PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Arts and Sciences: English

The Gothic is a genre that fixates on, and represents, the blurring of boundaries of such dualities as self/other, past/present, male/female, life/death, visible/invisible, subject/object, and familiar/strange. Focusing on the ambiguities caused by these blurred boundaries, Haunting the Female Body reads the Gothic not only as a genre but as a lens, or system of reading, that reveals otherwise invisible cultural truths, remnants, and repressions buried in literature or other forms of narrative. Building on Derrida's concepts of hauntology, spectrality, and the trace, I apply the Gothic lens to different texts written by, and about, women since 1960. In all my readings, I seek to confront the ghosts repressed in these texts and resurrect that which has otherwise been buried or forgotten in culture. I first explore Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, seeking a deeper understanding of how patriarchal society limits women's identities, and how the unlived lives that societal limitation precludes end up haunting the protagonist, Esther Greenwood. Next, I look at Toni Morrison's Beloved, and how the women's bodies in that story become sites for the inscription of slavery; even Denver and Beloved, who did not experience slavery firsthand, seem to inherit the traumas from their mother and grandmother—traumas manifested as ghosts that haunt their very bodies. While the first two chapters of my dissertation read texts that are frequently classified as Gothic, my next two chapters show how the Gothic lens can be used to read contemporary texts that have not yet been identified as Gothic, but which nonetheless overflow with Gothic conventions. As my third chapter argues, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), is a novel in which the Gothic lens offers the most appropriate and useful way to analyze the text's exploration of such themes of diasporic literature as the impossibility of defining identity and the haunting influence of the past. Finally, in taking invisibility as its (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tamar Heller Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jennifer Glaser Ph.D. (Committee Member); Beth Ash Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Theatre

Early nineteenth-century mixed-Black Americans were made complicit in the propaganda of both pro-slavery and abolitionist messaging, at times upheld as model minorities for their contributions to the Southern slave-owning plantation economy, while other times depicted in heart-breaking abolitionist narratives about the evils of slavery, and the often-deadly identity crises these “tragic” people were subjected to. The reality of mixed-Black existence was far less dramatic than the lives of the characters in texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), or Dion Boucicaut's The Octoroon (1859); what was revealed to contemporary white audiences was a desire to sympathize with the Other who occupied the closest proximity to whiteness. Thus, the trope of the “tragic mulatto/a” became a vehicle for propagandizing the moral “goodness” of white society and its positive, Christian, “civilizing” influence on the Black and/or indigenous Other. This Practice-as-Research dissertation examines the manner in which miscegenation between Black and white Americans has been feared, fetishized, and resurrected in popular historical narratives over the past two centuries. Living between races, conceived out of wedlock and often as a result of sexual assault, the “tragic mulatta” is often depicted as a pitiable creature, beautiful, yet doomed by her sundry origins. Unable to claim full membership in neither racial group, she lacked both the honored status offered to white wives and mothers in traditional society, and any form of social protection against sexual exploitation. This project contains four chapters which detail the people, places, and creative work that informed my Practice-as-Research play, Blood, Earth, Water.

Committee: Jennifer Schlueter Dr. (Committee Chair); Beth Kattelman Dr. (Committee Member); Nadine George-Graves Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American History; American Literature; Black History; Black Studies; Gender Studies; History; Museum Studies; Performing Arts; Theater; Theater History; Theater Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

In this dissertation, I analyze embodied practices of resistance to state violence that theorize and enact decolonial alternatives to necrogovernance in Contemporary Mesoamerica. Examining and co-theorizing with activists in resistant motion, I propose a theory of decolonial interruption rooted in embodied challenges to the colonial binaries of citizen and outcast, presence and absence, progress and stasis, and life and death. Grounded in Latina feminisms and performance studies, I conduct research through the experiential modalities of participant-observation, activist practice-as-research, and haunting to argue that transformative, decolonial possibilities emerge when bodies in resistant motion organize to interrupt the logics of coloniality and capitalism and obstruct the evolving technologies of necrogovernance. The chapters explore activists who spend time in the places and moments of interruption, in the borderlands between binaries, to create theories and practices of alternative ways to belong among histories of deadly state violence. Positioning examples of hip hop feminism, public ritual, and graffiti for historical memory in Guatemala City and humanitarian aid in the Sonoran Desert as nodes of transformative activist theory-making, I offer a movement-based archive documenting the praxis of hemispheric decoloniality. I develop the frameworks of Contemporary Mesoamerica, necrogovernance, and transtemporal activist sociality as ways to rupture epistemic hegemony rooted in heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. These frameworks emphasize the knowledges and possibilities that emerge among bodies in coalition across time and decolonizing theories of belonging, persisting, and surviving for marginalized people in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, Mexico, and the U.S. Southwest. This research proposes vocabularies, lenses, and epistemic structures that challenge the historic erasure of non-colonial ways of knowing the world while also increas (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Guisela Latorre (Advisor); Harmony Bench (Committee Member); Shannon Winnubst (Committee Member); Paloma Martinez-Cruz (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Latin American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2016, English (Arts and Sciences)

Ten Impossible Things Before Daylight is a collection of essays which turn on experiences with the uncanny, including premonitions, visitations, bizarre coincidences, impactful dreams, and lucky charms. My essays seek to explore a side of the uncanny that is not horrific but instead, eerily invigorating. The lead-off essay “Goodnight Noises” is an uncanny elegy for friend that I knew since childhood who tragically developed severe schizophrenia. My essay is about making sense of his somewhat mysterious disappearance and death, by interpreting a dream that my wife had the same night that we found out about his passing. “Far and Wee” is the story of the unplanned rescue of a baby goat that my wife and I found in an ocean while on vacation. Our rescue of the goat led us to many moments of prescience regarding the birth of our firstborn son. The collection is a varied and confessional portrait of my evolving sense of the uncanny and its influence over the red letter days of my life. It also celebrates Cleveland, new love and old friends, and seeks to surmount and memorialize the loss of friends, a serious illness, and the zombie-like horrors of today, gun violence at home and a war in the middle-east that, unlike the soldiers fighting in it, seems impossible to kill. “Canary from a Coal Mine: Reorganizing a Sense of What is Possible in Uncanny Nonfiction is a critical introduction to the essay collection. In it I seek to establish some strategies for working with the uncanny, a concept frequently associated with fiction, in creative Nonfiction. My essays picks up Marjorie Sandor's notion of the uncanny as a genre-busting “viral strain” and uses it to examine the differences between the uncanny in fiction and in life. From there, it observes how those lived examples are represented by nonfiction authors, with the aim of re-enacting uncanny experiences in the minds of readers.

Committee: Eric LeMay (Committee Chair) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Comparative Literature; Composition; Film Studies; Literature

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

Despite the extensive amount of research that has been conducted on the long-term consequences of the inheritance of the psychological impact of the Holocaust, little has been investigated about the transmission of transhistorical memories of the Middle Passage and enslavement to African American populations. In addition, while current trauma studies mainly focus on the inheritance of trauma observed across a single generation, the transmission of the original trauma across multiple generations deserves closer examination. This project extends beyond the question of intergenerational transmissions by investigating unconscious transfers of memory and images that cannot be situated within a singular temporal frame, but span multiple ones. In particular, this study explores the psychological dimension of trauma that is transmissible and demonstrates the ways in which the initial trauma of enslavement reinvents itself in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred (1979), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata (1998), and Edward P. Jones' The Known World (2003). By examining the traumatic transfer of painful memories across temporal boundaries in these narratives, this study contributes to an ongoing dialogue about the unconscious transmissions of the original trauma of African American slavery, opening up a multitude of possibilities for further research in representations of transgenerational trauma in other contemporary texts of African American literature.

Committee: Willie H. Harrell, Jr. (Committee Chair); Babacar M'Baye (Committee Member); Vera Camden (Committee Member); Elizabeth Smith-Pryor (Committee Member); Richard Adams (Other) Subjects: African Americans; American Literature; Ethnic Studies; Literature; Minority and Ethnic Groups

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2013, English

This linked short story collection explores the concept of utilizing the genre of fiction to tell a true story. These nine stories all feature a single narrator-character, known simply as Nick, who interrogates his own past through the art of writing. The collection challenges the notions of conventional narrative tradition in terms of both its composition and its various styles of narration. In addition to their concern with fiction's ability to capture greater truths, these stories also investigate the themes of memory, trauma, and the subjective nature of reality, as well as the social and societal ramifications of working class life and the physical and psychological consequences of labor. Finally, the collection examines the ways in which place and region work towards the construction of persona.

Committee: Joseph Bates Dr. (Advisor); Margaret Luongo Professor (Committee Member); Kay Sloan Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Literature

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2009, Art

My artwork deals with my experience of everyday spaces. I include subtle color and translucent layers of white paint along with collage elements. Decorative patterns move across the surface in contradiction to spare architectural components suggesting an overlaying of interior and exterior spaces. The resulting image is an abstracted and atmospheric depiction of surface and space, time and memory. I am most fascinated by images that document small histories, identifying where something once was and how it has been transformed or changed by time. Chipped paint, aged buildings, old signs, and the residue of flyers on a wall are all sources for my work. I am specifically interested in evidence of human interaction with spaces and how those interactions, however small, affect my experience of that space.

Committee: Pheoris West (Advisor); Laura Lisbon (Committee Member); Sergio Soave (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts