Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2023, English

Zora Neale Hurston is an African-American writer, anthropologist, and ethnographer of the Harlem Renaissance. She is distinguished for documenting and celebrating the religions of African Americans in the South. In this study, the author argues that Hurston represents the practiced religions in Southern African-American communities in Jonah's Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain while noticeably omitting Islam, despite the fact that Islam predominated in more Northern African-American Communities as a reclaimed religious history and practice. Hurston's exclusion prompts inquiries into the history of Islamic erasures in Southern African-American communities and introduces ambiguity in interpreting the metaphors found in Jonah's Gourd Vine because of the differences between the Biblical and Quranic narratives surrounding the figure of Jonah. The author concludes that Hurston omits Islam because it was not noticeably practiced in the South among the African-American community. Finally, the author argues that Muslim readers must understand the Biblical Jonah to understand the metaphorical meanings of the vine relative to the protagonist John Buddy Pearson in Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine.

Committee: Crystal B. Lake Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Andrew Strombeck Ph.D. (Committee Member); Shengrong Cai Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Literature; Religion; Religious History; Spirituality

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2017, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

The Familiar Stranged is a collection of four horror stories written in the vein of George Saunders, Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson, Tananarive Due, and Brandon Massey. Focusing on the unconventional/unusual point of view and also voice, these stories follow unsuspecting characters—an artificial intelligence, dead writers who seek revenge, mannequins who come to life at night, and an imaginary “friend” who all reside in an upside down, familiar made strange, slightly off kilter world, bound and imprisoned by various circumstances. These stories are intended to feel episodic—paying homage to The Twilight Zone in tone and theme. There is a critical introduction followed by the text.

Committee: Imad Rahman MFA (Committee Chair); Mike Geither MFA (Committee Member); Adam Sonstegard Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American Literature; Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2004, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

My dissertation analyzes modern women's novels that interrogate the role of marriage in the construction of female identity. Mapping the character of Clarissa in The Voyage Out (1915), “Mrs. Dalloway's Party” (1923), and primarily Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I highlight Woolf's conviction that negotiating modernity requires an exploratory yet protected consciousness for married women. Rhys's early novels, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), portray women excluded from the rite of marriage in British society. Unable to counter oppressive Victorian mores, her heroines invert the modernist impulse to “make it new” and face immutability instead, contrasting with the enforced multiplicity of identity endured by women of color in Fauset's Plum Bun (1929) and Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Hurston's last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), indicts American race and gender relations in the story of a white woman's modification of her identity within an abusive marriage. In each novel, marital crises reflect the experience of becoming “modern,” of attaining female selfhood in sexually, socially, and racially complicated milieus.

Committee: Amy Elder (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2010, English

This thesis pertains to the forgotten women dramatists of the Harlem/New Negro Renaissance of the 1920's and 1930's. It is divided into two parts: Preface and one-act drama. The Preface addresses the problems and issues when researching these women, namely the fact that there is little research devoted solely to their contributions to the movement. Set in the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson in late summer of 1929. Johnson is one of the most prolific women dramatists of the Harlem/New Negro Renaissance, whose works expanded even into the Civil Rights Movement, the one-act drama consists of a meeting between Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston, who is most notable for her non- dramatic works, despite the fact that it was in drama that she first made her mark. The first scene, set in the parlor, attends to the issue of race and how each woman goes about addressing their own representation of how race affects the African American community. In the second scene, the women are in the kitchen and address the most pressing issue of gender relations within the African American community.

Committee: Albino Carrillo MFA (Committee Chair); Stepehn Wilhoit PhD (Committee Member); Joseph Pici MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American History; American Literature; Black History; English literature; Gender; Theater; Womens Studies