Titus Livius, better known as Livy, was a Roman historian writing at the beginnings of the Augustan age and the fall of the Roman Republic. Livy wrote his magnum opus, Ab Urbe Condita, as a moralizing history in response to the moral degradation and civil strife he experienced during the collapse of the Republic. The first seven chapters of Book I outline Roman prehistory before Romulus’s reign and contain several imitations and allusions to archaic poetry and Classical historiography. Livy himself believes that the subject of his writing would have been better suited for poetry than prose. This project aims to provide quantitative evidence for Livy's claim by quantifying and analyzing instances of literary devices of earlier poetry such as alliteration and etymologizing to determine whether a poetic influence is implicit in Livy’s prehistory of Rome. Preliminary results based on the quantity of alliteration present in Livy's writings suggest some influence by earlier poetic sources. However, it is difficult to substantiate any conclusions on statistical grounds due to fragmentary literatures. Instead, this project also proposes further hypotheses about source accessibility and poetic inclination that may explain the quantitative phenomena.

Starting in European folklore, antisemitism has gone largely unnoticed in fairy tales. Antisemitism present within our modern fantasy standards stems in large part from European folklore, further manipulated by rising antisemitic propaganda in the late nineteenth century, coalescing in Nazi propaganda, and internalized as stereotypes by storytellers, thus leading to a double standard of otherizing and assimilation in Western culture. As folklore evolved into the current fantasy genre, these stories transferred antisemitic and stereotypical of villainous Jewish characters into our modern-day media. Antisemitic caricatures populate our media, and gentiles, or non-Jews, often don’t realize it because of how pervasive these stereotypes have become in the main body of Western culture developed over the millennia. Drawing connections to the villainized images of a Jewish-coded character throughout fantasy stories and films, this paper uncovers the systemic and institutional problems Western media pushes onto an indifferent public, where thinking critically about our media doesn't extend to antisemitism. From case studies including Tolkien's work, Barbie movies, and the Harry Potter series, this paper identifies antisemitic stereotypes that have become impossible to avoid in media. Through widespread acceptance of these stereotypes, we perpetuate the misconceptions of our predecessors and otherize the Jewish body. Through perpetuation of hateful stereotypes in modern media and a lack of acknowledgement of ongoing antisemitism, we normalize the person of Jewish descent as the villain. Spotting these stereotypes is the first step in overcoming this imagery. Subversion becomes the next step to undo the damage to Western culture and modern media; reinterpreting and rewriting antisemitic stories as aspirational stories is a way to subvert the ideas of what a hero and a villain can look like.

The Svoboda Diaries, preserved in 61 volumes, are a unique record of life in 19th-century Iraq. Working as an officer in the Lynch Company, a British steamship venture on the Tigris River that operated between Baghdad and Basra, Joseph Svoboda (1840-1908) kept his diaries in English for 40 years (1862-1908). Along with the historical information they preserve, these diaries reflect the evolution of Joseph Svoboda’s writing style and vocabulary, and contain a variety of different spellings signifying the diverse linguistic environment of Ottoman Iraq. The presenters of this paper have been working as a team, editing and digitizing Svoboda Diaries as a part of the ongoing Svoboda Diaries digital humanities project. Our team currently follows a detailed pipeline that describes six steps: digitization, transcription, editing, Arabic translations, final proofing, and publishing. We have transcribed the scanned diary pages line by line, and systematically proofread one another’s work. Team members recently developed a framework of proofreading in order to identify and indicate illegible and damaged portions. The orthographical, language-related and cultural issues presented by these diaries have pushed us to be creative and methodical in how we collaboratively edit the Svoboda Diaries for digital preservation and publication, and signify potential applications for research across diverse disciplines. By documenting the research and experience Svoboda Diaries Project has amassed over the course of a decade, this group presentation contributes to the literature about accurately preserving and making accessible primary documents, and provides guidelines to navigate the ambiguities of editing handwritten historical texts. The paper also discusses future prospects for the Svoboda Diaries Project, such as the introduction of TEI coding that will enhance digital representation of this source material.

As interest in diverse voices in German literature grows, the long-overlooked Swiss author Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) has begun to attract greater scholarly attention. The purpose of this research is to analyze central themes of Schwarzenbach’s 1929 novella To See a Woman and contextualize this work within Schwarzenbach’s biography and the social history of the German-speaking world. The presentation consists of three parts: First, I draw on academic, journalistic, and primary sources to describe Schwarzenbach’s life story and her unique positionality in interwar Swiss society. Second, I discuss the origin, disappearance, and rediscovery of her 1929 novella To See a Woman, its eventual publication in 2008, and its significance in Swiss literary history. Third, I use methods of close reading and literary analysis to examine the role of the landscape surrounding the Alpine resort town of St. Moritz in the novella. The textual evidence gathered through this methodology indicates that the landscape is essential to the narrator’s experience of desire, functioning as an expression of the individual freedom afforded by entering spaces removed from everyday life. By analyzing Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s life in connection with her novella To See a Woman, this research provides insight into diverse perspectives on interwar Swiss society and their literary representation, offering a basis for further academic inquiry into Schwarzenbach’s work.

This project uses the lens of female young adults in novels to examine the war’s lingering impact and the destabilization of socialist identity conceptions during the postwar period. It pays special attention to women’s identity as explored through their engagement with religious conceptualizations of gender and the family unit. These issues of identity are examined through the young female protagonists in the novels Picture in the Teacup (1986) by Dina Kalinovskaya, and Redemption (1984) by Friedrich Gorenstein. Both Kalinovskaya’s Serafima and Gorenstein’s Sashenka struggle to understand their roles in postwar society and their own senses of self, specifically due to the disorienting revival of Russian Orthodoxy and traditional gender norms during the war. They confront religious and socialist constructions of female identity during their constant movements between the child and the adult, the woman and the non-woman, and the perceived roles of the mother. Novels are a unique space to these societal restructurings as they combine the personal and public spheres; they are fictional pieces created for mass consumption but are also created by individual authors and informed by their positionalities and identities. The author holds a unique position in Soviet society as a moral authority, maintaining a particularly intimate relationship with the public and acting as the people’s own voice against governmental repression. This paper argues that the war exacerbates these preexisting rifts through the infusion and normalization of gross violence. This was especially damaging for young adults, who were forcibly suspended between childhood and adulthood as an undefined “other” while trying to establish their identities in wartime. It also notes that the war did not create these cultural conflicts as this would imply prewar societal stability, which would deny the mass trauma of the famine, forced collectivization, and 1937 Stalinist purges from the interwar period.

On the surface, career warrior Larry Alan Thorne seems a likely candidate to be an anti-hero. He fought in three unpopular wars, voluntarily joined the Waffen-SS twice, and was convicted of treason in his homeland, Finland. A carjacker and three-time prison escapee, Thorne, né Lauri Allan Törni, has become a celebrated folk hero and declared a legend by many. He was awarded Finland’s highest military honor, an Act of Congress was passed to grant him American citizenship, John Wayne portrayed a fictionalized version of him in the iconic 1968 film The Green Berets, and he is the only known Waffen-SS soldier buried in Arlington National Cemetery. My research explores the question, “How is public memory of Larry Thorne a case study of historical revision and rehabilitation?” My presentation analyzes numerous primary and secondary sources, including depictions of Thorne in movies, music and social media, as well as personal correspondence with experts including Michael Cleverley, author of the leading English language biography of Thorne, and Professor Oula Silvennoinen of the University of Helsinki, who co-wrote a Thorne biography in Finnish. This research project reveals the significance and nature of a decades-long historical revisionist campaign with regard to a figure with a dubious past, and how those efforts to shape the public story of Thorne involve, at times, potentially misleading narratives. The current personality cult of Larry Thorne is a case study of historical revision in public memory, and his story is still being written and rewritten.

Throughout our education and personal lives, most of us have read literary works in translation, but rarely do we consider the invisible labor and many considerations that go into translating a text from its original language into a new one. In this paper, I chronicle my discovery of this art form, starting with my first experiences as a novice translator, helping my professor translate an 18th century philosophical text. I bring my audience along as I take on my first independent translation project, beginning with choosing a text and selecting passages to translate, and culminating in locating an American publisher to submit my work to. I attempt to illuminate some misconceptions about what translation is and what it is not. I hope to elucidate why translation is not simply rewriting a text word-for-word from one language to another in a manner that is accessible for everyone. I seek to help those who speak multiple languages better understand, for themselves, why it is they can’t just translate something easily and on the spot. Through the use of specific examples that I encountered in my preparation of a sample of a novel for potential publication, I will introduce some of the common problems faced when translating a literary text, and hopefully leave readers with a new appreciation for this work.