Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 0, English

In this dissertation, I consider a range of texts from the nineteenth century including novels, personal essays, and diaries in which authors attempt to narrate experiences of illness in light of the shifting cultural perceptions of how the physical body and the concept of “self” relate to each other. The Diary of Alice James, Robert Louis Stevenson's “Ordered South,” Harriet Martineau's Life in the Sick-Room, and Henry James's The Wings of the Dove are the main texts analyzed. In each of these examples, I examine the ways that authors compose texts to understand the self alongside the “nerves and fibres” of bodily lived experience. Of primary interest to this dissertation is considering how the texts I examine can be fruitfully analyzed when concepts gleaned from the realm of medical humanities are applied to illness stories. This is a necessary intervention because much of the recent work in the broader field of medical humanities seeks to present illness narratives as artifacts of patient experiences that can be approached as acts of testimony or as evidence of therapeutic exercises. The primary concept that I rely on throughout my dissertation is the “corporeal gap” taken from the work of one of the founders of the practice of Narrative Medicine, Dr. Rita Charon. I use this concept as my way of accounting for some of the ways the texts I examine invent approaches to the difficult work of talking about how sickness disrupts the relationship between bodies and selves. The “corporeal gap,” functions as both feature and analytical tool throughout my dissertation. Primarily, I use the corporeal gap as an interpretive tool that allows me to attend to the various ways the texts I examine deal with the interruptive and disruptive experience of illness.

Committee: Kimberly Emmons (Committee Chair); Erin Lamb (Committee Member); Athena Vrettos (Committee Member); Kurt Koenigsberger (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, Musicology

Many of today's vocal techniques and ideas about vocality originate at the turn of the previous century. Over the course of the nineteenth century, science and aesthetics, theory and practice, the medical and the musical came together. Arthur Chervin exemplifies the nineteenth-century impulse toward blending theory and practice in his journal La Voix Parlee et Chantee, published from 1890 through the end of 1903 in Paris. From 1848 onward, doctors and medical practitioners in France began to infiltrate many aspects of politics, social life, and art. As an acknowledged expert in stuttering and a state-appointed physician and the Paris Opera, Chervin was well positioned to facilitate a multi-disciplinary publication that merged medical perspectives with those of performers and pedagogues. His journal is unique in its interdisciplinarity and its wide-ranging arguments about vocal health and aesthetics. A close reading of La Voix enables an exploration of the many sociological, cultural, and artistic implications of voice, health, and pathology in 1890s France. In the early chapters of this dissertation, I show how physicians' interventions into the bodies of ailing singers both constricted the timbres available for expressive singing and contributed to the idea that vocal anatomy determines vocal sound. And, moving beyond the physical, I investigate the relationship between mental interiority (sanity, trustworthiness, identity, etc.) and vocality, showing that contributors to La Voix believed they could evaluate an individual's innermost feelings by listening to the sound of their voice. Later chapters examine pedagogies designed to shape children's voices, and finally an exploration of timbral practices in three distinct groups of voice users—amateur choristers, professional orators, and singers/actors. Throughout, I synthesize contents from La Voix and other period sources, as well as from contemporary scholarship on vocality, contemplating how fin-de-siecle vocal (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Francesca Brittan (Advisor); David Rothenberg (Committee Member); Peter Bennett (Committee Member); Andrea Rager (Committee Member) Subjects: Medicine; Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Comparative Studies

This project is an exploration of the intersections between fanfiction and asexuality, and the potential for online play spaces to produce meaningful and useful insight for asexualities work. Inspired by my own experiences in public health, I approached this project through folklore with the goal of experimenting with a digital mixed-methods approach that could help introduce professionals in applied fields to the potential benefits of intentional and sustained attention to online spaces. Using thematic textual analysis on a sample of Avengers (Marvel Movies) fanfiction stories on Archive of Our Own that are tagged as Acefics, I looked for recurring themes and topics around asexual experience and asexual representation that would benefit from further pursuit. I used those initial findings to develop and deploy a survey to gain a deeper understanding of those themes and topics and to recruit Acefic readers and authors for 90-minute interviews. Interviews and surveys were used to confirm salient themes and build a greater depth of clarity on those topics. The combination of interviews, surveys, and textual analysis demonstrated that even an online play space like AO3 was a productive site for discovery and study development for applied project intended to serve members of primarily online communities, like the asexual community, as well as emerging communities.

Committee: Amy Shuman (Advisor); Miranda Martinez (Committee Co-Chair); Merrill Kaplan (Committee Member); Gail Kaye (Committee Member) Subjects: Folklore; Public Health

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2013, Theatre

This thesis uses practice-based research to explore possible interventions into the traumatic impact of illness upon breast cancer survivors' voices and the role of neoliberal pink ribbon culture in compounding their silencing. The interdisciplinary research pulls from the fields of applied theatre, critical pedagogy, materialist feminism, narrative analysis, social movement theory, medical sociology, and dialogue, disability and performance studies. Reflecting upon process and praxis relating to a regional tour of Susan Miller's My Left Breast as a means to engage a community of survivors, advocates and the general public, this thesis asks: Can a community-based theatre event focused on exploring breast cancer counternarratives provide both a therapeutic space for survivors to tell their stories as well as encourage the audience to think more critically about how culture works to influence narratives emerging from breast cancer culture?

Committee: Ann Elizabeth Armstrong (Advisor); Paul Jackson (Committee Member); Ann Fuehrer (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Medical Ethics; Pedagogy; Performing Arts; Theater; Theater Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, English

This dissertation explores different discursive spaces (memoirs, online magazines, local art galleries) in which women and men narrate their recoveries from various mental disorders. I argue that these narratives, and the discursive spaces in which they are told, are rhetorically strategic, and ultimately allow the authors agency within a broader climate of surveillance, oppression, and stigmatization. These writings resist, transgress, and at times, (re)construct the medical model of recovery and sociocultural expectations of people, particularly women, with disorders. Their narratives also complicate our current understandings of writing spaces, especially those coupled with the power of digital technology. Memoirs and online discursive spaces mark a shift in the voices of women with mental disorders, from persons oppressed by their illness, doctors, and society at large, to women challenging the medical model of mental illness, and ultimately creating their own models of recovery. These recovery narratives engage the medical model in interesting ways, such as by resisting it from within, as with those medical practitioners diagnosed with mental disorders themselves (Jamison, Slater) who write about their experiences in very public spaces (memoirs). Other narratives are seemingly compliant with conventional modes of treatment prescribed by the medical model, such as the Fresh A.I.R. Gallery artists who exhibit their works in a space funded by a comprehensive mental healthcare organization. Still others construct their own models of recovery by navigating through contradictory medical information (Reader's Digest) and voicing their opinions against medical authority in online spaces. I call upon Adrienne Rich's notions of revision and recovery as the theoretical framework I employ throughout my dissertation project. My project seeks to open a dialogue between rhetoric, feminisms, and disability studies so that an enabling theory of mental health discourse will emer (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brenda Jo Brueggemann Professor (Advisor); Nancy J. Johnson Professor (Committee Co-Chair); Cynthia L. Selfe Professor (Committee Member) Subjects: Health Care; Literature; Mental Health; Psychology; Public Health; Rhetoric; Social Research; Womens Studies