The Honors Thesis is a research project for which eligible students apply during their junior year and complete in their senior year. Colby departments and programs that have an honors program establish the requirements for the project and its final format. Each student, upon completion of the thesis, has the opportunity to publish their project in Digital Commons so that it may be made available to the Colby community and to the world at large.
Honors Theses from 2008
Moral Philosophy in 20th Century Legal Dramas, Emily M. Parker
Phosphorus Primer for Maine’s lakes, Lindsay B. Philips
Inhibition of cellular thioredoxin reductase by the anticancer prodrug cloretazine, Tyler R. Schleicher
Stock Markets and Household Wealth: Can a Stock Market Crash Cause a Recession in The U.S. Economy?, Ishan Singh
Representations of Grief in Akhmatova’s Requiem and Pushkin’s the Bronze Horseman, Hillary R. Smith
An Incumbent's Guide to Reelection: The States and Economic Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections, Kyle Smith
Stranger in a Strange Land: The struggle for cultural and personal identity in Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Laura E. Smith
"System of Silence": Philadelphia Orphanages and the Limits of Benevolence, 1780s-1830s, Brian Sweeney
Poisonous Books and Corrupting Influences: Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, Jessie C. Tang
Demographic Differences in Household Expenditure for Low-Income Families: Evidence from the United States, Joerose Tharakan
Advocating at the margins: women’s NGOs in China, Ling U
Interactions of Electrons and Rydberg Atoms in Ultra-Cold Plasmas, Cristian Vesa
Effects of context of natural and artifactual objects on categorization, Linsey Walker
Cytotoxicity of Diepoxybutane and Epichlorohydrin in Relation to Stages of the Cell Cycle, Megan L. Watts
Diode Lasers for use in experiments on cold Rydberg Atoms, Bill Whitledge
Using Variable Stomatal Sensitivity to CO₂ in Relict Conifers to Reconstruct Ancient Atmospheres and Predict Future Implications of Climate Change, Kerry A. Whittaker
Riley’s Story, Juliana N. Wilson
Honors Theses from 2007
Can the business cycle be used to create predictable mutual fund outperformance?, Michael Aquino
Where did all these books come from? The Publishing Industry and American Intellectual Life, Maro N. Asadoorian
Agent of Change: Trickster in Ojibwa Oral Narratives and in the Works of Louise Erdrich, Patrick B. Benton
Towards the Synthesis of Biomimetic Tungsten Complexes, Eric Paul Bergh
Antarctica – Poems by Jessica Bernhard, Jessica Bernhard
Biogeochemical model for the eutrophication of East Pond, Maine, Bernadette Bibber
Carry the Fire or the Sunset Limited: Determinism and the Illusion of Free Will in the Works of Cormac McCarthy, Peter Carty
Home: A Collection of Short Stories, Allison E. Cole
Rawls and Health Care, Elizabeth H. Coogan
Gauguin : Generating Art Using Genetic Algorithms & User Input Naturally, Thomas E. Cook
“Nothing that is so, is so”: Indeterminate Language in Shakespeare, Matthew K. Crane
The Destablilization of Gender & Religious Identity in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Megan Deeley
Geographic distribution of genetic Variation in the Rare Orchid Isotria medeoloides , Emily Devlin
Divergent effect of social cohesion on economic growth in East Asia and Latin America, Horacio Diaz Adda
Messy Love: Collection of Short Stories, Mindy Favreau
What Changes a Person – A Collection of Short Stories, Mindy Favreau
Apple and The Tree: Shakespeare’s Use of Father-child Relationships in Character Construction, Elizabeth Finn
Photojournalistic Manipulations of Reality: The Power Over Knowledge, Valerie Friedman
Women Making Progress?: a Study of Wide Sargasso Sea as a Response to Jane Eyre, Kaitlin M. Gangl
Was Austen a Pro-Feminist? Education In Austen’s Novels, Anna Gillespie
Concomitant polymorphism in 1,2-bis(9-anthryl)acetylene, Rebecca Goldstein
Complex Adaptive Systems Approach for Investigating Genetic Epistasis, Thomas A. Goth
Anhedonia and depression: Anticipatory, Consummatory, and Recall Deficits, Kaitlin Hanley
Cold and Silver – A Novella, Kyle Haskett
Demon Rum, Devious Politics: the Lessons of Neal Dow’s Crusade for the Maine Prohibition Law, Andrew J. Herrmann
Developing a Tool to Assess Human Health Impacts of Purchasing, Kaitlin C. Himmelmann
Religion and Renunciation in Wordsworth: the Progression of Natural Individualism to Christian Stoicism, Geoffrey L. Meldahl
Fun World – Pilot' A Television Screenplay, Drew Moreland
Quantitative PCR reveals preferential nuclear DNA alkylation by epichlorohydrin in the chicken genome, Adam Newman
Intramolecular Chemistry of ß-acetoxyethylidene and Photochemical Generation of Vinylidenes, Jennifer M. Nguyen
Optimizations for hardware-software partitioning using WalkSAT, Andreea Olea
Detailed Mechanistic and Optimization of the Photochemical Production Method of Superoxide, Ta-Chung Ong
POV-IT: the POV-Ray Interactive Tutorial, Eleanor O'Rourke
The Politics of the Spoken Word in African American Poetry and the Vernacular Tradition, Charlie Patton
Too Many Bad Cooks Spoiling the Broth? Effectiveness of NGOs in Addressing Child Labour in El Salvador, Ivica Petríková
Short History of Waterville, Maine, Stephen Plocher
In Any Weather : a Collection of Short Stories, Stephen J. Plocher
World Bank -CPA conflict: the Struggle to Define Human Rights and Development in the Philippines, Adam B. Robbins
Collective Moral Responsibility, Allyson Rudolph
Museo de la memoria: an exploration through memory of ESMA, Cornelia Sage
Hearing Arnold in a new space : building a transformational-theory patrimony, Whitney Simmonds
Saturday Night Random, Elizabeth Stovall
Obstacles and Stepping Stones to the Hero’s Pedestal: Reunified Germany’s Selective Commemoration of Resisters to National Socialism, Suzanne J. Swartz
Immunological effects of written disclosure in athletes, Kristen Thatcher
Voices of the Poor: Poverty and Growth in Albania, Magda Tsaneva
An Epistolary Heritage: An Examination of the Influence of Clarissa, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Julie on Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, Delwyn Webster
Two essays in the Indiana family cap provision, Aimee Williams
Confronting Convention: Ideologies of Gender & Marriage in the Works of Edith Wharton, Naomi Wilson
External Control of Electron Temperature in Ultra-cold Plasmas, Roy O. Wilson
Dialectics of Diaspora Space: a Study of Contemporary, Diasporic, South Asian Fiction, Christopher A. Zajchowski
Honors Theses from 2006
Awakenings: A Collection of Short Fiction and Memoir, Emily Allen
League of their own: the competition for Jewish-American identity in the novels of Philip Roth, Rebeccah Amendola
John Coltrane: Jazz Improvisation, Performance, and Transcription, Garry J. Bertholf
The Virtues of Impurity: Exploring Repulsion in the Works of Samuel Beckett, Marissa Chin
Northern Door, Emilie Coulson
Determining the Hydrologic Seasons and Creating a Numerical Model of the Belgrade Lakes Watershed, Katherine E. Curtis
Carrying Emptiness: the Ecology and Zen Buddhism of Gary Snyder’s Poetry, Erica Dorpalen
Some Big Tragedy, Travis Downs
Non-adherence: a Symptom of the Current Health Care Model, Margaret Duggan
Exploring Opportunity in America: Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Rags to Riches Success, Anna Erdheim
Investigating the mechanisms of a novel ribosomal RNA degradation system, Daniel Fowler
Vector Theory of Spontaneous Lorentz Violation, Shu Hong Fung
Modernist Success in a Postmodern Failure: Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism, the Avant-Garde and the Ascension of Late Capitalism, Art after 1945, Russell Gullette
A Computational Study of the Reactivity Differences of Two Carbonyl Dianions, Sylvia Haller
Resistance of forest community types to structural and compositional change following beech bark disease infestation, Sarah Ann Hoskinson
Altering finite Markov chains to more accurately model forest succession, Malcolm Itter
Land, Consciousness and Continuance: The Poetry of Simon J. Ortiz and Joy Harjo, Ashley Jones-Pierce
Modeling spatially explicit human-wildlife conflict: GIS and moose-vehicle collisions in Maine, Alexandra Jospe
Patterns of dorm energy use and potential opportunities for dorm energy conservation at Colby College, Sarah Kelly
Assisted living: The politics of Medicaid and Medicare, Sarah Lim
The Tastes of a Nation: M.F.K. fisher and the Genre of Culinary Literature, Melina Markos
A Journey Through Memory and Self in the Works of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez, Kara McCabe
The travel imagination and the hybrid reality in the wake of colonialism, James McLaughlin
Media Coverage and Disaster Relief: Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words?, Jessica H. Minty
Environmental awareness of Waterville Junior High School students, Jenna Morrison
Creating a code snippet wiki repository, Nicholas Kinyua Mwai
The Case of Raging Bull: Homophobia and the Masculine Cinema of Martin Scorsese, Michael O’Brien
A broad-spectrum mer operon in a multi-drug resistant strain of the fish pathogen, Aeromonas salmonicida, Erin Parry