Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, English

Setting the Table: Ethos-As-Relationship in Food Writing employs methods from rhetoric and technical and professional communication to argue that the rhetorical mode of ethos should be understood as fundamentally relational, rather than as a more discreet property of communication synonymous with the rhetor's authority or character. I argue that reconceiving ethos-as-relationship better accounts for the rhetorical strategies used by the food writers who identify as women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and/or as part of the LGBTQ+ community whose texts I analyze, which include food memoirs, decolonial cookbooks, and food blogs. Food writing is a valuable place to examine the development of ethos because food writers are especially attuned to hospitality, a structural metaphor that all rhetors can use as a framework for understanding their relationship to their audience. A key focus of my analysis is the development of these food writers' textual personas, or their self-portrayal within the text. Textual personas are crucial to the development of what I call the ethotic relationship between writers and readers because a reader is unlikely to meet the writer in person, and an ethotic relationship can only be formed with another party. Ethos-as-relationship has important implications for understanding expertise and professional identity, especially for those rhetors who occupy historically-marginalized positionalities, as they must often work harder to negotiate a position of authority in relation to their audiences.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2016, English

This thesis argues for the examination of early medieval Ireland as a time and place worthy of indepth rhetorical study. The approach used for this examination draws upon intercultural and comparative rhetorics, borrowing in particular from the work of Mao and Baca. The thesis also takes an interdisciplinary tack, examining scholarship produced by historians and Celticists, which further informs and contextualizes the rhetorical analysis. This study includes an extensive literature review of relevant scholarship from both rhetoricians and historians, and concludes with a rhetorical analysis of three primary documents from the early medieval Irish corpus. Analysis of the primary documents and the sociohistorical context surrounding them revels the presence of sophisticated rhetorics within early medieval Ireland that exist alongside, and outside, the mainstream European tradition. Implications for the plurality of rhetorical traditions within Europe, and the continued study of those plural traditions, are discussed.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2016, English

This dissertation analyzes the rhetorics of Appalachian civic organizations that make the argument “remaining” is a tenable option among discursive, material, and economic pressures to do otherwise. This dissertation analyzes “remaining” through a rhetorical frame to show how remaining is more than simply staying put—it requires active rhetorical intervention in civic contexts and attention to the circulation of rhetorical positions and content. Analyzing “remaining” as a cultural rhetoric enables us to identify a civic techne that can be used in Appalachia and other areas where rhetorics of remaining are (or could be) deployed. I identify and develop this new frame—rhetorics of remaining—through my year-and-a-half participatory research with two Appalachian civic organizations: Appalshop, a multi-media non-profit in eastern Kentucky; and the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, a community advocacy group for Appalachian out-migrants and their descendants in Cincinnati, Ohio. I trace acts of rhetorical remaining through interviews, analyses of media productions and web spaces, and collaborating with these groups in developing rhetorical strategies and producing content. This dissertation contributes to ongoing scholarship of how culture shapes rhetorical practice in civic spaces and how questions of circulation shape our rhetorical decisions by examining the civic work heritage claims do for communities. I uncover three broad strategies used in rhetorical remaining: "keeping with" heritage as a civic art among oppressive or indifferent discourses; offering "inventional trajectories" that redirect media flows; and "slow circulation," a strategy for community advocacy oriented toward sustained change over the long haul. Through these strategies, rhetorics of remaining offer a rhetorical theory for social change for communities struggling to pull themselves out of economic decline, halt outmigration, and/or to maintain cultural identities outside of a homeland.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2015, English

This dissertation project focuses on object-oriented rhetoric (OOR), a perspective that questions the traditional notions of rhetorical action as solely a human province. The project makes three major, interrelated claims: that OOR provides a unique and productive methodology to examine the inclusion of the non-human in rhetorical study; that to some extent, rhetoric has always been interested in the way nonhuman objects interact with humans; and that these claims have profound implications for our activities as teachers and scholars. Chapter one situates OOR within current scholarship in composition and rhetoric, arguing that it can serve as a useful methodology for the field despite rhetoric's traditional focus on epistemology and human symbolic action. Chapter two examines rhetorical history to demonstrate that a view of rhetoric that includes nonhuman actors is not new, but has often been marginalized. Chapter three examines two videogames as sites of theory and practice for object-oriented rhetoric, specifically focusing on a sense of metaphor to understand the experience of nonhuman rhetors. Chapter four interrogates the network surrounding a review aggregation website to argue that, while some nonhumans may be unhelpful rhetorical collaborators, OOR can assist us in improving relationships with them. Finally, chapter five argues for object-oriented changes in practices and approaches in both teaching and research.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, English

My dissertation traces and analyzes the identifications with science that emerge in the rhetorical tradition of the multimodal exhibition of scientific objects, concepts, processes, and practices in the museum context. I demonstrate how multimodal exhibits in science centers have embedded implicit instruction in scientific method and its value; these identifications with science are further reinforced and complicated by wider cultural expectations and ambitions for science and science centers, and how those expectations and ambitions come to be realized in the built spaces of the science centers enclosing the exhibits themselves. I argue that the display of science exhibits within the context of science centers' built spaces reproduces a rhetorical tradition that encourages visitors to respond according to sense-making conventions that are historic in origins, and which privilege a “folk epistemology of common sense empiricism.” The compelling characterization of science as a process conducted through careful observation and inference was separated from the dominant definition of science when experimental science displaced analytical science and its practice moved from private homes and museums to university laboratories. In the twentieth century, through their reproduction of exhibits' “naked eye science,” museums—both natural history and the emerging institution of the science center—preserved the now-outdated theory of knowledge-making with objects. As cultural expectations and ideas about science changed during the twentieth century, the needs of local communities hosting science centers changed, and science center institutions and buildings were adapted to address new educational, economic and civic demands. While exhibits' sense-making functions remained based on the assumption that science is done through careful observation of past events, new architectures and built spaces enclosing those exhibits realized celebratory functions for their surrounding communi (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2013, English

This project rethinks the study of comparative rhetoric and its contributions to the global turn in rhetorical study. It theorizes a rhetoric of inside-outside positionalities, building on the uchi/soto (inside/outside) dynamic, a feature of Japanese language and social interactions. Inside-outside positionalities offers new ways of understanding instances of meaning-making brought about by intercultural interactions, and highlights the importance of comparative approaches for engaging with global and local rhetorics. Alongside developing a new theory, the project makes a case for comparative epistemologies as both means and ends for ethical rhetorical study in a globalized world. Chapter 1 rethinks the indexical (pointing to established meanings) dynamic of uchi and soto as constitutive of new meaning. Drawing from Jane Bachnik's work with uchi/soto, which explains Japanese social interactions as shifting between insider and outsider status, this chapter recuperates the uchi/soto dynamic as a rhetoric of inside-outside positionalities, a meaning-making principle that is reiterative (as developed by Judith Butler) rather than indexical. Chapter 2 uses inside-outside positionalities to rethink the construction of cultural identity. It explores how those things regarded as representing the innermost (i.e., essential) ideals of a culture or group draw from both outside and inside cultural influences. Such readings destabilize notions of cultural essence. Two sites are explored: The Japanese Christmas cake and the animated series Taisho Baseball Girls. Chapter 3 turns to the troping of Japanese women as an enactment of inside-outside positionalities in creating a modern national identity. The first portion of the chapter discusses the "troping" of women by Japanese elites to shape Japanese cultural identity; the latter portion addresses how these tropes can be resisted through critical recombination. Changing images of the Japanese schoolgirl identity, ranging (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2025, English: Composition and Rhetoric

This dissertation examines the rhetorical decision making of graduate and undergraduate students to build a theory of feminist digital embodiment for teachers, writers, professionals, and administrators to consider how they engage across different digital spaces with the intent for social action and change-making. Feminist digital embodiment is an intersectional lens that allows us to prioritize lived experiences, positionality, and identity in digital spaces while considering larger oppressive structures and contexts of our social and cultural moments while working toward rhetorical and strategic autonomy in these spaces. In chapter 1, I theorize and build my theory of feminist digital embodiment drawing on scholarship from digital rhetoric and composition, feminist theories, and embodiment theories to highlight how we might move toward making change across different contexts. In chapter 2, I discuss how feminist digital embodiment can inform and influence the research methods for this dissertation project. In chapter 3, I share the patterns that emerged from interviews with graduate students about their self-representation across personal, professional, and academic digital spaces to discuss how mentors and teachers of graduate students may use a feminist digital embodiment framework to help support their graduate students as they navigate the intricacies of these spaces. In chapter 4, I share the course structure, planning, student writing, and post-semester interviews of a pedagogical study conducted in a cross-listed interdisciplinary feminist research writing course. In chapter 5, I discuss the larger implications and applications of feminist digital embodiment across contexts including how writing program administrators and teachers of writing may use the theory to inform their mentorship and teaching of students across contexts and levels.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2023, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

This dissertation examined media rhetoric in the Los Angeles Times about 51 murdered marginalized women in the “Southside Slayer” serial killer cases. The “Southside Slayer” was five different Black men who did not fit the profile of a serial killer and were able to continue murdering women from 1983 to 2007. The victims and/or killers were all associated at one point with the “Southside Slayer” moniker and/or task force, even though some of the killers were later given different nicknames in the press. The goal of this study was to identify harmful narratives against marginalized women victims, and how they were perpetuated through the Los Angeles Times. Through qualitative archival research and a feminist social constructionist lens, language and word/phrase choices in 126 articles from the Los Angeles Times dating from 1985 to 2020 were examined for the use of synecdoche, derogatory language, and negatively connotative language when referring to the fifty-one women. In addition, use of the victims' names, use of the killers' names, and use of killer-friendly language were examined. Using critical discourse analysis and grounded theory, harmful narratives and dehumanization of the women were perpetuated through the underuse of victims' names combined with overused combinations of synecdoche, derogatory, and/or negatively connotative words/phrases. Digital media of today was also examined, and perpetuation or disruption of the harmful narratives and dehumanization varied.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, English (Arts and Sciences)

This study explores how a single visual from an online NASA article gets used as evidence in three different online contexts. The author found these new online contexts using Google Images reverse search function. In locating these visuals in new online contexts, this study analyzes how the visual events contained within a single figure correspond to the linguistic portions of the online contexts. The resulting analysis found that the visual and linguistic connections show that the writers in these online contexts used the same figure as evidence to make different yet similar arguments. Moreover, this reverse search method was applied to junior composition course for the purpose of seeing how effectively the author's method helped composition students identify visuals as arguments.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Media and Communication

The popularity of modern comic books has fluctuated since their creation and mass production in the early 20th century, experiencing periods of growth as well as decline. While commercial success is not always consistent from one decade to the next it is clear that the medium has been and will continue to be a cultural staple in the society of the United States. I have selected this type of popular culture for analysis precisely because of the longevity of the medium and the recent commercial success of film and television adaptations of comic book material. In this project I apply a Critical lens to selected comic book materials and apply Critical theories related to race, class, and gender in order to understand how the materials function as vehicles for ideological messages. For the project I selected five Marvel comic book characters and examined materials featuring those characters in the form of comic books, film, and television adaptations. The selected characters are Steve Rogers/Captain America, Luke Cage, Miles Morales/Spider-Man, Jean Grey, and Raven Darkholme/Mystique. Methodologically I interrogated the selected texts through the application of visual and narrative rhetorical criticism. By using this approach, I was able to answer my guiding research questions centered around how these texts operate to reinforce, subvert, and modify socio-cultural understandings related to the race, gender, and economic class in the United States.

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.

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

Rhetoric and feminism have historically been seen as having little to do with each other. This dissertation seeks to illuminate commonalities between rhetoric and feminism by demonstrating how Burkean identification operates as a pivotal link between the two. It argues that Burkean identification allows for an articulation of how to use the claims we make about who we are to create the kind of transformation feminism is interested in encouraging. It does so by elucidating the relationship between feminist rhetorical principles and Burkean thought through the analysis of third-person identity constitution—a three-step process through which the audience is encouraged to identify with a third-person Other. Each step of that process is demonstrated through the rhetorical analysis of science-fiction television series that use third-person identity constitution to constructively transform the perception of the third-person Other and to encourage the audience to adopt the feminist rhetorical principles that led to that changed perception. These analyses reveal the significant role Burkean identification can play in developing a constructively transformative and feminist rhetoric as well as the important tool science fiction can be for feminist rhetoric.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2017, English

In response to the global flows of cultures and communities, this thesis calls for an expansion of the application scope of comparative rhetoric from indigenous rhetorical traditions to transcultural rhetorics. Drawing upon methodologies from the field of critical discourse analysis and comparative rhetoric, I propose a hybridized methodology--the critical-comparative approach--to study Chinese American rhetoric. To verify the applicability of this methodology, I conduct a critical-comparative discourse analysis of fortune cookies and demonstrate how they can be served as the exemplification of Chinese American rhetoric. The findings reveal that the negotiating process of the Chineseness and Americaness of the transcultural artifact is embedded in the fortune cookie sayings, in the production, distribution and consumption of the dessert, and in the larger historical and sociocultural contexts. Committed to pursue a dynamic equilibrium in transcultural communication, this project is the first step toward understanding how the critical-comparative approach could open up dialogue among different rhetorical traditions and afford the possibilities of reversing the power imbalance from within. Implications upon the pedagogy of comparative rhetoric and upon the understanding of transcultural rhetorics are suggested, followed by a discussion about the limitations of the current study and the possible directions for future studies.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2016, English

This thesis aims to investigate and interpret similarities and differences between Chinese and English narrative rhetoric and then to shed light on cultivating EFL students into multilingual writers. Based on twenty Chinese and twenty American English majors' retellings of a short film story, it is found that Chinese writers are telling-oriented, fond of explicit theme preaching while American writers are showing-oriented, focusing on depicting actions and concrete details. Chinese writers interact with readers in a creative, excited and assertive interlocutor tone whilst American writers engage readers primarily by playing the narrator and character role. Chinese writers rely on figurative languages to embellish their writings whereas American writers exploit oralized expressions to invigorate their stories. The thesis goes on to interpret these cultural-specific narrative tendencies by examining discursive textual and contextual factors and finally suggest multilingual writers should be taught to integrate both cultures' rhetorical strengths into creative narrative writing.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

Appalachian studies scholars, Appalachian activists and advocates, and government agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission have sought a solution to the "Appalachian problem," which is typically portrayed as a matrix of poverty, low educational attainment, poor health, environmental destruction, and cultural deficiencies, as long as this problem has been perceived to exist in the late nineteenth century. Through a rhetorical analysis of ethnographic and archival research on three different types of Appalachian activist campaigns and advocacy organizations, the Kentucky Moonlight Schools of the early twentieth century, The Urban Appalachian Council and Appalachian Community Development Fund of the late twentieth century, and Create West Virginia of the early twenty-first century, I determine how each engages with three common topoi on solving the "Appalachian problem." The first topoi, assimilation, requires Appalachia be assimilated into modern, urban cultural, economic, and technological systems; the second, preservation, acknowledges the distinctiveness and difference of the culture and recommends it be preserved it as an isolated, monolithic, homogeneous entity; and the third, abandonment, proposes allowing nature to take over the region as the people are relocated to urban and suburban areas. By exploring specific instances in which these three topoi are rhetorical deployed, complicated, or opposed by the Kentucky Moonlight Schools, the Urban Appalachian Council and the Appalachian Community Development Association, and Create West Virginia, I have determined what detrimental assumptions these claims rely on, how they position Appalachian culture and identity, and how they limit or facilitate successful resolutions to the "Appalachian problem." I then develop a new regional rhetoric to guide the policies of a variety of groups, including but no limited to nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and educational instituti (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2015, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

Each time our students and colleagues participate online, they face invisible tracking technologies that harvest metadata for web customization, targeted advertising, and even state surveillance activities. This practice may be of concern for computers and writing and digital humanities specialists, who examine the ideological forces in computer-mediated writing spaces to address power inequality, as well as the role ideology plays in shaping human consciousness. However, the materiality of technology—the non-human objects that surrounds us—is of concern to those within rhetoric and composition as well. This project shifts attention to the materiality of non-human objects, specifically computer algorithms and computer code. I argue that these technologies are powerful non-human objects that have rhetorical agency and persuasive abilities, and as a result shape the everyday practices and behaviors of writers/composers on the web as well as other non-human objects. Through rhetorical inquiry, I examine literature from rhetoric and composition, surveillance studies, media and software studies, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. I offer a “built ecological network” theory that is the manufactured and natural rhetorical rhizomatic network full of spatial, material, social, linguistic, and dynamic energy layers that enter into reflexive and reciprocal relations to support my claim that computer algorithms have agency and persuasive abilities. I also address how computer code figures in digital surveillance environments on the web, as well as how to refigure digital rhetoric and literate practices through the built ecological network. My results help shift attention to the role rhetoric plays in materiality, and further implicates rhetoric as both under the realm of human and material activity.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2014, English

Challenging rhetoric's traditional focus on the West and (phal)logocentrism, this dissertation recovers conduct as a major form of Thai rhetoric, significantly shaping the nation's ethos, cultural milieu, and social memory. I analyze how this rhetoric is used to address political exigencies in three momentous periods of Thai history: European colonialism in the 1890s, national cultural reforms in the 1930s, and the revolt for democracy in 2010. Beginning in the 19th century, I demonstrate how Thai monarchs reappropriated Western "genteel" manners to subvert European colonialism, the basis of imperialism, and within the same period, I recover a lower-ranking Thai queen's advice on the rhetorical use of felicitous conduct as a means to gain prestige, power, and influence in the royal court. Progressing to the 20th and 21st centuries, I show how governmental mandates on proper conduct reshaped cultural memory and national consciousness to create a "democratic" paradigm shift in the 1930s and how a civic revolt in which the protestors splashed their own blood in public spaces to revolt against the government reformed democracy and nationalism in 2010. This project draws upon original archival recovery, field study, and person-based research conducted on site in Thailand. By reconceptualizing conduct as rhetoric enacted in historical context and by foregrounding the discursive force of female perspectives often ignored in history, this dissertation advances a theory of conduct rhetoric to expand our understanding of the gestural modality beyond the realm of oratory and composing. More broadly, it provides a new apparatus for rethinking the history, theory, and practice of "the available means of persuasion."

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Media and Communication

Copyright is in theory a neutral legal instrument, but in practice copyright functions as an ideological tool. The value of creative content in culture vacillates between the rhetorical poles of progress and profit within copyright law. This study is an ideographic rhetorical critique of copyright. Ideographs are rhetorical containers of ideology that publics use to define various aspects of culture. Some ideographs are contained within the dialogue of a topic. I argue five terms that make up the ideographic grammar of copyright: public domain, fair use, authorship, ownership, and piracy. The public domain is the space where copyrighted material enters when the term of protection expires. The public domain expresses the ideology that creative material belongs to the people who consume content. Fair use is the free speech exception to copyright law that allows for certain types of infringement. Fair Use is the ideology in which the use of creative work belonging to others must be fairly represented. Authorship is how an author creates content and how an audience consumes it. Authorship is an ideology focused on progress towards the process of creating content as motivated by an author. The question at the center of authorship is who controls content: the author or the public. Ownership takes the question of authorship one-step further by invoking material property. Ownership is the embodiment of the idea that management, control, and profit of copyright are more valuable than original creation. The Corporate Public is focused on ownership of content, because ownership is a legal condition of property where a person or group can profit. Piracy, which appears most often in any discussion of copyright law, is an intentional theft of copyrighted work(s). Piracy is a battleground between content theft and the people who publicly resist copyright.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2013, English

This project explores the concept of empathy as a rhetorical stance and strategy of engaging across marked social differences. It contributes to Krista Ratcliffe's call for scholars in rhetoric and composition studies to "map more theoretical terrain and provide more pragmatic tactics for peaceful, cross-cultural negotiation and coalition building" (Rhetorical Listening 72). I define rhetorical empathy as a trope characterized by narrative and emotional appeals and as a topos or attitude interlocutors adopt to engage with socially marked difference, building on Susan Miller's conception of rhetoric as emotion-based trust (Trust in Texts). This dissertation also addresses a gap in studies on empathy within cognitive science and psychology that typically focus on bodily responses to attempt to measure someone's level of empathetic engagement within staged scenarios. Such studies often do not take into account the social position of research subjects or the role of motivations in empathetic responses. My research methodology for this project involves an analysis of three rhetorical exchanges involving marked social difference: in Chapter Three I focus on class in two late-nineteenth labor rights speeches of Jane Addams; Chapter Four centers on the intersection of sexuality/gender and religion in the rhetoric of two contemporary gay rights activists; and in Chapter Five I focus on constructions of race in the online, multimodal response of a minority student group to a racist Twitter incident at a midwestern U.S. university. I identify the following recurring and recursive moves as characteristic of rhetorical strategies based on empathy: • Appealing to the personal within discourse systems: experience and emotions • Considering motives behind speech acts and actions • Confronting difference and injustice • Situating a rhetorical exchange as part of an ongoing process of mutual understanding and (ex)change (including vulnerability and self-critique on the (open full item for complete abstract)

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2009, Arts and Sciences : Communication

In July 1980, in Dayton, Ohio, church history reached a milestone for gender equality. Marjorie Swank Matthews became the first woman to be elected as a bishop in any Protestant Christian denomination. The purpose of this thesis project is to conduct a feminist rhetorical criticism of three of Bishop Matthews's sermons from across her four-year term in the episcopal leadership of the United Methodist Church. Feminist rhetorical scholarship broadly falls into two perspectives, writing women in and challenging rhetorical standards. While neither perspective is complete, this project's method is to combine the two perspectives, an approach that offers the potential for insightful and productive knowledge generation. Therefore, this thesis simultaneously considers questions from scholars with diametric understandings of feminism and the application of feminist values to rhetorical theory and criticism. The sermons this project considers, in chronological order, are “Chosen for Challenge,” dated February 16, 1982; “The Sign of Discipleship,” dated May 1, 1983 and May 15, 1983; and “We Shall Go Forth,” dated October 13, 1984. This project uncovers the rhetorical strategies of the first woman bishop in any Christian denomination and argues that understanding her life and rhetoric as hagiographic is valuable. Implications for the usefulness of each perspective (and the combination of perspectives) for rhetorical theory and criticism are considered.