This project investigates the tension between sensory immersion and intellectual articulation within the Roman domestic interior. Shifting from a generalized phenomenological exploration of "atmosphere" toward a specific "ekphrastic recreation," this research centers on Lucian of Samosata’s De Domo (On the Hall). While Lucian employs ekphrasis to translate visual splendor into oratorical authority, this project executes a "reverse ekphrasis," translating his literary descriptions back into a physical, visual environment. By using the archaeological record of the Bay of Naples area from the 1st century CE as a stylistic and spatial benchmark, the work explores how the pepaideumenos (the educated viewer) navigated the "theatre of authority" through the "educated gaze." The core of the project consists of 8–10 large-format faux stained-glass panels reconstructing Lucian’s described mythological cycle. This medium serves as a material metaphor for pandere ("unfolding"); the transparent, layered acrylic requires the viewer to physically and mentally parse the composition, mirroring the intellectual effort required to decode Roman iconographic programs. It further incorporates the "social gaze" to examine how spatial logic reinforced hierarchies of gender and status. Ultimately, this reconstruction seeks to recover not just the elite "official" narrative, but the marginalized bodies and non-literate perspectives present within the social reality of the Roman house.

In an increasingly global society, code-mixing has become more ubiquitous in daily interactions, even among monolingual individuals. Yet, bilingual speakers continue to phonologically adapt non-English lexical items. This work aimed to identify the social forces influencing code-mixing practices. Specifically, we tested previous findings about code-switching as a means of establishing group membership in English-dominant L1 and heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Korean. Utilizing a structured double interview format, our study focused on code-mixing frequency and participant ratings of experimenter approachability. This methodology revealed language-specific code-mixing patterns. Whereas Korean speakers tended to code-mix regardless of experimenter affiliation, Mandarin Chinese speakers appeared to rely heavily on the dominant language of the environment until they felt a sense of comfortability with the experimenter. These micro-level social factors seem to correlate with macro-level sociopolitical perceptions of the participants’ respective ethnic homelands. Our results simultaneously corroborate and revise an existing theory about one of code-switching’s functions with larger implications about belonging in today’s society.

This paper examines the relationship between Dante the Poet and Dante the Pilgrim to understand the role of the author, as depicted in La Commedia. I examine how Dante constructs authority through the interplay between the voyager’s experience and his narrative voice. Through close reading of key episodes in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, my analysis demonstrates the gradual unity of the Pilgrim and the Poet. Early in the poem, the Poet relies on direct address to establish credibility, while the Pilgrim struggles with fear and uncertainty in navigating obstacles within the story. As the journey progresses, the two figures merge, reflecting the Pilgrim’s skill to manage adversity and the Poet’s mastery in storytelling. Different episodes with Geryon, Virgil, Beatrice, Muhammed and Jason demonstrate this transition from fear to confidence. The reader empathizes with the Pilgrim’s moral growth and the Poet’s increasing confidence and authority. I argue that Dante guides the reader to analyze and navigate challenging real life situations by metaphorically addressing them within his epic poem.

Admission to health professions programs is highly competitive, with discourse often centered on one’s application. This raises an important linguistic question: how does language vary across pre-health communities with potentially different priorities? This study examines how pre-health individuals prioritize concerns through the language they use in online peer-to-peer contexts. Reddit, an online platform, contains communities of self-identified pre-health students (pre-medical, pre-physician assistant, pre-dental, pre-pharmacy, and pre-nursing). A corpus of approximately 2.7 million words was collected, analyzed using lexical frequency analysis and chi-square tests. This study is organized around three main dimensions of variation: stress, financial, and career language. While an omnibus chi-square test revealed significant differences across all three dimensions (p < 0.001), pairwise comparisons reveal important nuance. Stress language shows smaller and less systematic variation than financial or career language, no single community consistently diverging from all others. However, the pre-dental community uses financial language at a higher rate than all other groups. The pre-pharmacy community uses career language at a higher rate than any other group, differences that are statistically significant across all pairwise comparisons. This suggests while stress is a broadly shared concern, financial and career priorities are distributed unevenly, reflecting the distinct professional and economic landscapes of each field.

This paper examines the semantic evolution of tǔ (土, "soil/earth") across three indexical orders: from agrarian signifier, to urban slur, to reclaimed subcultural aesthetic. Grounding the analysis in Silverstein's indexical framework and Sontag's Camp aesthetics, it argues that tǔ's morphosyntactic fluidity within Chinese as a non-inflectional language enables a "functional hijacking" of the sign, allowing speakers to detach the signifier from its pejorative history and reconstruct a běntǔ (本土) identity that revalues local rootedness as cultural sovereignty. The study employs a mixed-methods approach: a diachronic corpus analysis (1970–2024) using jieba and calibrated SnowNLP sentiment scoring, and a scenario-based survey of Gen Z native speakers. Corpus data reveal a V-shaped sentiment trajectory, bottoming out in the 2000s before rebounding in the 2020s alongside a surge in "Cultural Identity" usage. Survey findings show that contemporary youth deploy tǔ not as a marker of rural poverty, but as a judgment of aesthetic inauthenticity, while simultaneously reclaiming its "rawness" as a form of anti-elitist pride.