B-hydroxybutyrate Favorably Alters Muscle Cell Survival and Mitochondrial Bioenergetics

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Brian Parker and Faculty Mentor: Benjamin Bikman-PDBIO Introduction The growing worldwide incidence of obesity and its associated pathologies, like type 2 diabetes, has received much deserved attention. However, despite this attention and substantial research efforts, little meaningful progress has been made in slowing or reversing the growing cost and trends of obesity worldwide. As of […]

Antiochus IV and the Origin of Jewish Martyrdom Literature

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Allen Kendall and Faculty Mentor: Stephen Bay, Comparative Arts and Letters The study of ancient martyrdom literature has typically revolved around early Christian literature. Many scholars view the concept of martyrdom as a Christian construct, which borrowed only minimally from earlier literary traditions.1This assumption exists largely because Christian writers first used the term “martyr”—originally a […]

Exploration of Creative Nonfiction Writing in Reykjavik

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Rachel Dalrymple and Faculty Mentor: Joohn Bennion, English Department The purpose of this project was to increase my understanding of nonfiction writing by collaborating with prominent nonfiction writers at the NonfictioNow conference in Reykjavik in June 2017. Following the conference, I created a portfolio of nonfiction essays. Selections of these essays were submitted to BYU’s […]

How Teachers Grade Native and Non-Native Writing: Exposing Biases and Grading Discrepancies

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Jenna Snyder and Faculty Mentor: Dr. Grant Eckstein, Linguistics and English Language With Dr. Grant Eckstein leading our research team, we gathered TESOL writing teachers together to start our data collection. Using an eye-tracker, we monitored the different grading tendencies of 10 different writing teachers. Using this data, we made important observations and applications to […]

“Light Athletics” Socio-Economic Dissonance in Post-Revolution Ukraine

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John Ballif and Faculty Mentor: Daniel Barney, Art Education INTRODUCTION: In the wake of Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution in 2014, Ukraine has struggled to reconcile its deep-rooted sense of tradition with increasingly westernized aims. After deposing authoritarian president, Viktor Yanokovich, the Ukrainian people now experience a cultural identity crisis paralleled only by the aftermath of the […]

A Look at Peruvian Theater: A Translation of and Reflection on No hay isla feliz

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Rachel Draut and Faculty Mentor: Marlene Esplin, Comparative Arts and Letters No hay isla feliz (1954) is a significant part of Sebastián Salazar Bondy’s repertoire and a valuable work of Latin American literature that deserves to be known to the English-speaking world. The play’s author was one of most influential Peruvian authors of his time […]

Poets of Resistance: Restoring Life to the Student Writings of the Intermountain Indian School

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Terence Wride and Faculty Mentor: Michael Taylor, English Department In hopes of permanently removing them from their Indigenous cultures and communities, from 1950 to 1984, thousands of Navajo and other American Indian children were sent to Brigham City, Utah to attend the Intermountain Indian School, the largest of nineteen postwar federal Indian boarding schools that […]

English as a Second Language Speakers’ Ability to Replicate Native Speaker Speech Forms When Engaged in Imitative Interaction

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Ariana Avila and Dr. Mark Tanner, Linguistics and English Language Department Introduction: The purpose of this study was to gather acoustic data aimed at empirically assessing the degree to which non-native English speakers can approximate the linguistic features of native speech when engaged in imitative interaction. The focus of my study was to investigate the […]