This edition of QC Research Highlights features some of the important, fascinating research done by graduate students at Queens College. Academic Works, CUNY’s institutional repository, has a small collection of master’s theses and student capstones completed at Queens College. This collection is still growing! See below if you’d like to participate.
Social Sciences
Thanks to our partnership with the History department, we have been able to add theses showing some of the breadth of this discipline, from anarchist education to the business of baseball to the history of environmentalism and ecofascism.
Eric Anderson’s thesis, The Anarchist Classroom: A Test of Libertarian Education and Human Nature at the Modern School in New York and New Jersey, 1911-1953, examines the history of radical education in the early twentieth century, specifically in the “Modern School” movement.
Patrick Spranger writes about the role that gentrification and white flight played in the former Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles in his thesis, Sadness in Brooklyn: The American Housing Act of 1949 and the Brooklyn Dodgers Move to Los Angeles.
Santiago G. Lozada’s thesis, From Green Pastures to Scorched Earth: German Environmentalism and Ecology, C. 1800S-1945, outlines the history of environmentalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its complicated relationship to the rise of Nazism.
Arts and Humanities
In his thesis, Sacred Music in Colonial Era Hispaniola: The Evangelization of the Taino People, Tito Gutierrez discusses how sacred European music became a tool of colonialism and conversion on the island of Hispaniola.
Natural Sciences
Finally, we’re delighted to share some of the scientific research being done by Queens College graduate students! Both these theses are in Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Azlan Maqbool’s thesis, Investigating Distribution of Legionella pneumophila in Urban and Suburban Watersheds, assess the presence of the aforementioned bacteria – the cause of Legionnaire’s Disease – in New York City street water. These bacteria are indeed common in street water and increase in wet weather, and this is the first study to document that.
Lisa Hlinka studied magma and explosivity in her thesis, Top-Down Control on Eruptive Style at Masaya Volcano Inferred from Melt Composition. Using the Masaya volcano in Nicaragua, Hlinka shows that explosivity is caused not by volatile contents, but pressurization from temporary sealing of the conduit.
Help our collection grow!
Thanks to all the authors featured here for sharing their theses in the repository! Thanks, also, to Grace Davie, David Lahti, Emily Wilbourne, and other faculty who have assisted in facilitating student deposits.
The master’s theses in Academic Works currently represent only a small portion of the important research done by QC graduate students! If you’re interested in sharing your thesis, please see this Guide to Theses and Capstones in Academic Works.
The library also holds many master’s theses in print. You can search for these works in OneSearch and, once you have the call number, request access by emailing the Borrowing desk.