Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Creative Writing/Fiction

With[in]out is an artistic experimentation and liberation of hybrid stories that mirror thought processes and memory through an array of characters from an array of genres. Each piece utilizes form, genre, diction, white space, and style to best exhibit the inner worlds of characters on the page as well as the worlds the characters themselves inhabit. With[in]out creates a space for characters to go on a complex, internal journey involving difficult decisions, mental illness, trauma, isolation, and recovery. The collection asserts that memory is but a collage of images and sensory experiences and asks the reader to consider this tenet, as well as the stylistic choices within each piece, to gain a deeper understanding of how each character operates, to viscerally immerse oneself beyond prose conventions.

Committee: Lawrence Coates Ph. D. (Advisor); Abigail Cloud Ph. D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Environmental Philosophy; Ethics; Experiments; Families and Family Life; Individual and Family Studies; Language; Mental Health; Personal Relationships; Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

This study documents patterns of description of Roman Catholic characters, beliefs, cultural attitudes, dispositions, doctrines, worship and ceremonial rites, and visual and material culture in eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British prose fiction. From Daniel Defoe's Religious Courtship (1722) to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), British prose fiction wrestles with the problem of religious difference between Anglo-Protestants and a defamiliarized Catholic other. Delineating Roman Catholicism the spatial-geographical as well as timebound “constitutive outside” of Protestant Great Britain, numerous British novels portray Catholics and Catholic religion as shadows of a dark age past from which Britain itself has emerged, enlightened and whole. And yet certain features of these fictions belie a clean, easy separation and indeed problematize Anglo-Protestant identity itself. Describing in fetishistic detail Catholicism's visual and material culture, to emphasize its strangeness and outlandishness to British observers, British writers draw attention to Protestant Britain's own lack of internal religious unity and coherence, which is often symbolized by the novel's inability to render a rival Protestant religious imaginary on the page. I argue that the stark contrast between the visible and embodied evidence of Roman Catholic religion and an Anglo-Protestant religious imaginary that both contains and resists Catholic art and artifice, is a constant source of unspoken disquiet and tension in the British novel. British writers of the eighteenth-century wrestle with the question or what Britons have lost or gained in shedding the visual and material culture of Catholicism for comparatively immaterial and rational constructions of faith. In consequence, however, a Catholic religious imaginary and sacramental universe—part of England's religious heritage from the Catholic Middle Ages—is preserved in the realm of the symbolic, and becomes a challenge to b (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Linda Zionkowski (Committee Chair); Michele Clouse (Committee Member); Nicole Reynolds (Committee Member); Joseph McLaughlin (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; History; Literature; Religion; Religious Education; Religious History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Spanish and Portuguese

The present work reflects on the most noteworthy recent trends in contemporary, postcolonial Portuguese literature authored by women writers, namely Isabela Figueiredo's Caderno de memorias coloniais (2009), Dulce Maria Cardoso's O retorno (2011), Aida Gomes's Os pretos de Pousaflores (2011), Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's Esse cabelo (2015), Isabela Figueiredo's most recent novel A Gorda (2016), and Alexandra Lucas Coelho's Deus-dara (2016). Specifically, I address how these women writers engage the public sphere through their fiction's focus on formative but still controversial events in Portugal's recent history. I argue that the novels I analyze play a critical and transformative role as they question the still imperialist discourse of Portuguese national culture produced by the state and the media, among others. By giving voice to other stories and/or experiences that were, and still are, traditionally excluded by the hegemonic narratives of the nation, and inspired by the sociology of absences developed by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I claim that they form a canon of a "literature of absences" that focuses on colonialism and its aftermath in order to push the boundaries of the still crystalized representations of the Portuguese empire, and to showcase their myriad reverberations in postcolonial Portugal. Ultimately, in times that call for an urgent and necessary decolonization of the former European empires, this dissertation aims to contribute to surveying the different ways contemporary, women-authored fiction in Portugal imagines a post-imperial condition.

Committee: Pedro Pereira Ph.D. (Advisor); Ignacio Corona Ph.D. (Committee Member); Isis Barra Costa Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Romance Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

CANNED ROSES, the title of this collection of poetry and short fiction, metaphorically captures the plastic, transient, comic absurdist quality of modern relationships. In Japan, and perhaps soon in the United States, canned roses are being sold, apparently for those romantic emergencies when there's no time for fresh flowers. These plastic (literally, not just figuratively) roses are packaged in containers much like those designed for canned potato chips. Since roses are the classic gift of lover to beloved, canned roses serve as an apt symbol capturing the ideas this dissertation expresses about love in the modern world. This is a book about relationships, particularly male-female, but also familial. Seeming polar opposites are being expressed: the futility of relationships in this fast-paced, superficial, increasingly mobile, alienated, technological world; and, at the other extreme, the all-encompassing beauty, transcendence, and magic of love, fleeting though it may be. Tied to the theme of relationships is the motif of the self, that is, an essentially egocentric search for the self, especially as the self copes with and comments on, in witty satirical fashion, life in an absurdist universe. The fiction especially (the poetry to a lesser degree) has its roots in an existentialist view of an absurdist universe, especially apparent in the relationships of the characters and the comic satiric voices of the narrators.

Committee: Terry Stokes (Advisor) Subjects: