Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2023, Film

This paper includes a combination of structural and genre analysis of the film "Lonely Creatures" (which was directed by the author), reflections on the process, and analysis of the film's strengths, weaknesses, and what was successfully accomplished. There is also explanation and reflection on the process of fabricating props, set pieces and a puppet as well as discussion of the visual effects techniques employed in the post-production process.

Committee: Lindsey Martin (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Fine Arts; Motion Pictures

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Creative Writing/Fiction

The Dead Come to Carcal is a new-adult fantasy/adventure which centers around a multi-pronged mystery in the Inca-inspired city, Carcal. The novel follows five characters who become connected to that mystery and drawn together to solve it. Enrel Leolore, a militia warrior who lives in Carcal, haunted by a curse she bears from a spirit; Adwynn Theyros, a mage bounty hunter who is blood-bound to an arcane contract by the prestigious Candlelight University, attempting to save her mother from debt; Lumiseth Amruus, a skilled cleric who is chosen by the Rutaran god of the sun to halt an ancient evil rising in the land of Atrea; Vaen, Lumiseth's personal handservant and childhood friend, who is tasked with caring for his charge on his prophesied journey; and Howler, a wandering thief who is following a recurring dream in search of revenge for their shattered family. When mysterious circumstances bring each of these individuals to the city of Carcal, nestled in the mountains of the Atrean Collective Territories, they find themselves pulled into a secret plot of disappearances, would-be spirits, and the cryptic machinations of the magical forest, Yuko. They must find a way to collaborate with one another in spite of their varied upbringings and agendas to get to the bottom of Carcal's mysteries. Else their lives, and the lives of everyone in Carcal, fall to a mounting threat of unimaginable depths—depths which the world of Harrigon hasn't seen for centuries. The novel explores multiple, intertwining points of view, inspired by the popular tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons. By doing this, it reveals its characters' troubled lives, engaging in themes of societal and structural inequality, imperialism, privilege, family, love, mental health, neurodivergence, growth, redemption, and healing. It crafts a unique and rich fantasy world that is inspired by historical cultures of our own, and is written in the feminist fantasy tradition, featuring a diverse cas (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Reema Rajbanshi Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Pauls Tuotonghi Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Fine Arts; Gender; Glbt Studies; Literature; Mental Health; Modern Literature

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Youngstown State University, 2022, Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing)

“Incarnate” is a “darkened epic fantasy” about a youth who survives incredible odds and harrowing experiences that seek to harden him as a person. It is a coming-of-age story and plays to the fictional tradition of the hero's journey both literally and metaphorically. Throughout its narrative, the novel explores and criticizes the fate and responsibilities of the typical “chosen one” archetype and examines the protagonist's understanding of justice and morality while battling between self-preservation and self-sacrifice as an evil force threatens the world.

Committee: Chris Barzak MFA (Advisor); Hilary Plum MFA (Committee Member); Steven Reese PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Literature

BA, Kent State University, 2018, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Two high school seniors, Oliver Ludens and Elizabeth Trennor, struggle with the prospects of young adulthood. If it wasn't hard enough, a new magic further complicates their prospects. Before long, they are thrust into a strange city in a hidden world and join a team of rough and tough vigilantes. When a magi-political crisis emerges involving a cult fixated on spiders, Oliver and Elizabeth are forced to make crucial decisions about their past and their future.

Committee: Robert King Ph.D. (Advisor); Heaphy Leslie Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sato Paula Ph.D. (Committee Member); Baker Charles Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Language Arts; Literature

BA, Kent State University, 2019, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Freshman college student Marty Gallagher believes there's something paranormal in the town of Rosenberg, and he intends to find it. However, Marty's discovery of the paranormal creates more questions than it answers, chiefly, why is Rosenberg so strange? Gradually, six other students at Rosenberg State University find themselves involved in Marty's quest: flirtatious, brilliant Adonis Montgomery, who believes in strange gods; sporty, sociable Nora Park, who is adamant that magic does not exist; her twin brother Nathaniel Park, in love with Adonis; Sebastiana “Bash” Bordignon, storyteller; Ronan Kendrick, who is delighted by anything strange; and small-town farmboy Scott Hayward, who doesn't actually care if magic is real or not. Scott – Smallville to his new friends – only wants to recover from the anxiety and depression that made him drop out of college the first time around, something with which his friends and his dog seem to be helping. Marty's strange quest frames Bash's short stories, too, of which there are three, each exploring a different genre and literary concept: (1) adventure novels, in the style of Indiana Jones, with influence from Arabic and Persian mythology; (2) Egyptian mythology combined with tragedy; and (3) a darker superhero story with hints of detective noir. The different genres Bash explores highlight the central problem Marty is facing in understanding Rosenberg: is Marty dealing with aliens or gods, time travelers or the supernatural?

Committee: Matthew Shank (Advisor); Stephanie Siciarz (Committee Member); Elizabeth Howard (Committee Member); Michael Sanders (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

MFA, Kent State University, 2017, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The protagonist Zar, an elf woman who lives and works as a temple prostitute, meets Brandur, a healer from the local University. He has come to establish the beginnings of his healing career at the Temple where he knows his work can benefit the poor of the city's western side. However, he has also come in the hope of discovering a person of interest that a shadow-organization named the Greywings are looking for. As Brandur discovers, Zar so happens to be this person. Zar also deals with the trials and challenges of navigating a world that is run by human men. The story engages in issues of race, sex, sexism, class conflict, and the psychology behind each of those topics.

Committee: Eric Wasserman Prof (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2014, English

BLOOD OF THE WINDMAKER is a fantasy/steam punk novel that attempts to make an exploration into human bodies and their significance/insignificance using fantasy tropes and an inverted Journey of the Hero structure. During the writing of this, I was especially interested in subversions and “otherings” of the human body—tattoo markings have an intricate role in the magic system of my world, but the acquisition of this “magic” marks a person as Other. I'm trying to answer the questions: why do some bodies generate more meaning than others? What do bodies really “mean”?

Committee: Brian Roley MFA (Committee Chair); Margaret Luongo MFA (Committee Member); Kay Sloan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2013, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

While studies of fantastic literature have often focused on their structural and genre characteristics, less attention has been paid to the manner in which they address social issues and concerns. Drawing on theoretical, taxonomic, and historical approaches, this study argues that 19th-century England represented a key period of transformation during which fantastic literature evolved away from its folkloristic, mythic, and satirical origins and toward the modern genres of science fiction, feminist fantasy, and literary horror. The thesis examines the subversive and transformative function of the fantastic in nineteenth-century British literature, particularly how the novel Frankenstein (1831), the poem “Goblin Market” (1862), and the novel Dracula (1897) make deliberate uses of the materials of fantastic literature to engage in social and cultural commentary on key issues of their time, and by so doing to mark a significant transformation in the way fantastic materials can be used in narrative. Frankenstein took the materials of the Gothic and effectively transformed them into science fiction, not only through its exploration of the morality of scientific research, but more crucially through its critique of systems of education and the nature of learning. “Goblin Market” transformed the materials of fairy tales into a morally complex critique of gender relations and the importance of women's agency, which paved the way for an entire tradition of such redactions among later feminist writers. Dracula draws on cruder antecedents of vampire tales and the novel of sensation to create the first modern literary horror novel, while addressing key emerging anxieties of nationalism and personal identity. Although historical connections are drawn between these three key works, written at different points during the nineteenth century, it does not argue that they constitute a single identifiable movement, but rather that each provided a template for how later writer (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kathe Davis Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Margaret Shaw Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Mark Bracher Dr. (Committee Member); Pamela Grimm Dr. (Committee Member); Donald Hassler Dr. (Committee Member); Linda Williams Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2024, Film

Max Kaplan's thesis explores what it takes to make a standout body horror film, from researching horror's gothic roots to making a compelling and unique horror to the daily tasks of a film director.

Committee: Lindsey Martin (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Fine Arts; Literature; Motion Pictures; Music; Performing Arts; Personal Relationships

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2024, English (Arts and Sciences)

Maria lived a normal life with loving parents who would do anything for her. Well, that's what she thinks, anyways. After waking up in the body of a black cat with no memory of her past, the young girl is determined to find out how she ended up under a bridge in the Foxglove Forest. Maria quickly meets Henrik, an outsider living in the forest and haunted by his own past. Together, the pair will work to solve the mysteries that have shaped their lives, revealing the bloody truth of Foxglove Forest along the way.

Committee: Patrick O'Keeffe (Advisor) Subjects: Composition

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2024, Department of Humanities

A thief, Gwen, is given the task to earn herself an enormous amount of money by a very wealthy employer. The task, however, is not as easy as she might have thought. To earn her money, Gwen must travel across land and sea, navigating the world of the aristocracy and figure out a way to behave in front of a new social class. She is thrown into a world she has only ever heard of and must wear the right clothes, say the right thing and act a certain way all while trying to stay hidden for if she is caught, Gwen knows the rest of her days would be spent in prison. In one of four lands, this story takes place in Celdwyn: The Land of Song, following Gwen whose natural instinct is to fight back twice as hard with anything that comes her way, which proves to be difficult for her working relationship. How was she supposed to know it was not common to tackle your employer to the ground when you're upset. Gwen has one task, and one task alone: steal the oculus. Is it so bad if she steals a few extra pieces of gold and silver along the way? And cutlery? Artwork? Clothing? Lampshades and jewellery? What about the crown? The one that sits on the King's head, would it really be so bad if she found a way to take that and keep it forever?

Committee: Chris Barzak MFA (Committee Chair); Dolores Sisco PhD (Committee Member); Jay Gordon PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation aims to expand how children's and YA literature scholars approach literary analysis for young audiences. This research examines the ways in which narrative theory can illuminate an analysis of children's novels and their adapted narratives, through the interrelated tools associated with adaptation theory, rhetorical narrative theory, multimodality theory, and musical theatre studies. To fulfill these aims, I have conducted a narrative analysis of Rick Riordan's middle grade fantasy novel, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2005), and Joe Tracz and Rob Rokicki's 2015 musical theatre adaptation, The Lightning Thief: The Musical. Specifically, I have used rhetorical narrative theory (Phelan, 2007; 2017) to examine the narrative techniques used in the adaptation of Riordan's novel. This approach, in combination with a content and musicality analysis, yielded new dimensions of the storytelling construction and authorship of the adaptation, along side the narrative construction of the original novel. The analysis revealed that using a narrative, content, and multimodal approach made visible the specific judgements created and offered by the authors, and these judgements aligned with certain narrative events. Additionally, music adds its own narrative contributions and enhances the ways authors inform or shape audiences' potential judgements. These insights support a centering of the formation of narratives for young audiences as a framework for analysis children's literature and literary adaptations. In combining these analytical approaches, I show that a variety of theoretical tools and resources can work together to show the interrelated authoring process and decisions that shape readers' potential for engaging with a middle grade novel, a theatrical production, and related musical elements of a production.

Committee: Pat Enciso (Advisor); Kevin McClatchy (Committee Member); Mindi Rhoades (Committee Member); Michelle Abate (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Music; Theater

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

The makers of commercial popular culture often incorporate folklore into their works. Although their definition of folklore is generally restricted to pre-modern narratives and beliefs that form only a small part of what folklore is, their works relate to traditional content in a more expansive way. This dissertation examines a contemporary television genre that not only incorporates traditional content but, I argue, functions as folklore in its own right by negotiating truth and belief, constructing social Others, and, at the meta-level, constituting an archive. Since the 1990s, serial narratives in which everyday people investigate and solve supernatural disturbances in a procedural format have become a mainstay of North American television and streaming media. Such programs, including The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have generally lacked a cohesive genre designation. I argue for “supernatural procedural” as the genre's preferred term and trace its history from predecessors in Victorian-era occult detective fiction to early forms in 1970s television, through solidification in the 1990s into its current permutations. I outline conventions that include, among others, realistic worldbuilding, a blend of episodic and serial storytelling, and, notably, a tendency to engage with folklore. Employing an approach blending folkloristics and popular culture studies, I argue that specific characteristics of the supernatural procedural allow series to function as televisual folklore: folklore not just adapted by, but actually occurring within the television medium. This emphasis contributes to newer avenues in folklore studies, which has only recently begun seriously analyzing television, and popular culture studies, where folkloristic perspectives are often overlooked. This work considers the abovementioned series at length alongside subsequent programs like Supernatural and Grimm, using supporting analysis from Lucifer, Evil, SurrealEstate, and Wellington Pa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dorothy Noyes (Advisor); Angus Fletcher (Committee Member); Merrill Kaplan (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Folklore; Mass Media

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

Withering is a collection of seven stories rooted in an exploration of humanity's relationship with the natural world and with itself. Spanning geographies and time periods, these stories are connected in their primary impulse to reconsider passivity in the face of environmental degradation. Other prominent themes in the collection are dynamic social identities and the performative quality of those identities. The stories that comprise Withering are situated primarily in the eco-fabulist tradition, with other inspirations found in the New Weird movement and horror, as well as traditional realism. By blending genre, Withering seeks to decenter readers' understanding of reality. The uneasy and shifting reality through related but distinct genres serves to underscore themes of calamity and worlds that have been broken and reassembled in new ways. Withering challenges popular notions of crisis, environmental and otherwise, as being a purely distinct event, having a clear “before” and “after;” rather, my thesis considers crisis a degenerative process, much in the way a plant slowly withers away over time, leaf after leaf shriveling up and falling.

Committee: Joseph Bates (Committee Chair); Daisy Hernandez (Committee Member); Margaret Luongo (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

Orhan is a boy set upon by the tremendous pressure of growing up in a world that has known only conflict. The sultan has instituted a conscription of his people, called “sword debt”, which requires one member of each family to take up a sword and fight against the invading forces helmed by the ruthless General Yu. If the bearer of the sword dies, another in the family must take on the sword debt. And with no end to the war in sight, the debt can never be paid. When Orhan's family receives a sword debt, the sword is taken up by Orhan's older sister Rasheda, who is captured. When the sword returns to Orhan, he decides to shirk his duty with the sword debt and, instead of fighting in the war, takes it on a personal quest to rescue his sister. He is aided by Zeki, a mischievous young monk, and Aysu, a deserter with a mysterious past. Along the way they encounter a dragon who lives in the trunk of the Tree of Life, false prophets, true prophets, whirling dervishes who dance their way to a world beyond their own, and the horrifying effects of war without end.

Committee: Brian Roley (Committee Chair); Joseph Bates (Committee Member); Margaret Luongo (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation is an examination of maturation through the lens of adolescent cyborgs in young adult literature. I begin by asserting that adolescents are inherently posthuman because of their liminal, hybrid subjectivity. Humanism asks teenagers to suppress what it perceives as monstrous otherness so that they can become normative adult citizens. The cyborg is therefore an excellent analytical tool for examining how these adolescent identities are constrained to specific kinds of humanist conceptualizations of identity through the development that society promotes. I offer a complex matrix for understanding subjectivity that navigates humanist and posthumanist ideologies alongside conceptualizations of embodiment and socialization. In the body of the dissertation, I examine three cyborgian figures: the shapeshifter, the witch, and the virtual reality avatar. Shapeshifters embody adolescent change. Their developmental trajectories follow their navigation of the dogmatism and manipulations of humanist pursuits of science. The mutability of the shapeshifter symbolizes the adolescent's experience with changing bodies, which humanism seeks to control and posthumanism seeks to embrace. Witches must navigate access to power that exceeds that normally allowed to teenagers. The school story, a narrative regularly associated with this figure in young adult literature, restricts adolescents to particular identities by teaching them to control their powers. The virtual reality avatar signifies the adolescent's navigation of posthuman space. YAL normally privileges analog reality, asking teenagers to leave behind their virtual space in order to mature. In each of these three figures, I analyze narratives that follow the normative, humanist trajectory of growth alongside those that explore alternative, posthumanist maturations. I examine the figures across various visual and verbal formats, looking at film, comics, and prose adaptations of archetypal cyborg figures. The (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michelle Abate (Advisor); Caroline Clark (Committee Member); Brian McHale (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Youngstown State University, 2022, Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing)

A work of fiction in the genres of horror and dark fantasy. The following twentyeight chapters consist of a novel-in-progress. Set in the fictional small town of Evergreen, PA, That Hateful Shape follows protagonist Persephone “Percy” Birch, a queer artist and the only daughter of the sheriff. Percy is hopelessly in love with her best friend, Cheryl Young, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The night of Percy's seventeenth birthday, Cheryl is killed by a group of local privileged boys, who bury her body in the forest of an old oak tree. Unknown to them, the tree contains the last living dryad – a mythical tree spirit – and she is enraged by the damage done to her forest and the environment by humanity. The dryad consumes Cheryl's corpse via her roots, inadvertently assimilating her memories and consciousness, and emerges from her tree to wreak bloody vengeance. As Percy searches for answers to Cheryl's disappearance, she begins uncovering secrets, while the dryad finds herself inexplicably drawn to Percy.

Committee: Christopher Barzak MFA (Advisor); Imad Rahman MFA (Committee Member); David Giffels MA (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Popular Culture

This thesis seeks to demonstrate how “race” as a concept is utilized in the genre of high fantasy. It examines how race is constructed in fantasy texts utilizing an essentialist framework wherein race is determinative of individual morality, psyche, and aptitude. In imagining race in fantastical worlds, high fantasy texts reproduce the ideas of unabashedly white supremacist race philosophers such as Carl Linnaeus, Arthur de Gobineau, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, applying them to fantastical beings rather than real world groups. The same racial logics that informed Nazism are seen at play in The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, and World of Warcraft. This thesis will examine how the essentialist framework is utilized through the three most common racial groups in high fantasy: Dwarves, Orcs, and Elves. In examining each of these groups in turn, broad patterns of how race is imagined become clear. Stereotypes about real-world groups are imported into fantastical worlds, where they are often combined and remixed over time by successive waves of authors. In comparing different fantasy texts, we see how the characterization of particular races changes with time to reflect the culture of the eras that produce them. In some cases, these re-imaginings are done directly in opposition to previous texts in attempts to correct offensive caricatures. However, even as imagined races themselves have changed with time, the overall concept of “race” in high fantasy remains mired in an essentialist mindset.

Committee: Jeffrey Brown Ph. D. (Committee Member); Esther Clinton Ph. D. (Committee Member); Jeremy Wallach Ph. D. (Advisor) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Ethnic Studies

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2021, English

This project has three main goals: to discuss the current and historical climate of inclusion in fantasy and in fiction, to create a concrete criteria to test fiction for inclusion, and to apply that criteria in my own fantasy novel. In pursuit of these goals I use film studies to demonstrate statistically the lack of inclusion, scholarly sources, and personal testimonies from those who have felt left out of the fantasy tradition due to their identity. In my criteria for inclusion, I modify the term “balanced cast”, which is used to show a work of fiction's characters have traits that correspond with appropriate demographics. For my novel, the US Census and CDC demographics are used, supplemented with UCLA's demographics for transgender identities and other statistics government sources do not include. For example, the CDC reports that 26% of Americans live with a disability. In film, the number of characters with a disability is 2.3%. A balanced cast requires that characters be within 5% of the corresponding demographic, meaning that 21% or more of my characters will have at least one disability. My novel will have a balanced cast in disability, neurodivergence, gender, race and ethnicity, and sexual orientation. In addition to having a balanced cast, my criteria added three modifiers: equitable, normalizing, and conscientious. Together, these modifiers ensure that many identities within these umbrella groups are recognized, that the portrayal of these characters do not support misinformation and perpetuate stereotypes, and that the novel has at least one deep exploration of a character's relationship with a certain trait.

Committee: Mary-Kate Hurley (Advisor); Edmond Chang (Advisor) Subjects: Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Youngstown State University, 2020, Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing)

Several thousand years ago, Ireland was not such a green and hospitable place. Six different groups of people had invaded her shores, seeking a better life. Some argue that it was five and not six, but that's not the point—the point is that they didn't know Ireland was not entirely devoid of life when they arrived. Over the course of a thousand years, give or take a hundred or two, many people fought to survive against plagues, droughts, and monsters. During the fifth of these invasions, magic found its way to Ireland's shores, changing the power dynamic forever. The Fomorians, a race of monsters and supernatural beings, fought against the Tuatha De Danann and they eventually won. They enslaved the Tuatha, for a time, but eventually the tables turned once again. This struggle went on for a spell and then came the Milesians, Ireland's sixth and final invaders. With poetry and science they waged war on the inhabitants of Ireland. And then, with a bit of tricky wording, they banished magic and all magical beings beneath the great fairy mounds of Ireland. It's been quite a while since then—whatever happened to the Fomorians? To the Tuatha? One family has kept that information secret ever since the Milesians won their war, but something that is happening in the land below, a place called Lindera, which might threaten the veil of secrecy and may very well release magic onto the land above once more. The Stolen Word (Approx 52,000 words), is the first book of Urban Fantasy Series that tells the story of a young woman named Ciara, who recently had a tossle with a small group of Fomorians who have now kidnapped her brother and stolen a journal belonging to their mentor and Chieftain of their village. With the help of her friends from the land above, a small group of people who are the last remaining descendants of the Tuatha De Danann, she sets out on a quest to save her brother and to prevent the Fomorians from returning to the land above.

Committee: Christopher Barzak (Committee Chair); Robert Pope (Committee Member); Steven Reese (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Folklore