Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

Committee Chair

Nicole Tracy-Ventura

Committee Co-Chair

Cynthia Chalupa

Committee Member

Cynthia Chalupa

Committee Member

Sandra Stjepanovic

Abstract

This thesis sought to explore the representation of Muslims in US-American

Press. In order to do this, the Time Magazine Corpus was used to observe words that collocate with the word “Muslim” in Time Magazine. The frequency of the word “Muslim” was observed for each decade and coded to determine the semantic prosody of each token. The 1960s-2006 were observed in order to provide a more comprehensive view of Muslim representation in Western media and how this representation has changed over time. The majority of collocations were considered to be neutral, however, a large number of collocations were considered to be negative and very few were considered to be positive. The majority of collocations were related to conflict and ethnic, national, or racial identity. Negative collocations rose in the 1980s and again in the 2000s reflecting a rise in Islamophobia and a separation of the “Muslim World” from “the West,” especially in the 2000s.

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