Recent documents in OpenSPACES@UNK: Scholarship, Preservation, and Creative Endeavors
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Future food production requires sustainable approaches that used both land and water resources efficiently, while remaining economically viable. One approach is aquaponics, the practice which combines hydroponics and aquaculture, as a sustainable food producing system. Aquaponic systems are unique, as the system can be designed to reuse and repurpose locally sourced materials and resources to meet…
Hinge is a poetry collection accompanied by an extended, hybridized introduction that interweaves an analysis of the author’s poetic influences, personal experiences as a domestic violence survivor, and poetic practice. The work simultaneously explores how writing and embodying poetry through public performance can facilitate the reunification of memory and emotion for survivors of DV living with…
What if you lose your parents? What if you live on the streets? What if you live in an orphanage? What if a family of quirky scientists adopts you? These are the questions 10 orphans explore in 1880 England. The experiment is simple, can they form a family, or will their pasts catch up to them? With 10 children there is no end to the fun, laughter and trouble in one house. Every experiment can go…
On December 8, 1873, Representative Jerome B. Chaffee, the non-voting delegate of the Colorado Territory, submitted a proposal in the House of Representatives to make Colorado the 38th state in the Union. What should have been a routine matter — Colorado had the sizable population and economic stability necessary to achieve statehood — dragged on for more than three years. At stake was the outcome…
Dead Letters: A Retelling of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” presents the classic story from Bartleby’s perspective. This novella-length work explores themes of identity as Bartleby navigates the contradictions of life in the mid-nineteenth century. Bartleby tells us about his past and how he arrives at the lawyer’s office in New York, where the two narratives meet. Those familiar with…
Irish women’s immigration to Iowa brought rich culture and lasting impacts, despite their contributions being silenced by history. Women left Ireland for economic opportunity and education abroad to support their impoverished families. Millions emigrated between 1830 and 1915, spreading across the world. The Irish women who came to the United States encountered discrimination and cultural…
Critical discussions of detective fiction from the 1920s and 30s ask two main questions: what is detective fiction and what is it for? T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers both wrote extensively on detective fiction throughout the interwar period as part of this larger literary effort to understand the nature, purpose, and influence of detective fiction. Scholars examining their detective criticism…
Centuries before European arrival in the Great Plains region of North America, Indigenous exchange networks connected people within the continental interior to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf Coast. Throughout this vast Native Space, Indigenous peoples sought new resources and opportunities to create sustainable and successful lifeways by harnessing the spiritual, economic, and…
The modern history of Germany’s Jews developed through two contemporaneous and parallel transformations across the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: first, the development of the German national identity and creation of the German state; second, the gradual emancipation of Germany’s Jews and their integration into society. As a result of these two simultaneous developments, the majority of…
PRAXINOSCOPE is a literary novel that explores the lives and inter-relationships of a family spanning one hundred years, from 1925 to 2025. It has a large cast of first-person narrators. Through the writing of PRAXINOSCOPE, I explored the challenges of writing a cohesive story when many individual characters contribute to the narrative. The result is a family—rather than a single individual—as the…