Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, History

This dissertation interrogates the experiences of Chinese immigrant and Chinese American women and families during the era of Chinese exclusion. The enforcement of anti-Chinese immigration laws, starting in the late 19th century, initiated the creation of the U.S. as a “gatekeeping nation-state.” Scholars have examined the boundaries formed by exclusion of Asians and Asian Americans from the social and physical spaces of U.S. society. In this work, an intersectional analysis of Chinese immigrant and Chinese American women and families complicates existing narratives of U.S. immigration, race, and gender. By focusing on women's experiences as boundary-crossers who challenged community prescriptions and anti-Chinese policies, this work shifts the historiography away from male, working-class immigrants. In its broadest arguments, this dissertation 1) constructs a social history of Chinese America using the experiences of transnational students, interracial families, and Chinese American women who were expatriated via marriage and then re-claimed their U.S. citizenship; 2) argues that these women's gendered negotiation of state power changed the ways in which white immigration officials perceived them, a ground-level foreshadowing of post-World War II raced and gendered immigration dynamics; 3) challenges the normative idea of Chinese America as coastal, urban Chinatown space and co-ethnic community; and 4) re-maps Chinese America through regional mobility and networks, focusing on understudied areas of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. A focus on the histories of everyday people resulted in exceptional stories of women. They not only crossed the physical borders of the U.S., but also engaged in interracial marriage, used their student status to challenge Orientalist perceptions of Chinese women, and claimed legitimacy as U.S. citizens. Employing historical, feminist, and anthropological methodologies, this analysis draws on archival case files from the Chinese (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Advisor); Kevin Boyle (Committee Member); Lilia Fernández (Committee Member); Katherine Marino (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Asian American Studies; History; Womens Studies

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

Focused on alternate universes where you can get your car taxidermied, where you can be reincarnated as your neighbor's golden retriever, and where you have conversations with loved ones you've meant to all your life (but couldn't), In This Universe is a collection of branching what-ifs and cosmic could've-beens, a multiverse-jumping selection of short speculative personal essays, lyrical essays, and braided essays that challenges genre conventions and questions the idea of whether a single universe even exists that can accommodate multiple ways of being. Though it deals with many different subject matters, there is always the presence of an alternate universes working as a sort of metaphor for future-thinking and alternate ways of being. Written with the intention of providing a space for folks who don't see themselves as valid in this world, or who can't imagine possibilities for themselves in this world, In This Universe looks to reimagine embodiment and to reshape spaces and ways of being, so that we might discover for ourselves far grander, perhaps far stranger, and mostly hidden possible realities.

Committee: Daisy Hernández (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Jody Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

Withering is a collection of seven stories rooted in an exploration of humanity's relationship with the natural world and with itself. Spanning geographies and time periods, these stories are connected in their primary impulse to reconsider passivity in the face of environmental degradation. Other prominent themes in the collection are dynamic social identities and the performative quality of those identities. The stories that comprise Withering are situated primarily in the eco-fabulist tradition, with other inspirations found in the New Weird movement and horror, as well as traditional realism. By blending genre, Withering seeks to decenter readers' understanding of reality. The uneasy and shifting reality through related but distinct genres serves to underscore themes of calamity and worlds that have been broken and reassembled in new ways. Withering challenges popular notions of crisis, environmental and otherwise, as being a purely distinct event, having a clear “before” and “after;” rather, my thesis considers crisis a degenerative process, much in the way a plant slowly withers away over time, leaf after leaf shriveling up and falling.

Committee: Joseph Bates (Committee Chair); Daisy Hernandez (Committee Member); Margaret Luongo (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2021, American Culture Studies

Ethnic Studies (ES) is the study of history, practices, and contributions of people of color and their descendants. Ethnic Studies has emerged as an academic discipline resulting from social activist groups of the late 1950s, and, subsequent student activism of the 1960s. In ways that were planned and improvised, Black scholar activists along with the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) fashioned the need for the development of curricula that provided an alternative to the traditional Eurocentric focus in many academic fields. An inquiry into the origin of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) qualifies in general some African Americans' responses to education in the U.S. and specifically at the first school to have ES in the state of Ohio. Alliances between activist student groups and individuals of diverse backgrounds led to the formation and development of a new academic discipline, Ethnic Studies at BGSU beginning in May 1970. The development of Ethnic Studies programming and curricula at BGSU emerged from a coalition of student activists advocating for Black Studies. BGSU's department is among the oldest in the nation focusing on interdisciplinary studies of race. African Americans organizing and sustaining Ethnic Studies at BGSU brought academic and artistic value and distinction to them and to the institution.

Committee: Angela Nelson PhD (Advisor); Michael Brooks PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American History; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Comparative Studies

Ryumonji Zen Monastery and Clouds in Water Zen Center both belong to the same Soto Zen lineage founded by the Japanese priest Dainin Katagiri and are both located in the same geographical region, the American Midwest. Yet, in only twenty-five years, Soto Zen in these two institutions shows subtle but significant differences. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation focuses on the processes of teaching and learning to analyze Zen Buddhism at Ryumonji and Clouds in terms of how they have transformed over the years, correlating their transformations to how they transform their practitioners. Furthermore, it argues for the need to study how Zen Buddhism transforms its practitioner in a holistic way, considering the practitioner as an indivisible body and mind in the world. To this end, I develop a psychophysical approach that analyzes how Zen Buddhism transforms its practitioner's physical and mental modes of engaging the world. The psychophysical analysis shows that Ryumonji develops psychophysical skills in its practitioners through the ritualization of physical postures and gestures while Clouds develops them through the ritualization of psychological postures and gestures. As a result, practitioners at Ryumonji and Clouds develop different modes of attending to and understanding the world—what I call psychophysical skills. In addition, Ryumonji and Clouds have different conceptions of social engagement and their practitioners apply the psychophysical skills they develop through Zen Buddhism in social engagement in different ways. This dissertation analyzes these differences between Ryumonji and Clouds within the contexts of their rural and urban locations, the biographies of their founders and teachers, and their institutional histories, situating the local and particular contexts within the larger contexts of the development of Soto Zen in the United States and the cultural landscape of the United States. It brings careful ethnograp (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Isaac Weiner (Advisor); Thomas Kasulis (Advisor); Melissa Curley (Committee Member); Katherine Borland (Committee Member) Subjects: Philosophy; Religion; Religious History

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

The creative component of my dissertation is a novel called Take A Picture which tells the story of sixty-seven year old Jack Hoskins, a childless widower and the owner of the last independent funeral home in the fictional town of Dove Point, Indiana. As a large corporation encroaches on Mr. Hoskins' business, he finds himself questioning the efficacy of his profession and searching for a different way to serve his community. His decision to begin photographing the dead has enormous repercussions for both his business and his personal life. Take A Picture , like all of my fiction, operates in the realistic tradition and has been inspired by the works of authors from Herman Melville to Richard Ford. The critical component of my dissertation is an essay titled “Unfathomable Me: The Privileged View of Nature in Melville's Moby-Dick.” My essay argues that Ishmael seeks an unimpeded, unmediated experience of the natural world, and this occurs most notably in the chapter, “The Grand Armada.” In this chapter, Ishmael looks down into the ocean depths and witnesses a pod of whales mating and nursing their young. At this moment, human beings become decentralized in the natural world, and Ishmael is able to see the whales as “subject” and not “object.” Much of nineteenth-century American literature—most notably the works of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman—deals with this desire for first-hand knowledge of the natural world as well as an intense concern with recognizing oneself as a member of the larger human community.

Committee: Brock Clarke (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American

PHD, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

The Midwest home front is one of the overlooked frontiers in American Civil War scholarship. Historians have focused on the war-torn Confederate states, New England, and the dramatic border states, while largely ignoring the experiences of Midwesterners. Outside of studies of the Copperhead peace movement, many other significant aspects of the war experience in the Midwest have failed to garner sufficient scholarly attention. This dissertation addresses this gap in the historiography by examining the war years at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Indiana University. As the only three viable state universities in the Midwest prior to the war, these institutions offer a valuable lens through which to investigate how students understood and shaped their relationship with the nation's conflict. Students at these three universities experienced the war in different ways, each affected by their surrounding political environment, enrollment struggles at their schools, and the ideological perspectives of their professors. University of Michigan students crafted a justification for remaining in school that defined their educations as equally patriotic as serving in the Union military. University of Wisconsin leaders forced students there to adjust to the admission of women during the war. Indiana's students rebelled against a repressive faculty edict passed down early in the war and launched an uprising that mimicked the South's complaints and demands. This clash of wills lasted more than two years and caused the dismissal of several students. At each university, students who remained in school pushed their liberties to the edge during the Civil War, but almost all backed off rather than risk losing their educational opportunities. Woven together in thematic chapters, this study reveals the turbulent nature of the home front in the Midwest. Students at these state universities actively engaged with the war intellectually to enhance their educatio (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Leonne Hudson (Committee Chair); Lesley Gordon (Committee Member); J. Matthew Gallman (Committee Member); Patrick Coy (Committee Member); Yoshinobu Hakutani (Committee Member) Subjects: History