ScholarWorks

ScholarWorks is an open access repository for the capture of the intellectual work of Montana State University (MSU) in support of its teaching, research and service missions. MSU ScholarWorks is a central point of discovery for accessing, collecting, sharing, preserving, and distributing knowledge to the Montana State University community and the world.

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Scholarship & Research

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God and the state are watching: how renewed entanglement of church and state degrades women's reproductive rights (again)
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2026)
Christiaens, Hannah Elizabeth Blanch
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Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Doug Downs
Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the criminalization of pregnant women is on the rise, affecting not only those seeking abortion but all women navigating their reproductive rights. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, while framed in secular terms through originalism, has enabled a surge of religiously influenced legislation at the state level. This thesis examines the relationship between government and religion by revealing patterns between 17th-century colonial religious government and contemporary legislation following Dobbs. Through rhetorical analysis of foundational 17th-century texts and a historical examination of the colonial culture of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this project identifies parallels between the religious governing that predated the Establishment Clause and modern legislative moves to regulate reproductive rights. To understand these patterns, this study uses a theoretical framework referred to as the pastoral panopticon, combining the concepts of Michel Foucault's theories of the panopticon and pastorate to create an overarching tool for dissecting the mechanisms of religious surveillance in government and its effects. The analysis identifies that religiously motivated legislation persists regardless of the constitutional protection of the separation of church and state. By dissecting the motivation surrounding Dobbs and the resulting surge in state-level legislative developments, this thesis argues that Roe v. Wade functioned as an extension of the Establishment Clause, and its removal created space for renewed efforts of religious influence in government. In increasing religious influence, a recreation of the social control of the 1630's makes it possible for contemporary women to face the same religious scrutiny as their 17th-century counterparts, regardless of the centuries passed.
Landmark mountains: a vertical history of empire-building and nation-making in the American West
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2026)
Esparza, Joseph Everett-Jimenez
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Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Michael Reidy
Landmark Mountains is a vertical history of the United States that argues landmark mountains reveal how ideology, imagination, and the contradictions of settler colonialism coalesced in the making of empire and nation. These iconic and prominent mountains in the American West were contingent spaces, places to assert the ideology of continental republicanism, settler sites, and contested landscapes in the formation of the American republican empire and nation-state. American explorers and settlers from the Founding of the Republic (1763) to the post-frontier era (1898) imagined prominent western mountains as imperial prizes and as iconic symbols of national meaning and identity. Beginning with early republican ideology, continental presumptions were essential in bolstering the symbolic and imaginative use of both Western and vertical spaces in the service of an expansive republic. During the nineteenth century, explorers and settlers construed the iconic landmark mountains of the American West as both barriers to and symbols of a continental republican empire and, later, of national identity. At key moments in national history, landmark moments were geographical spaces to define again and again what the United States was, who the republic was for, and the role of the citizen in it.
Implementing a standardized nursing documentation note following positive Edinburgh postnatal depression scale screenings: a quality improvement project in a community hospital postpartum unit
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Nursing, 2026)
Dempsey, Laken Kole
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Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Stacy Stellflug; Anne Brown (co-chair)
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This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.
Postpartum depression is a common complication of childbirth that affects maternal well- being, infant development, and family functioning. Although routine screening using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale is widely implemented, gaps in documentation and communication following positive screening results may limit timely follow-up and continuity of care. At a community hospital postpartum unit in Montana, screening completion was consistently high; however, documentation of provider notification and follow-up actions after positive screens was fragmented across the electronic health record and difficult to verify. A quality improvement project was conducted to implement a standardized nursing documentation note to improve the consistency and visibility of documentation following positive screens. The intervention consisted of an electronic health record template embedded into routine nursing workflow, supported by staff education, tip sheets, and iterative Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles over a seven-week implementation period. Measures included education completion, use of the standardized documentation note following positive screens, and documentation of follow-up planning. Data were collected through retrospective weekly chart audits and analyzed using descriptive statistics. During the implementation period, 12 positive screening encounters were identified. The standardized documentation note was used in 8 of 12 encounters, and documentation of provider notification and follow-up actions was present in most cases, although sometimes recorded outside of the standardized note. Use of the standardized documentation note varied across weeks but was generally high when positive screens occurred. Implementation of a standardized documentation workflow was feasible within an inpatient postpartum setting and improved the organization and visibility of documentation related to follow-up care. Standardizing documentation processes may support safer discharge practices, improve continuity of care, and strengthen system-level responses to postpartum mental health needs.
Methane-cycling microbial communities across changing environments
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2026)
Christian, William Callow
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Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Roland Hatzenpichler
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This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is responsible for ~0.5 °C of global warming since pre-industrial times. The majority of methane emissions to the atmosphere come from microbes, and the impacts of changing climate on ecosystems also affect their methane-cycling microbial communities. This relationship between biology and climate forms a feedback loop, the nature of which is crucial to characterizing and contextualizing climate change impacts. This dissertation discovers novel pathways of methane production and examines methane cycling microbial communities from anthropogenically-impacted environments. We developed and performed various microbial ecology and microbiology techniques to characterize these microbial communities and the physiology of their members. These analyses were done in conjunction with the collection of environmental data and methane flux from methane-relevant environments, including thawing permafrosts, rivers, and saline lakes. Through this research, we demonstrate that methane cycling does not always conform to historic assumptions. We identified a novel pathway for aerobic methane synthesis that can be conferred to E. coli by the heterologous expression of a single gene. In melting permafrosts, the highest methane fluxes emanated from sites with small relative abundances of methanogens near the surface, suggesting that the highest methane emissions from the arctic are coming from deep permafrost thaw and encouraging caution when modeling methane flux from near-surface characteristics. In the Yellowstone River, dissolved methane concentrations imprecisely predict flux, a result that also has major implications for methane-emission modeling. Additionally, our results indicate that microbial community dynamics can impact methanogen physiology and prevalence more than environmental factors. A novel halophilic methanogen was discovered in high-methane fluxing soils and brought into culture. The methane yield and proteome from cultures of this methanogen were relatively unaffected by changes in salinity; however, co-culturing with a particular bacterium significantly altered protein expression patterns. In permafrosts, methanogen relative abundance was better predicted by the presence of syntrophic bacteria than by environmental conditions. Comprehensively, this dissertation highlights the impact of community dynamics on methanogen physiology and methane flux in changing environments.
Optical emission from nitrogen containing intermediates in high pressure nitromethane flames
(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2026)
Dean, Brahm Nickolas
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Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Robert A. Walker
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This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.
Liquid monopropellants are fuels capable of sustained combustion without a separate oxidizer, making them attractive for applications where oxygen is scarce, such as underwater or in space. However, these fuels require high pressures to combust reliably, making experimental measurements technically challenging. As a result, the chemical processes governing monopropellant combustion at elevated pressures remain poorly understood, and existing computational models describing these processes lack experimental validation under realistic operating conditions. This dissertation presents spectroscopic measurements of nitromethane flames burning at elevated pressures under both air-independent and air-supported conditions. Experiments were conducted using a custom-built high-pressure combustion assembly capable of sustaining stable flames at pressures relevant to propulsion applications. Optical emission spectroscopy, a technique that measures the light emitted by a flame to identify the chemical species present, was used to spatially resolve individual intermediates in the flame under both atmospheric conditions. Measurements revealed the presence of three nitrogen-containing intermediates, CNꞏ, NHꞏ, and NH 2ꞏ, that have not been previously reported in significant quantities in high-pressure nitromethane combustion and are largely absent from existing computational kinetic models. All three species were detected in air-independent flames and in the decomposition region of air- supported flames, but were suppressed in regions where oxygen was available, consistent with known oxidation chemistry. Temperature measurements extracted from the spectroscopic data provided additional characterization of the flame environment. These experimental observations were found to be in qualitative agreement with new kinetic modeling simulations performed by collaborators, lending further support to the observed trends. These findings provide the first spatially resolved experimental measurements of nitrogen-containing intermediates in high-pressure nitromethane combustion and establish critical benchmarks for the validation and refinement of computational combustion models. The experimental platform demonstrated here is broadly applicable to other liquid propellant fuels, offering a path toward more comprehensive experimental characterization of monopropellant combustion chemistry under application-relevant conditions.