There is a need from within religious communities for a redesign in their houses of worship to re-engage a younger audience with spirituality. There is a decreasing amount of young people continuing with their spirituality practices post leaving their home. Through this work, I will test the affection of sigils with nature motifs as an entry point among urban young adults in the age range 18-25 into spiritual thinking and the possible barriers that may make it difficult to approach and explore ideas as well as houses of spirituality in this age group. Through the thematic analysis of photodocuments and testimonies from participants of the experience, conclusions will be drawn about how the modern, young urban audience responds to nature rooted spirituality. There have been many cultures across human history that have examples of spiritual paintings, ceremonial garments, architecture, talismans, murals, carvings and tattoos, who based their religious iconography on sigilis that utilize patterning inspired by their local flora and fauna. In response to these examples, I have designed a rich sigil system inspired by historical and modern semiotics. Through an intermedia installation patterned with these sigils, I will invite participants to engage in a meditative-like prayer to gauge their reaction to approaching a nature based spirituality. I theorize that open designed environments that use abstraction and motifs found in nature will be more approachable to a young adult audience than traditional brick and mortar institutions using anthropomorphic icons as their symbol of divinity and magic. These design principles can be applied to modern worship houses to better reflect the needs of urban young adults and make their exploration of divinity more approachable amongst this community.

In the span of a single decade, two of the most powerful militaries in the world discovered the same hard truth: an army's ability to fight depends entirely on the systems that supply it. The Crimean War and the American Civil War, fought scarcely seven years apart, subjected the British and Union armies to structurally identical procurement crises. Both nations entered war with small, professional supply systems built for peacetime scale, and both watched those systems collapse under the weight of industrial mobilization. Soldiers froze, starved, and died for want of equipment that existed but never reached them. Yet the two nations responded in opposite ways. This project examines why. Drawing on government investigations from both nations, including the British McNeill-Tulloch Commission report and the American Van Wyck Committee findings, alongside the records of the Union Quartermaster General, it argues that the divergence was not accidental. Britain, whose supply apparatus answered to an aristocratic establishment insulated from democratic pressure, investigated its failures and then deferred, producing no lasting reform for nearly two decades. The United States, whose system answered to officials accountable to an outraged electorate, acted within the war itself, building centralized procurement reforms and passing the False Claims Act of 1863, a fraud statute still governing federal contracting today. The comparison reveals that catastrophe alone does not produce reform. Reform requires accountability that reaches the powerful, a lesson with enduring relevance to how democratic states govern war.

The subgenre of Latin American horror operates as both a traditional and evolving form of expression that exceeds the boundaries of entertainment, functioning as a critical language through which communities interpret collective fear in relation to lived realities. While scholars often treat the genre as a direct allegory for state-sponsored violence and the structural inequalities of the colonial era, such interpretations frequently overlook the genre’s transatlantic roots and its development alongside broader gothic aesthetic movements, including modernism and postcolonial critique. This qualitative study examines how horror serves as a living cultural practice across Latin America. By situating Latin American horror within these frameworks, this project explores how inherited structures of fear are reshaped across time and space. Methodologically, the study employs comparative analysis of film and literature across Mexico, Guatemala, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, alongside regional storytelling traditions intersecting with Indigenous belief systems and the Eurocentric knowledge structures imposed during colonization. Particular attention is given to the circulation of narratives and the intersections of Indigenous cosmologies, colonial epistemologies, and modernist aesthetics. Ultimately, the findings suggest that Latin American horror does not just document trauma; it actively builds a space for the public to confront and process the ongoing psychological effects of colonial history.

This project will explore the cultural importance of folk heroes from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in relation to the social conflicts that emerged from the Mexican-American War to the Mexican Revolution. Two historical figures driving my research are Juan Nepomuceno Cortina and Pancho Villa. I plan to bring forward a woman figure into the narrative, going beyond the male-dominated heroic tropes of the West. I plan to approach this research through a social and cultural lens, examining the regional and cultural resistance constructed along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the influence of resistance violence on identity. A primary research question is, how did folk heroes of the United States-Mexico borderlands become ingrained within the cultural identities and traditions of resistance among borderland communities throughout the later half of the nineteenth century? A primary source that will ground my investigations is Juan Nepomuceno Cortina: Proclamation to the Mexicans of Texas, September 1859, wherein Cortina challenges the authority of Anglo-Americans and pledges to protect the Mexican communities of Texas. This research expects to find that resistance emerged from “folk heroes,” such as Cortina and Villa, functioning as cultural symbols to preserve the collective memory within the blurred lines of the borderlands. This research has significant implications in collective resistance emerging from folk heroes, such as Cortina and Villa, functioning as cultural symbols to preserve the memory within the blurred lines of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.