Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Theatre

The invisibility of Italian contemporary women directors in Italy and abroad is symptomatic of how Italian theatre is studied in the Anglophone academy and the concerning gender inequality and misogyny widespread in Italy during the Berlusconi Era (1994-2011). This dissertation looks at this grossly understudied aspect of Italian theatre by examining the role that Sicilian director Emma Dante (b. 1967), her company Sud Costa Occidentale, and her works played in the 1994-2011 Italian theatre landscape. This study reads her staging of female bodies, her theatrical works as a whole, and her directorial persona for attitudes towards women in the context of Sicilian and Italian culture. It analyzes the individual stories told in Dante's La trilogia della famiglia siciliana (The Trilogy of the Sicilian Family, 2001-2004), Cani di Bancata (Market Dogs, 2006), and Trilogia degli occhiali (The Eyeglasses Trilogy, 2011) as vehicles to denounce the symbolic and systemic violence targeting and oppressing Italian women. Although primarily based on text and performance analysis, feminist and body theory also undergird the explorations undertaken in this study. This work is historiographically guided and rooted in contemporary Italian cultural studies, as it reconstructs the context in which Dante's plays were written. Chapter 1 provides the historical, sociological, and cultural background necessary to frame to rest of the dissertation. Chapter 2 presents the lower-class Sicilian women in La trilogia della famiglia siciliana as doubly marginalized by their gender and socio-economic status. It explores how the financial disparity between the sexes, the gender roles, and the violence perpetuated against women depicted in the Trilogy point at gender issues such as economic inequality, Catholic Church-backed ideas predicating the submission of women to men, and gendered killings. Chapter 3 paints mafia realities as controlled by both regional and national power dynamics regul (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lesley Ferris (Advisor); Jennifer Schlueter (Advisor); Ana Elena Puga (Committee Member); Charles Klopp (Committee Member) Subjects: European Studies; Performing Arts; Romance Literature; Theater; Theater History; Theater Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2014, Journalism (Communication)

Despite growing evidence to the contrary over the last fifty years, the mainstream media in America have stubbornly clung to the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and was himself murdered there two days later by Jack Ruby, who also was acting alone. This dissertation examines the patchwork of misleading, suspect and narrowly selected evidence that supports the Warren Report's theory and then documents via content and textual analyses and in-depth telephone interviews how the mainstream media have marginalized and at times ridiculed critics of the lone gunman theory in book reviews, newspaper columns, magazine articles, TV news broadcasts, and the selection of books for publication. Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model of the Mass Media helps explain why the mainstream media, especially its elite newspapers and news magazines, have failed for a half century to delve more deeply into the full range of evidence and connections that appear to underlie a conspiracy in what has been called The Crime of the Century. But the model falls short of explaining why both the media and nearly everyone in the JFK research community have failed to examine the broadest possible set of connections that may include the complicity of the French secret army (OAS), Israeli leaders and the Mossad. To understand "the firewall" that has been built around a full investigation into the Kennedy assassination, one must turn to the theories of Political Correctness and Spiral of Silence.

Committee: Mike Sweeney (Committee Chair) Subjects: American History; American Studies; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Middle Eastern Studies; Military History; Modern History; Peace Studies; World History

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2010, Journalism (Communication)

This thesis is a content analysis of Italian newspaper coverage of the Sicilian mafia ring Cosa nostra during a four-month period surrounding the Italian “decapitation” of Cosa nostra. The study examines the differences between the cosmopolitan newspaper La Repubblica and the provincial newspaper La Sicilia, and how organized crime fits into the hierarchy of media influences introduced by Shoemaker and Reese (1997). The results of this study indicate that the two newspapers, although different in audience, values, and societal stature, are similar to each other in terms of coverage of the mafia. Issues addressed in this thesis include cosmopolitanism vs. provincialism, media framing, and media influences, as well as the mafia as an ongoing sociological and historical research topic in Sicily.

Committee: Hong Cheng PhD (Committee Chair); Marilyn Greenwald PhD (Committee Member); Yusuf Kalyango PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Journalism