Many academic departments at Oberlin have honors programs which provide selected students an opportunity to pursue in-depth research under faculty supervision. Each department establishes its own requirements for the format and deposit of completed projects. In addition to undergraduate honors theses, this collection includes some graduate theses from the periods when Oberlin offered masters degrees, as far back as 1924. Some theses are only available by request.
Theses/Dissertations from 2022
Migratory Stories: Building Ethical Immigration Policy, Lucca D. Abele
“I am a Hindu; I am an Indian and I am a Man” A Rhetorical Analysis of Contemporary Hindu Nationalist Political Ideology, Julia Binder
The Imperial Gothic: Contact Tracing Narratives of Disease, Disorder, and Race in Global American Literature, Emma Brownstein
The Personal Must Always Be Political: A History of Survivors' Narratives in Anti-Sexual Violence Zines, Jeannine Colby Fortin
La mirada masculina en Nadie me vera llorar de Cristina Rivera Garza: Reflejos e imagenes fragmentadas del cuerpo y de la mente femenina, Riley T. Davis
Contractible 4-Manifolds, Alexandra Du
Japaneseness For Western Audiences in Video Games: How the West Came to Desire Japanese Cultural Marks in their Video Games, Benjamin Echikson
(In)valid Vaginas: Overcoming the Shame of Vaginismus and Rejecting the Idea of Sexual Failure, Emily Anne Fiorentino
"Kill the State in Yourself": Totalitarianism and the Illiberal Dissidence of Egor Letov, Katherine Frevert
Demons of Analogy: The Encounter Between Music and Language After Mallarme, Joshua Tasman Girardeau Reinier
The Practice and Purpose of Adaptation of Classical Texts, Cassandra J.S. Gutterman-Johns
Building a Morally Respectable Nation: Examining Japanese Foreign Policy through Ebara Soroku; 1913-1922, Shogo Ishikawa
Universal Preschool and Maternal Labor Force Participation: Evidence from Florida and Vermont, Hannah Keidan
Characterizing AGN Influence on the Calculated Metallicities of Adjacent Star-Forming Spaxels, Aidan Khelil
Artistic Agency, Feminine Labor, and the Female Body in Buddhist Hair Embroideries of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Chloe Y. Lai
Racial Domination Through the Grey Areas: The Categorization of Mixed-Race in the United States and Brazil, Arman Luczkow
From Moral Panic to Permanent War: Rhetoric and the Road to Invading Iraq, Kai Philippe
Error Handling Approaches in Programming Languages, Joey Aldrin Rees-Hill
Moving the Chains on Men's Sports: An Analysis of Successful Female Coaches, Kira Widran
Jacobi's Four Squares Theorem, Arman Yagci
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Open Multiagent System, Tianxing Zhu
Theses/Dissertations from 2021
Love in the Time of Corona: Changes to Oberlin Hookup Culture During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Sophie M. Aaron
Autoridad subversiva: la construcción de poder y conocimiento intergeneracional y transatlántico en círculos femeninos durante la Inquisición española, Eliza Honor Braverman
Proper 3-colorings of cycles and hypercubes, Emily Cairncross
Community, Connection, and Conflict; The Liminal Spaces of the Regents Canal and the Industrial Transition of London (1812-1900), Maya Pearl Colman
Where Do You Go When You Go Home? Narrative Studies of Gender Euphoria, Silas Crewe-Kluge
In the Shadow of the Carceral State: The Evolution of Feminist and Institutional Activism Against Sexual Violence, Bethany MunYeen Gen
Plasticity and the Art of Recovery: Wangechi Mutu’s Praxis of Afrofeminist Reassemblage, Madi Goetzke
Collaborative Game Mosaics, Xiaoyun Gong
Assessing Barriers and Benefits to a Food Waste Composting Pilot Program in Oberlin, Ohio, Julia Halm
Petrology of an oxidized blueschist cobble from the San Onofre Breccia, California, USA, Alaina A. Helm
The Mathematics of Mutual Aid: Robust Welfare Guarantees for Decentralized Financial Organizations, Christian Ikeokwu
Quality of SQL Code Security on StackOverflow and Methods of Prevention, Robert Klock
The Compromises Progressive Prosecutors Must Make: Three Case Studies, Alexander John Kott
Retributive Justice: A Review of the Ethical Considerations Surrounding Capital Punishment and Solitary Confinement as used in United States Correctional Facilities, Adelaide Marie Laros
From Transnormativity to Self-Authenticity: Shifting Away From a Dysphoria-Centered Approach to Transgender Identity, Matty LaValley
Energy and Greenhouse Gas Savings for LEED-Certified U.S. Office Buildings Using Weighted Regression, Tian Liang
The History of Afro-Asian Solidarity and the New Era of Political Activism, Jasmine N. Mitchell
The Relationship between School Shootings and Gun Acquisition Rates, Sun-il (Sun) Moon
The Worst First Citizen, Sarah Nicole Passannante
Increasing the Value of Information During Planning in Uncertain Environments, Gaurab Pokharel
Belief in the Unbelievable: Yakov Druskin and Chinari Metaphysics, Patrick D. Powers
Representation, Narrative, and “Truth”: Literary and Historical Epistemology in 19th-Century France, Samuel A. Schuman
Dancing on the Dead: Death, Entertainment, and Respectability in Victorian London, Noa H. Segal
Avoidance Behavior Due to More Stringent Environmental Standards: Evidence From The LEED Certifcation, Spencer Tu
Interpersonal Forgiveness: An Approach to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Gianna S. Volonte
A Critical Analysis of Stereotypes, Patrick Wai
Impact of Race, Tracking and Advanced Course Experiences on Self-Esteem, Identity and Access to Higher Education Among Students of Color, Katharine A. Ware
Blurring the Boundary between Play and Ritual: Sugoroku Boards as Portable Cosmos in Japanese Religion, Jingyi Yuan
Grotesque, Bodily, and Hydrous: The Liminal Landscapes of the Underworld In Homer, Virgil, and Dante, Sophia Zandi
Theses/Dissertations from 2020
Courcelle's Theorem: Overview and Applications, Samuel Frederic Barr
Memoirs of Wehrmacht Soldiers —— From Survival to Victimhood, Jiahao Cao
The Stock Connect Programs: A Study of their Impact on Chinese Stock Returns and Global Stock Markets Integration, Jiadi Cheng
Noise Traders in Large-cap and Small-cap Portfolios: Impact of Sentiments on the Mispricing, Eunjun Choo
Curving Towards Bézout: An Examination of Plane Curves and Their Intersection, Camron Alexander Robey Cohen
The Rise and Fall of Qigong, William J. Cramer
The ACA's Dependent Coverage Mandate: An Investigation of its Effects on Mortality with Regard to Race, Jack W. Derwin
Neoliberalism, Rationality, and the Politics of Congestion Pricing in New York City, Max Finkelpearl
Machine Learning? In MY Election? It's More Likely Than You Think: Voting Rules via Neural Networks, Daniel Firebanks-Quevedo
Friends, Barbarians, Future Countrymen: Clientela and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, J.T. Godfrey
The Politicization of Water: Transboundary Water-Conflict in the Indian Subcontinent, Ananya Gupta
The Experience of Guatemalan Women who Seek Asylum in United States Courts: A Legacy of Paternalism and Gendered Violence, Nina E. Harris
Legal Consciousness and the Legal Culture of NAGPRA, Eleanor Haskin
The Oberlin Near East Study Collection in Context, Julian Hirsch
“Don't frack with us!” An Analysis of Two Anti-Pipeline Movements, Rachael Lucille Hood
Asking Questions is Easy, Asking Great Questions is Hard: Constructing Effective Stack Overflow Questions, Jane W. Hsieh
Cosmopolitan Continuities: The Re-Framing of Historic Architecture and Urban Space in Contemporary Morocco (1990-Present), Simon Fader Idelson
To Love is Human: Leonid Zorin's A Warsaw Melody Considering Concepts Love and Fate in Russian Culture Reflected in its Theatre Tradition, Christine Louise Impara
Socialist Realignment: Correctional Education in East Germany’s Youth Workhouses, 1949-1969, Milena Rae Kagel
Race, Mines and Picket Lines: The 1925-1928 Western Pennsylvania Bituminous Coal Strike, Eli Martin Kirshner
Determinants of Alumni Giving to a Private U.S. College: Evidence from Oberlin College, Kenneth Kitahata
Teaching the Narod to Listen: Nadezhda Briusova and Mass Music Education in Revolutionary Russia, Annika K. Krafcik
Assessing the Feasibility of Machine Learning to Predict Chronic Pain in Adolescence, Max A. Kramer
How Well Can We Measure Well-Being?, Lily X. Lu-Lerner
Naming Power?: Urban Development and Contestation in the Callowhill Neighborhood of Philadelphia, Rachel E. Marcus
Meaning in Apocalypse, Alexander Johan Metz
Moving Honestly - pangalay performance, national identity, and practice-as-research, Kara Elena Nepomuceno
Swimming Across the Divide: Environmental Peacebuilding in the Jordan River Valley, Antonia Offen
Justice on Trial: German Unification and the 1992 Leipzig Trial, Emily Dorothea Purvis
"Everybody Hates Us": Iraqi Women Resisting Imperialism, Repression, and Extremism (1990-Present), Thomas P. Rice
1984 and Film: Trauma and the Evolution of the Punjabi Sikh Identity, Hayley Dawn Segall
Pretraining Deep Learning Models for Natural Language Understanding, Han Shao
MAD: Conservative Mothers and the Political Transformation of the 1970s in Detroit, Michigan, William A. Taylor
"Established and Accepted": The Purim of Prague and Jewish Invention of Tradition in the Early Modern World, Yitzchak Rami Teeter
Dreaming of Abolitionist Futures, Reconceptualizing Child Welfare: Keeping Kids Safe in the Age of Abolition, Emma Peyton Williams
The Study of Parental Educational Investment in Left-behind Children in China, Zilin (Kelley) Zhong
Theses/Dissertations from 2019
General Game Playing as a Bandit-Arms Problem: A Multiagent Monte-Carlo Solution Exploiting Nash Equilibria, Brandon Mathewe Banda
The Stigmatization of Vaginal Masturbation and Its Effect on Sexual Pleasure, Hannah I. Berk
The Realness or, Liquid Smoke or, This is What the F••k Boutta Happen, Octavia M. Burgel
Agents of Soviet Decline: Mass Media Representations of Prostitution During Perestroika, Emma C. Downing
The Sound & the Surplus: Speculation as a Radical Mode, Emma B.B. Doyle
Delegate Voting at the 1787 Constitutional Convention: The Entanglement of Economic Interests and the Great Compromise, Emily Highkin
Just Punishment?: The Epistemic and Affective Investments in Carceral Feminism, Tess Joseph
Can Machine Learning on Economic Data Better Forecast the Unemployment Rate?, Aaron S. Kreiner
