final project, I hope to provide a more comprehensive view into the lives of these young women.