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The Aster Trilogy: The Staff of Vanadu

Description
My thesis is a creative project. It is a full-length fantasy novel, the first in a trilogy, with the first draft being over 80,000 words. The novel is about a girl named Aster in a world called Aevenora. She is nineteen. Her father just died, giving her a rock-like object…

My thesis is a creative project. It is a full-length fantasy novel, the first in a trilogy, with the first draft being over 80,000 words. The novel is about a girl named Aster in a world called Aevenora. She is nineteen. Her father just died, giving her a rock-like object with his last breath and telling her to bring it to her great-grandmother, who lives on the other side of Aevenora. Aster and her friends, who join her on her way to her great-grandmother's, are fighting against the Underground throughout the novel. The Underground is a group of people dedicated to regaining wealth, technology, unity, and power that Aevenora had a millennium ago, in the Golden Age. But they have a sinister side to them: they force all magic users (including Aster) to join their cause or die. A theme throughout the novel is Aster's struggle with death. From her mother's death at a young age, to her father's death, to using self-defense and killing humans herself, Aster wonders what the point of death is and why people she loves have to die. This struggle is one philosophers have long grappled with, and one I hope to provide a philosophical answer to by the end of the trilogy. Because novel-writing is a long and involved process, I am submitting only the first draft as my thesis. It is not yet publishable, but I will spend a year or two revising it, then send it to agents and hopefully publish it. I request the embargo option, so that the first draft of the novel will not be released until I have completed the final draft and sent it to agents.
ContributorsSchaeffer, Ariana Joy (Author) / Amparano, Julie (Thesis director) / Friedrich, Patricia (Committee member) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
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Envisioning Female-Strong: Reclaiming the Feminine Heroine of Young Adult Literature

Description
As a writer and reader of young adult (YA) literature, I find it is impossible to ignore the rise of traditional masculinity within new, adolescent heroines. In the 21st century, readers have seen the rise of supposedly strong female characters—heroines who carry assault rifles and avoid their emotions. By relinquishing…

As a writer and reader of young adult (YA) literature, I find it is impossible to ignore the rise of traditional masculinity within new, adolescent heroines. In the 21st century, readers have seen the rise of supposedly strong female characters—heroines who carry assault rifles and avoid their emotions. By relinquishing their emotions and their flaws, these heroines have sacrificed the qualities about themselves that initially made them appear so interesting. My desire to see more realistic heroines like myself developed into a creative fiction project that follows and acknowledges the voices of feminine heroines. I call these protagonists “female strong.” My project—a collection of linked short stories—is peopled with the types of heroines that are severely lacking in YA novels and in the film industry. In my own short stories, I have embraced the narratives about young women who are both strong and emotional. I wanted to create memorable female characters that the reader could root for simply because of their feminine strength, even if their flaws were naivety, or lack of confidence, or even if they failed to achieve their resolution in the end. Female-strong characters are vital because they present a view of women who aren’t purely fantasy; they are placed in the real and are feminine, too. In other words, they don’t have to be a gorgeous, knockout model who can kick butt; instead, they can derive strength from their intellect, or their intuition, or perhaps even from their emotion.
ContributorsGoldsmith, Ilyssa Sallie (Author) / Gruber, Diane (Thesis director) / Amparano, Julie (Committee member) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Veil Us in Believability: An Exploration of Placemaking and Collaboration in the Development of Fantasy New Works

Description
This creative project is a reference document explaining the fictional fantasy world of the in-progress novel Veil Us in Gold by Shepard Adkins. Using the framework of the anthropological concept of placemaking, I describe three countries featured in the manuscript, including information on history, government, daily lives, and more. These…

This creative project is a reference document explaining the fictional fantasy world of the in-progress novel Veil Us in Gold by Shepard Adkins. Using the framework of the anthropological concept of placemaking, I describe three countries featured in the manuscript, including information on history, government, daily lives, and more. These descriptions were influenced by collaboration with Adkins and historical research on Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, and Enlightenment Russia. After completing the reference document, I interviewed Adkins to see how our collaboration in worldbuilding has shaped the revision process of their novel.
ContributorsMar, Kimberley (Author) / Jakubczak, Laura (Thesis director) / Fette, Donald (Committee member) / Adkins, Shepard (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2022-05

Utilizing Research and Testimony To Develop an IT Leadership Model

Description

This project aimed to understand what best practices for leadership in the Information Technology sector and if it could be consolidated for a comprehensive learning plan. This learning plan was housed on a traditional LMS (Canvas) and utilized a combination of IT Management research, interviews conducted with five industry members…

This project aimed to understand what best practices for leadership in the Information Technology sector and if it could be consolidated for a comprehensive learning plan. This learning plan was housed on a traditional LMS (Canvas) and utilized a combination of IT Management research, interviews conducted with five industry members (all boasting five or more years of work experience), and an analysis of six top institution IT Leadership programs, to create a template. For the provided questionnaires, participants were asked to consider their time in the industry and discuss work culture dynamics, distribution of power, and what pain points were felt in their daily operations. All participants also described their direct roles and seniority, ranging from self-described “middle” to ”high” level placements. Based on these interviews, much of what seems to halt productivity and employee satisfaction regularly comes from a lack of concise and regular communication and a need for more understanding regarding team members' drive or capabilities. Regarding the program evaluation, six IT Leadership programs were chosen, where five were constructed by higher education institutions and one from a certificate governing body. The top skills identified across all programs were communication and decision-making. Communication is an all-encompassing idea for collaboration and strong speaking skills, with programs 1,4,5, and 6 noting their importance. Decision-making in this context is about both work delegation and firm problem-solving. For work delegation, it was pointed out in the interviews that techs and engineers see strong leadership utilizing professional judgment as vital to a business’s performance, with all programs but program 4 similarly emphasizing the same. Given this evaluation, the leadership styles used can be identified as Delegative, Strengths-Based, and Transformative. The previously noted interviews and research resulted in a 4-week course demo, which utilized the interviews in conjunction with leadership concepts.
ContributorsOrtiz Leon, David (Author) / O'Flaherty, Katherine (Thesis director) / Rouse, Nick (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor)
Created2023-12

Inspecting the Glass Ceiling: Analyzing Perspectives of Gender and Parenthood in Leadership

Description
The gender gap in leadership has been shrinking over time, with women occupying 32% of managerial positions in 1983, and 40.5% of managerial positions in 2022 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2004, 2023). Within the United States, the cultural and social expectations for what it means to be a good…

The gender gap in leadership has been shrinking over time, with women occupying 32% of managerial positions in 1983, and 40.5% of managerial positions in 2022 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2004, 2023). Within the United States, the cultural and social expectations for what it means to be a good leader include having agentic personality traits (Badura et al., 2018), being an active participant in group discussion (Bass, 1990), and expressing primarily achievement and antagonistic emotions (Fischbach et al., 2015). But, does a working man or woman’s desire to have children impact the way others perceive their ability to assume a position of leadership? Approximately one hundred and fifty college students and civil engineers were equally split into five groups. Four of the five groups were instructed to rate a different imaginary coworker, distinguished based on their gender and desire to have kids in the future. The fifth group was instructed to rate their ideal manager. All five groups used a descriptive index with 67 terms in order to complete their respective ratings. The results supported the hypothesis that men who want to have children have character traits that are most similar to those traits used to describe an ideal manager. However, the results did not support the hypothesis that women who want to have children would be least similar to the ideal manager group, as men who do not want to have children were rated least similar.
ContributorsDyer-McGowan, Karen (Author) / Koop, Gregory (Thesis director) / Holloway, Steven (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor)
Created2024-05