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.

Committee: Kimberly Emmons (Advisor); T. Kenny Fountain (Committee Member); Vera Tobin (Committee Member); Mary Grimm (Committee Member); Christopher Flint (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2020, English

Flora: A Cookbook is a hybrid creative writing project that functions as both a cookbook and a memoir of the author's diagnosis with Crohn's disease, a chronic, inflammatory bowel condition. The project';s 18 recipes are entirely dairy-free in order to match the author's restricted diet. They are connected to stories, which tell of the author';s upbringing, his personal health, his love of food, his Jewish identity, and, more generally, the history of Crohn's disease in the United States. Themes explored in Flora include the visible and invisible body, self-actualization, cultural inheritance, and romantic anxiety.

Committee: Daisy Hernandez (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Joseph Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : Romance Languages and Literatures

This dissertation explores the uses of gastronomical references as metaphors to talk about Puerto Rican culture and identity within literary works of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. The narrative of Guillermo Cotto-Thorner's Tropico en Manhattan (1951), Carmen Lugo Filippi's “Recetario para incautos” (1983), Ana Lydia Vega's “Historia de Arroz con Habichuelas” (1983), Mayra Santos Febres' “Marina y su olor” (1996), and Carmen Vazquez Arce's El libro de los afectos culinarios (1996) are clear examples of the creation of a gastronomical Puerto Rican identity and culture. Using Cultural Studies, Post-colonial and Feminist Theories as theoretical backgrounds, the topic of food is decoded as a way to talk about the construction of a material Puerto Rican identity that is parallel to a hybrid cultural and racial past characterized trough these gastronomical representations. The space of the kitchen and food then becomes a way to explore and understand the reality of a contemporary culture and identity that has been reshaped through the influence of various countries.

Committee: Dr. Maria Paz Moreno (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, Caribbean