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Light is seldom addressed in archaeological research, despite the fact that, at least in ancient Egypt, it would have impacted upon all aspects of life. When discussing light in Egyptology, the vast majority of scholarly attention is placed on the sun, the primary source of illumination. In comparison, artificial light receives very little attention, primarily due to a lack of archaeological evidence for lighting equipment prior to the 7th century BC. However, 19th and 20th century lychnological studies have exaggerated this point by placing an overwhelming emphasis on decorated lamps from the Greco-Roman Period. In an attempt to move beyond these antiquarian roots, recent scholarship has turned towards examining the role that light, both natural and artificial, played in aspects of ancient societies’ architecture, ideology and religion. The extensive body of archaeological, textual and iconographic evidence that remains from ancient Egypt is well suited to this type of study and forms three core data sets in this thesis. Combining a materials-based examination of artificial light with a contextualized, theoretical analysis contributes to a richer understanding of ancient Egyptian culture from the 3rd to 1st millennium BC. The first three chapters of this study establish a typology of known artificial lighting equipment, as well as a lexicon of lighting terminology. A comparison of the archaeological and textual evidence allows for a discussion on the consumption of lighting in ancient Egypt and its impact on social and economic spheres. From this material it becomes apparent that artificial light was a luxury and this corresponds to its inclusion in religious texts and iconography, as well as the presence of lighting implements in tombs of the wealthy elite. The second half of the thesis examines the ritual application of artificial light, incorporating iconographic and textual evidence, consideration of ritual space and timing, and experimental archaeology. This interdisciplinary approach allows for a discussion of the sensory experience of artificial lighting and its perceived potency in ancient Egypt. It also demonstrates the contribution that Egyptology can make to lychnological and sensory studies of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean by examining the impact of light on phenomenology and aesthetics.

The relationship between the Bible and literature is long-standing and has received increasing attention in recent years. This project investigates the interface between the Bible and literature by focusing on the genre of “parable”. The influence of the Bible on Western literature is considerable, and yet in the case of George MacDonald’s writing it is often overlooked. The “parabolic” is a helpful way to focus our discussion as it is an important genre both in Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and more subtly in MacDonald’s fantasy and fairytale writing. It is remarkable that approximately a third of Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God comes in the form of parabolic speech. Rather than serving as a nice illustrative story to a theological point made elsewhere, the actual form of parabolic speech is crucial for the message it seeks to convey. Form and content work together in Jesus’ parables in a unique way to break open the reality depicted in parable. This thesis attempts to investigate a specifically biblical view of “parable” for understanding certain aspects of MacDonald’s fantasy literature. MacDonald developed a decidedly theological understanding of story as having the capacity to refresh the revelatory nature of Scripture. It is by the imagination that a poet is able to find new forms to recast and recover old and forgotten truths. By designating the poet as a finder rather than a maker, MacDonald resists Coleridge’s idealist inclinations to elevate the poet to a creator. His employment of story and more particularly the “parabolic” is then not only an aesthetic but also a theological choice. MacDonald’s last fantasy romance, Lilith, will serve as our test case to demonstrate this. Considering the “parabolic” in Lilith sheds significant light on the meaning of Lilith and offers up a decisive answer to the important question of whether MacDonald moves in his fantasy and fairytales from a decidedly Christian perspective to a more polyvalent view of reality. This argument shall be further substantiated by bringing to the light the important influence of Novalis on Lilith.

Using Visible/Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day/Night Band (DNB) data, a method, dubbed the “variance method”, is developed for retrieving nighttime aerosol optical thickness (AOT) values based on the dispersion of radiance values above an artificial light source. An improvement of a previous algorithm, this updated method derives a semi-quantitative indicator of nighttime AOT using artificial light sources. Nighttime AOT retrievals from the newly developed method are inter-compared with an interpolated value from late afternoon and early morning ground observations from four AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) sites as well as column-integrated  from one High Spectral Resolution LiDAR (HSRL) site at Huntsville, AL during the NASA Studies of Emissions and Atmospheric Composition, Clouds and Climate Coupling by Regional Surveys (SEAC4RS) campaign, providing full diel coverage. This method does not account for lunar reflectance from either the surface or the aerosol layer. Sensitivity tests do no indicate large systematic or random errors associated with lunar illumination. VIIRS AOT retrievals yield a coefficient of determination (r^2) of 0.60 and a root-mean-squared-error (RMSE) of 0.18 when compared against straddling daytime-averaged AERONET AOT values. Preliminary results suggest that artificial light sources can be used for estimating regional and global nighttime aerosol distributions in the future.

This dissertation explores nighttime in Ancient Rome. Although several monographs on the history of night have appeared in the last two decades, no one has focused on antiquity. Through the examination of literary sources from the second century BCE to late antiquity from histories, biographies, plays, novels, laws, art, archaeology, and theological treatises, this dissertation examines how Romans experienced and thought about night. Chapters one and two argue that night intensified emotions. The first chapter examines how Romans constructed the nocturnal soundscape. The change from day to night altered the meaning of some sounds. Other sounds induced more anger, fear, excitement, and even divine transcendence than they did during the day. The second chapter explores a reoccurring complaint Romans made about nighttime: it imprisoned them. The chapter charts how nocturnal boredom divided Romans: virtuous from reproachable, literate from illiterate, laborer from leisured. Nocturnal boredom led to creativity for some and trouble for others. Chapters three and four explore how night separated people by status and identity. The third chapter considers the slave experience at night. Sketching the problems night posed to masters, I argue that slaveholders were more concerned about where their slaves were than keeping them busy. Because masters desired to keep their human property accessible at all hours, many slaves spent their nights inactively confined. The fourth chapter examines how beds marked Roman identity. Where one slept separated the civilized from uncivilized, the rich from the poor, and the manly from the effeminate.

"Reflection" is an experiment with what I call"symbolic architecture" i.e. design where the features of the building have a profound meaning or a strong recall to some familiar aspect in our lives. It is a meditation center designed to rejuvenate visitors by providing an ideal environment to practice and teach meditation. The design is inspired by concepts of Hindu philosophy and each element of the building, the light, the materials, the water and the structure is likened to an element of the spiritual being that helps a meditator achieve a connection between the body and the soul.

Louisiana-born pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) lived the majority of the first twelve years of his life in New Orleans, immersed in diverse musics and cultures from both Europe and Africa. As a result, he would come to embody a confluence of these two continents’ traditions. The extent to which West- and Central-African musics and cultures influenced Gottschalk has not previously been studied in depth. As a result of the slave trade, Africans from the Mande, Kongolese, and Dahomean cultural regions were present in New Orleans during Gottschalk’s childhood. These cultures would all contribute to the musical environment of New Orleans, and consequently inform Gottschalk’s musical life. Not only did Gottschalk quote African-derived melodies in his compositions, but he also utilized African-derived rhythms and their variants, as well as rhythmic structures that parallel those common to West and Central Africa. Furthermore, the ways in which Gottschalk learned and performed music parallel those commonly found in West and Central Africa. The presence of African-derived elements in Gottschalk’s earliest compositions shows that he had already absorbed them into his musical vocabulary during his childhood. As his later works demonstrate, Gottschalk continued to draw upon both European and African musical concepts. Gottschalk’s ability to blend both African and European elements into his compositions facilitated his popularity in Europe where people found him to be “exotic,” as well as in the Caribbean and Latin America where similar hybrid musics were already commonplace. In addition, some of Gottschalk’s compositions foreshadow later developments in American musics that grew from African-American culture. Because of the opportunities his childhood presented, and his ingenuity in blending the diverse musical ideas and concepts he encountered, Louis Moreau Gottschalk became the first “American” musician and composer of international renown and can reasonably be considered the beginning of an “American” musical identity.

Why is sleep, a moment that is physiologically full and mentally boundless, thought to be a moment of absence and powerlessness? Where did this devalued notion of sleep come from and how can we situate sleep studies within a continuation of a historical processes and economic infuences? In other words, how does sleep effect and exist within systems of power? To answer these questions I turn to a range of scholarship and theoretical studies to examine the complexities and dynamics at work within the cultural discources on sleep. By creating a genealogy of sleep I am able to track the way notions of sleep have changed and evolved over time. I develope a theoretical framework to examine how the Enlightenment effected notions of sleep by strengthening a cultural disposition for logical, rational and phonomenological modes of knowledge. I find that the advent of modernity is signified by the moment in which sleep, darkness and unkowing become negative while being awake, light and knowledge become positive. To understand how sleep (and sleep studies) operates in contemporary situations I examine them within the economy of time in which clock time is conflated with money. Here I also visit the way sleep functions in relation to work in a neo-Taylorist management era. I offer an account of sleep's connections to passivity in the within patriarchal systems of thought. I determine that the cultural politics of sleep and sleep disorders point to a rift in the Western Self because of a presumed simultaneity of thinking, acting and being. I have engaged in a range of disciplines and use theory, historical studies, textual analysis , and autoethnography as methodologies to outline some of the major cultural discussions that surround sleep.

This dissertation investigates representations of African Americans in the work of urban realist artist Reginald Marsh from 1928 through 1938, a period when popular conceptions of urban culture were being reshaped by an increasingly perceptible black presence in prominent American cities like New York. Through critical readings, I establish the ways in which Marsh's complex, contradictory representations of blacks acted as substantive cultural and visual markers---manifestations of concerns about the urban presence of African Americans. As Marsh negotiated public perception, popular imagery, and his own experience of observing those who comprised the city of New York he created a pictorial vocabulary engaged with mainstream culture's attempts to determine America's new urban and ethnic landscape. The central focus of this project is its historically specific investigation of how and to what extent blackness signified in social science journals, popular sources, and publications by African-American writers during this period. It also reveals how the artist adopted various strategies that functioned within contemporary discourse about blackness. I demonstrate that Marsh's imagery constructs a means for deciphering New York's shifting urban culture through the presentation of public, racialized space. The black figures that appear on the subway, at Coney Island, Harlem or the Bowery in Marsh's paintings correlate to the period's discourses on urban space, social order and ways to negotiate the presence of African Americans in the city. Marsh employed pictorial methods of representing blackness in order to express the vibrant city as a transgressive site, a place that provides the opportunity to subvert established norms, while concurrently acknowledging the boundaries of the country's greater racial order. In addition I argue that Marsh's reputation as an urban realist who was both participant in and observer of the city's working-class amusements granted him the authority to exploit a range of representational techniques, from caricature to old master drawing styles to politically charged visual tropes, to interpret the black urban presence. Aesthetic decisions such as the arrangement of figures and the use of unnaturalistic physical characteristics operate both to distinguish black racial identity and contain its cultural residue.

This dissertation formulates a poetics inherent in Novalis's theoretical works, investigates the respect in which the major motifs of the Hymns articulate and are articulated by this poetics, and reads them against this background. By examining key passages of several recent important secondary works, the lack of close readings of the Hymns as enactment of their own theory, or the inaccuracy of those that do, is addressed. It finds (1) that it is possible to reconcile the Hymns thematic heterogeneity with the Fichtean dynamic throughout; and (2) that reading Novalis's poetics in terms of his biography, and his biography in terms of his poetics, is crucial to this reconciliation. Chapter 1 takes an historical look at the philosophical foundations of Novalis's poetics in order to provide a heuristic. It demonstrates how Novalis assimilates Kantian and Fichtean terms into a poetic program that transcends conventional aesthetics. The strophic arrangement of Gehoben ist der Stein reflects this transcendence; the Hymns' inversion of the Medieval topos of inexpressibility articulates it. Chapter 2 shows how metaphor in the Hymns presupposes hovering between the subject and the object of consciousness, rather than identity with the reflexive subject. Metaphor thus frees itself from fixed referentiality and becomes a means of perception. In Hymn one, alternation in narrative perspective enacts this, as does oscillation of terms of metaphor. Chapter 3 analyses the motif of self-transformation in the Hymns. It explains how the Hymns enact a resolution of the aporia of reflexive self-consciousness through their pursuit of consciousness back to its origin and their initiation of new consciousness out of this origin, as thematized in Hymn 5 and in the relation between light and consciousness in Hymn 1. This chapter also explains how Novalis's resolution to die after Sophie von Kuhn involves imparting the same dynamic to his mourning over her. He traces his own consciousness back to its origin (night vision) and enacts new consciousness out of it, thus transforming it. Hymn 3 enacts and thematizes the threshold between consciousness and pre-consciousness; Hymn 6 deals with the origin of consciousness in connection with time.

This study explores the newspaper fiction published in the United States from 1890 to 1930, years in which many of the conventions of modern journalism developed. I trace the story patterns that run through the novels and short stories: the portrayal of journalism as a school in a cemetery, the saga of the crusading journalist, and the romance of country journalism. Moreover, I place the story patterns within their historical contexts. My methodology combines historical research into the period 1890-1930 and literary exegesis of representative works of newspaper fiction. Where possible, I have also sketched the journalistic backgrounds of the various authors. It is my contention that newspaper fiction, which was largely written by one-time journalists, represents a secret history of journalism. Within its pages can be found the fantasies and fears that once filled the working days of newspapermen. In my Introduction, I explain why newspaper fiction emerged as a distinct literary genre in the nineties. I also examine the literary fashions of the years under study, discuss the widespread belief that journalism was a steppingstone to literature, and review the previous scholarship on newspaper fiction. The next three chapters each deal with a separate story pattern in the fiction. Every chapter opens with a general description of a story pattern, moves to a discussion of the forces that encouraged the growth of the pattern, and then turns to analyses of novels and short stories that illustrate the pattern. There is a section for Conclusions in which I suggest that the public derived at least part of its image of the press from newspaper fiction, and that aspiring young journalists modeled themselves to an extent on their fictional predecessors. Anecdotal evidence indicates that would-be journalists, in the absence of journalism textbooks and schools of journalism, resorted to newspaper fiction to prepare for their chosen career. The initiates may have shod themselves in the fictional newspaperman's shiniest dreams and coffined themselves in his darkest nightmares.

Hospitalization, a significant environmental alteration, is hypothesized to produce first night effect (FNE), a transient phase shift in the timing of sleep-wake in a 24-hour context. The extent to which this effects circadian rhythms and subsequent cognitive performance is unknown. This quasi-experimental, interrupted time series study examined the circadian nature of FNE, vigilance, and short-term memory (STM). Sleep-wake activity and core body temperature were monitored for 96 hours in home and hospital settings in eleven healthy females (22-41 years). Vigilance and STM performance were assessed at six intervals. Two-tailed paired samples tests revealed that, in the hospital, subjects went to bed later, woke up earlier, and experienced a shorter nocturnal sleep period with less nocturnal sleep (p $\le$.05). Times of low nocturnal temperatures occurred significantly later in the sleep period (by 54 minutes) and peak diurnal temperatures occurred later (by approximately 7 hours) in the waking period (p $\le$.05). Vigilance and memory scores revealed greater vigilance at home $(t=2.424,$ p =.036), and improved memory performance in the hospital $(t={-}2.796,$ p =.019). In healthy women, environmental alteration did not evoke heightened vigilance; it provoked a significant transient phase shift in core body temperature curves and timing of sleep-wake extending beyond 24 hours. It is concluded that FNE is a circadian phenomenon and suggested that these effects may be intensified among vulnerable patient populations.