M.M., University of Cincinnati, 2006, College-Conservatory of Music : Music History

The Story of Irving Berlin (1925), written by drama critic Alexander Woollcott when Berlin was only thirty-six, is the composer's first full-length biography. Despite its acknowledged hyperbolic and apocryphal nature, the biography is consistently invoked by scholars as a source document for Berlin's career. This thesis examines the rhetoric, function, and influence of The Story of Irving Berlin and uses its construction to consider dominant American ideologies of the 1920s. Situated among other biographies of its era, Woollcott's writing adheres to the tenets of the then-popular “new biography” school, which emphasized an anecdotal, fiction-like approach. By fashioning a narrative modeled on patterns of fiction and invoking Berlin's Jewish heritage to heroically characterize the composer, Woollcott effectively mythologized Irving Berlin as an archetype for the American dream. Although this characterization was intended to promote Berlin's public image, Woollcott's fictional constructs have hampered subsequent scholarship on the composer, outlasting the era they were intended to serve.

Committee: bruce mcclung (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2024, Theology

Katherine Burton (1887-1969) is a forgotten, yet prolific US Catholic writer who wrote for average, middle-class, white women in the mid-twentieth century. From her conversion to Catholicism in 1930 to her death in 1969, Katherine wrote a monthly “Woman to Woman” column in The Sign for thirty-six years, over forty-four biographies and histories of Catholic men, women, and religious communities, and countless articles for other Catholic periodicals. Her books, as well as the Catholic periodicals in which her writing regularly appeared, had a large, nationwide readership. Katherine's words hold significance for religious scholars today seeking to further understand the faith lives of middle-class women in the pews during one of the most turbulent time periods in US history. Examining Katherine's writing provides scholars with a view into how Catholicism and Catholic womanhood were understood and presented by a laywoman to her mid-twentieth century laywomen audience. Katherine's writing is also a compelling example of how intricately an author's personal life is often entwined with their work and how studying the two side by side enriches the narratives they both tell.

Committee: Bill Portier (Committee Chair); Sandra Yocum (Committee Member); Mary Henold (Committee Member); Jana Bennett (Committee Member); William Trollinger (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Religious History; Theology

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Germanic Languages and Literatures

This paper examines the theoretical difficulties related to the study of Gretel Karplus Adorno, wife of Theodor Adorno. In 1937, Karplus turned away from a successful career as an independent businesswoman to become Adorno's wife, unofficial secretary, and life-long promoter. This decision challenges contemporary assumptions that women in Karplus' situation were either stifled during their lives or intentionally overlooked posthumously. In contrast, this paper analyzes Karplus's 1930-40 correspondence with Walter Benjamin to suggest that she saw her marriage and submission to her husband's ambition as an opportunity to achieve her own life goals, not an obstacle to those goals. Karplus found financial success and social disappointment in her Berlin career. She developed close relationships with Adorno and Benjamin out of a desire for their intellectual companionship. For this reason, she was eager to support their work, even at the cost of her manufacturing career. This paper concludes that a biography of Karplus must not only accept her decision to leave her career, despite its apparent complicity with a patriarchal bias towards men and husbands. Such a biography must also challenge ideas of success defined by the bourgeois notion of an individual genius who produces products (e.g. books) in isolation.

Committee: John Davidson (Committee Member); Paul Reitter (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Germanic Literature; History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, German

At its core, this thesis delves into the intricate layers of posthumous historiography surrounding Empress Elisabeth of Austria – examining not just her history, identity, and ideas of visuality, but also probing the underlying mechanisms shaping the construction of her biographical narrative. It seeks to unravel the complexities inherent in the selection process of what information is deemed pertinent for inclusion, especially considering the nuanced treatment of sensitive or disruptive pieces of information. By scrutinizing this selection criteria, the thesis aims to shed light on the underlying motivations and biases guiding such decisions as well as the implications of their inclusion – or lack, thereof. Furthermore, this study explores the experimental possibilities of adaptation within the realm of contemporary Austrian film. It posits that the burgeoning interest in Sisi within wider Habsburg scholarship has catalyzed innovative approaches to storytelling in cinema. Through a detailed analysis of select cinematic works, the thesis elucidates how the exploration of Sisi's legacy has sparked a renaissance in Austrian filmmaking, fostering a fertile ground for experimentation and reinterpretation. By intertwining insights from historiography, film studies, and cultural analysis, this thesis not only offers a comprehensive understanding of the complexities surrounding Sisi's portrayal but also serves as a catalyst for broader discussions on the intersection of history, identity, and visual representation in contemporary discourse.

Committee: Edgar Landgraf Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christina Guenther Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Aesthetics; European History; European Studies; Film Studies; Foreign Language; Gender; Gender Studies; Germanic Literature; Literature; Mental Health; Womens Studies; World History

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, History

John M. Sant was a World War II bomber co-pilot who was shot down over German-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1944. He and the other eight surviving crew members were captured and sent to Stalag Luft I, a German prison camp near the Baltic Sea. Sant spent the next ten months in captivity, keeping a logistical journal of his daily life in the camp. With this journal, along with primary documents, copies of declassified military paperwork, and a typed account of Sant's narrative located in the Skinner Personal Archive as a chronological framework, this thesis constructs a biographical narrative of Sant's life and wartime experiences. Sant's journal provided an indirect glimpse into his inner thoughts. His entries reflect a fear of being overlooked, both during captivity and following release. Sant found solace in escapism through literature and reminisced about home life, emphasizing the importance of morale and interpersonal connections among the POWs. Elements of optimism infuse the passages he chose to copy down, showing his enduring belief in the strength of the Allied forces. The journal also served as a covert way to challenge the authority of the main camp authorities. Sant's hopefulness played a crucial role in maintaining his emotional well-being, a theme more prominent in his post-war writings. The arrival of new prisoners, while disheartening, meant access to more current information. Sant's diary entries not only reflect his emotional state regarding his fellow POWs but also his reaction to news like General Patton's progress in Europe, offering him temporary relief from worries about America's military effectiveness. His aspirations for post-war life served as a comfort and a way to look forward to a future beyond the uncertainty of war. The journal also played a key role in asserting Sant's sense of self-determination under the strict confines of his POW status. While it contained no information unknown to his captors, it provided him with a sense of con (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Randolph Roth (Committee Member); David Staley (Advisor) Subjects: American History; Armed Forces; History; Military History; Military Studies; Modern History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1961, English

Committee: J. Robert Bashore (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1950, Economics

Committee: Lloyd A. Helms (Advisor) Subjects: Economics

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1947, English

Committee: Emerson C. Schuck (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

This historical research study situates the pedagogical work of Dr. Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs (1915-2010) within the histories of art education. By situating a Black women art educator into the histories of art education during the 1940s-1960s, the history of art education must be reconsidered. By tracing and crafting a bridge from the work of Carter G. Woodson and the concept of fugitive pedagogies to Dr. Burroughs, a clearer picture of the art classroom within de facto segregated high schools emerges. Utilizing alternative historical methods such as microhistory, critical fabulation, and place-based methodologies, Margaret's educational career comes into focus, challenging the dominant narratives within histories that continue to obfuscate the work of Black art teachers. The analysis first looks at Margaret's biographical information prior to becoming a teacher, including her experiences within the school systems of Louisiana and Chicago. From there, I trace the ways that art education became a major theme in her life, and the ways that her art teachers worked to provide her the opportunity to become an art educator. The second section focuses on two different layers of analysis: one utilizing the tenets of fugitive pedagogies to deepen our understanding of Margaret's work in her high school classroom; the second focusing on the importance of place and how being in Bronzeville and dedicating herself to her community impacted her and gave her a reason to leave the classroom and become the head of the DuSable Museum of African American History.

Committee: Joni Acuff (Advisor); Clayton Funk (Committee Member); Shari Savage (Committee Member); James Sanders III (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; Art Education

BA, Oberlin College, 2021, Classics

In his telling of the Life of Nero, Suetonius crafted an image of an archetypical tyrant that he then used throughout his other Lives. The princeps was Rome's premier citizen--as such, they needed to perform all aspects of citizenship as well as possible, especially in regards to successfully performing masculinity. Therefore, to be a good emperor was to embody male virtue; to be a bad emperor was to be effeminate and lack virtue. Suetonius crafted a rhetorical trope of the unmanly tyrant using his portrayal of Nero. This is seen most clearly in Nero 29, where Nero was sexually passive to a freedman, had public intercourse, and performed oral sex, among other improprieties. This trope was then used in the Lives of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Domitian to cast them as unqualified and tyrannical.

Committee: Andrew Wilburn (Advisor); Benjamin Todd Lee (Committee Member); Rebecca A. Frank (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Germanic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation identifies an intersection between language critique and biography in the early thought of Johann Gottfried Herder. Through an analysis of three works written between 1765 and 1770, I show that Herder uses the form of biography to arrive at a concept of living language and to critique modern languages against it. First, Uber die neuere deutsche Literatur (1767-68) presents a biography of language, an allegory that depicts German and other national tongues as forms of aging prose and, furthermore, sketches Herder's concept of well-formed prose as an animate, middle state of adulthood. In turn, Herder's biographical tribute to the author Thomas Abbt, Uber Thomas Abbts Schriften (1768), depicts well-formed prose on the level of the bourgeois individual, exposing the contradictions inherent in the concept of a harmonious middle. In the Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (1846), Herder reflects critically on the life of his own individual language and arrives at a new paradigm, a language of eternal youth. As I ultimately show, the coincidence of language and biography in Herder's thought enables him to conceive of – and perhaps realize – a German prose that is thoroughly alive.

Committee: A. May Mergenthaler (Advisor); Matthew Birkhold (Committee Member); Bernd Fischer (Committee Member); Robert Holub (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature; Linguistics; Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Sociology

In 2015, nearly 30% of individuals aged 50 and older had two or more marriages compared to 19% in 1980, indicating that a growing share of older adults either divorced or were widowed during early or midlife and later remarried. Although widowhood remains a common exit from marriage in later life, divorce to people over 50 is also on the rise. Despite increasingly complex marital biographies of older adults, few researchers have examined differences between disruption pathways (i.e., one divorce, one widowhood, or multiple disruptions) and whether remarriage is associated with fewer costs of marital disruption. It is also unclear whether duration remarried or unmarried relates to better or worse health after different disruption pathways. Using the 1992-2014 Health and Retirement Study, I investigate the associations of different disruption pathways, subsequent remarriage relative to being unmarried, and duration remarried or unmarried with older adults' mental and physical health, contact with children, and ambivalence toward children. I also account for gender differences as the health and parent-child ties of men and women often differ in later life. This dissertation underscores the need to pay attention to older people with multiple disruptions, as they are often disadvantaged in health and parent-child relationships relative to older adults with one divorce or widowhood. The findings regarding the role of remarriage for each well-being outcome are mixed. Remarriage is beneficial for the mental health of men relative to being unmarried after any type of disruption, and for the physical health of divorced women. Although remarriage relates to more frequent parent-child contact for divorced men, remarriage relates to less contact among women after one widowhood or multiple disruptions. Remarriage also links to greater ambivalence among men after multiple disruptions. Duration also matters, but not uniformly across outcomes. Remarried men after multiple disruption (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: I-Fen Lin Dr. (Advisor); Susan L. Brown Dr. (Committee Member); Karen Guzzo Dr. (Committee Member); Wendy D. Manning Dr. (Committee Member); Sudershan Jetley Dr. (Other) Subjects: Aging; Demography; Families and Family Life; Gerontology; Sociology

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2018, Art

This written work uses personal narratives as a mirror, to the objects, artworks, processes, and materials of my thesis work. It is also an account of the two years of my father's illness and death from the diagnosis of a Stage IV Glioblastoma brain tumor. It patches together a narrative of a father who is eternally heroic, a mother who willingly wades into the dark, and siblings who share the same pain. The writing is a way for me to make sense of it all, what it means to be a daughter and sister, exist in a body, and be confronted with the death of someone I really love. Its weaves together the Madonna and Bible stories, histories around corpses, dolphins, opal rings and broken ceilings. The art work made during that time is an absorption and reflection of these things. It documents the quiet and catastrophic devastation of brain cancer.

Committee: Carmel Buckley (Advisor); Alison Crocetta (Committee Member); George Rush (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Leadership and Change

The dissertation is a deep study of an iconic 20th century female, African American leader whose acclaim developed not only from her remarkable first generation post-Reconstruction Era beginnings, but also from her mid-century visibility among Negroes and some Whites as a principal spokesperson for her people. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune arose from the Nadir- the darkest period for Negroes after the Civil War and three subsequent US Constitutional Amendments. She led thousands of Negro women, despite social adversity, to organize around their own aspirations for improved social and material lives among America's diverse citizens., i.e. “the melting pot.” The subject of no fewer than thirty-two dissertation studies, numerable biographies, innumerable awards, and namesake educational institutions, Bethune ascended to public leadership roles. Her renown of the first five decades of the 20th century is reconstructed to be less enigmatic for people of African descent, and more visible for other mainstream Americans. Remarkably, she employed a uniquely crafted philosophy of interactional destiny for the world's “races” anchored in her brand of Christian evangelism. Bethune's uniquely early feminist worldview and strategies for inter-racial cooperation, different than the worldviews of some of her contemporaries, achieved much social capital and opened doors of opportunity for herself and countless others through a brief federal government position, and organized women's work before 1955. Since much of her meta-narrative was riddled with hagiography and myth, this study has fettered out some myths and eradicated some of the hagiography. The study combines primary sources, secondary sources, photo-ethnography, and hermeneutics to illuminate another pathway for future leadership students and organization developers to appropriate aspects of Bethune's 20th century leadership performance as their own. Unintended to merely applaud Dr. Bethune's leadership performance, this stud (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Philomena Esssed Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Laura Morgan Roberts Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kevin McGruder Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American History; Black History; Black Studies; Organizational Behavior; Social Structure; Spirituality; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1980, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1978, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2016, Journalism (Communication)

The life of Archibald W. Campbell Jr. intertwined with the press, the formation of a new state, the growth of West Virginia, and vast changes to the United States over a dynamic half century. Campbell's life story provides a prism through which is revealed a spectrum of social, as well as personal meaning during the period from 1855 to 1899. The journey sheds new light on the role of the press in West Virginia's formation and early development and uncovers human virtues and imperfections of a man who was integral to the improbable realization of statehood at a time when the region was critical to the country's survival.

Committee: Michael Sweeney PhD (Committee Chair); Greg Newton PhD (Committee Member); Marilyn Greenwald PhD (Committee Member); Kara Lombardi PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Biographies; Communication; History; Journalism; Mass Communications

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2015, Leadership and Change

This dissertation is a biographical study of the life of Dr. Helen Caldicott that details her life and work over the years from 1997 to 2014. The history of her significant role in the end of the Cold War and her influence in public opinion regarding nuclear power and nuclear arms has been well-documented through many books, films, and articles as well as her own autobiography up to this twenty-year-period. My study will help to fill the gap in her most recent life. In particular, I will explore the impact of her activism on society and her personal life in this period. Research methods include interviews with Dr. Caldicott, interviews with her collaborators, archival material, and deep reflection of the researcher. I am interested in what Dr. Caldicott understands now, about her work and her life, that may not have been apparent to her twenty years ago when she wrote her autobiography A Desperate Passion (1997) and was in the middle of her effort to educate a population about pending nuclear disaster. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at AURA, http://aura.antioch.edu/etds/ and OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd

Committee: Carolyn Kenny PhD (Committee Chair); Laurien Alexandre PhD (Committee Member); Elaine Gale PhD (Committee Member); Timothy Mousseau PhD (Other) Subjects: Biographies; Business Community; Environmental Justice; Ethics; Gender Studies; Social Psychology; Sustainability