Since my last update, I have made quite a bit of progress on the remainder of my thesis. Although applying for jobs and this semester’s schoolwork have set me back a little bit, I am relatively happy with the progress I have made, especially considering the major concept changes I described in my last post.…
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At this point in time, I have finished coding all of my transcripts. This means that each speaker’s Excel file has been filled with their respective tokens of affect, judgment, and appreciation according to the criteria of the Appraisal framework (Martin and White, 2005). All the tokens have also been organized around central themes of…
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My final semester of college has begun, and I have about two months left to analyze my data and finish writing my thesis. Before returning to campus, I laid out steps to achieve this goal and so far, everything is going according to plan. As I anticipated, completing all video coding has been the biggest…
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The post It’s All Coming Together appeared first on W&M Honors Fellows.

Now that I’m back in Williamsburg it is time to put my nose to the grindstone and write up my honors thesis and carry out a few supplementary experiments to my thesis. My advisor and I have laid out an action plan through which I will write up my thesis in a non-linear order beginning…
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The post Honors Blog 10: Beginning The Write Up appeared first on W&M Honors Fellows.

Since I returned back from winter break, there have been numerous developments to my thesis. First, my thesis advisor and I went through his comments for the chapter I wrote on film portrayals of social identity. I was happy to see such thorough comments on the draft, as after working on the chapter for nearly…
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The post January Update: Minor Concept Changes and Writing Goals appeared first on W&M Honors Fellows.

Over Fall Break (2018), I traveled up to Washington D.C. to visit the Cobb Collection in person. I had made arrangements with Dr. Fatimah Jackson, the director of the Cobb collection at Howard University, to visit the off-site location where the remains were located. Over the summer I had identified my sample of skeletal remains…
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The post On the specifics of the Cobb Collection: New Role appeared first on W&M Honors Fellows.

  Since returning to school my project has undergone significant changes. My initial topic was focusing on treponemal disease like syphilis, yaws and pinta which were extremely prevalent in the enslaved population. These illnesses are associated with the conditions of enslavement and have been traditionally been seen in this population. My early iteration of my…
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Throughout January I have been outlining my thesis and the arguments I intend to support. I have selected examples from my ethnographic research in order to support these arguments with events I observed. I have now broken down the writing of my thesis into specific benchmarks throughout the semester. I hope to have a draft…
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The post Month 7: A Tangible Plan appeared first on W&M Honors Fellows.

Middles are hard. Mary Wroth’s Urania is hard. These are my defining discoveries from the past two months of work. My Urania section is the middle section of my thesis, sandwiched between my sections about The Alchemist and The Blazing World.  I’ve always struggled with middles; in my creative writing, I know what will happen in the beginning and end of my pieces,…
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The past few weeks have been a busy one for my thesis! I am coming to the end of working on my chapter on the role of hands in “Janet’s Repentance.” This has been incredibly fun to write since this text is so rich in haptic imagery. I have traced the abusive hand of Robert…
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