Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

From 1901-1938, the ecumenical Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions (CCUSFM) published a series of annual textbooks intended for American Protestant women, members of local branches of women's foreign missionary societies, to study and teach each other. The United Study texts constructed a version of women's rights rhetoric that I refer to as modern missionary feminism. They positioned their readers as heirs to the history of Christianity, participants in contemporary political and social movements, and sisters to “heathen” women around the world who needed their help. In these ways, the United Study series created interrelated exigencies for American women, who were told that because of their privileged status as educated, modern, Western women, they were required to help other women and that the way to do so was through their support of Christian evangelism. To CCUSFM members and the authors they commissioned, the conversion of the world to Christianity, the spread of women's rights, and modernization through Western cultural imperialism were inseparable. In particular, they believed that modern Christian women needed to act on behalf of missions in order to bring about the ideal, unified, egalitarian, and peaceful Christian utopia of the future. The contradictions inherent in their rhetoric (which utilized opposing ideas such as conservative/progressive, professional/familial, international/local, and unity/diversity) went largely uninterrogated; rather than viewing such binaries as either/or, their rhetorical positioning of modern missionary feminists allowed them to embrace multiple sides of various debates, revealing new ways in which rhetorical scholars can consider women's and religious rhetorics.

Committee: Nan Johnson (Advisor); James Fredal (Committee Member); H. Lewis Ulman (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Religious History; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, History

This dissertation seeks to unearth the inherent complexity of relations among evangelical missionaries, their filial churches, Catholics, and secular actors in the context of Protestantism's precipitous rise in Brazil between the 1910s and 1960s. It argues that American Protestant missionaries proved to be crucial agents of cultural change who successfully imparted to their Brazilian believers facets of their anti-Communist, paternalistic, and intermittently apolitical ideologies over the course of several systems of government, including two dictatorships. Crucially, this dissertation situates missionaries as intersectional, transnational, and non-state actors within the larger framework of U.S.-Brazilian religiopolitics, cultural transfusion, and the construction of gender, economic, and racial norms. Although far from passive recipients of American evangelical ideas, Brazil's newly-converted Protestants embraced U.S. missionaries' thought to a considerable extent, thereby cementing the incisive cultural change that American missionaries had sought to foster in Brazil. In doing so, Brazilian church workers and leaders refashioned U.S. norms of evangelicalism while also increasingly advocating for the nationalization (indigenization) of evangelical denominations. Basing itself on four case studies of U.S.-founded or influenced evangelical churches, this dissertation unravels the many contradictions and complications inherent to U.S. missionary work in Brazil. These factors include Brazilian evangelicals' wavering between apoliticism and political activism, a vying for influence with the Catholic Church, the legacy of Jim Crow and its consequences to mission work in Brazil, as well as a series of intra-church disputes that ultimately resulted in the nationalization (indigenization) of each church. At the core of the evangelical experience between the 1910s and 1960s stood an identitarian quest to gain legitimacy among Brazil's secular and religious authoritie (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Peter Hahn (Committee Chair); James N. Green (Other); Jennifer Eaglin (Committee Member); Joseph Parrott (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative; History; International Relations; Latin American History; Religious History; World History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Cross-Cultural, International Education

The Maumee Mission School for the Ottawa Indians operated from 1823-1834 in Maumee, Ohio. This was a significant time period in Northwest Ohio being after the War of 1812 and before the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Due to the War of 1812, the Second Great Awakening, the Great Migration of the 1800s of white settlers into Ohio, and the complicated relationship between the Native Americans and the white settlers, the Maumee Mission school functioned as a post-conflict school with the goal of assimilating Ottawa students into a Christian Euro-American society. The chapters provide evidence for this claim as well as give more detail on how and why the Maumee Mission School functioned in this regard. Chapter I explains how the school indirectly taught the Ottawa and other Native American students who had the power in the new American society. Chapter II focuses on the people at the Maumee Mission school. The school was a multi-ethnic school boasting students from several different tribes and backgrounds. Chapter III describes which traits were expected of a “civilized” person. Chapter IV discusses the opinions about the Maumee Mission School's success. The Maumee Mission School adds to the historical perspective of Native American schooling by demonstrating the similarities and differences between the Maumee school and boarding schools that operated after the Removal Act of 1830, highlighting a pivotal period in the relations between the federal government and Indian nations. It also examines the culture of Northwest Ohio in the 1820s and 1830s, adds to the complex history of missionary work, and illustrates the American Indian education policy: assimilation. The Maumee Mission operated as a post-conflict school with nationalistic beliefs driving the purpose to assimilate the students into Christian Euro-American culture and bring peace to the area.

Committee: Christopher Frey Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Margaret Booth Ph.D. (Committee Member); Rebecca Mancuso Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Education; Native American Studies

Master of Arts, Case Western Reserve University, 2020, History

For over 150 years, the “Three-Self” principles, including “Self-Support,” have been central to Chinese Christianity. During the late nineteenth century, William Ashmore, the leading American Baptist missionary in South China, aggressively adopted these principles as an extension of his denomination's congregational approach to church governance—insisting that Chinese churches be self-governing and financially self-sufficient. During the 1920s and thereafter, Three-Self was widely embraced by Chinese Christians as an expression of resurgent nationalism. When the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, they transformed Self-Support to establish official Chinese Christianity on a non-denominational, hyper-nationalist, and anti-imperialist basis. This thesis focuses on several conflicts over Self-Support in Kit-Yang between 1889 and 1949, showing how power struggles among different groups reshaped the Three-Self principles amid the larger revolutionary transformations of Chinese society. Ironically, the Communist government's reconceptualization of the Three-Self concept effectively reversed its original meaning, replacing local autonomy with centralized control.

Committee: Daniel Cohen (Advisor); Kenneth Ledford (Committee Member); Miriam Levin (Committee Member); James Bonk (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Asian Studies; Bible; Divinity; History; Political Science; Religious History; World History

Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.), Xavier University, 2019, Psychology

Social support from a military unit has been found to moderate the relationship of trauma exposure with symptoms of PTSD and depression (Armistead-Jehle, Johnston, Wade, & Ecklund, 2011; Brailey, Vasterling, Proctor, Constans, & Friedman, 2007). The present study examined whether among cross-cultural missionaries, support from a work team would likewise moderate the relationship of lifetime traumatic load with PTSD symptoms, depression symptoms, and functional impairment. Participants in this study were exposed to a high number of traumatic experiences: 76.8% were exposed to one or more traumatic event compared to 51.2% of women and 60.7% of men in American, and 29% exposed to three or more traumatic events compared to 19.2% of men and 11.4% of women in American (Kessler, 2000). Traumatic load had a positive correlation with the severity of PTSD and depression symptoms, and team support had a negative correlation with the severity of symptoms and functional impairment. However, multiple regression indicated that team support did not significantly moderate the relationship of traumatic load with PTSD symptoms, depression symptoms, or functional impairment. Among participants exposed to three or more traumatic events, low levels of social support accurately predicted scores indicative of probable PTSD or major depressive disorder, with functional impairment. Participants indicated how their team promoted posttraumatic growth following trauma exposure: 42.6% indicated that their team promoted growth in better understanding spiritual matters, and 40.7% indicated that their team promoted growth in knowing that they can handle difficulties. Recommendations for future research are to examine training, practices, and interventions which effectively increase social support among missionaries and humanitarian aid workers living in areas at high risk of trauma exposure.

Committee: Janet R. Schultz Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Behavioral Sciences; Behaviorial Sciences; Mental Health; Occupational Psychology; Organizational Behavior; Psychology; Religion

BA, Oberlin College, 2018, Art

In 1950s, two fourteenth-century tombstones with Latin inscriptions were discovered in Yangzhou, China. Both tombstones were made for an Italian merchant family. The tombstones bear Christian iconography such as the Last Judgment, the Virgin and Child and the martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria, while non-western details are represented as well, including the Mongol garments, Chinese furniture and Islamic and Nestorian gravestones. My research considers the dynamic matrices of various religious and ethnic groups, which concomitantly arrived in Yuan China under an overarching control of the Mongol Empire. By valorizing the pictorial language on the tombstones, I will illustrate how the Christian funerary monuments, traversing their private and religious boundary, reflect the pluralistic society of Yuan China. Given the lack of primary textual evidence directly related to the Yangzhou Latin tombstones, my study aims to reconstruct the contextual situation of the tombstones by assembling and interweaving fragmentary historical and visual information. My cross-cultural study attests to the potential of images in articulating their own circumstances against a “messy” culture.

Committee: Erik Inglis (Advisor); Bonnie Cheng (Other) Subjects: Art History

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, Individual Interdisciplinary Program

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of mission-operated leprosy settlements or leprosaria in the treatment, control and rehabilitation of leprosy victims in the part of Cameroon that was formerly under British administration between 1916 and 1975. Disease control was a major social and welfare problem in former European colonies and protectorates in Africa. Colonial administrations grappled with the duality of providing basic sanitation and healthcare to the population as well as institute measures to prevent the outbreak or spread of infectious diseases. Leprosy constituted one of the infectious diseases that threatened the social, cultural, economic and political boundaries in colonial and postcolonial Cameroon. Despite the long and challenging history of disease in the country and Africa in general, African countries still grapple with the problem of managing highly-stigmatized infectious diseases suggesting the need to interrogate past disease control measures in order to inform and direct measures at tackling contemporary challenges. Public health stakeholders in Africa continue to isolate patients of stigma-related disease which often lead to deleterious effects on the original goal of disease control. This project examines the place of leprosy settlements in the interconnection of the policy of isolation in the control, treatment and rehabilitation of victims of leprosy. In the literature on the social history of medicine in Africa, the agency of the patients is often neglected, if not silent. This study analyzes the policy of custodial care in the control and treatment of leprosy in former British Southern Cameroons and West Cameroon. It describes the agency of patients in the effective operation of leprosy settlements and implementation of leprosy control policy. It also analyzes the economic, socio-cultural and religious tensions that ensued as a result of the adoption of patient isolation as the main measure at controlling leprosy (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steve Howard (Committee Chair); Gillian Ice (Committee Member) Subjects: African History; African Studies; History; Public Health

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Spanish and Portuguese

In this dissertation, I argue that Jesuit missionary writings in the Americas demonized and appropriated indigenous sources of medical knowledge, contributing to the exclusion of indigenous voices from the archive of the western history of science and medicine. I take a critical look at the way in which Jesuits implemented a discourse of sorcery as a strategy to delegitimize Amerindian healers and spiritual leaders that stood in opposition to the colonial occupation of present-day Brazil and Mexico. In chapter 1, I illuminate the cognitive operations behind the Jesuit impulse to impose Christianity on native communities through a reading of Jesuit-authored letters from colonial Brazil, including missionary correspondence from Jose de Anchieta, Fernao Cardim, and Antonio Vieira as well as a set of anonymous letters penned from Sao Vicente. In these documents we find that— given the swiftness of smallpox outbreaks—encounters among Jesuit missionaries and Amerindians were often structured around an urgent need to care for the sick, making the study of local medicines all the more necessary. In chapter 2, I analyze Portuguese Jesuit Fernao Cardim's appropriation of indigenous botanical information in his natural history, known today under the title Tratados da Terra e Gente do Brasil [Treatises on the Land and People of Brazil] (1583-1601). As Cardim's text demonstrates, missionaries wrote natural histories to serve as conversion manuals, set alongside useful information on how to survive in foreign places. In my final chapter, I bring in a natural history from another area of the Americas, Jose de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias [Natural and Moral History of the Indies] (Sevilla 1590), to demonstrate the systematic approach that the Company of Jesus took in their study of American nature. As visitors to the missions in the Americas, both Cardim and Acosta drew heavily from locally based Jose de Anchieta and Juan de Tovar as they compiled their studies o (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lisa Voigt (Advisor) Subjects: Alternative Medicine; Comparative Literature; Epidemiology; European History; European Studies; History; Latin American History; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Medicine; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Native American Studies; Religion; Science History

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2009, East Asian Studies

The Protestant missionary enterprise in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was an enormous effort on the part of Western Protestant missionaries to convert a foreign civilization to Christianity and the Western way of life. One of the most important aspects of this campaign was the focus on education and the introduction of public missionary schools for girls into the Chinese context. Certainly many historians, such as Kenneth Latourette and Alice Gregg have produced broad works that touch on the subject of missionary schools for girls, and others, such as Ryan Dunch and Mary Jo Waelchli, have written fascinating case studies on individual schools. This thesis will look at the phenomenon of female education in the public sphere, examining the development of missionary schools for girls in China between 1872 and 1924. Examining three schools as case studies, this thesis will argue that these schools were not uniform, but that each school was an institution responsive to desires of the local community in which it was located, the individuals who were associated with it, and the historical trends of the times. The intersection of these three disparate factors resulted in a series of schools linked by a common goal – the education and conversion of Chinese girls – but following very different paths. These paths would lead not to the conversion of China, as hoped by the missionaries, but would leave a lasting impression on education for girls in China.

Committee: Christopher Reed PhD (Advisor); Cynthia Brokaw PhD (Committee Member); Patricia Sieber PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education History; Gender; History; Literacy; Religious Education

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1968, History

Committee: Mary Young (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2009, Religion

The Volga-Kama region of nineteenth century Russia included a diversity of ethnic and religious groups, including followers of indigenous religions, Islam, and Christianity. During the nineteenth century, many groups were reorienting their identities through establishing stronger connections to Christianity or Islam, or even by renovating their traditional practices and representing them in new ways. Many scholars, drawing from Russian sources, present minority peoples' religious practices as being somewhat confused or syncretic. However, I will argue that it is necessary to use comparative perspectives from studies of Inner Asia and concepts from post-colonial theory in order to fully explore religious conceptions and practices in the Volga-Kama region. Even in a changing world, minority peoples attempted to keep their own communities in the center by reorienting the structure of sacred power so that it did not come from Russian intermediaries but rather directly to their own local communities.

Committee: Scott Kenworthy (Advisor); Rick Colby (Committee Member); Lisa Poirier (Committee Member) Subjects: Religion; Religious History; Russian History

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2008, History

This thesis examines the evolution of Father Pierre Biard's Jesuit missionary ideals and the legacy of his experience. Biard's encounter with native people demonstrated that the Jesuits had to adequately catechize the Indians before baptism. This required them to understand the Indians, their customs, and their languages. His desire to engage with Indians marked a break in traditional patterns of interpretation, despite the conventional discursive understanding Biard brought with him from France. Furthermore, his tense relationship with secular interests at Port Royal degenerated into a war of accusations about Biard's involvement in the 1613 destruction of the colony. In defending himself from these allegations, Biard publically verbalized his clear recommendations for how future Jesuits should run their missions. Both his interactions with Indians and his relationship with traders helped him define a unique missionary strategy that left a lasting legacy for future Jesuit missionaries.

Committee: Carla Pestana PhD (Advisor); Lisa Poirier PhD (Committee Member); Wietse de Boer PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2005, History

This interdisciplinary Ph.D. course of study combines history with cultural geography and draws on multiple sources. Examined in this dissertation are those eastern Kentucky settlement and missionary schools that created fireside industry (craft) programs for their students and local residents. The thesis of this dissertation is that settlement and mission workers participated in cultural exchange and were cultural mediators when it came to craft programs. Their goal was to explain and interpret the larger world crafts marketplace. The primary purposes of the dissertation are to identify those settlements and missions that participated in reviving various mountain crafts; to add new information to the limited existing information about Appalachian mountain settlement and missionary schools' fireside industries; and to address whether or not the academic contributions these schools provided were beneficial to the local communities in which they were located – both from the standpoint of economics and culture. While men were very active in these endeavors, this work will concentrate primarily on the women who were involved in the craft programs. The secondary purposes of the dissertation are to provide the historical background of these schools and to outline the converging philosophies which influenced settlement workers and missionaries. These include movements such as industrialization, progressivism, arts and crafts, social settlements, social gospel, temperance, and women's clubs.

Committee: Andrew Cayton (Advisor) Subjects: History, United States

BA, Oberlin College, 1981, History

The American Missionary Association (AMA) proved to be the largest and most enduring of the benevolent societies which sponsored teachers in the South. Local affiliates of the society were organized throughout the East and Midwest to raise funds, gather donations, and enlist teachers. Many of those who went South as teachers were recruited from colleges, theological seminaries, female seminaries, and normal schools in these areas. Not surprisingly, a significant group of individuals who were sent South by the AMA was recruited from Oberlin College. Most of those who came from Oberlin College, as was true of the missionary teachers on the whole, were women.This paper explores this particular group of evangelical Oberlin women who became teachers and missionaries to the freed-people. It looks at how their experience in the Southern work brought together both the larger historical cycle of post-Civil War reform and their own life cycle patterns as evangelical women. These two cycles would be important in shaping the motivations of the women, their perceptions of the work, and their conceptions of reform.

Committee: Carol Lasser (Advisor) Subjects: American History; Education History; History; Religious History