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 2007
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
Beautiful Reckonings: Thought, Pain, and Complexity in John Keats’s Letters and Poetry, Erin Rhoda
Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, Erin Rhoda
Position tracking and motion prediction using Fuzzy Logic, Patrick Rodjito
Hydrogeologic investigation of the Serpentine Bog, Belgrade Lakes Watershed, Maine, Christopher J. Russoniello
Of Catholics and Politics in China: an Evaluation of the Political Agency of the Chinese Catholic Church, Sarah J. Schleck
Infinite Jest’s Spectacular Resistance: Subversion and Hope in a Pluralizing Entertainment Culture, Samuel Stark
Role of home equity in retirement saving: building your nest (egg), Caroline Theoharides
Politics and Poetry: The Evolution of Adrienne Rich, Eleanor Thermansen
Catalyzing Change: Towards Accelarated and Expanded U.S.-EU-Russian Action to Reduce the Threat of Nuclear Terrorism, Jessica C. Varnum
Characterization of the Wheat Grain PKABA1-Interacting Protein TaWD40, Natalie Wayne
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Liz Wyckoff
Synthesis of 2-oxo-16-(3', 4'-methylenedioxyphenyl)-trans-15-hexadecene, Adelajda Zorba
Honors Theses from 2005
The Use and Characterization of Rivers in Modern Literature, Jessica Beetz
Role of private owners in the conservation of exotic species, Jessica L. Beetz
Mysticizing Philosophy, Megan Celeste Burd
The Transboundary Implications of Wolf Reintroduction and Recovery in Maine, Brendan J. Carroll
The Synthesis of Biomimetic Tungsten and Molybdenum Complexes, John Sterling Cole III
United Methodism in New England: A historical, organizational, and spiritual study, Benjamin Davis
Guest-host chemistry of p-sulfonatocalix[6]arene and nizatidine, Galia Debelouchina
Speechless, Caitlin Dennehy
Extension of national membership: government promises, immigrant expectations and the impact on the foreign population in Germany, Justin Dubois
Synthesis and characterization of di- and tri-oxacalix[4]arenes, Michael Feldman
Sew and Tell: Making Rebozos, Stories and Thinking about Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo, Melissa Hernandez
Liberalization of village banking in Guatemala: structural differences in village banking institutions, Erica L. Hill
Finding Family Trees: Barbara Kingsolver’s Creation of An Ecological Community, Melissa Hinkle
Governmental resistance in international intellectual property rights, Emily Honig
How Unpleasant It is to be Locked Out' Gender, Value and The Canon, A Reception Study of Three Modernist Women Writers, Elizabeth Johnson
On Messalonskee Lake, Michael King
Quite Off the Beaten Track: The Emergency of Sentimental Travel Writing and Its Influence on Anglo-American Society, Daniel Lynch
The Extraordinary Ordinary West: Humanity and Realism in McMurty’s Old West Narratives, Ann MacDonald
So I Guess You Know What I’m Thinking: A Collection of Short Stories, Mary Medlin
Analytical tools for studying phosphorus and nitrogen lake nutrient dynamics and their application to the field, Ivan Mihajlov
Beyond the Ordinary: The Consoling Power of Fantasy Literature in War, Todd Moore
Timing is Everything, Gillian Nadel
Synthetic approaches to rigid "rod-and-panel" macrocycles, Timothy Newhouse
Maternal and Cultural Influences on Individual Identity: The Novels of Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, Rebecca Nisetich