Flyer for the University of Missouri Libraries Undergraduate Research Contest, which recognizes and rewards outstanding student research....

One of the prizes for the 2018 Undergraduate Research Paper Contest was awarded for this paper by Autumn McLain....
From the first paragraph: "Since Gulliver's Travels was first published, readers and critics have disagreed over whether it showed that its author, Jonathan Swift, hated humanity or not. Gulliver himself ends the book with an extreme hatred of and disgust for mankind, but it is unclear whether he reflects Swift's thoughts or not. In his letters, Swift continuously flaunts his disdain for humanity, but also undermines it at every turn. By closely reading his correspondence as a whole, an understanding of his motives for writing and his feelings about humanity can be reached which can in turn inform a reading of his texts which seem to defy interpretation. Swift's constant contradictions and qualifications of his disdain for humanity serve as evidence of the fact that Swift was not a misanthrope, though he was an occasionally hateful man and one who wished to appear as a misanthrope."...

One of the prizes for the 2018 Undergraduate Research Paper Contest was awarded for this paper by Beckie Jaeckels....
From the first paragraph: "There are few moments in which history aligns with present discourse in an uncannily beautiful fashion. Dr. Berkley Hudson at the University of Missouri--Columbia School of Journalism can testify to this stumble of fate...

The first place prize for the 2011 Undergraduate Research Paper Contest was awarded for this paper by Alexandria Dimitrova which examines the emergence and development of two contemporary genres of Bulgarian music and their close ties with Roma...

One of the honorable mentions for the 2022 Undergraduate Research Project Contest was awarded for this paper by Audrey Dae Bush....

One of the prizes for the 2022 Undergraduate Research Project Contest was awarded for this paper by Zoe Korte....
Toni Morrison's "Love" and Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" both use achronological and polyphonic prose to demonstrate the damaging effects of abusive power dynamics on the vulnerable psyches of children....

The second place price for the 2012 Undergraduate Research Paper Contest was awarded for this paper by Donald Glen Cole which examines the role of religion prior to and during the Civil War....
"Throughout the antebellum period and into the Civil War, Southern Christianity played a pivotal but poorly explored role in driving the South to secession and shaping the national identity of the Confederacy. It was instrumental in creating the consensus and drive that led the South to leave the Union in an attempt to preserve their "peculiar institution" of slavery. The commonly-held beliefs of the southern church, that Christ was resurrected and that the South were a people chosen by God, formed much of the foundation of nascent Confederate nationalism. However, the South's Christian character was not enough to hold together a nation fracturing under the strain of defeat, let alone lead the Confederacy to victory and independence."--Page 1....

One of the prizes for the 2020 Undergraduate Research Project Contest was awarded for this paper by Abby West....
"After Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, the colonists began to believe that their 'independence [was] undoubtedly secured,' even though the conflict was far from over. This certainty that eventually the colonists would prevail resulted from the clear notion that this one victory was indicative of what was to come. After this battle, the colonists' correspondence and publications read as if they were trying to set up a self-fulfilling prophesy and will triumph into existence, which they achieved by using this one success as an encouraging weapon to wield when the people got listless. Moreover, the French entrance into war proved absolutely crucial to the colonial war effort, giving them both a much-needed boost in morale and the legitimacy sufficient for other countries to take up arms alongside them and take them seriously as a nation. This was in stark contrast to Britain's sudden isolation and need to preserve their other imperial holdings, which forced them to take a much more reserved tactical approach that led to their eventual downfall."--Page 8-9...

One of the prizes for the 2020 Undergraduate Research Project Contest was awarded for this paper by Devon Terry....
"The era of the Third Reich is most often associated with images of war and the struggle within concentration camps. However, another factor in the development of the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich is the German art that was created and released during this time. Art created by German artists underwent intense changes both before and during World War II. Arno Breker was a German artist who created a multitude of sculptures under Hitler's commission starting before and during the events of World War II. His sculptures often depicted the perfect German man and carried many implications about what German culture should contain. Arno Breker's Wounded Man, completed in 1943, shows the impacts of German culture during the Third Reich through its totalitarian implications and ideals. These ideals are shown through the inspection of Breker's life and artistic transformations, the totalitarian concepts seen in Wounded Man, and the role that Wounded Man had within the ideology of Nazism."--Page 1....

The first place prize for the 2015 Undergraduate Research Paper Contest was awarded for this paper by Lelise Howard. From the first paragraph: "You never know who is going to walk in and change your life. Sometimes there is a onetime interaction...

The first place prize for the 2012 Undergraduate Research Paper Contest was awarded for this paper by Nicholas Schuster which examines the final symphony composed by Gustav Mahler....
"Two months prior to the debut of the Eighth, Mahler undertook the composition of his final work, his tenth symphony. Unfortunately, he did not live to finish the score, dying from streptococcal endocarditis in May 1911. In addition to a defective valve, Mahler's heart had been metaphorically overwrought before contracting the fatal bacterium. The summer of 1910 had proven especially turbulent for the composer. Learning of his wife Alma's infidelity with the young architect Walter Gropius hurled Mahler into a state of perpetual tumult, prompting the symphonist to imbue his burgeoning composition with intense grief. As his most autobiographical work, Mahler's Symphony No. 10 reflects the composer's despair and attempts to reconcile with Alma while assimilating Expressionist tendencies into his late Romantic style."--Page 1....

One of the prizes for the 2022 Undergraduate Research Project Contest was awarded for this paper by Kathryn Colvin....
According to T.S. Eliot's well-known critical essay "Hamlet and His Problems," Hamlet crucially lacks what Eliot calls the "objective correlative" for his emotions: the "equivalence" of an emotion to that which precedes and produces it. Despite Eliot's disapproval, Hamlet is widely praised as a great artistic success in spite of, or even because of, the supposed impossibility of confining what Harold Bloom praises as Hamlet’s "enigmatic malaise" to the formulaic, the mechanistic, the linear. If Eliot and Bloom disagree profoundly on the artistic merit of Hamlet, they agree on the absence of equivalence, the lack of an adequate Hamlet equation, with Bloom passionately embracing the supposed mystery of the "sea-change" in Hamlet's characterization between Acts 4 and 5....
A convincing objective correlative for the sea-change can be found, however, in Hamlet's Act 4 "How all occasions" soliloquy from the Second Quarto--yet its textual authority is debated, and it is often omitted from performances. Rodney Bennett's 1980 BBC television production of Hamlet and Kenneth Branagh's 1996 feature film both include "How all occasions," framing it as a pivotal moment (Bennett) or even the grand, emotional climax of the film (Branagh), yet explicated Hamlets tend to be received poorly by academic critics, and Branagh's production inspired a particularly vitriolic reception. The question, thus, becomes whether we ultimately prefer Hamlet's cultural afterlife as unfathomable enigma to the Second Quarto Hamlet of Shakespeare: not whether the objective correlative can be found, but whether we want for it to be....

The second place price for the 2011 Undergraduate Research Paper Contest was awarded for this paper by David Lamble which examines Thomas Jefferson's beliefs about the importance of a woman's domestic role in American society by establishing a set...

The University Libraries have had another year of growth and change! This was also a year of transition as Jim Cogswell, director of libraries, retired in July after fourteen years of service, and I assumed the duties as interim director...