Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Art Education

Facing world situations with an accelerating rate of violence and natural disaster, and living in an interdependent world that is deeply divided politically, economically, and culturally, my dissertation aims to find the most intellectually responsible way to address the idea of humanitarianism in/through art education. My research question is: How can I envision a visual culture curriculum that maximizes the positive educational value of Nachtwey's anti-war photography in order to cultivate care ethics that may lead to the promotion of humanitarian education? This is an educational action research initiative with a critical edge. In Literature Review (Chapter 2), I address the theoretical foundation of this curriculum which has five dimensions: 1) identify with the victims, 2) address that the lack of equity is a determined political choice, 3) create a reverential condition in which to look at atrocious images, 4) cultivate relational ethic of caring, and 5) support social reconstructionist multicultural art education. These five dimensions are drawn from James Nachtwey's photography, critical social theory, humanitarianism, general education, and art education. In Methodology and Data Collection (Chapter 3) and Data Analysis (Chapter 4), I lay out how this curriculum was designed, implemented, and evaluated. Findings indicate that this curriculum is promising, but not without challenges. Creating spectatorship of suffering is intimately intertwined with the notion of opening humanitarian space. Students' personal experiences and contextual information presented by the instructor play critical roles in constructing students' understanding of humanitarian issues. In Conclusion (Chapter 5), I propose three key directions for research and policy: 1) acknowledging our moral constitution as co-spectators of far away suffering, 2) facilitating an in-depth inquiry on the failure of humanity, and 3) coalescing around global humanitarian issues through an interdisciplina (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Deborah Smith-Shank PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Christine Ballengee-Morris PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Sydney Walker PhD (Committee Member); John Quigley PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2020, Theatre

This MA Thesis seeks to continue a longstanding conversation in Theatre Studies about the role of the audience by looking at the concept of active and passive spectators through the lens of play theory and establishing a new category of creative spectator. This study analyzes the way of conceptualizing and engaging visitors in a “visitor-centered museum” developed by the Columbus Museum of Art in 2012 to argue that this method can be adapted and applied to theatre spectators. Finally, I suggest various strategies for transforming theatre lobbies into audience-dominated spaces, which shifts the focus of scholarly conversation away from how spectators perceive what they see on stage, a space controlled by actors, designers, and directors, to what they see and how they interact with material in a space over which they can have more control in the process of making. Using this field of theory and praxis moves the conversation of spectatorship from the stage to audience-dominated spaces, in particular, the lobby.

Committee: Ana Puga DFA (Advisor); Jennifer Schlueter MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Museums; Performing Arts; Theater

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Camp is a critical sensibility and a queer reading practice that allows women to simultaneously critique, resist, and enjoy stereotypes and conventional norms. It is both a performative strategy and a mode of reception that transforms resistance into pleasure. Scholarship on feminist camp recognizes a tradition of women using camp to engage with gender politics and play with femininity. Most of the scholarship focuses on women's camp in mainstream and popular culture and how they talk back to the patriarchy. Little work has been done on feminist camp outside of popular culture or on how women use camp to talk back to feminism. My dissertation adds to conversations about feminist camp by exploring a new facet of camp that talks back to feminism and challenges a feminist audience. I examine the work of three contemporary feminist and queer independent filmmakers: Anna Biller, Cheryl Dunye, and Bruce LaBruce to explore the different ways they subvert cinematic conventions to interrupt narrative, play with stereotypes, and create opportunities for pleasure as well as critique. I argue that these filmmakers operationalize a feminist camp gaze and open up space for a feminist camp spectatorship that engages critically with ideas about identity, sex, and feminism. In addition, I consider the ways in which other types of feminist cultural production, including sketch comedy and web series, use camp strategies to deploy a feminist camp gaze to push back against sexism and other forms of oppression while also parodying feminism, ultimately creating space for resistance, pleasure, and self-reflection.

Committee: Linda Mizejewski (Advisor); Shannon Winnubst (Committee Member); Treva Lindsey (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Gender Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

This dissertation fills a gap in phenomenological approaches to film and creates a framework for religious experience that grounds it in the body, arguing that bodies have religious experiences when they become aware of the deep connections they have with the world and the material realities that run underneath existence. In the viewing experience, film and spectator enter into a relationship with each other, and this relationship shapes religious experience for viewer and film. I argue that religious experience begins with the body and is produced through material relationships between bodies, claiming that film itself, through its relationship with the world and viewer, has religious experiences and, indeed, a soul. To demonstrate this, I interrogate my own spectatorship, considering films and moments in them that have sparked my own cinematic religious experiences—mysterious voice-overs and strange sounds, fractures in the formal and narrative worlds of films, and sequences that prompt new ways of seeing. My experiences come from a wide spectrum of cinematic traditions and time periods, among them contemporary U.S. art house, post-revolution Iranian film, and Pather Panchali, a masterwork of Indian cinema. Through close attention to my own viewing practices and detailed filmic analysis, I advance a spectatorship that sees through the eyes of faith, trusting in film to re-connect us to the material world and open up new possibilities of being in the world.

Committee: Ryan Friedman Dr. (Committee Chair); Jared Gardner Dr. (Committee Member); Issac Weiner Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Religion

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2017, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis, written in English, proposes an ethico-affective theory of the sound event in film in an effort to rethink the relationship of film and spectator in terms of listening. The movements of the argument progress through an analysis of a two-minute scream from Maiwenn's 2011 film, Polisse, that works to demonstrate the ways in which resonances in theoretical language on film, sound, affect and music, specifically as they relate to the interstice from Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2: the Time-Image, help us to think of the spectator in terms of her active participation in film's material. This step away from cinematographic analysis forces us to scrutinize the methods through which film directly affects the senses of its spectators in ways that confound their ability to "read" the image. As such affections, as Baruch Spinoza suggests, influence how the spectator perceives her own capacity to act in the world, this thesis concludes that listening for sound events in film allows us to perceive the ethical dimensions of film and spectatorship.

Committee: Elisabeth Hodges (Advisor); Jonathan Strauss (Committee Member); Mack Hagood (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethics; Film Studies; Mass Media; Motion Pictures; Music

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2017, Communication

This online longitudinal multi-wave study investigated impacts of sports spectatorship on students of two college football powerhouses — The Ohio State University and the University of Alabama. Specifically, the study looked at changes of self-esteem, mood, university affiliation and university football team affiliation with data collection occurring before and after watching football games. The study found some significant effects on self-esteem, mood, university affiliation and university football team affiliation at the university levels for individual waves but not overall. During this study, there was an on-campus incident at one university that may have affected these results.

Committee: Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick Dr. (Advisor); Brad Bushman Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2013, Film (Fine Arts)

This thesis provides a historical approach to the question of how lesbianism is made visible in Hollywood film adaptations of lesbian narratives from the 1930s to 2011. Chapter one examines Code censorship and haunting absences in Rebecca (1940), These Three (1936) and The Children's Hour (1961). Chapter two analyzes ambiguous lesbian representation as a type of dual marketing approach designed to appeal to both heterosexual mainstream audiences and queer audiences in The Color Purple (1985), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), and Orlando (1992). Chapter three culminates in an examination of the location of queerness in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009, 2011) focusing on the character of Lisbeth Salander as a queer force aimed at destabilizing heterosexist assumption. It is through my examination of the historical shifts in the process translating lesbianism from a verbal description to a visible depiction on screen in Hollywood adaptations that the social and cultural significance and impact of these historical shifts becomes apparent.

Committee: Ofer Eliaz (Committee Chair) Subjects: Film Studies; Gender; History; Literature; Mass Media; Modern Literature; Scandinavian Studies; Womens Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2009, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the ethical implications of voyeurism as a diegetic construct within cinema within the specific context of Michael Haneke's 2005 film Cache. The first chapter uses works by Rene Descartes and Diego Velazquez to frame the question of the deceitful nature of the senses, which contextualize the way we look at film as an entity distinct from lived experience. The second chapter examines theories of montage in order to elaborate upon the difference between narrative and lived experience. The third chapter looks at films by and interviews with Alfred Hitchcock to elaborate upon the previous chapter's discussion of montage and explain the ethics and the legal code of voyeurism as presented in Cache.

Committee: Elisabeth Hodges PhD (Advisor); Jonathan Strauss PhD (Committee Member); Claire Goldstein PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Literature; Romance Literature