Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, English (Arts and Sciences)

“‘An Odd Monster': Essays on 20th Century Literature” focuses on intersections of history, place, gender, race, and imperialism in twentieth-century modernist literature. Within these discussions I assert that western conceptualizations of history or the past work to erase the non-white bodies and cultures pivotal to imperial success, to subsume women into patriarchal subordination, and to present a historical progression antithetical to the experience of those relegated to subalternity. In discussions of Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, I argue that defiance to authoritarian containment—whether from within or without—often takes unlikely forms with seemingly feeble results. In analyses of characters who write back, talk back, rebel, do nothing, and/or commit small acts of violence, I contend throughout that insubordination to systemic oppressions for the purposes of prioritizing individual agency over moral triumph do not have to be “successful,” to be revolutionary. Utilizing foundational voices such as Sara Ahmed, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, among others, I argue that these acts are transcendent despite little to no substantial change emerging because the characters and writers themselves make and claim their own autonomy and belonging. This work participates in and urges for a continuation of the work of “New Modernist Studies,” which seeks a more expansive understanding of modernism through collapsing the rigid (often exclusionary) spatial and temporal boundaries.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation analyzes the construction of a pervasive social imaginary of unequal order in Central America between 1870 and 1900. This period was crucial in the region, which underwent a series of economic, political, and social reforms that would forever transform the natural and social landscapes of the isthmus. Although most of these structural changes have already been studied, it is still unclear how literary and cultural production intersected with the liberal elites' endeavors of social classification, economic modernization, and political institutionalization. This dissertation addresses that problem through theoretical elaborations on the social imaginary (Cornelius Castoriadis) and the distribution of the sensible (Jacques Ranciere). I specifically analyze three different types of cultural texts: household economy guides for girls and young women; cuadros costumbristas (sketches of manners); and sentimental novels and theater plays. Part 1 deals with the cultural measures that contributed to a symbolic and material division of public spaces and private spaces, both ruled by the rationale of capitalism. Chapters 1 through 3 study in detail the role of household economy manuals in the dissemination and implementation of the new capitalist logics of productivity, rationalization, and accumulation across the domestic or private spaces. Chapter 1 analyzes how these cultural texts created two opposing female archetypes: the "economic woman" or "productive housewife", figured as an agent of domestic modernization, and the "abject servant", a subaltern subject that would undergo a set of new domestic policies of surveillance, discipline, and exploitation. Chapter 2 addresses the role of the productive housewives in the implementation of new modes of regulation of time and desire within the urban households, while Chapter 3 covers the rearrangements in domestic spaces brought by the new concepts of comfort and hygiene. Part 2 deals with the simultaneous reo (open full item for complete abstract)

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation analyzes how contemporary African-American women writers transform the Euro-American Bildungsroman into a suitable vehicle to express the experiences and aspirations of Black girls. Writers such as Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gayl Jones, Sapphire, Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, and Jacqueline Woodson use African-American cultural references, young women's issues, and orature to create contemporary African-American female Bildungsromane that accurately depict Black girls' lives. In the process, these writers reveal how "race," gender, and class as they exist in a racist society have complicated the maturation process of Black adolescents. Chapters One through Three explore specific issues that are important to the lives of young Black girls, silencing and sexual violence, western standards of beauty, and integration into an unwelcoming "white space" during the Civil Rights Era. Chapter Four compares and contrasts the depictions of young Black girls in novels written specifically for a young adult audience with those written for an adult audience. Ultimately, this literary study illustrates how young Black girls as depicted in the novels struggle to develop healthy cultural and individual identities despite the presence of racism and sexism in their lives.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2009, English

This dissertation traces a distinctive form of literary citation in the late twentieth century and proposes that a number of important late twentieth century works reuse essentialist and possibly racist discourse to create more humane and ethical concepts of selfhood. The texts in this dissertation “play” with and critically engage with the notion of the “other” through intense allusion and citation of dominant literary and cultural narratives in order to resist the exclusionary, dominant ideology of American selfhood. My project focuses on four such novels – Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, Thomas King's Green Grass Running Water, Percival Everett's Erasure, and Robert Coover's The Public Burning – which redeploy narratives that represent ethnic minorities in racist and essentialist ways. For example, Maxine Hong Kingston builds her novel around the writings and performances of Walt Whitman, Sui Sin Far, Frank Chin, and the nineteenth century “Siamese Twins,” Chang and Eng Bunker. Alluding to Far's idealized Eurasian “one family,” Chin's authentic ethnic self, and the exotic “other” represented by the Bunker twins, Kingston critiques and reformulates essentialist discourse to produce an anti-racist subject. The chapter on Percival Everett's Erasure traces a similar critique of resistance as Everett draws on aspects of both sides of an historical African American dialectic between separatism and universalism. The third chapter considers the imperialist narratives that Thomas King uses to build his novel, Green Grass Running Water, and shows how his allusive storytelling reimagines the traditional form of the Western, linear story. Robert Coover in The Public Burning parodies the narrative of Manifest Destiny and the repression of dissent on the American's journey to the apotheosis of his self. This dissertation proves that one can ironically engage with the very discourse that might erase one as a “legible” subject in order to reformulate discourses of ex (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, English

This dissertation reveals how cognitive disability's formal and rhetorical potential developed in the U.S. from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, detailing the ways in which writers determined the reader's engagement with cognitive others. Scientific pathology inspired literary authors to experiment with narrative mechanics. Conversely, literature and popular nonfiction revealed to psychologists unrecognized features of cognitive identity as well as narrative's methodological and political potential. Cognitive disability, never fully assimilable, emerges as a force that can reorganize narrative events and aestheticize their telling. My work challenges theories of disability that prefigure difference as fixed or known in narrative. Great authors redefine disability as a force that is always coming to be known. I introduce a heuristic to help scholars understand this process, specifically how stories introduce tenuous ways of representing and narrating disability, put forth conflicting ontological claims about the mind, and withhold what can be known about disability at key moments. As readers struggle to pin down what exactly disability is, narrative places them in a space where they can reflect not only on the abilities of the disabled subject, but their own.

PHD, Kent State University, 2017, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This project comprises a digital edition of a selection of letters by American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), including all known letters written by the poet between 1889 and 1895, and hosted online by Colby College Libraries' Digital Collections. The edition is based on work started last century by Professor Wallace L. Anderson of Bridgewater State University, and left unfinished by him at his death in 1984. Professor Anderson collected a vast quantity of Robinson's letters from various repositories and private parties around the country. He transcribed them and provided annotations and textual notes for about three-quarters of them. For my project, I have edited, updated and corrected a substantial portion of Anderson's transcriptions, as well as completed fresh transcriptions of my own, checking them for accuracy against Robinson's holographs held at Harvard and the University of Virginia. I have formatted the new edition so as to more accurately represent the holographs, and have added my own textual notes and annotations to those of Anderson, along with an introductory critical essay detailing my methods and principles. It is of primary importance to me that these letters be accessible to both the scholarly community and the general public, with a view to maximizing their usefulness for literary and historical research. I have settled on digital publication as the best means to achieve this end because it will render the letters accessible to anyone with a computer and internet connection, free of charge. The project of publishing the remainder of Robinson's letters in this format is expected to continue beyond the dissertation.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1993, Graduate School

BA, Oberlin College, 2022, English

This thesis examines the intersections among gothic literature, empire, and contagion, and traces the emergence and evolution of a yet unexplored subgenre: the Imperial Gothic. Where early American Gothic narratives express anxieties about national stability and the republican subject, the Imperial Gothic explores anxieties that emerge when imperialism brings white Americans into contact with foreign commodities, environments, and bodies, ranging from foreign nationals, immigrants, and enslaved peoples, to Martians. It demonstrates how viral threats to the body correspond to the nationalist conception of foreign threats against the imagined white body politic. What emerges from this body of global and interplanetary literature is an “epidemiology of American imperialism.” While dark passageways, imprisoned heroines, and duplicitous patriarchal villains are staples of the classic Gothic genre, several additional tropes recur in the Imperial Gothic: trade and capitalism gone wrong, uncertain, or blurred identities, unknown deadly illnesses that spread through spatial contact zones, and the failure of both biological and national defense mechanisms. I explore these tropes through seven primary sources with publication dates ranging from 1799 to 2018. These works include: Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799), Herman Melville's Redburn (1849), Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), Katherine Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969), and Ling Ma's Severance (2018).

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2021, Philosophy

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz has yet to achieve her proper place in the early modern canon of philosophy. For the past century Sor Juana, the 17th century Mexican nun and scholar, has been examined through different lenses—literary, gender studies, and Latin American philosophy. In this thesis, I argue for the need to examine Sor Juana's works through the lens of philosophy of literature. In three chapters, I look at two of Sor Juana's works and how she used the genres of letter writing and poetry to advance her philosophical ideas about women and herself. The first is a poem known as Hombres Necios or Foolish Men, and the second is a letter known as La respuesta a Sor Filotea or The Reply to Sor Filotea. Poetry and letter writing were some of the only genres permitted to women at this time. Sor Juana took advantage of this restriction and exploited the natural attributes of these two genres so that her arguments were less vulnerable to censorship. The first chapter examines Hombres necios through a philosophy of poetry lens. In the poem, Sor Juana asserts that there are sexual double standards that women suffer; these double standards are placed on them by men. Many scholars like Octavio Paz, Frank Warnke, Alan Trueblood, Electa Arenal, and Amanda Powell examine Sor Juana's poetry through literary or feminist lenses. I add to their interpretations and contribute to the philosophical discussion the idea that Sor Juana's poem creates a space for her arguments. By using the structure of the redondilla, or “little round one”, Sor Juana emphasizes different words to create double meanings and give words to the anger that women feel. The poem allows men a slight reprieve of guilt, before they are confronted with her conclusion that all men are to blame. The second and third chapter focuses on the similarities that Sor Juana draws between her own persecution and self-defense to that of Socrates found in Plato's Apology. By comparing the two defenses, we see parallels betw (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

In the introduction of this project, my primary goal is to clarify how this work configures the Black Power Era. In the first chapter, I read events from Malcolm X's childhood as expressed in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) as metaphor used to reconstruct an environment in which Black death and anti-Black surveillance practices permeates the lives of Black Americans. In this chapter I contrast the rhetorical gestures X uses to those James Baldwin employs in The Fire Next Time in which he writes to his young nephew and recalls a visit with the Elijah Muhammad. Contrasting the two titles, I suggest that the rhetorical gestures of Malcolm X — centering Blackness and decentering whiteness in the interest of self-declaration constitute the prevailing rhetorical gestures of the Black Power Era while those rhetorical gestures used by Baldwin — centering whiteness and upholding rhetorics of colorblindness — constitute prevailing rhetorical gestures of the Civil Rights Movement. Overall, this chapter illustrates how the rhetorical gestures of Malcolm X capitalizes on the specters of Black death and anti-Black surveillance practices which become central themes in the Black Power Era. In the second chapter of this project I focus on Amiri Baraka's Dutchman (1964) to explain how Black death and anti-Black surveillance practices structure the play. In respect to the overarching claim of my project I use close reading to frame Baraka's essay “The Revolutionary Theatre” as a response to the forces of Black death and anti-Black surveillance practices and a guide for reading through the rhetorical gestures found in Dutchman. In the third chapter of this project I analyze one of Gil Scott-Heron's best known songs, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The analysis situates “Revolution” within the genus of Black Arts Movement works which employ Black nationalist rhetoric to protest the specters of Black death and anti-Black surveillance practices. Finally, in the conclusion of (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

Pathology and Pity traces the interdependence of medical and moral models of disability in American literature of the long nineteenth-century, from Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), to several short stories by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, to the promotional materials of stuttering school literature from the 1880s to the 1920s, to Herman Melville's Billy Budd, unpublished at the time of Melville's death but composed 1888-1891. The interdependence of these models shapes not just the way that disability is represented in the works examined, but also the way that disability functions in and shapes the narratives. Each chapter focuses on how medical and moral discourses related to a particular disability - blindness, madness, and stuttering - in contemporaneous philosophical, medical, journalistic, and promotional writings influenced the literary works examined. Throughout nineteenth-century America, the relationship between medical and moral models of disability produced a number of related discourses that tie into Foucault's concepts of disciplinary power and biopower: compulsory ablebodiedness; disability as an object of and barrier to sympathy; the push toward cure; the ability of diagnosis to reliably read pathological and moral defects; the connection between willpower, self-awareness, and ability; the benevolence of medicine; and the elevation of expertise. Some works of American nineteenth-century literature reinforce these discourses, others challenge them, and some exhibit a tension between the two positions. Disability functions as a narrative device to speak to national debates in American culture and to comment on the very nature of storytelling and reading. Tyler's novel uses the cure of blindness to reflect on the proper way of seeing America and telling the story of becoming a proper American citizen. Poe's stories incorporate anxieties about madness and psychiatric diagnosis to address concerns about criminal responsibility and the role of (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Comparative Studies

My project, Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11, interrogates the enduring notion of America as the promised land of freedom and social mobility in the narratives of Muslim immigrant women. Informed by the critical theories of minority discourse, U.S. borders studies, and postcolonial scholarship, I argue that autobiography and fiction by Muslim American women writers indicate an ideological flexibility, demonstrating a spectrum of discursive negotiations and stances that strategically claim secular, religious, modern, feminist, capitalist, transnational, and multiracial identities that altogether challenge the hegemonic and binary configurations of the figure of “the Muslim” and reformulate the terms of citizenship and belonging in the U.S. I read these strategies in three different writings: Selma Ekrem's autobiography Unveiled: The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl (1930), Mohja Kahf's novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), and Leila Halaby's novel Once in A Promised Land (2007). Collectively, these texts articulate and address anxieties about the presumed “incommensurability” of Muslim/Middle Eastern identity with the imaginary ideal of normative Anglo-American modern society, and they offer a unique ethnic, religious, and cross-racial perspective that challenges dominant U.S. conceptions of the minority difference and exclusion. My project contributes to the theorizing of transnational minority literature in a context that goes beyond the simplistic framework of minor to major anti-hegemonic discourse. While I discuss these texts as counternarratives to hegemonic articulations of citizenship and exclusionary discourses of American identity, I also focus on minor-to-minor sensibilities, paying attention to the ways in which literature offers a space for articulations of cross-ethnic alliances, solidarities, and tensions amongst immigrants and other (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

The Narrative Space of Childhood traces the representations of childhood in 21st century Anglophone Arab literature in the diaspora. Concerned with the contemporary moment, this study focuses exclusively on Anglophone Arab coming-of-age narratives published post 2000 including Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati, Alia Yunis's The Night Counter, Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men, Nathalie Abi-Ezzi's A Girl Made of Dust, Alicia Erian's Towelhead, and Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home. Anglophone Arab writers frequently place children at the center of their literary production, most notably in the midst of conflict-ridden zones besieged by threats of violence, daily terror, and political unrest. Child narrators in Anglophone Arab literature function as reluctant witnesses, innocent bystanders, and unwitting collaborators. In many cases, they become active participants, exercising agency, sometimes finding themselves culpable in the violence. Children frequently offer testimonials, inscribe the battlefield as a playground enacting multiple states of play, become collateral damage dispossessed of home and family, and serve as a repository for collective memory in terms of families, communities, cultures, and generations. Children's perspectives are limited in understanding the confluence of events unfolding within a conflict zone. Their naivety, however, is relatively short-lived. The child's vision provides a piercing, unflinching depiction of history from a vantage point that explodes conventional sentiment in favor of a more penetrating, debilitating, and raw vision of crisis. The figure of the child in 21st century Anglophone Arab diasporic literature interrogates, challenges, and resists facile tropes of sentimentality, nostalgia, and authenticity. Most evident in these works is the child's capacity to instruct, rehabilitate, and complicate adults' beliefs about gender, sexuality, masculinity, femininity, memory, trauma, and play. The post 9/11 Era as it relates to yo (open full item for complete abstract)

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2018, Arts and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation explores the works of contemporary Arab American women writers with a focus on language, identity, and community. I am especially interested in the ways in which the Arab American immigrant experience mirrors that of other ethnic American groups, as demonstrated in their literatures. First, I argue that Randa Jarrar's debut novel, A Map of Home (2008), which uses language—both Arabic and English—as a source of empowerment, reflects Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua's concept of the “new mestiza consciousness.” Comparing the Chinatown community in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993), to the Muslim community in Mohja Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), reveals the complicated relationships the novels' characters have with their communities. In both novels, the personal development of their young women protagonists is greatly influenced by their respective communities, which simultaneously serve as positive sites of support and complex sites of difficult negotiations. While the characters in A Map of Home and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf ultimately learn to effectively navigate their hybrid subject positions as both Arabs and Americans, the failure to do so leads to a tragic end for the couple at the center of Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land. Halaby's characters fail to recognize that the racial profiling they experience post-9/11 is symptomatic of the U.S.'s long history of violence against people of color. Once in a Promised Land serves as a cautionary tale, demonstrating that the idea of America as a “promised land,” especially for people of color, is false. I posit that placing the literature of Arab Americans in conversation with that of other ethnic American groups reveals the similarities of their experiences, ultimately promoting solidarity and creating the potential for coalition building.

Honors Theses, Ohio Dominican University, 2017, Honors Theses

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) is so famous that the title has become a part of our everyday speech and is often listed as one of the best American novels of all time. This, of course, is untrue of the six works of fiction that Heller wrote after Catch-22. This project explores Heller's six works following Catch-22, with a focus on his second novel, Something Happened. This project not only seeks to redeem Heller's works, discussing them independently of Catch-22 and discovering their individual value, but explains exactly why Heller's career failed; because he became immediately associated with comedy, and his works, no matter the genre, were advertised as such, his readers never felt as if they had read what they expected to read – and not in a positive, surprising way. After Something Happened, Heller tried to return to comedy, but his audience grew tired of the familiarity very quickly. Understanding why this happened to Heller could help improve the publishing world as a whole and save future authors from failing in the same way.

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, English

Black children have had to contend with myriad visual representations of their bodies in popular media, from photographs in newspapers of young black children marching for civil rights to cartoons in popular picture books of grotesquely caricatured black children killing themselves. For several centuries, authors and illustrators of African American children's literature have recognized the power of these images and have subsequently created their own picture books that establish black children as political agents deserving rights. With a particular interest in picture books authored by canonical African American writers, including Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Baldwin, this dissertation examines visual representations of black children in African American children's literature from 1836 to 2015. In order to investigate how images communicate belief systems, function in a different rhetorical framework than works created chiefly for adult audiences, and redefine previously constructed visual statements, this study is framed by a chronologically-ordered investigation of African American children's literature. I argue that picture books carry messages about the frailty or strength of the black child's body, ultimately affecting larger assumptions about black childhood and racial identity.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Spanish and Portuguese

Both Spain and Peru experienced protracted violent conflicts between insurgent groups and State forces during the second half of the twentieth century. In Spain, this involved Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), a radical Basque nationalist organization which sought Basque autonomy via armed struggle in a conflict which lasted from 1959 until 2011. In Peru, the insurgent threat was represented by Sendero Luminoso, a Maoist guerrilla insurgency based in the Peruvian highlands that sought drastic sociopolitical change within Peru. Sendero Luminoso launched what they deemed a people's war in 1980, and the bloody conflict that ensued continued until 1992. The damage caused by each of these conflicts was monumental, both in terms of the loss of human life and damage to infrastructure in both countries. In this dissertation I examine the depiction of these conflicts in a selection of Peruvian and Spanish novels and films. I argue that each work promotes a certain version of the conflict it describes, and that this can be revealed through an analysis of the humanizing and dehumanizing discourses at play in the representation of the actors in both of these conflicts. From Peru, I will examine Santiago Roncagliolo's novel Abril rojo (2006) and Fabrizio Aguilar's film Paloma de papel (2003). From Spain, I will analyze the novel Ojos que no ven (2010) by J.A. Gonzalez Sainz and the film Yoyes (2000) by Helena Taberna. In this work, I argue that these discourses of humanization and dehumanization affirm or deny, respectively, the humanity of subjects involved in these violent political conflicts. I assert that dehumanization is employed to legitimate systemic violence during a state of exception, while humanization serves to refute that legitimation by providing a more comprehensive image of the actors and their motivations. Furthermore, I signal the significance of the use of these discourses, as I consider these works to be part of a larger corpus from a number of disciplines that (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2009, Department of Languages

This thesis interprets Bernard Malamud's God's Grace (GG) as a parody of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man (CM). It contrasts the two works in terms of historical milieu, setting, genre, plot, structure, and characters. Furthermore, it delves into a comparative thematic analysis, exploring such topics as God, theodicy, the Fall, evolution, an anti-Christian polemic, misanthropy, confidence (faith), deception, isolation, madness, imagery of the bottle, time, apocalypse, Apocrypha, slavery, and optimism and pessimism. My main conclusion is that there is overwhelming evidence to support a Melvillean reading of GG. I contend that Malamud deliberately modeled GG on CM and that CM is the most important source in a literary analysis of Malamud's final novel published during his lifetime. Malamud used other sources to be sure, but his reliance on CM is so painstaking and all-encompassing that no Malamud scholar can gain a full understanding of GG without reading and studying CM in depth.

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2000, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation explores the fiction written by Jewish American authors from 1896-1930. Drawing on Werner Sollors' ideas on the invention of ethnicity, and the work of historians like Gerald Sorin and Moses Rischin, this work argues that Jewish American writers of fiction from the first decades of the twentieth century participated in a re-invention of Jewish ethnicity for modern America. Writers such as Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Sidney Nyburg, and Ludwig Lewisohn portray the discovery of new kinds of Jewish-ness for the modern world. All of these practices have their roots in one or another tradition within Judaism, but they would now serve as the central modes for a new Jewish ethnic identity. This literature helped define what being Jewish American meant at this period in history. Moreover, these re-inventions of Jewish ethnic identity have influenced all subsequent interpretations of American Jewishness to this day.