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OpenBU is Boston University’s digital institutional repository for scholarly articles, theses and dissertations, preprints, and grey literature. This repository enables BU researchers to share, disseminate, and preserve their scholarship, and makes their research more accessible
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Recent Submissions

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The visionary decade: new voices in art in 1940s Boston
(Boston, Mass.: Boston University Art Gallery in cooperation with Boston Public Library, Print Dept., 2002) Hitchings, Sinclair; Mayer, Stephanie
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Surrounded by Water: Expressions of Freedom and Isolation in Contemporary Cuban Art
(Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 2008) Remba, Natania
The art from the period represented in this exhibition has recovered and renewed the cosmopolitan traditions characteristic of the most advanced Cuban intelligentsia, and with a sense of its own prestige has firmly claimed a place on the international scene. The reaffirmation of outstanding aesthetic qualities, at the generational and individual level, is a process inseparable from the history, the politics, and the social and cultural upheavals in whose midst these artists worked. This turmoil is reflected, from different points of view, in the works selected for the exhibition. For example, among them are allusions to the frequent, risky, and illegal emigration of rafters from Cuba to the United States, and comments on the insularity, understood as a state of geographical isolation-with cultural resonance and as an existential, solitary condition of individuals.
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Provincetown prospects: the work of Hans Hofmann and his students
(Boston, Mass.: Boston University Art Gallery, 1993) McInnes, Mary Drach
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Choosing obligation: values and practice in a liberal observant Jewish community
(2024) Ash, Ellie; Ammerman, Nancy
This dissertation explores how American Jews who are both deeply engaged with rabbinic tradition and committed to liberal ideals relate to different forms of cultural and religious authority. It is based on participant observation, interviews, and an ethnographic survey that I conducted in a socially liberal, traditionally observant Jewish congregation called Minyan Kol Rinah. Members of this congregation took for granted many of the assumptions of contemporary cultural liberalism, expressed especially in progressive social values and a humanistic ethos. Against this background, they engaged self-consciously with the rabbinic discursive tradition. Most chose to obligate themselves to Jewish law (halakha), which they encountered not as fixed custom but as a dynamic, contested jurisprudential system. I argue that despite its traditionalism, Minyan Kol Rinah's religious culture is part of a broader phenomenon of religious liberalism in the United States. Minyan Kol Rinah was a partnership minyan, a 21st century innovation which allows more participation in public worship by women than conventional Orthodox synagogues. Minyan Kol Rinah bridged the Orthodox and non-Orthodox communities, and should be considered part of a “liberal observant” Jewish religious network that crosses denominational boundaries. This study uncovers the complex ways Jewish law functions in lived observant practice. It explores congregants’ pragmatic negotiations with a complex variety of sources of authority, including texts, public rabbinic conversations, rabbinic advisors, social models, and internalized moral commitments. I argue that liberal observant Jews typically experience Jewish law as a reified “external authority” which is partly independent of the rulings of contemporary rabbis. Kol Rinah participants were both social and theological liberals. Humanism, that is, the ethos that prioritizes worldly human welfare and autonomy, was a common thread of their social and theological liberalism. In religious cosmology, humanism appeared in the way participants insisted on respect for individual choices, conceived of ethics and social justice as the essence of religion, and approached Jewish scripture and symbols from a historicist, relatively disenchanted perspective. Congregants engaged deeply with rabbinic tradition through liberal frameworks, showing that “liberal” and “traditional” are not opposites. This study contributes an analysis of how different forms of authority, including religious law, work in practice in the lives of laypeople. It also shows the analytic importance of considering different modes of cultural authority, such as the difference between codified teachings and taken for granted “common sense.” Doing so helps us understand the complex ways people draw on and combine multiple sources of authority as they construct their religious lives.
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Terra firma?: earth watch, earth sense, earth sites
(Boston, MA: Boston University Art Gallery, 1989) Ranalli, Daniel
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Celestial Images: Astronomical Charts from 1500 to 1900
(Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1985)
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Syncopated rhythms: 20th-century African American art from the George and Joyce Wein collection
(Boston: Boston University Art Gallery; Seattle: Distributed by University of Washington Press, 2005) Hills, Patricia; Renn, Melissa
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Power and paper: Margaret Bourke-White, modernity, and the documentary mode
(Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1998) Stomberg, John; Bourke-White, Margaret
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A theater of recollection: painting and prints by John Walker
(Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1997) Stomberg, John; Walker, John
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Ground- and satellite-based observations of column nitrogen dioxide: instrument performance, column-to-surface relationships, and the role of meteorology in coastal urban environments
(2024) Adams, Taylor Jonathan; Geddes, Jeffrey A.
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is a criteria air pollutant that is deleterious to human health and the environment, but characterizing its distribution is challenging. This challenge arises from its abundant and heterogeneous sources, short lifetime, and the limited spatial extent of surface monitoring networks. In lieu of comprehensive surface monitoring, space-based retrievals of NO2 abundance may address gaps in our understanding of its spatiotemporal variability. Space-based observations of NO2, however, have coarse-resolution sensors, requiring well-constrained inputs, and until recently have only collected one observation per day (at most), limiting their utility for characterizing diurnal variability or intra-urban heterogeneity. Throughout this dissertation, I constrain the precision of ground- and space-based remote sensing instruments dedicated to retrieving NO2 abundance, as well as explaining the spatiotemporal variability of NO2 to provide new insights relevant to urban air quality. Chapter 1 of this dissertation explains the motivation for this dissertation in more detail. In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, I quantify previously unexamined aspects of the diurnal precision of ground-based spectroscopic column NO2 observations using a high spatiotemporal resolution model of the 2013 DISCOVER-AQ campaign domain around the Houston, TX area. Pandora is a ground-based instrument commonly used to observe NO2 columns in the atmosphere. Networks of these instruments are distributed throughout the world, and their precision and accuracy make the instrument favorable for observing the spatiotemporal variability of NO2 and validating satellite instrument NO2 observations. Pandora-derived NO2 observations are often considered implicitly precise relative to satellite observations, thus motivating this evaluation. With this model I developed an instrument viewing “operator” to simulate the Pandora instrument’s operation. This operator creates synthetic direct-sun (DS) differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) columns which, when compared with modeled overhead columns, reveal that urban heterogeneity results in late-day (4-6 pm, LT) observations being less precise than previously estimated. In Chapter 3 of this dissertation (Adams et al., 2023) long-term collocated surface and column NO2 observations at Boston University were used to understand drivers of total column NO2 variability in a coastal urban setting. I found that variations in column and surface NO2 abundance were governed by different processes. The temporal variability of NO2 column density was highly dependent upon meteorology, while concentrations of NO2 at the surface were more dependent upon surface emissions patterns and boundary layer entrainment. I found that the apparent equal mixing height of NO2 plumes within the boundary layer were not sensitive to prevailing meteorology or boundary layer stability. Additionally, I found that the sea breeze fostered uniquely large temporal variations in column NO2. I demonstrated that sea breeze conditions challenge the ability of satellite-derived column NO2 observations to accurately characterize day-to-day variation. In Chapter 4 of this dissertation, I use long-term measurements of Pandora-derived total column NO2 at Boston University, Blue Hill Observatory (Milton, MA) and Harvard University. This long-term record confirmed that variation in temporal gradients in column NO2 observed in chapter 3 correspond to spatial gradients. Differences in column NO2 between sites as a function of time of day allowed us to infer the scale and formation of spatial column NO2 gradients. Finally, I evaluated to what extent satellite-derived column NO2 retrievals are capable of interpreting emissions differences across time and space. Generally, the TROPOMI satellite instrument overpasses struggled to characterize changes in column NO2 gradients across the Boston and Harvard University measurement locations between 2020 and 2021 relative to Pandora. However, TROPOMI resolved differences in the distributions of NO2 across urban-suburban scales that were not as obvious in the Pandora measurements. My results suggest that this difference in strengths at various scales is a result of the Pandora’s sensitivity to near-field emissions perturbations, in contrast with TROPOMI’s satellite footprint method which averages across larger-scales. Chapter 5 of this dissertation summarizes the conclusions from Chapters 2, 3, and 4 and provides suggestions for future investigators.