Tag Archives: History

“The University of Diplomacy and the School of Vice: Travel and Instability in Reformation Zurich 1515- 1526”

Brandon Brener, & Dr. Amy Caldwell

“I was hired as a research assistant by Dr. Caldwell in Fall of 2023 and Spring 2024 to assist with a project on travel and diplomacy in Zurich during the Protestant Reformation. This research is ongoing, and highlights a number of different methods of research.

In 1526, when other Swiss cities were threatening to go to war with Zurich over their adoption of the Protestant religion, Zurich’s city council executed or exiled its diplomats. While other historians have chalked this up to religious differences due to the Reformation at large, nonreligious theories have not been examined as thoroughly. By examining several sources, this research position has highlighted findings into the diplomatic networks of city councilors based on archival and published primary sources. This project highlights the historiography on Reformation Zurich.

I transcribed council lists from a large book of published primary sources looking for members that appear consistently, then disappear on regular diplomatic travels, before disappearing altogether as the Zurich city councils shuffled itself following the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Zurich, a protestant aligned city saw itself cut off from the other Catholic members, and sought to reorganize its member base, at a time when these experienced members might have been needed most.

By examining archival as well as published and standardized primary foreign language documents, I have gotten a glimpse at the various ways in which published historians conduct and catalog their research. Additionally, as I have mentioned before, the utilization of new forms of research, through the microfilm reader, has allowed me to utilize this equipment in the future.

This has been something of a prosopography, a biography of these people when there is not very much information out about them. Many of these diplomats and council members, though powerful in their own day, left behind little other than their names in these council lists. The positive aspect of the lack of material on this subject is that the field is essentially wide open with plenty of room to come up with new conclusions, provided the right sources are tracked down.”

Poster Presentation

Session 3

2:45pm – 4:00pm
Grand Salon

History

At Least You’ll Sanctify Me When I’m Dead: Monstrous Language and Monstrous Women

Tarae McQueen, & Dr. Rainer Buschmann

There is a precedent within the horror genre of film that allows the ‘monsterification’ of women, in particular with the language used to describe them. Often there are tropes or concepts that revolve around or are entirely dependent on violence against the female characters in the narrative, whether this is physical or – the focus of this research – linguistic. Words like ‘hysterical’, ‘whore’, ‘witch’, and ‘siren’ have become ingrained in popular culture’s view of women, and have defined the categories in which they exist within the genre at large. Categories that have been defined by Australian academic Barbara Creed.
In Creed’s text The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, she breaks down women in horror into 11 categories or stereotypes from witch and vampire to the vagina dentata and the uncanny creatrix. Creed’s research is based on the work of Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to examine why there is such a fascination and revolution where women’s bodies are concerned. All sections of Creed’s text examine the dehumanization and abjection of women in horror, and the fear that accompanies it for men in particular. She examines the intersections of womanhood to look at the ways in which women are also victimized by the same narratives in which they are the monsters. Which takes us back to linguistic violence.
The goal of this research is to examine how linguistic violence became a part of the monstrous feminine, which has influenced the aesthetic of the ‘dark feminine’ and played a large part in popularizing the idea of ‘feminine rage’. I have chosen a selection of 12 films, and will be using the films themselves, reviews, ratings, and academic research from a broad spectrum of disciplines to examine the transition. This intersectionality is key to the field of film and cinema studies, and that is exemplified in my research. I pull from psychology, sociology, medicine, religion, anthropology, and history for my analysis, showing that film as a vehicle of study is, in addition to being easily and widely accessible for a vast majority of students, distinctly interdisciplinary in an incredibly unique way.

Oral Presentation

10:45am – 12:15pm
Del Norte 1545

History