Since 1927, Bates College has offered an Honors Program to promote, develop, and recognize academic work of higher quality than ordinarily required for the baccalaureate degree. The honors thesis is the written component of the yearlong program completed during the senior year under the guidance of a faculty advisor.
Historically, the final copy of the honors thesis has been submitted in paper format and made available for research at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library. To promote greater access to senior theses by the Bates community and the world beyond Bates, the College introduces SCARAB, the College's institutional repository.
Paper copies of honors theses from 1927 through 2011 can be viewed in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library. To see the library catalog record for paper copies of theses deposited in the Archives, click HERE.
Theses from 2015
Developing Leadership Skills in Adolescent Girls, Caroline Anne Kern
Submissively Subversive: Mo Yan's Red Sorghum Clan and its Film Adaptation by Zhang Yimou, David FC Kohler
Peer and Self-Perceptions of Learning Differences, Megan Mariko Lapp
The Origins of American Unitarianism Reconsidered: Theophilus Lindsey, James Freeman, and the English Episcopal Reform Origins of American Unitarianism, Samuel Williams Learner
Walking on a Bridge You Also Built: Practitioners’ Experience Navigating the Borderland Between Western and Chinese Medicine, Rachel H. Levine
"Same Story Every Time / Being Black is Not a Crime": Gun Regulations and Recurrent Patterns of Government Control of Black Americans in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Joshua Kurzer Manson
Compulsory Licenses: Damaging Firm Value in the Short Run?, Daniel E. Mansuri Mr.
Les Mutations d’un lieu de mémoire. Le Vélodrome d’Hiver au cinéma : 1970 et 2010, Talia Rose Rees Mason
Vocal performance in the chipping sparrow: can a bird change his song?, Meredith C. Miles
Wastelands: Managing Trash and Humans on the US-Mexico Border, Gabriel Scott Nudel
Reflections in the Author's Eye: Optics, Involution, and Artifice in the Novels and Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Amelia J. Oliver
Petrogenesis and Paleostress Analysis of the Mesozoic Mill Brook Dike Zone in the Mount Dartmouth 7.5' Quadrangle, New Hampshire, Graham Grear Oxman
Nuancing Czech Secularism and Debunking Assumptions of Atheism: Finding Spirituality and Questioning Identity in a Culturally Christian Post-Communist Society, Molly Irene Pailet
Using Community Structure Networks to Model Heterogeneous Mixing in Epidemics, and a Potential Application to HIV in Washington, D.C., Katherine Ragland Paulson
The Lady is a Tramp: The Integration of the Appalachian Mountain Club Hut System as a Distillation of the Women’s Rights Movement, Grace Lillian Pezzella
The Third Dimension of Power within Education Based NGOs in Nicaragua, Emily Catherine Roseman
Going West: An Interdisciplinary Study of Marfa, Texas, Martha Schnee
UNDER THE COVERS: Deconstructing the Presentation of the Human Reproductive System in Secondary Biology Education, Alexandra M. Skaperdas
White Privilege: A Study of White Students' Racial Awareness at a Predominantly White, but Historically Inclusive Institution, Quincy Elizabeth Snellings
"Infinitesimal Progress": Rethinking Bergsonian Modalities of Time in William Faulkner's Novels, 1929-1932, Beau P. Sperry
“To my virginity!”: Queerness, Silencing, and Dominicanity in Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Nicholas Jason Steverson
What Role Did the Sassanid Empire Truly Play in the Fall of the Western Roman Empire? Exploring Divergences in Causal Frameworks, Nicholas Vladimir Strunc and Nicholas Vladimir Strunc
Decreased Attentional Abilities are Related to Dissociation in Undergraduates: An Exploratory Study of Dissociation, Cognition, Sleep and Mood, Hannah L. Weiss
Controlling Birth Control: Media Representations of Contraception in the 1960s, Anna Forest Whetzle
Evaluation of the ubiquitin-protein ligases UBE3A and DTX3L as mediators of EMCV 3C protease concentration, Joshua T. Zimmer
Theses from 2014
Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie, Kathryn A. Ailes
Neuromodulatory Effects of Delta Opioid Receptors on Accessory Olfactory Bulb Processing, Abigail Jane Alexander
An Investigation of Quantum Dynamics in a Three-Level Bose-Einstein Condensate System, Saad J. Ansari
Same Sex Relationships and the Right to Intimate Association: Developing an Alternative Constitutional Framework in Support of Gay Rights, Evan L. Binder
Scotland within Empire: the Quest for Independence with or without Union, Michaela E. Brady
Why Haiti?: A case study of human processes in a "natural" disaster, Lucy Louisa Brennan
Materiality and the Literary Letter, Alexandra McDowell Carley
The Anthropology of Think Tanks: Democracy Promotion in Egypt after the 2011 Uprisings, Sabina Erika Lee Frizell
A Study of Matter-Wave Diffraction in Bose-Einstein Condensates for Atom Interferometry Applications, Yang Guo
Assessing the Landscape: In Search of a Coherent Value Theory for Environmental Ethics, Alex J. Hamilton
Do Reentrant Processes Facilitate Feature Binding?, Mariya E. Manahova
The More the Merrier: Exploring the Efficacy of Foreign Supernatural Agents as Mechanisms of Compensatory Control, Mary Alice Millard
El poder de la emoción en una marcha sin fin: Un diálogo con los académicos, la prensa internacional y las palabras de las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Hannah A. Miller
Design and construction of multi-dimensional optical lattices for 87 Rb Bose-Einstein condensates, Edward Russell Moan
Critical Speed Analysis of Railcars and Wheelsets on Curved and Straight Track, Joanna Charlotte Moody
The Ainu Speak of Famine: How Oral Traditions Reflect and Inform Historical Analysis of Changing Food Practices and Trade Relations in Early Modern Period Hokkaido (1603-1868), Joanna Charlotte Moody
Legal Hybridity: Rule of Law under Authoritarianism, Aung Phone Myint
The Tropical Eigenvalue-Vector Problem from Algebraic, Graphical, and Computational Perspectives, Alex William Nowak
The Biopolitics of Marriage and Motherhood: Understanding the Transformative Role of White Middle-Class Women in the American Eugenics Movement 1900-1930, Emma Barrett Perkinson
The Reign of “King Henequen”: The Rise and Fall of Yucatán’s Export Crop from the Pre-Columbian Era through 1930, Nyle Lucien Rioux
How the Mind Refigures Memory: The Role of Social Construction and Fallibility in the Fictions of Faulkner, Woolf, and Nabokov, Rebecca H. Salzman-Fiske
Chilean University Students’ Understandings of Dating Violence: A Qualitative Study, Simone H. Schriger
Religion and the Postmodern in Contemporary North American Fiction, Alexandra T. Sentner
The Politics of the Gate: Byzantine City Walls and the Urban Negotiation of Imperial Authority, Samuel Aldred Slattery
Sex Scandals in Victorian Britain: Moral Codes and National Reputation in Crisis, Rachel Spence
"Another Landscape, Another Tongue:" The Queer Language of Silence in Virginia Woolf's Fiction, Sarah Streat
LiDAR as a Tool for Lineament Mapping and the Reevaluation of Bedrock and Glacial Geology: Examples from the Mount Moosilauke Region of the White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire, Joshua T. Sturtevant
The Education of ELL Students in Lewiston, Maine, Malia K G Taggart
Tribe (™): An Investigation of Ethnic Agency in Sebei, Uganda, Devin Tatro
Giant in the Hillside: Hip-hop and Copyright Law, Benjamin L. Vanasse
Control of Digital Information: Why Privacy Violations Reduce Our Freedom, Stephanie J. Wesson
Theses from 2013
Social Anxiety and Memory Conformity in Eyewitnesses, Alexandra Abry
Satire and the Necessity of Locale: Genealogical Readings in Max Beerbohm and Karl Kraus, Matthew Joseph Bettles
Regulatory Focus Theory and Reactions to Anti-Egalitarian Humor, Stephanie Boyle
Synthesis and Antioxidant Activity of Phenylpropanoid Glycoside Analogs, Jennifer C. Brown
Classical Music Education: a transcontinental comparative study of classical music for today’s youth, Jessica Diana Cooper
Thymic Morphology and Increased Apoptotic Rates in Juvenile and Adult Female Mice Following Exposure to Low Levels of Arsenic Early in Development, Isabelle Lane Curran
Meta-affective processing and its relationship to serotonin and BDNF systems, Lauren A. Demers
Towards Global Justice: Reconciling Rawlsian Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism in an Interconnected World, Kate L. Fetrow
How to Maintain One-Party Control: A Case Study of the Political Strategies Used by New Hampshire Republicans, Mikayla Clara Foster
Turkey's Gender Equality Puzzle: Navigating the difference between policy and practice, Nora M. Hanagan
From Modernization and Development to Neoliberal Democracy: A History of the Ford Foundation in Latin America 1959-2000, Jacquelyn Marie Holmes
Hamd and Naat: Muslim Women Singers in Pakistan, Amna Ilyas
Requiem Mass for Chamber Orchestra and Choir, Miles C. Isacke
Diversity and characterization of songs in the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort population of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) during their annual spring migration, 2011, Hansen Dalmasse Johnson
Dominant and subordinate male odors elicit different patterns of synaptic and intrinsic plasticity in accessory olfactory bulb mitral cells of female mice, Samantha Marie Landino
Peripheral Levels of Oxytocin and Affective Processing in Relation to Schizotypy, Laura Kolker Max
Protecting Life: A Metaphorical Analysis of the Pro-Life Abortion Movement and the Conservation Movement, Holly W. McLaughlin Ms.
Constructing The Prophet: Steve Jobs and the Messianic Myth of Apple, Scott Forsyth MIckey
Microfinance as Ambivalence: Kilimanjaro Women Experiences of Capitalist Development, Desmond Mushi
Statistical Methods of Wavelet Analysis with Applications to Ecological Time-Series, Daniel J. Peach
Getting Away With Murder: Why States Deny Past Atrocities, Cameron Ashleigh Sheldon
Fat Talk with Parents and Weight Bias in High School and Undergraduate Students, Stephanie Leigh Sprague
Jane Austen and the Art of Revision: Reading, Fiction, Feminism, Natalie R. Thompson
A comparative study of songbird serum effectiveness against the causative agent of Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, Carla Greer Tilchin
L’écriture comme mise en œuvre et mise en doute de la représentation dans L’Acacia de Claude Simon, María Daniela Velasco Molina
Theses from 2012
Two essays on the optimal control of infectious diseases: Examining discrepancies between discrete-time and continuous-time models, Arjada Bardhi
A Study of the Impact of Ditch-plug Alteration on the Hydrogeology of the Sprague River Marsh, Phippsburg, Maine, Colin H. Barry
Working Toward Pragmatic and Sustainable Exclusive Breastfeeding Practices Among Somali Mothers in Lewiston, Maine, Mariah Marilyn Clarke Barstow
Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, and the Birth of Psychological Man, Jeffrey Erik Berry
“In a newe plantation it is not knowen whether man or woman be more necessary”: Gender Relations in Seventeenth-Century Virginia, Caylin E. Carbonell
“This is a reckoning.” A Project in Directing Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Elizabeth Ann Castellano
World Bank-NGO Entanglements in Ecuador’s Intag Region: Engagements that Favor a World Bank Hegemony or NGO Agency?, Corey James Creedon
Japanese Manga and Modern Literary Heroism: Heroes of Action and Inaction in Japanese Comic Books, Brendan Steel Culliton
Determining P-T Paths of Metamorphism Based on Mineral Textures and Pseudosection Analysis in Small Point, Maine, Heather A. Doolittle
Child of the Black Atlantic: Negotiating Identities in Helene Cooper’s Memoir, Tasheana S. Dukuly
New Evidence of a Post-Laurentide Local Cirque Glacier on Mount Washington, New Hampshire, Ian T. Dulin, Brian K. Fowler, and Timothy L. Cook
Political Change through Narrative, Catherine Elliott
Perceptual Asymmetries and Lateralization in Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Kristen Jeanine Gavin
The College and the Community: Exploring the Impact of Service-Learning on the College Aspirations of Community Partners, Joanna L. Goldin
La dominicanidad desde la diáspora: Literatura e historiografía en La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao, Dhariana María González