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Browsing by Author "Yalen, Deborah, committee member"

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    Recurrence: a novel. Book one
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Shrayfer, Lilia, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Levy, E. J., advisor; Yalen, Deborah, committee member; Foskin, Kevin, committee member
    Inspired by the disappearances of over a dozen Soviet Jews during the refugee crisis between 1979-1989 in Italy, this novel aims to offer a speculative portal into the crises of identity that may have led to such tragedy. Spanning three generations of one Bukharan-Jewish family, from Stalin's purges of the 1930's, to Khruschev's Sovietization campaign, to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, to the above period of statelessness in Europe, the book explores this family's exile through the lens of Eva Kalandarova's gender and sexual identity. What is transmasculinity for transient lives? What does it mean for someone haunted by the sins of their father? In 1941, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was evacuated to Central Asia, where she and other Russian writers in exile sought to recreate literary life. It is in Central Asia that she wrote—and later burned—her only play of a writer condemned not only by the state, but by her peers. Her contemporaries at the time, such as Nadezhda Mandelstam, write that she saw the future of the Soviet Union. Inspired by her diary entries detailing typhus-induced hallucinations, the novel speculates on the possibility that Akhmatova's relationship with the landscape and its locals may be found in her work. Accordingly, the novel imagines parallel dreams and associations between the Bukharan Jewish families centered in this book and her writing. Similarly, the novel explores Ladispoli as a mirror to the historical anxieties and traumas of the Jews of Rome. I have aimed for a poets' novel; I have aimed for a historical fiction novel, a speculative novel, a trans-national Jewish novel that imagines new Jewish questions. I have aimed to situate my people amidst the Jewish literature that has too long overlooked them, for even in our silence, we have much to say.
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    Second mothers: fictive kinship and patriotic feminism in the Army Nurse Corps, 1917-1975.
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Franks, Cassie, author; Little, Ann, advisor; Yalen, Deborah, committee member; Conway, Thomas, committee member
    The Army Nurse Corps, founded in 1901, has been shaped over the last century by a hierarchy of age and experience among nurses in the ANC, many of whom served in a previous war, creating intergenerational links to women who served in later war. Through the work and action of women such as Col. Florence Blanchfield, who served as a Chief Nurse in WWI, then as the superintendent of the ANC from 1943-1947, Col. Althea Williams who served as an officer in WWII and Korea, then served as the Chief Nurse for the Army during the Vietnam War, and countless others, the ANC challenged the militaries treatment of sex differences and women's ability to serve. The relationships between higher and lower ranking ANC officers and the hierarchy and age between these groups of women shaped their experience, ideas, and the ANC itself. The work of these women, and countless others, illuminates the position of experienced nurses, their leadership, and how their rank and experience allowed them to not only teach the younger generation of nurses but created a sort of proto-feminist consciousness among Vietnam Era nurses. Many Chief Nurses, higher ranking officers, and experienced nurses, earned the nickname of "Ma," "Mama", or "Mother." These women helped to cultivate an environment that allowed women to serve under pressure, look to their superiors for assistance, and challenge the gender norms that permeated the 20th century military.
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    What it was like when I was alive
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Ziffer, Emily, author; Altschul, Andrew, advisor; Levy, EJ, committee member; Yalen, Deborah, committee member
    These stories are interested in the ways that language, cultural heritage, and physical location influence identity. Moving through different historical time periods and countries, the characters in these stories grapple with questions of self-definition: how much are we defined by our inherited cultures and values and how much are we defined by what we choose to love and claim as our own? In seeking these answers, the characters are forced to confront the tenuous landscape between who they want to be and who they are expected to be. While there is a sense of loss embedded in this kind of self-discovery, there is also the joy of learning how the world, if we let it, has the power to surprise us, and open us up to the possibilities of love.