Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

A bug in the system: speculations on cybernetics, superorganisms, and simulated serendipity

Publication Date
2016-January-01
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What is a cybernetic organism in the age of digital imagining? Where can we find a historical nexus between the methods used to models systems and the increasing velocity of digital images? How do bodies fracture and congeal when integrated...

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Covering Islam: National Trauma and The Politics of the Imagination

Publication Date
2015-January-01
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My thesis scrutinizes the U.S. media construction of the events of September 11, 2001 as "national trauma," and the way in which this framing of the attacks has allowed '9/11' to invoke a visceral imagination of the deterministic relationship between...

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Duelling and the Fantasmatic Spectre of Male Honour in Imperial Germany: The Kaiser’s Will and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest

Publication Date
2022-May-15
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Underneath the historiographical disagreements about military honor and dueling in Imperial Germany there lurks a consensus that most duelists simply internalized the dictates of honor. This article troubles that presumption by attending to the Prussian-German military honor code’s mixed messages...

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The Captain of Köpenick and the Uniform Fantasies of German Militarism

Publication Date
2022-June-15
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This article examines a famous 1906 event that occurred when a con man dressed in a captain's uniform commandeered two small contingents of soldiers in Berlin and took them to nearby Köpenick, where he proceeded to arrest the city’s mayor...

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The Emperor’s New Uniforms: The Uniform Fantasies of Wilhelm II and His Critics

Publication Date
2024-February-15
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In light of Wilhelm II’s well-known predilection for military uniforms and displays, many of his contemporaries regarded him as a real-life version of the titular figure in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” This essay uses the concept...

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