PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2013, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Educational Studies

This study is about how the ideology of African inferiority was embedded into the culture of colonial America. The focus is on early Virginia law because it was initially used as the primary mechanism to begrudge the image of Africans in the American colonies. Virginia law synthesized and transported the ideology of African or black inferiority generated decades earlier in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England before race theory. Depraving the African image through law in colonial Virginia represents the continuousness of an ideology which began in the fifteenth century. While an abundance of research exists about the imposition of slave law as a primary apparatus of control over the African population, there are a dearth of studies about the relationship between ideology and law in the context of African subjugation. The central thesis of this study is that Virginia law promoted the ideology of African (black) inferiority and European (white) superiority into the cultural fabric of the colonies. According to Johan Galtung, when the dominant ideology is incorporated into the cultural sphere of a society it becomes a system of “cultural violence.” Winthrop Jordan’s seminal study, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, has been invaluable for documenting attitudes and ideas in Europe and colonial America about their professed superiority over Africans. Yet, detailing European attitudes is a step toward establishing ideology as a stable structure of oppression. Connecting the ideology of African inferiority which undergirded Virginia law with the pre-colonial ideology propagated by Europeans is imperative to establish the continuity of these ideas as the basis of a system of “cultural violence.” Conceptualizing the propagation of European ideology as a system of “cultural violence” helps to modify classic approaches of studies about African resistance. Historians often study Afr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Vanessa Allen-brown Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Kim N. Archung Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stephen Sunderland Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies

Doctor of Musical Arts, Case Western Reserve University, 2007, Musicology

The performance of piano variations on simple popular songs was a practice embraced with great earnestness by young ladies in mid-nineteenth-century American domestic settings. Variation settings of “favorites,” in their great array of styles, techniques, and theatrical effects, served as important vehicles for defining pianistic activity of the time and played a mediating role in relation to a number of the dichotomies characterizing nineteenth-century American musical culture. This study addresses issues of cultural context, education, performance, and compositional convention related to such works, exposing their usefulness in bridging the aims of “cultivated” and “vernacular” music that appear to have polarized middle-class entertainment during this period. Beyond this function, the genre provides a valuable frame for examining the role of pianistic expertise amidst the mostly female populace of drawing room performers. Accompanying this study is a representative collection of thirty-five variation compositions based upon familiar songs of the day. The pieces span the period of 1800 to 1865, roughly outlining a time of great cultural and economic change from the post-Revolution decades into the Civil War. The works chosen also span the ranges defined by such terms as “complex” and “simple,” or “brilliant” and “easy.” This differentiation is but one of the dialectical frames, discussed in literature of the time, that show arduous effort on the part of nineteenth-century minds to assess the musical values of young America. In order to support a perception of the piano variations as sitting on the cusp of a “highbrow/lowbrow” divide, a thorough investigation of American antebellum manifestations of that divide is provided. Full examination of this tension shows the unique place of the variation genre in relation to such dualistic discourse in nineteenth-century musical life. The findings suggest that this unusual showcase for female virtuosity is a protected avenue (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: L. Peter Bennett (Advisor) Subjects: Music; Women's Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, English

My dissertation demonstrates how literary responses to the United States' first widespread financial crises—the Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857—gave form to the abstract but increasingly violent forces governing the brave new economic world. Previous economic critics, working under the rubric of the New Historicism, tend to emphasize how literature rehearses arguments about the U.S. economy at the level of theme or plot. Such scholarship, however, obscures how literary form itself conveys economic policy. Over the course of this project's five chapters, I argue that Washington Irving's picturesque sketches (1819-20), James Fenimore Cooper's discursive romances (1821-23), Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist addresses (1837), Catharine Maria Sedgwick's didactic allegories (1836-37), and Herman Melville's anti-novel (1857) are fundamentally concerned with the economic problems of panics, including excess, abundance, and scarcity. Literary engagement with panic reveals itself, for example, in the sprawling style of Cooper's The Spy advocates the expansion of free trade to spur the economy in the early 1820s. Performing opposite work, the carefully controlled allegory of Sedgwick's “Who, and What, Has Not Failed” attempts to contain the rapid growth of the money supply in 1837. Most radically, Melville's The Confidence-Man, in resisting narrative closure, belies the blind optimism in market outcomes driving investment in 1857. Through readings of an array of panic-era literature, then, this project concludes that the coincidence of crises and important moments in U.S. literary history, typically mentioned in standard histories as incidental, is no accident: financial distress demanded artistry, and literature thrived as the market crashed.

Committee: Elizabeth Hewitt (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Economic History