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 2016
An Investigation of AMS in Oman Ophiolite Gabbros, Sarah D. Trutner
Storytelling, Community and Dialogue: The Making of And Yet We'll Speak at Grafton Reintegration Center, Lillian W. White
Theses/Dissertations from 2015
Selfish Routing on Dynamic Flows, Christine Marie Antonsen
The Tomb of Ny-ankh-nesut: A Contextualized Study of Looted Fragments, William L. Austin
Chaos and Learning in Discrete-Time Neural Networks, Jess M. Banks
Performance and Resilience: Performance, Storytelling, and Resilience Building in Post-Katrina New Orleans, Sophia Colette Becker
Taking Up Space: Community Formation Among Non-Urban LGBTQ Youth, Madison Bishop
The Electoral Influence of Teachers’ Unions on Democratic Education Policy Priorities, Molly Ziek Brand
Gendercomic, Anne H. Buckwalter
Healing and Belonging: Community Based Art and Community Formation in West Oakland, Pablo Miguel Cerdera
“The Whole Vexed Question”: Seamus Heaney, Old English and Language Troubles, Una A. Creedon-Carey
Living in an (Im)material World: Consuming Exhausted Narratives in New Grub Street, Emma C. Eisenberg
Into the Fray: Norman Jacobson, the Free Speech Movement and the Clash of Commitments, Kai Gardner
The Complicated Relationship Between Music and Foreign Language Learning: Nuanced Conditions Required for Cognitive Benefits Due to Music, Talia Greenberg
The Chicago Women's Liberation Union: White Socialist Feminism and Women's Health Organizing in the 1970s, Lara Griffin
La Guerra Civil Española en la memoria histórica: Una conversación continua con el pasado, Jordan C. Hensley
Rethinking the Ill Body in Phallocentric Western Culture: A Critical Engagement with Luce Irigaray, Sarah E. Kahn
Can Bình Speak?: Marginalization, Subversion, and Representation of the Subaltern in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, Joanne Eun Jung Lee
Pillars and Buttes: A Petrologic Comparison of Modern and Ancient Hydrocarbon Seep Rock, Erica C. Morelli
The Effects of Foreign Language Acquisition on Wages for US College Graduates, Christopher Nguyen
Partnerships and Mandates: Power Relations Between Donor and Recipient Organizations Promoting Gender Equality in Nicaragua, Alyssa Katherine Phelps
Misreading the River: Heraclitean Hope in Postmodern Texts, Nancy Lee Roane
Arrow: A Modern Reversible Programming Language, Eli Rose
A Trickster in Disguise: Reading a New Type of Satan in 2 Corinthians, Miranda Julia Rutherford
The Impact of the State Children's Health Insurance Program on Educational Outcomes in the United States: A Two-Fold Analysis, Olivia Simuoli
Reconstructing Seville: Translating Eduardo del Campo’s Capital Sur, Hannah Lynn Varadi
“La storia mia è breve”: reading Puccini’s La Bohème beyond the obvious, Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit
Effect of Water Levels and Beach Availability on Waterfront Homes, Benjamin Towson Whitener
Science and Medicine in Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Kazus Kukotskogo, William D. Wise
Tropical Linear Algebra: Notions of Rank Over the Tropical Semiring, William D. Wise
Theses/Dissertations from 2014
Minds, Bodies, and Political Selves: Embodying Pro-Choice Activism, Samantha Leah Aisen
An Arbitrary Death? Capital Punishment and the Supreme Court, Truman Braslaw
The Mechanical Aspirations of Written Things in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Maxwell Harrison Cohn
Anomie: Concept, Theory, Research Promise, Max Coleman
La influencia de Don Quijote en la música clásica europea 1605-1935, Julia Connor
Hegemonic Masculinity and Misconceptions of Gender and Mental Health in Violent Criminality, Mina Dailami
The Accessibility of a Classical Music Education to Youth in the United States, Josie Davis
How Unusual is Tropical Storm Irene? A Case Study of Storm Deposition in Littleville Lake, Huntington, MA, Catherine Dunn
CELEBRATING EXTINCTION? The Disconnect Between Reality and Media Representation of Bluefin Tuna in Japan, Gene Fukui
"The Nurceryes for Church and Common-wealth": A Reconstruction of Childhood, Children, and the Family in Seventeenth-Century Puritan New England, William C. Gautier
Full of Hot Air: Heat Flow at the Medicine Lake Volcano Hot Spot, Modoc County, California, Katrina D. Gelwick
The Rise and Fall of Social Problems: Alcohol and Tobacco in Oberlin, Jung Han Guel
Without Closets: A Queer and Feminist Re-Imagining of Narratives of Queer Experience, Julia Golda Harris
On the Genealogy of Obscenity: Naked Lunch and The Death of Obscene Literature, Luke Harrison
Polarization Analyzed Small Angle Neutron Scattering of Ferrite Nanoparticles, Kathryn Hasz
Hearing Beyond the Veil: Benjy Compson and the Acousmatic Experience, Adam Hirsch
Low-Temperature Deformation of Mixed Siliciclastic & Carbonate Fault Rocks of the Copper Creek, Hunter Valley, and McConnell Thrusts, Jack R. Hoehn
Eclogites and eclogites: Oxygen isotope evidence of a shared subduction origin for Franciscan eclogites and Moses Rock eclogite xenoliths, William F. Hoover
Traversing the Desolate Terrain: Creative Experimentation within Union Strategy, Johnnie Kallas
Planning Against Planning: Friedrich Hayek's Utopian Vision of The Good Society, Nicholas Kuipers
The one place we're trying to get to is just where we can't get: algebraic speciality and gravito-electromagnetism in Bianchi type IX, Benjamin Kurt Lemberger
Anxious Seas: Reading Affect in Dazai and Murdoch, Joseph B. Lubitz
Overtone Spectroscopy of Hydrogen in MOF-5, Jocienne N. Nelson
Aloha, Marriage Equality: Unsettling Gay Constructions of Paradise, Cuyler Otsuka
Ecotheology and the Parables of Jesus: Creative Re-readings of Parables In Light of the Environmental Crisis, Anita L. Peebles
Inverted Linear Halbach Array for Separation of Magnetic Nanoparticles, Chetan Poudel
Meaningful Play: Exploring the Possibilities of the Novel in Don DeLillo's White Noise, Steven Quam
Theses/Dissertations from 2013
A Swarm of Salesmen: Algorithmic Approaches to Multiagent Modeling, Alexandre Amlie-Wolf
Medicaid and Education: The Impact of Medicaid Coverage on Children's Educational Trajectory, Melissa Atlas
Manhattan Transference: Reader Itineraries in Modernist New York, Sophia Bamert
Relating Plant Spatial Pattern, Plant Biodiversity, and Ecosystem Function to Management Practices in Experimental Restored Wetlands, Erika C. Brandt
Sovereignty and Exceptionalism: The Case of Israel/Palestine, Aaron Braun
Unresolved Debates Over Memory and History: La Nación and the Evolving Portrayals of the Last Dictatorship in Argentina, Alexis Burdick-Will
Amateurism and Professionalism in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Vlad A. Bursuc
An Evaluation of Mergers in the U.S. Petroleum Industry, Matthew D. Capozzi
More Than Duffle Bag Medicine: An Ethnographic Analysis of a Student Movement for Global Health, Julie A. Christensen
Controlling Factors on Bedrock River Sinuosity in the Eastern Tibetan Plateau, Lydia Curliss
Translating Chris Ware's Lint into Russian, Matthew Davis
Two-Coloring Cycles In Complete Graphs, Claire Djang
Posibilidades de la abstracción: la obsesión y la traducción en los cuentos de Julio Cortázar, Caitlin Dougherty
Reconsidering the Puebloan Languages in a Southwestern Areal Context, Michael Sklar Everdell
Payment Schemes and Moral Hazard, James Foust
TARP: Indication of a Potential Target? Evaluating Market to Book Ratios and Their Relationship to TARP, Oscar Garcia
The Content of Thought Experiments and Philosophical Context, Kevin G. Gilfether
The Performance and Perception of Social Identities in Country-Rap Music, Rachel Grandstrand
The Effects of Federal Reserve Liquidity Facilities On Inter-Bank Borrowing Rates, Isaac Green
Dubbin' the Literary Canon: Writin' and Soundin' A Transnational Caribbean Experience, Warren Harding
Drug Markets and the State: A Perspective from Political Economy, Jake M. Kosinski
Private Corrections, Public Implications: The Local Economic Effects of Private Prisons, Charlotte Landes
Strict Photo ID, Voter Turnout, and Race, Thomas La Voy
Una cárcel de cultura: secuelas de la dictadura chilena en un centro de arte comunitario, Sofia LeBlanc
A Poetics of Complicity: Translating Luis García Montero, Alice McAdams
An Investigation into Crowd Out Phenomenon in Local Churches: Combining Experimental and Survey Methodology, Matthew Moench
Parallel Pillars: How International Relations Theory Can Explicate and Rebalance the Three Pillars of the Responsibility to Protect, Lauren Muscott
Intersection Number of Plane Curves, Margaret E. Nichols
Building the Post-industrial Community: New Urbanist Development in Pittsburgh, PA, Steven Alexander Niedbala
Renegotiating a Beheading: Literary Opposition to Varna Hierarchy in Shambuka's Story, Thomas Ahlers Nunan
The School and Society: Secondary School Social Studies Education from 1945-1970, Kevin John Owens
The Presence of the Past in Three Guatemalan Classrooms: The Role of Teachers in a Post-Conflict Society, Margaret Paulin
The Jormungand Climate Model, Christopher V. Rackauckas
Activating Community to Enable Residential Energy Efficiency, David Roswell
Doppler-Free Saturated Fluorescence Spectroscopy of Lithium Using a Stabilized Frequency Comb, Michael E. Rowan
Hybrid Rhythms, Antithetical Echoes, and Autopoiesis: Intersections Between Sound, Self, and Nation in the Poetry of Yeats, Connor Stratton
Unfree Labor and American Capitalism: From Slavery to the Neoliberal-Penal State, David Tisel
Thermobarometric Modeling of the Catalina Amphibolite Unit: Implications for Tectonic and Metasomatic Models, Henry W. Towbin