IDA
Mount Holyoke College Institutional Digital Archive
The Institutional Digital Archive (IDA) is a service that collects, preserves, and showcases the scholarly work of MHC's faculty and students. Some materials are restricted to the campus community and require an MHC login to access.
Communities in IDA
Select a community to browse its collections.
Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
- This is an archive of United States immigration sanctuary policies that were passed from 2001-2014. The archive contains four main collections organized by policy type: Executive Orders; Ordinances; Policing Policies; and Resolutions. There are 234 policies in the archive. Welcome!
- This community houses data collected on campus as part of the Campus Living Laboratory Initiative. Data include those collected from environmental monitoring stations, as a result of faculty and student independent projects, or data collected in labs or other collection exercises. Datasets are presented with varying levels of access as described by the party responsible for uploading the data.
- Repositories for retaining data and scholarly research of the Mount Holyoke College faculty
- Repositories for retaining data, scholarly research, and academic output of Mount Holyoke College students
Recent Submissions
All-Consuming Desires: Feminist and Queer Usages of Cannibalism in Twenty-First Century Texts
(2025-08-22) Tarinelli, Emily; Young, Elizabeth
Consumers of popular culture have a taste for cannibalism. American writers have produced stories about cannibalism for hundreds of years, but only within the last generation, I argue, have cannibal narratives — many of which are created by women — adopted stronger themes of gender and sexuality.
This thesis focuses on the female cannibal as a figure whose monstrosity is tied to women’s sexuality. The first half of my project explores works that employ cannibalistic horrors to critique the racialized, gendered, and sexualized configurations of human consumption under capitalism, such as Chelsea G. Summers’ novel A Certain Hunger (2020), Mimi Cave’s film Fresh (2022), Monika Kim’s novel The Eyes Are the Best Part (2024), and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017). The second half of my project explores works in which cannibalism allegorizes the all-consuming nature of lesbian desire, awakening, and existence in a heteronormative world, such as Karyn Kusama’s film Jennifer’s Body (2009), Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s streaming series Yellowjackets (2021–), and Luca Guadagnino’s film Bones and All (2022). By analyzing these feminist and queer cannibal narratives, I show how cannibalism functions as both a form of resistance and a model of oppression in twenty-first century American literature, film, and television.
Please Return To:
(2025-08-22) Jakobson, Sophia; Williams, Marianna Dixon
In Please Return To: I construct mixed media paintings, sculpture, and textiles that contend with the relationship between queerness and the landscape. I draw from landscapes that have shaped me, using the body and landscape as orientation devices to explore my experience occupying a queer body. Landscapes are not neutral, but rather are shaped by and reveal systems of power. I use queerness as an active and expansive term– in queering the landscape, I’m not only thinking about how landscape painting can be subverted, but also how this process may reveal complications of queer legibility, belonging, and embodiment.
Like an archeological dig, I pull from personal archives and queer theory. Theorist Sara Ahmed explores the body as a sedimented history– both the body and its surroundings are mutually shaped through repetitive action over time. I use materials such as recycled paper, fiber, and cement as forms of physical poetry to build emotional landscapes. Industrial and natural, soft and rigid, fragmented and solid– the work traverses material boundaries, drawing attention to how we construct naturalness and how these embedded assumptions construct possibilities for how bodies should appear and behave.
Inviting participation, I ask the viewer to co-construct the landscape by tangibly shaping the environment through imaginative play. I engage with cast shadows and camouflage as metaphor for queer legibility, acknowledging both the simultaneous complications of and desires to be seen. Amidst an increasingly contentious political backdrop in which queer and trans people are subject to violence, surveillance, and erasure, the work contends with how grief and concealment can exist alongside play, growth, and possibility.
Exploring the Relationships between Negative Emotions, Coping Strategies, & Drinking Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic
(2025-08-22) Strayton, Natalie; Allecia, Reid; Mara, Breen
The COVID-19 pandemic was an overwhelming, negatively emotionally charged time, which, for some, led to increased drinking behaviors as a way to cope with these difficult experiences. Interestingly, there have been mixed findings on people’s experiences of negative affect during the pandemic and its associations with drinking behaviors. This study sought to elucidate some of these mixed findings. Specifically, this study considered a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents to examine changes in negative emotions across three waves of data from the pandemic (April, June, & November 2020) and the associations between negative emotions and drinking behaviors at the third wave. Additionally, this study explored the relationships between coping strategies and drinking behaviors, and whether coping strategies moderated the association between negative affect and drinking behaviors. The results of this study revealed that negative affect decreased across the pandemic, and that Wave 1 negative affect was not significantly associated with Wave 3 drinking, however Waves 2 & 3 negative affect were significantly associated with Wave 3 drinking. Maladaptive coping was significantly associated with Wave 3 drinking behaviors, however adaptive coping was not. Furthermore, the results did not reveal a significant interaction between coping strategies and negative affect. The results of this study show how people’s experiences of negative emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic may have led them to unhealthy, maladaptive coping strategies like drinking. This study sets the stage for future research to uncover interventions to improve negative emotionality, coping strategies, and drinking behaviors.
Understanding the First Amendment: It's Limits and Potential in the Fight Against Misinformation
(2025-08-22) Cincotta , Lauren; Holley , Danielle
The rise in political misinformation in recent years is concerning, particularly when it leads to
real life consequences such as the events of January 6th, 2021. The question now is what can be
done to increase the health of the media landscape. Any measures taken must be considered in
the context of the protections for the freedom of speech and of the press outlined under the First
Amendment of the United States Constitution. This amendment was shaped by suppression of
dissenting opinions experienced under British rule, and lives in the American consciousness as
an absolute protection against any restriction on the freedom of speech or the press. Yet, this is
not the true history. From the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, through the early 20th century,
suppression of speech was common for those with less political power, particularly in wartime.
In the late 20th century, a massive evolution in interpretation of the First Amendment led to more
expansive First Amendment freedoms. While this change was positive in some respects, the
move toward faith in absolute free speech has left the U.S unprepared for the current
misinformation crisis. United States history, as reviewed in this paper, shows a pattern denying
the most robust First Amendment protections to those without political or financial influence.
Even in peacetime, Supreme Court interpretations of the First Amendment in crucial cases have
favored the speech of conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and the wealthy interests behind
ownership of news outlets at the expense of average citizens and the truth.
The current legal and political climate requires understanding the complex and flawed history,
through historical and legal analysis, of First Amendment protections in the United States. The
historical failures to apply the First Amendment consistently to all parties makes a compelling
argument for the need to balance the right of the people to express their dissent with the
potential, and real harms of speech particularly through the evolution of social media and
artificial intelligence. This paper argues that instead of seeking to impose hard limits on speech
within the scope of the First Amendment, the path forward should take into account the previous
mistakes made by trying to control public discourse and consider proactive legal measures to
enhance protections and access to quality information.
The effects of tau expression on glial mitochondrial morphology in Drosophila melanogaster
(2025-08-22) Anacheka-Nasemann, Becks; Colodner, Kenneth
Tauopathies are a branch of neurodegenerative disorders characterized by the phosphorylation of the protein tau. These diseases are one of the leading causes of dementia, currently have no known cure, and are frequently heartbreaking to affected individuals and their families. While neurodegenerative diseases are poorly understood, studies have shown that hyperphosphorylated tau causes mitochondrial dysfunction and results in a decrease of ATP production during cellular respiration, as well as an increase in the toxic byproduct ROS, leading to apoptosis. While the effects of tau on mitochondria is established in neurons, this relationship has not been thoroughly examined in the “other” cells of the brain, known as glial cells. Glia support neuronal cellular respiration and synaptic functioning, making them potentially susceptible to mitochondrial tauopathy. This research examined whether the morphology and quantity of glial mitochondria are disrupted in the presence of tau in Drosophila melanogaster. It found that the quantity of glial mitochondria is significantly reduced in the presence of tau, but that tau had no effect on mitochondrial volume, surface area, and sphericity. These findings suggest that glial mitochondria are disrupted by tauopathy in a unique manner, and highlights their importance in future studies as therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases. Given their roles in metabolic support, we further quantified age and sex differences in astrocytic mitochondria, finding that day three flies possess fewer mitochondria than days 10 and 30. These studies were employed with the goal of establishing control conditions for future studies aimed at determining astrocytic-specific effects of tau expression.