We Did It Our Way: Motivations, Satisfactions, and Accomplishments of Senior Academic Women

In a survey of senior academic women whose careers began around 1970, over half of the 98 respondents cited the desire to serve or make a difference and sought personal fulfillment in their work. Most saw men’s motivations as dissimilar, typically as more self-interested and competitive. Despite generally high satisfaction, dissatisfaction with time pressure/workload and with support was common. Satisfactions and accomplishments overlapped. Frequently mentioned were teaching, scholarship, and their discipline, especially by faculty, and programmatic accomplishments, especially by administrators. Many respondents mentioned helping women; many mentioned a collaborative, nurturing style as integral to their success and as different from their typical male colleagues. Context is provided by the metaphor of immigration (Martin, 1997, 2000), the concept of ambivalent sexism (Krefting, 2003; Glick & Fiske, 1999), and recent work on women and leadership by Eagly and colleagues (e.g., Eagly, 2005; Eagly & Carli, 2007).

The Divine Eye in Ancient Egypt and in the Midrash Interpretation of Formative Judaism.

This paper studies the “eye” as a religious phenomenon from the multiple traditions of ancient Egypt compared with rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity using a semiotic approach based upon the theories of Umberto Eco. This method was chosen because the eye is a graphic as well as a linguistic sign which both express religious concepts. Generally, the eye represented an all-seeing and omnipresent divinity. In other words, the god was reduced to an eye, whereby the form of the symbol suggests a meaning to the viewer or religious practitioner. In this manner the eye represented the whole body of a deity in Egyptian and the power of a discerning God in rabbinic texts. By focusing upon the semantic aspect of the eye metaphor in both Egyptian and rabbinic texts two religious traditions of the visually perceivable are analyzed from a semiotic perspective.

Fantasy Making the Invisible Visible: Liminality in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and American Gods

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the ways in which the fantasy genre is ideally positioned for discussing social issues, such as invisibility and liminality. Elements associated with invisibility, such as poverty, homelessness, and alienation, were explored within two novels by Neil Gaiman: Neverwhere and American Gods. Gaiman's application of these elements within the fantasy genre were juxtaposed with samples from other genres, including Plato's 'Parable of the Cave' and Jennifer Toth's The Mole People. Another aim was to contrast Gaiman's use of the 'beast in the sewer' metaphor with previous renditions of the myth, demonstrating how fantasy, paradoxically, offers a unique and privileged view of reality.

Representations of the Human/ Nonhuman Primate Divide: the Influence of Science, Fiction, and Science-Fiction on the Concept of 'Being Human'

For as far back as human history can be traced, mankind has questioned what it means to be human. One of the most common approaches throughout Western culture's intellectual tradition in attempts to answering this question has been to compare humans with or against other animals. I argue that it was not until Charles Darwin's publication of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) that Western culture was forced to seriously consider human identity in relation to the human/ nonhuman primate line. Since no thinker prior to Charles Darwin had caused such an identity crisis in Western thought, this interdisciplinary analysis of the history of how the human/ nonhuman primate line has been understood focuses on the reciprocal relationship of popular culture and scientific representations from 1871 to the Human Genome Consortium in 2000. Focusing on the concept coined as the "Darwin-Müller debate," representations of the human/ nonhuman primate line are traced through themes of language, intelligence, and claims of variation throughout the popular texts: Descent of Man, The Jungle Books (1894), Tarzan of the Apes (1914), and Planet of the Apes (1963). Additional themes such as the nature versus nurture debate and other comparative phenotypic attributes commonly used for comparison between man and apes are also analyzed. Such popular culture representations are compared with related or influential scientific research during the respective time period of each text to shed light on the reciprocal nature of Western intellectual tradition, popular notions of the human/ nonhuman primate line, and the development of the field of primatology. Ultimately this thesis shows that the Darwin-Müller debate is indeterminable, and such a lack of resolution makes man uncomfortable. Man's unsettled response and desire for self-knowledge further facilitates a continued search for answers to human identity. As the Human Genome Project has led to the rise of new debates, and primate research has become less anthropocentric over time, the mysteries of man's future have become more concerning than the questions of our past. The human/ nonhuman primate line is reduced to a 1% difference, and new debates have begun to overshadow the Darwin-Müller debate. In conclusion, I argue that human identity is best represented through the metaphor of evolution: both have an unknown beginning, both have an indeterminable future with no definite end, and like a species under the influence of evolution, what it means to be human is a constant, indeterminable process of change.