Undergraduate Research Symposium 2024

In this presentation I will examine and attempt to answer the question: do the kinds of fantasies we pursue or indulge—especially in genres like video games, movies and pornography—have an effect on our moral character? To begin, I distinguish between fantasization and imagination. Next, I discuss data from recent studies in psychology, several normative ethical theories, and whether or not fantasies have any moral implications. I finally argue that our fantasies do indicate something very real, and very important, about our moral character.

Many scholars in the last thirty years have investigated British empire expansion during the Victorian era using postcolonial approaches to Victorian literature. In an examination of hybridity manifesting in the colonizing force rather than the colonized, Sebastian LeCourt has located British Latter-day Saints in this expansion narrative by citing their eclecticism, hybridity, and openness to cultural fusion as necessities to their endurance as agents of British expansion. My project utilizes devotional poetry written by John Lyon, a Scottish convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to explore how the theologized emigration narrative endemic to Victorian Mormonism––and Lyon’s poetry––is an expression of the Mormon positioning in the narrative of British colonial expansion. By doing so, I explore Lyon’s redefinition of “nation” along with his melding of devotion and emigration to demonstrate and expand LeCourt’s analysis of Latter-day Saints in the story of a growing British empire.

Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in Clermont-Ferrand is a striking 13th-century cathedral that has received limited art historical attention. My research, funded by a BYU HUM grant and mentored by Dr. Elliott Wise, explores the four keystones in the cathedral’s choir, which are carved with seven enigmatic heads just above the wreath of leaves that crowns each vault.

My findings demonstrate that these keystone carvings—even though some are nearly invisible from the floor below—play a key role in the cathedral’s architectural agenda to showcase political connections and advertise local prestige. My research sheds new light on these enigmatic carvings while deepening our understanding of keystone faces across France and the cathedral’s artistic and historical significance.

Research in Utah has shown that numerous speech patterns are characteristic to the region. For example, word pairs like cord and card (Bowie 2003), feel and fill, or fail and fell (Baker & Bowie 2010) might be pronounced alike.

In this study, nine participants (six men, three women) from the Uintah Basin read 200 words to see if these (and other) speech patterns and unique features appeared. The findings suggest that many features commonly associated with Utah English are more prevalent in rural areas like the Uintah Basin than in more urban areas. This supports the idea that rural Utah may be more resistant to change and hold onto older speech patterns. These insights help create a more accurate understanding of the distribution of linguistic features across Utah, highlighting the importance of including rural areas in dialect studies.

The publication of Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing has occasioned a remarkable upsurge of interest in what Fricker calls testimonial injustice, which according to Fricker occurs whenever a victim is wronged in her capacity as a giver of knowledge. While Fricker’s preoccupation with the ethical dimensions of testimony is mirrored to an unmistakable degree in the writings of Jacques Derrida, this fact has gone unrecognized by Fricker herself, and has yet to be addressed in the substantial body of secondary literature that has been produced by commentators on Fricker’s work. I seek to fill this gap in the literature by putting Derrida in dialogue with Fricker on the subject of testimonial injustice.

In an attempt to view how diseases were contemplated and treated during the Brazilian colonial period, my research examines literary and historical accounts as well as medical literature contemporary to that era, dating as early as the sixteenth century until the proclamation of the Republic in 1889. The confluence and extensive interaction of indigenous American, African, and European peoples and traditions that occurred in the Portuguese colony made Brazil an exceptional historiographic case of intercultural assimilation of traditional knowledge. This research looks through the lens of colonial texts to consider the interplay and development of the distinct medical traditions among these three groups.