Read it Now!
We welcome you to this eighth volume of the Muhlenberg Academic Review! The MAR board is honored and delighted to present this journal to you as a product of the Gamma Iota chapter of the Sigma Tau Delta intercollegiate English honor society. This journal would not have been possible without the help of a wide array of people deserving of recogni tion: Editors-in-Chief Emma McKinley, Amy Swartz, and Dan Gullick, senior editors Anna Item & Alexandra Downey, Layout Editors/Webmasters Emily Nally, Molly Herron, and Arwen Lutwyche, and our intern and Managing Editor Gabi Levinger-Louie. Our sincerest gratitude is also with the student contributors to this journal: everyone who submitted a piece, our contributing editors who vetted every piece sent to us, and our copy editors who edited every piece featured in this journal. We also want to thank our faculty advisor Linda Miller for all of her support and hard work, all of which we are extremely grateful for.
This year, we were incredibly fortunate to have received essays from a vast array of disciplines. Included in this journal, you will find essays situated within disciplines including philosophy, sociology, mathematics, psychology, and more. Each essay selected went through multiple rounds of editing, beginning with our contributing editors providing feedback on all submissions. Based on their feedback along with our own readings of the pieces, we were able to select our ten essays for publication. After essays were selected, our copy editors worked closely with the writers to polish up the essays for publication. We see each of these essays as portraying the interdisciplinary nature of Muhlenberg’s curriculum while emphasizing the strengths of writing across the curriculum.
These essays were carefully chosen not only for their incredible prose, but for their broad scope of unique topics and fresh perspectives. In this collection, you will find thoughtful rhetoric on queerness in the American South, the ethicality of neuroscience as a means for qualifying legal insanity, a consideration of nationalism through a feminist-lens, and a research project combining both math and history to analyze unequal window placements on a historic Italian building. All of these pieces—and their equally commendable counterparts included in this edition—demonstrate the creativity and intelligence happening all across Muhlenberg’s campus. We commend these writers for their outstanding work, and thank them for being willing to share it with us.
Thank you for your support of this journal and your support of everyone who worked extremely hard to create this. We hope you enjoy this year’s volume of the Muhlenberg Academic Review.
Cheers,
Dan Gullick, Emma McKinley & Amy Swartz
Co-Editors-in-Chief of the Muhlenberg Academic Review