Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

During the Great Patriotic War (that is, the Soviet-German War (1941-1945) as part of the Second World War), performances of music and songs were an important part of the life of soldiers in the Red Army. This study examines how these songs could function in unofficial aspects of the lives of frontline soldiers. There was a “cult of folklore” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, which meant that depiction of folklore in film and literature was an official policy. However, the fact that such performances featured in officially sanctioned artistic works raises the question, how much was propaganda and how much reflected actual practices? To answer this question, I looked at all of the references to performances of songs in over fifty Russian-language diaries and volumes of letters written by members of the Soviet military. I did not use journalism to avoid propaganda, nor memoirs to avoid the problem of transformations of memories over the years; instead, I used sources written during the war itself that reflected the everyday life of the soldiers.

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)

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2020, History

This paper argues for an additional manner in which the social and cultural history of Rome can be both examined and understand through the implementation of folkloric practices. While folklore and history are two distinct academic traditions, there exists a certain amount of overlap between the fields and this overlap is worth exploring in more detail. In the course of this paper, it is argued that many aspects of Roman social and cultural history can be understood and examined through folkloric means. In chapter one, a working definition of folklore is established and shown to apply to the foundational mythology of Rome as portrayed by Livy in his Ab Urbe Condita. Chapter two continues to examine Livy and provides an argument that, in the process of his writing, Livy himself was more concerned with a folkloric interpretation of Rome's history than he was in staying firmly within the bounds of historical accuracy. Finally, chapter three branches off from Livy and focuses on the arcane and magical traditions which were prevalent in Rome to show that not only were folkloric traditions present in Rome's traditional mythology, but can also be seen throughout the Republic and even into the early Empire.

MFA, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Not Applicable

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, English

This dissertation investigates a key folkloric concept – authenticity – through an exploration of the Chinese restaurant. Scholars tend to be wary of using the term authenticity in conjunction with cultural expressions because of its association with dangerous nationalist movements, problematic boundaries, and potential for essentialism. Authenticity is often understood in the vein of continuity to the past; such an understanding implies singularity, stability and bounded concreteness rather than dynamism and fluidity in cultural expressions. As a result, in scholarship, claims of authenticity are often avoided or deconstructed as invalid or false. However, I argue that claims to authenticity can be valid and legitimate and that authenticity should be considered as multiple and flexible. I examine one Chinese restaurant, one Chinese dish, and a small collection of vintage Chinese restaurant menus to investigate discourses on authenticity. Ding Ho, one of the oldest Chinese restaurants in Columbus, Ohio, embodies several features typical of Chinese restaurants but also contain anomalous elements in their operations which, according to some on-line restaurant reviews, mark the restaurant as inauthentic. However, I suggest that anomalies are not evidence of pollution of a Chinese restaurant’s authenticity but instead indicate variations within the category. Discourses on a Chinese restaurant’s authenticity include, for example, some patrons’ desire for access to the separate Chinese language menu that some Chinese restaurants have. Such conversations often contain echoes of Orientalist narratives. Wor Sue Gai, the dish I focus on in my discussion, is a chicken dish often found in Chinese restaurants in Columbus, Ohio, and it is believed to be a local invention. While the actual origins of Wor Sue Gai are unclear, conversations about the dish on internet food discussion boards point to both Columbus, Ohio and Detroit, Mic (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Theatre

Throughout the United States, thousands of festivals, like St. Patrick's Day in New York City or the Greek Festival and Oktoberfest in Columbus, annually celebrate the ethnic heritages, values, and identities of the communities that stage them. Combining elements of ethnic pride, nostalgia, sentimentality, cultural memory, religous values, political positions, economic motive, and the spirit of celebration, these festivals are well-organized performances that promote a community's special identity and heritage. At the same time, these festivals usually reach out to the larger community in an attempt to place the ethnic community within the American fabric. These festivals have a complex history tied to the “melting pot” history of America. Since the twentieth century many communities and ethnic groups have struggled to hold onto or reclaim a past that gradually slips away. Ethnic heritage festivals are one prevalent way to maintain this receding past. And yet such festivals can serve radically different aims, socially and politically. In this dissertation I will investigate how these festivals are presented and why they are significant for both participants and spectators. I wish to determine what such festivals do and mean. I will examine five Dutch American festivals, three of which are among the oldest ethnic heritage festivals in the United States. My approach to this topic is interdisciplinary. Drawing upon research methods in several disciplines – theatre history, performance studies, theatre semiotics, ethnography and anthropology, folklore, and American history – I will describe and analyze how the social, political, and ethical values of the communities get expressed (performed, acted out, represented, costumed and displayed) in these various festivals. Instead of relying upon the familiar ideas of “the Midwest,” “rural America,” “conservative America,” etc. that are often used in political commentary today, I want to show just how complex and often contrad (open full item for complete abstract)

BA, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

Music is a global phenomenon. It exists in every culture on the planet in a myriad of forms. But music is more than just a human hobby. It is a cultural magnifying glass. It is through music that the stories of a people; their history and philosophies, are displayed. It is through this performance that a culture can be understood. Without a peoples' stories, their past is incomplete and often misunderstood. The American Blues: Men, Myths, and Motifs explores Southern African-American life after Reconstruction predominantly through primary sources that are often overlooked, such as W. C. Handy and John Lomax, along with the Blues musicians themselves. The South, from the lumber mills of Eastern Texas to the cotton fields of Mississippi, a new American culture had emerged; a nascent world on display. Their music was dominated by Rhythm and Blues, a style with origins in both Africa and Europe. It is from the Blues that the frugally documented African-American South can be understood. This thesis uses the lyrics, biographies, and interviews of some of the greatest storytellers, and African-American oral historians called griots like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, and Robert Johnson, in an attempt to understand the culture of the people and places these musicians sang and spoke about. The American Blues delves into the lives of musicians, the histories of their enslaved kin, and the music that both showcased their past, as well as their mythologies and philosophies. Through this research of folklore, lyrics, and histories the early American South can truly be seen.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2025, Comparative Studies

This dissertation investigates how living, environmental systems relate to the ways people who study folk and traditional arts understand community, meaning, and knowledge in the 21st century. It addresses the question, "What holds us together?" through the lenses of folklore and environmental humanities, expanding the definition of "us" to encompass the complex relationships between our communities and environments. Ahlstone traces the evolving understanding of "what holds us together?" within folklore studies by analyzing key sites of recursive discussion: the definition of community, the role of "meaning" in folklore, and the role of the folklorist in documenting, analyzing, and describing folk and traditional knowledge. Chapter One examines how the definition of "community" within folklore studies has evolved over the 20th century, moving from an anthropocentric worldview to one that actively includes multispecies participation in the expressions of creativity in everyday life. Chapter Two uses Wild Systems Theory (WST), an empirically supported ontology that describes beings as multi-scaled, self-sustaining energy transformation systems, to analyze how the meaning of folkloric expressions is interpreted by those who study them. Ahlstone argues the role of "meaning" in folklore studies is anthropocentric, which limits the ability to incorporate multi-species and posthuman frameworks research practices and analysis. Through an adaptation of WST, folklorists can develop frameworks that better reflect the systems involved in creative expression across living beings. The third chapter argues for a deeper and more conscious relationship between the study of folklore and fungus by proposing three lessons gleaned from their roles in ecosystems: emergence, mutualism, and decomposition. This broader aim of this dissertation is to understand the interconnectedness of life and how this shapes creative, everyday cultural expressions. By supporting cultural knowledge and pra (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2025, English: Creative Writing

This thesis, BORN OF FIGS, is a collection of poetry and hybrid works and an experiment in performing and modeling powerful transformations in language. Through wordplay that layers languages preceding modern English as well as languages other than English, the manuscript models and explores how histories intersect with the personal. Some poems about the speaker's encounters with plants, animals, and other products of the earth offer opportunities to witness and dwell in growth and change. These poems engage connections between ecological phenomena and infertility, miscarriage, and womanhood. Other poems are explicitly magick spells. These take inspiration from early Old English metrical charms, adapting their genre conventions, dramatic situations, and formulaic vocabulary, along with their performative nature as speech acts with the power to heal or harm. A third style of works appear in prose (lyric essay) and might be described as confessional. Through language-play that draws from abandoned vocabularies and modes, this manuscript is interested in developing a poetics of personally transformative ritual.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2025, Music

This dissertation explores how the punk music-culture scene in Japan is imagined and represented through print media, specifically the magazine Punk Rock Issue Bollocks, and in what ways this mediated form contributes and delimits the function of such representations. Print materials and commentaries often serve as references within music studies literature, but are rarely implicated in supporting the creation of the genre which they address. Punk music-culture is well-known for auto-descriptive practices in the form of zine and magazine commentaries written by and for community consumption. Drawing on the current longest running present-day Japanese punk magazine, Punk Rock Issue Bollocks, this project explores the punk “scene” brought to life in Japan to demonstrate how print materials play a vital role in arbitrating the subjective definition of a scene. These materials can offer distinct processual viewpoints onto communities of practice as they develop even when distanced from a physical site of enactment such as the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the material focus of this dissertation in the first place. In conversation with writing on music and community from ethnomusicological, musicological, folkloristic, and punk studies literature, this dissertation closely surveys the 16 volumes of Bollocks (20% of the total) released over a two-and-a-half-year period between January 2020 and July 2022. That data is emplaced alongside larger trends throughout. Chapter 2 deeply explores relevant literature relating from the standpoint of music studies of Japan, Japanese writing on punk, and punk studies writing on Japan. Chapter 3 presents a developmental trajectory of music magazine writing from which Bollocks derives. Chapter 4 offers a close reading of the formal features of Bollocks and theorizes how it acts to “enliven” a defined portion of the punk scene. Chapter 5 comprises four case studies, each addressing entanglements of Bollocks' for (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1922, Graduate School

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

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1924, Graduate School

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

This project functions as an examination of the folkloristic question of the generic category of the “fake”, “fictitious”, or “invented” legend. Using The Blair Witch Project (1999) motion picture as an example text, case study, and vehicle for this exploration, this project engages with historical folkloristic discourses of authenticity, extant taxonomies of legendry and legend performance contexts, and the novel category of the “folkloresque” system of folkloric popular culture allusion. These domains are examined in order to reimagine an allegedly “fake” legend complex (the marketing campaign surrounding The Blair Witch Project's initial premiere) as nevertheless engaged in certain critical contexts of folkloresque legend performance – namely, process and participation. These contexts, this project ultimately argues, serve in part as public platforms through which the generic boundaries of “fake” legend texts (like The Blair Witch Project) are generically reinforced or renegotiated by emic interlocutors through a pronounced reliance on commensurately folkloric rhetoric, performances, and other processes.

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

Folklore may be transmitted and diffused through many forms of media, adding to pre-established meanings and interpretations. This may be accomplished through the reinterpretation of mythological or legendary figures or stories in popular media, such as video games, novels, or cinema. Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons are often built on a foundation of mythology and folklore, which players use as inspiration to craft their own shared stories and experiences, allowing for endless reinterpretations and transmission of those interpretations. Through forms of subtle performative acts, players may experience different resistances to the narratives of dominant society. These resistances present themselves in different ways but may come as an active choice by the players or because of underlying shifts in framework or perspective. Medusa has become a symbol of feminine rage and resistance against Patriarchal institutions, which has been reflected in the developing resources of TTRPG material. This allows players to engage with that resistance on personal scales through performance in a safe, imaginative space. The types and styles of games that players engage with are varied, but many have correlations with other forms of media. These cross-media genres bring their own motifs and underlying frameworks into the TTRPG medium. Inspired by Dark Souls, the Soulslike subgenre provides a series of rules heavily, and subtly, influenced by European Christian motifs reinterpreted through a Japanese framework in a form of hybridization. The genre conventions that have been translated into TTRPG mechanics allow players to explore these hybridizations which themselves act as a resistance against globalization in a type of cross-pollination of cultural elements. Recent additions to the TTRPG library are also showing a shift in the outlook on accessibility and respectability of the player-base. Older TTRPGs often succumb to Orientalist and insensitive approa (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Comparative Studies

This dissertation applies a queer methodological approach to the folkloric analysis of LGBTQ communities. Lesbian queer communities are an effective space in which folklorists can study how the policing the boundaries of legitimate identity and practice threatens vernacular growth. Gathered at a time of increasing lesbian visibility and organizing for community spaces between 2019 and 2024, my ethnographic data examines three sites to demonstrate how queer people find each other and form communities: lesbian meme pages, Slammers (Columbus, Ohio's lesbian bar), and dyke kitsch. I focus on the process of identity formation, foregrounding both the importance of dyke desire and the fluidity of what that the category can look like. Focusing on what I call “zones of social reproduction,” I explore how lesbian queer communities refuse atomization while simultaneously allowing for expanding and shifting queer identities. Contemporary lesbian queer communities are engaging in vernacular identity practices to develop a conception of lesbian that moves beyond a shared biology to view trans and lesbian traditions as always already intertwined, revealing how marginalized communities flourish in when in solidarity.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, American Culture Studies

Monstrous animals occupied a prominent role in the imaginations of the 18th and early 19th century European settlers in what would become the United States of America. This preoccupation with monsters among early Americans is clearly reflected in the life and career of Thomas Jefferson. A close examination of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), scientific papers prepared for the American Philosophical Society, documentation relating to the Louisiana Purchase, financing of the Louis and Clark Expedition, and personal correspondence all reveal a persistent obsession with living mastodons, giant moose, and colossal lions among other curious creatures. As a key American representative of the western intellectual tradition known as the Enlightenment, Jefferson's conviction that the North American interior harbored such monstrous forms of undiscovered animal life may seem counterintuitive as one would presume Jefferson would be nothing but skeptical of the reality of fantastic beasts. However, Jefferson saw evidence for the reality of such hitherto unclassified species of megafauna in an amalgamation of fragmentary fossil remains, euhemerist interpretations of Indigenous American legends, and tall tales told by early pioneers; the same type of ephemeral evidence marshaled by today's cryptozoologists to prove the existence of such creatures as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. It is with this later observation in mind that this dissertation seeks to reframe Jefferson as a pioneering cryptozoologist while also considering the important role which cryptozoological monster lore has played in the formation of American culture.

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

This project focuses on historical and contemporary print cultures of the Ozarks, highlighting the vernacular dimensions of print and its connection with ideas of place and history. Rather than centering popular publications with broad circulation, I take a folkloristic approach to investigate how people collect and share information, news, traditions, and knowledge through everyday genres of print. The three primary case studies examined here include regional folk magazines from the mid-twentieth century, the newsletters of a lesbian social club at the century's end, and the digitized newspaper of a small Missouri town from a hundred years in the past. Each case study brings together scholarship from folklore and print culture studies, symbolized through the application of a conceptual pair tied to each discipline: region and assemblage; genre and network; and, finally, performance and news. By exploring the conceptual pair within each case study, I demonstrate how an interdisciplinary dialogue can address the connections between print technologies and local traditions. Tracing the ongoing remediation of oral tradition and older media genres and technologies, I uncover cross-temporal layering in the experience of rural regionality. At stake in this investigation of rural print culture is the concept of regionality: how mobile and dispersed place-based networks of access, resources, and communication are actualized and sustained. The study of rural print culture can help us better understand the ways in which people make use of print, both as a technology and as a modality tied to history and tradition, to envision and negotiate regional narratives in creative and unexpected ways.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1966, English

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1962, Theatre