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
  • Archive of U.S. Sanctuary Policies, 2001-2014  
    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!
  • Campus Living Laboratory Initiative  
    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.
  • College Initiatives and Programs  
  • Faculty -- Research, Data, Projects, and Papers  
    Repositories for retaining data and scholarly research of the Mount Holyoke College faculty
  • Students -- Research, Data, Projects, and Papers  
    Repositories for retaining data, scholarly research, and academic output of Mount Holyoke College students

Recent Submissions

  • Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access ,
    Painting Lesbian Worlds in Portraiture: Lenore Chinn, Asian American Lesbian Visibility and (In)Scrutability
    Xia, Olive; Lee, Anthony
    This art history thesis examines three portraits by San Francisco-based Chinese American lesbian artist Lenore Chinn: Déjà Vu (1986), Bing (2001), and Before the Wedding (2000). With these three paintings, I demonstrate that Chinn's work departs from photographic source material and instead operates within the postmodern tradition of figurative painting. In these acrylic works, Chinn paints large-scale, monumental portraits of lesbians of color, including a self-portrait and depictions of fellow lesbian artists and friends. Chinn employs figuration while destabilizing realism through disruptions of logical pictorial space and references to art historical portraiture, constructing visual frameworks for her subjects to inhabit, thereby problematizing the genre of portraiture. The space in which Chinn paints lesbians of color is termed the "lesbian imaginary," a postmodernist alteration of realism that enables these subjects to occupy the traditionally white, cis-male-centered genre of portraiture, often associated with power and authority. Chinn utilizes postmodern strategies of appropriation and allegory, reusing and recontextualizing existing images so that the visual language of portrait painting remains present but no longer serves as a neutral ground for representation. Her paintings chart a network of lesbian artists of color in the Bay Area during the AIDS era and function as an archival practice, documenting cross-racial relationships, artistic lineages, and underrepresented forms of lesbian representation within dominant art historical narratives. This thesis argues that Chinn's work extends postmodernism by illustrating how strategies such as pastiche, appropriation, and allegory generate new configurations of queer portraiture.
  • Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access ,
    Investigation of clpP Expression During Bacillus subtilis Sporulation
    Womer, Audrey; Camp, Amy
    Sporulation in Bacillus subtilis is highly regulated by stage-specific sigma factors that control gene expression as the cell transitions to a metabolically dormant state. The AAA+ protease complex ClpCP, activated in the forespore by the adaptor protein MdfA, plays an important role in degrading metabolites during metabolic shutdown. Recent findings in our lab and others demonstrate that clpC is turned on by the forespore-specific sigma factor, sigF, as is mdfA, raising the possibility that clpP is similarly regulated. Additionally, bioinformatic analysis of the region upstream of clpP reveal matching to consensus sequences for both sigF and the stress-activated sigB, in line with other dual-activated promoters in B. subtilis. We also identified a match to a sigE consensus sequence nearby. My project aimed to test the hypothesis that clpP expression during sporulation is controlled by a sigF-activated promoter. In order to evaluate this, we constructed a PclpP-lacZ fusion and transformed it into IPTG-inducible sigF, sigB or sigE strains and measured beta-galactosidase activity. We found that the PclpP promoter is activated by sigF, but not by sigE. This project helped advance our understanding of sporulation in B. subtilis and provided insight into conserved regulatory mechanisms in pathogenic bacteria.
  • Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access ,
    Seal Visions: Time and Agency in Same and Multi-Species Relationships
    Sapirstein, Pearl; Gundermann, Christian; Savoy, Lauret; Pickbourn, Lynda; Arnold, Nathalie
    In the year 2000, an article by environmental scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer popularized the term ‘Anthropocene.’ This mode of marking time asserts that global human impacts have reached the point where they define the geologic record; that humanity's collective ability to permanently alter Earth has overturned the Holocene with a new, formal, geologic epoch. The discipline of geology emphasizes that it strives towards an objective lens, and yet ‘Anthropocene’ primarily advances a narrative which inspires social action. This has led to considerable debate across academic fields. This paper seeks to complicate some of these notions of Anthropocene, particularly the ways in which they may universalize humanity as an agent independent from the rest of the natural world. One of the lenses this thesis uses in order to examine this paradigm is the manner in which the terminology of Anthropocene inadvertently positions human agency as able to act upon a static and undifferentiated creation. By the nature of its use of origin, scholars utilizing the term Anthropocene prioritize specific historical narratives over others; highlighting a linear model of time based on progression. Those who utilize the Anthropocene model often highlight Earth as being on the verge of collapse, and prioritize one mode of mitigating this precarity; that human beings are the sole agents empowered to change the world. This thesis forms connections from an unlikely juxtaposition of scholars in order to re-examine the terminology of Anthropocene; primarily the educator Paulo Freire and the Anishinaabe environmental theorists Vanessa Watts, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Kyle Whyte. This work begins to deconstruct the concept of humanity as a singularity - and claims that individuals have differing systems of relations within human and natural landscapes - those of the human and other-than-human alike.
  • Item type: Item , Access status: Restricted ,
    Hymn to the Third Death: An Orchestral Portrait of Three Endangered Birds
    Gillogly, Finn; Sanford, David
    This extended program note follows my process conceptualizing, composing, editing, and workshopping a set of three orchestral miniatures detailing three species of birds: the Red-legged Kittiwake, the Gunnison Sage-Grouse, and the Bachman’s Warbler. Each of these species are at varying levels of peril, being Threatened, Endangered, and Extinct, respectively. I undertook this project with the goal of drawing attention to these birds and the challenges that they face using an orchestral format, and demonstrating the ways in which music can be a method for science communication. This extended program note aims to give background and context to the piece that I composed and the birds I chose to highlight. I will begin with a brief overview of the piece, introduce the birds that I chose, discuss my inspirations and writing process, and the workshopping process and performance with the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra. I will conclude with my thoughts on music as a tool of science communication, and the importance of joy in the environmental movement.
  • Item type: Item , Access status: Restricted ,
    The Impact of Brexit on European Union Agricultural Trade
    Vavra, Kate; Mitchell, Christopher
    The United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union marked a broader retreat from globalization, affecting both trade relationships and government budgets. The majority of existing research on Brexit’s impact on trade focuses on the UK’s experience, overlooking the realities that EU member states faced after losing one of their top budget contributors and adapting to shifts in trade agreements with a global economic power. To evaluate the impact of Brexit on European Union agricultural trade, this study follows a research design that contains both a time series and a comparative analysis. Annual data points were collected from 2015, the year before the Brexit referendum, through 2023, which is the most recent year with reliable data. To accurately represent the EU within research limitations, France, Germany, and Poland were selected for study. To assess the agricultural trade of EU member states before and after Brexit, four subjects were selected: each country’s economic dependence on agriculture over time, the effects of EU agricultural policy shifts on member-states, overall bilateral agriculture trade flows by member-state over time, and international trade by agricultural product category. This research led to the conclusion that Brexit caused small trade shifts, but may have created larger consequences for the EU budget, CAP, and investment in less wealthy member states. This research adds to ongoing discussions regarding the various consequences of Brexit, as well as larger debates on the importance of European Union membership in an increasingly evolving world.