Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2024, Musicology

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of tremendous change in American musical life. It was the early days of the American popular music industry, represented by the moniker “Tin Pan Alley.” One of its leading lights was Charles K. Harris, an American songwriter who wrote “After the Ball” (1892), a song that became synonymous with the industry and Harris himself. However, like the music industry, Harris's story may have begun with a hit song, but it did not stop there; motivating him over the next few decades was a quest—how to keep a popular song popular—that put him on the edge of several transformative moments and technologies in American music. This dissertation explores and interprets Harris's attempts at keeping his music, notably “After the Ball,” popular as representative of the ways in which the music industry transformed in response to shifts in technology along with the new relationships audiences formed with popular music. Building upon the existing literature on Charles K. Harris, in particular that of Charles Hamm, Esther Morgan-Ellis, David Suisman, and Daniel Goldmark, as well as secondary literature on marketing theory, film, cartoon, media, nostalgia, and American cultural history, I shed light not just on a fascinating and influential figure in the early popular music industry, but on the ways in which popular music, media, and advertising interrelated during the era in which mass media and many of the most salient features of modern life were born.

Committee: Daniel Goldmark (Advisor) Subjects: American Studies; Marketing; Motion Pictures; Music

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2021, Musicology

Dance is famously ephemeral, and historians of dance must therefore grapple with an astounding number of gaps and uncertainties in the historical record. Often, researchers focus their attention on cultural context, reception history, or the musical score of a dance as the best ways to get close to a choreographic work that has not survived. I propose an alternative approach that centers on the theoretical frameworks that shaped these works. Through an exploration of technologies of representation that were used to record dance in France between 1852 and 1912, including notation, scientific graphs, photography, and film, I demonstrate how dance theory interacted with broader historical discourses concerning representation, temporality, and the body. Attempts to record dance, I argue, reveal how dancers, theorists, and choreographers situated their art in the context of these developments. I also show how methods of dance notation can be taken as a part of a larger history of media and representation in the years around 1900. Chapter One examines three texts that interlock to strengthen our understanding of the world of dance theory and notation: Arthur Saint-Leon's La Stenochoregraphie, which was re-imagined decades later in Friedrich Albert Zorn's Grammatik der Tanzkunst and Enrico Cecchetti's Manuel des exercises. Stepanov notation, the subject of Chapter Two, turned away from the fashioning of dance theory as grammar. Author Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov justifies his methods through reference to the ideas, words, and inventions of two French scientists, the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and Etienne-Jules Marey, champion of graphical representation. In Chapter Three, I consider the role of cinematic technologies as a medium used to record dance in the first twenty years of its existence. A case study, the comic film Le Piano irresistible (1907, dir. Alice Guy Blache) illustrates my arguments concerning dance, silence, and humor. I conclude in Chapter Four with (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Francesca Brittan (Advisor); Susan McClary (Committee Member); Daniel Goldmark (Committee Member); Andrea Rager (Committee Member) Subjects: Dance; Film Studies; History; Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Spanish and Portuguese

This research project utilizes critical analyses of morality, modernity, and the idea of the deber ser (“ought to be”) of the woman in Colombia during the period of the Hegemonia Conservadora (1886-1930), during which time the main processes of modernization took place in the nation. In this dissertation, I study how the arrival of the cinematographer changed the social, cultural, and visual practices of Colombian society. At the same time, I interrogate how different conservative groups worried about and reacted to the "immoral" topics represented in these films, while also examining the relationship between the cinematic image and the modernization of the country. Additionally, this study analyzes the ways patriarchal/heteronormative society utilized different media and moral discourses to set standards for women's behavior in the public sphere through the use of advice columns, photo spreads, advertising, comics, and cinematic images. I explore the conservative discourses of moral principles and good behavior evidenced in periodicals from the end of nineteenth century to 1930. Furthermore, my study analyzes lifestyle magazines from 1886 to 1930 to explain how women of the period were involved in the economy of consumption to become what I call the “mujer de toilette” ("woman of the toilette"). This study establishes a relationship between female stardom, beauty pageants, articles, and advertising (related to or addressing women) that demonstrates how women of the period were tasked with being aesthetically pleasing to males while also being controlled by the patriarchal norms. Finally, through analyses of some of the silent films made in Colombia during this period, I focus on the representation of the “ought to be” of the women in these narratives, where the genre of melodrama played an important role in the moral education of both male and female spectators. Throughout this project, I examine how the modernization period transformed the lifestyles of Colombia's (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Laura Podalsky Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Foreign Language; Latin American Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Theatre

The purpose of this study is to dissect the gesticulation used in the films made during the silent era that were adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays. In particular, this study investigates the use of nineteenth and twentieth century established gesture in the Shakespearean film adaptations from 1899-1922. The gestures described and illustrated by published gesture manuals are juxtaposed with at least one leading actor from each film. The research involves films from the experimental phase (1899-1907), the transitional phase (1908-1913), and the feature film phase (1912-1922). Specifically, the films are: King John (1899), Le Duel d'Hamlet (1900), La Diable et la Statue (1901), Duel Scene from Macbeth (1905), The Taming of the Shrew (1908), The Tempest (1908), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1909), Il Mercante di Venezia (1910), Re Lear (1910), Romeo Turns Bandit (1910), Twelfth Night (1910), A Winter's Tale (1910), Desdemona (1911), Richard III (1911), The Life and Death of King Richard III (1912), Romeo e Giulietta (1912), Cymbeline (1913), Hamlet (1913), King Lear (1916), Hamlet: Drama of Vengeance (1920), and Othello (1922). The gestures used by actors in the films are compared with Gilbert Austin's Chironomia or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery (1806), Henry Siddons' Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action; Adapted to The English Drama: From a Work on the Subject by M. Engel (1822), Gustave Garcia's The Actors' Art: A Practical Treatise on Stage Declamation, Public Speaking and Deportment, for the Use of Artists, Students and Amateurs (1882), and Charles Aubert's L'Art Mimique (1901). The conclusion of this study finds that silent Shakespeare films document not only stage productions of the period, but also document the gestures performed by trained actors in continuous moving images. Because silent film is a visual medium, the film adaptations generally depict scenes that are described in Shakespeare's texts. From the descriptions and illus (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alan Woods (Advisor); Janet Parrott (Committee Member) Subjects: Theater

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

Representations of the frontier through the early twentieth century have been subject to two sets of critical criteria: the conventional aesthetic expectations of the particular genres and forms in which westerns are produced, and the popular cultural demand for imitative “authenticity” or faithfulness to the “real west.” “In the Flesh” probes how literary history is bound up with the history of performance westerns that establish the criteria of “authenticity” that text westerns seek to fulfill. The dissertation demonstrates how the impulse to verify western authenticity is part of a post-Civil War American nationalism that locates the frontier as the paradigmatic American socio-topography. It argues that westerns produced in a variety of media sought to distance themselves from their status as art forms subject to the critical standards of particular genres and to represent themselves as faithful transcriptions of popular frontier history. The primary signifier of historicity in all these forms is the technical ability to represent authentic bodies capable of performing that history. Postbellum westerns, in short, seek to show their audiences history embodied “in the flesh” of western performers. “In the Flesh” is therefore divided into two sections: the first analyzes performance westerns, including stage drama, Wild West, and film, that place bodies on display for the immediate appraisal of audiences. Section two examines text westerns, including dime novels and Owen Wister's “The Virginian,” that are constrained to appropriate the conventions of performance to “display” in writing the bodies of their “authentic” western characters.

Committee: Chadwick Allen (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American