Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1931, Graduate School

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, History

This project explores the labor history of the Appalachian region and the presence of American labor history in the museum space and in public memory. The first section is a proposal for a Museum of Appalachian Labor Action, detailing the administrative and exhibitionary organization of a museum dedicated to the labor history of the Central, North Central, and Northern Appalachia, situated in Wheeling, West Virginia. The second section, a museum exhibition design titled “The Mine Wars Experience,” attempts to tell the history of the early 20th-century labor conflict, the West Virginia Mine Wars. The final section is an essay titled “Labor in the Museum,” an overall exploration of the place American labor history occupies in the museum space and in public memory more generally.

PHD, Kent State University, 2019, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

The Ohio Company of Virginia is not unknown in colonial American historiography, but it has never received the attention or analysis needed fully to demonstrate its role in British empire building. This dissertation explores papers of the Ohio Company, the journals of its agents, and the records of the Board of Trade and Virginia government to show how the Company negotiated with the Colony of Virginia and the British Crown to shape the process of British empire-building. The Ohio Company of Virginia's actions on both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the Appalachians built an empire in the Ohio Valley. The actions of the Ohio Company's agents created conflict with the French, Iroquois, and various bands of Ohio Indians, which eventually culminated in the Seven Years' War. To show how the Ohio Company spearheaded British empire-building in the Ohio Valley and sparked a world war, this dissertation follows the Ohio Company's history. The first chapter investigates the political movements Company's members and agents took in Virginia and London to obtain permission and support from the Crown and demonstrates how the Company's petitions influenced the expansionary policies of the Board of Trade, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Chapter Two explores the mapping expeditions of the Company's agents in the Ohio Valley and shows how the Company activities sparked French interest in the region and informed British cartographers and imperial administrators about the political and physical geography of the Ohio Valley. The third chapter, "Building the Empire," details how the Ohio Company constructed both infrastructure and Native American Alliances, which resulted in the Logstown Conference and subsequent land acquisitions, as well as the understudied Massacre of the Miami at Pickawillany. Chapter Four explores the influence of the Ohio Company in the events typically thought of as the origins of the Seven Years' War. "Negotiating for the Ohio Valley," reveals how the O (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, Oberlin College, 1948, Geology

This paper is a study of the Brallier and Chemung formations of west Highland County, Virginia. The limits of the Brallier formation are determined on the basis ot faunal and lithological evidence, and correlations made with formations in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia.The field work was carried on during the latter part of the summer of 1947 and the identification and correlations worked out in the winter of 1947 and the spring of 1948.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2004, Geography (Arts and Sciences)

At first glance, Keystone appears very similar to other small coal towns in southern West Virginia. Dilapidated and empty buildings, coal dust, and churches are evident on the landscape. However, Keystone is far from a typical coal town in central Appalachia. Although Keystone's population has been dropping since the period following WWII, the population that remains in this small city is largely African-American. The 2000 census indicates that of the 453 residents in Keystone, 73 percent are black. According to current literature, this should not be the case. African-Americans left southern West Virginia in the post-WWII era of mechanization in the coal industry. The persistence of the African-American community is due to several factors, including home ownership opportunities, the presence of a diverse economy, and political leadership at the local and state level. I use histories, archives, and interviews with residents and historians to argue that Keystone, West Virginia, is the capital of “The Free State of McDowell.”

Master of Science, University of Akron, 2007, Geology

Hellhole is an extensive (32 kilometer) cave system developed within Germany Valley (Pendleton County, West Virginia) on the flank of the Wills Mountain Anticline. The area can be described as a mature karst aquifer on the transitional margin of the Appalachian Plateau and Valley and Ridge physiographic provinces. Hellhole is the most extensive and deepest (158 meters) of several mapped caves in the area (others include Memorial Day Cave and Schoolhouse Cave). The upper bounding lithology is the McGlone Limestone. The cave penetrates through the Big Valley Formation and in to the New Market Limestone, a high purity unit that is mined locally. Faulting and folding are prominently exposed in several passages, but did not affect passage development in a noticeable way. The entrance sinkhole opens in to a large room, however, the morphology of the room suggests that the room formed the entrance by the intersection of passages followed by a vertical shaft intersecting from the surface. Passage orientation and strike of the bedrock are nearly identical (N25°E). Lower passages are generally down dip from upper (older) passages. Cave sediment and paleomagnetic analysis reveals that the minimum age of sediments analyzed are 1.070 million years old. Three hundred measurements of wall scallops show that paleowaters in the Western section flowed southwest (1.1 cubic meters per second). Paleoflow from the Southern portion of the cave flowed northward (0.94 meters cubic meters per second), and flow in the Northern section flowed southward (1.0 cubic meters per second). Most passages are 50 to 100 meters below the present land surface. Most of the cave appears to have formed under phreatic conditions, but the presence of thick clastic sediments in some locations attests to vadose invasion.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2013, Cultural Studies (Education)

This research study explored how White working class Appalachian males who have completed, or who were within one term of completing a program of study at one of ten community and technical colleges in West Virginia perceived academic success. It examined their definitions of academic success, the perceptions they held regarding their own past and present academic successes, as well as their views regarding factors from their lived experience that they felt contributed to their program of study completion. Using qualitative methodology, data was collected through semi-structured interviews with eight participants. It was designed to reflect the tenets of Appreciative Inquiry. While reflecting the changes within White working class identity formation in response to the deindustrialization of the economy, the findings of this study present two contradictions with the research literature. The first is that these men were found to define academic success from a working class perspective. This demonstrated their adherence to working class cultural capital while successfully completing a postsecondary program of study. This implies they did not need to abandon their working class cultural capital in lieu of new cultural capital in order to be successful at the college level. Furthermore, the factors from their lived experience that participants named as contributing to their program of study completion were factors that have previously been identified in research literature as factors that commonly present as barriers to postsecondary success for working class students. However, the participants in this study indicated these factors presented as positive influences that assisted in facilitating their academic success. Additionally, the perceptions of past and present academic success held by participants were noted as those that 1) reflect the development of/presence of positive psychological capital within these individuals and 2) demonstrate the educational experien (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2024, English

This paper brings together Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951), and Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970) to explore the landscape of secular modernity and femininity in twentieth-century Britain, ultimately illuminating the ways that modernity is haunted by persistent presence. Robert Orsi writes in his 2016 book History and Presence that modernity is characterized by a spiritual absence (a vacuum in which spiritual presence, God or otherwise, cannot be accessed), leaving the modern subject isolated and alienated. Three female characters in these novels — Miss Kilman, Sarah Miles, and Lise — experience this absence in various ways. Through Miss Kilman's story, Woolf's novel illustrates how absence is institutionally enforced in public society. Despite Woolf's identity as a secular author, Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates surprisingly spiritual themes. Catholic convert Greene later uses Sarah Miles' controversial journey towards faith and eventual sainthood to attempt to enforce presence. However, the varied critical reception of The End of the Affair revealed that its secular, modern readership was yet ready to accept such a blatant account of presence active in public. By the time Muriel Spark pens her biting and satirical novella in 1970, presence has disappeared entirely; Lise can only articulate that she is seeking “the lack of an absence.” I argue that The Driver's Seat becomes an experiment in what a world devoid of presence would look like; when society has so structurally and institutionally limited the modern subject's access to presence, she can only seek to escape absence, which underscores how women's “liberation” actually manifests itself in a secular world. This paper concludes with an examination of the modern novel as a sacred space within which readers can encounter presence.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1962, Graduate School

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1971, Graduate School

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2005, Graduate School

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1930, Graduate School

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1972, Graduate School

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2024, Geological Sciences

This study investigates the extent, nature, and formation processes of Paleo Lake Buckeye during the Late Pleistocene, located in the Buckeye Creek watershed in the central Appalachian Mountains. This thesis integrates GIS mapping, field methods utilizing sediment coring and trenching, radiocarbon dating and grain size analysis to reconstruct the margins and depositional environments of Paleo Lake Buckeye and its surrounding landscape. Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating indicate that the lake formed between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, coinciding with the peak of the last glacial epoch. The stratigraphic analysis shows fine-grained lacustrine deposits, organic rich layers, and episodic coarse-grained beds, which reflects periods of quiet water deposition interrupted by high-energy events. Paleo Lake Buckeye's formation is linked to periglacial conditions, where freeze thaw cycles mobilized sediments and permafrost dynamics influenced hydrological processes. This research not only interpret the paleoenvironmental conditions of the Buckeye Creek watershed during the Late Pleistocene, but also contributes to broader discussions on glacial and periglacial processes, climate variability, and landscape evolution in the central Appalachian Mountains.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, English

Modernist artist novels by and about women complicate traditional understandings of the kunstlerroman genre by challenging the definition and status of the “artist” and presenting a broader range of options for women interested in the arts. Beginning with Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and with specific attention to the character of Bertha Lunken, an art student, and continuing with readings of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mina Loy's Insel, and Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, the dissertation analyzes representations of the female artist. Through their artist protagonists, these authors explore their ambivalence regarding the importance of talent, vision, and marketability. Their portrayals of amateur artists, students, and models focus on the social and material conditions that women in the period had to navigate in order to come to their own understanding of artistic success. Such portrayals also speak to the ways women participated in various modernist movements, both as visual artists and as writers. Ultimately, a reexamination of the female artist figure in these novels allows for an expanded definition of modernism by finding continuities between the Modernist period and the late Victorian period, interrogating regionalist specificity and transatlantic communication, and considering ways that high modernist experimental fiction relates to a commonly feminized and dismissed mass-market literature.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, English

This thesis aims to reexamine the works of Virginia Woolf and other Stephen family members through the lens of the supercrip concept first coined by crip theorists such as Alison Kafer and Eli Clare. Woolf has often been framed as a resourceful writer who converted the symptoms of her mental illness into sources of creative inspiration for her work. However, her life was also plagued by self-imposed, constant pressures to read and write in the face of the difficulties brought on by her symptoms. Letters between her father Leslie Stephen and Charles Darwin suggest that Leslie may have seen his literary talent as a way to justify his own disabled existence as a cyclothymic. This thesis traces how Leslie's supercrip-infused, evolutionary ideology was transmitted into three of his disabled descendants: his first daughter Laura, his nephew Jem, and his third daughter Virginia. All three of these Stephen family members were subjected to lofty expectations for their reading and writing ability. By exploring the lives of Leslie, Jem, Laura, and Virginia, it is possible to observe the damaging effects of Darwinian theories on Victorian people with disabilities and see how the supercrip stereotype informs Woolf's contributions to literary modernism.

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2023, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

With her body of work, Virginia Woolf joins a host of female novelists decrying the lack of power that women in general wield in a patriarchal society. Specifically, her novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando provide a hopeful response to the dismal depiction of the female artist in Victorian literature, namely Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because of its subject matter of domestic abuse, unfortunately the experience of too many women in a society in which husbands are given too much power, Tenant was not regarded with respect in Bronte's lifetime. The novel so obviously portrays a woman without power in such dire circumstances it is indeed unsettling for most audiences. However, in her novel, Bronte's inventive techniques of using embedded and nonlinear narration to bring this mistreatment to light illustrates how the unbalance of power debilitated the expression of the female artist in her character Helen Graham. Although there is no direct evidence that Woolf read Anne Bronte's novel, Woolf responds to this hopeless depiction with modernist experimental and more nuanced strategies such as free indirect style and interrupted narration to paint a much more hopeful picture of the possibility of the female artist confronting the power of the patriarchy with success and freedom of expression. In doing so, she upends Victorian tropes and expected narrative structure to provide a scathing critique of the Victorian patriarchal culture in which she, herself, was raised.

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2023, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Our Bodies Like Rivers is an essay collection that meditates on the geographical and psychological landscape of home, Appalachia, climate change, and the anxieties and ironies of living in the Anthropocene. From environmental catastrophe, to the opioid crisis, to the plight of consumer, to the health and subtle changes of home and the ones we love, these essays all point to an interconnectedness. Our collective sickness and health is a body of water, without boundary or distinction. This work guides us through the wreckage of modern society and seeks to show us how we might go on.

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

This project examines the relationship between music and literary modernism, arguing that modernist authors invoke music in their novels to critique and to imagine more equitable social structures. Using Theodor Adorno's theories on music's ability to model inclusive social structures through balanced part/whole, or detail/totality, relationships, I consider both formal and thematic musical connections in modernist novels. If, as Adorno argues, musical form can reflect current social structures and offer models for more equitable ones, then the modernist use of music can be understood as an attempt to critique social hierarchies and to imagine a more equitable future. My first chapter examines the works of E.M. Forster and his use of music in Howards End and A Passage to India. An extended engagement with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and a brief reference to Indian raga allow Forster to consider issues of race, gender, and class through a musical lens. Through these musical references, Forster opens up possibilities for legibility of the individual within the whole. Ultimately, however, the individual is negated by the patriarchal and imperial whole. The second chapter turns to Virginia Woolf's late novels, The Years and Between the Acts, to argue that Woolf explores an expansive and democratic view of what constitutes music in an effort to undermine fascist communication. In my third chapter, I consider Trinidadian literature and its connection to calypso form. Using Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, I argue that the interactive and political aspects of calypso form, employed by Selvon and Naipaul in the ballad construction of their novels, allows for critique of the imperial power while offering alternatives to imperial narratives. Considering these author's engagements with music alongside Adorno's theories on equitable part/whole relationships in music, this project offers a new way to understand how music functions in modernist (open full item for complete abstract)

Bachelor of Science (BS), Ohio University, 2023, Translational Health

Objectives: The study evaluated the effectiveness of an enhanced West Virginia FARMacy program designed to prescribe healthy food and education to modify multiple cardiovascular disease risk factors in participants who were at risk for or previously diagnosed with a chronic disease. Methods: Participants met weekly for 2-hours where they were provided with locally sourced produce coupled with education and group wellness coaching focused on plant-based food, cooking, and physical activity. Baseline data consisted of demographics, a readiness for change assessment, height, weight, resting blood pressure, lipid panel and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c). These were repeated twice throughout the program. Data were analyzed for change over time using repeated measures ANOVAs, t-tests, and F-tests and effect size. Results: The sample consisted of 33 participants (Mean±SD: 62.2+11.7 y; range: 23 to 79 y; 81% females (n= 27). Significant improvements from baseline were observed in systolic blood pressure (↓ 9.4%; p = 0.006), triglycerides (↓ 16.9%; p = 0.04), dark green vegetables ( ↑ 84.7%; p < 0.001), and colorful vegetables ( ↑ 73.5%; p = 0.002). Between baseline and timepoint 3, BMI decreased ~2 kg/m2, improving the overall group weight classification from the obese to overweight classification (p < 0.001). While HbA1c did not significantly change throughout the program, it had a large effect size (0.96) between timepoint 2 and 3. Discussion: These results suggest that FARMacy is an effective program to reduce CVD RFs in a rural Appalachian population using lifestyle interventions.