Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Comparative Studies

My project, Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11, interrogates the enduring notion of America as the promised land of freedom and social mobility in the narratives of Muslim immigrant women. Informed by the critical theories of minority discourse, U.S. borders studies, and postcolonial scholarship, I argue that autobiography and fiction by Muslim American women writers indicate an ideological flexibility, demonstrating a spectrum of discursive negotiations and stances that strategically claim secular, religious, modern, feminist, capitalist, transnational, and multiracial identities that altogether challenge the hegemonic and binary configurations of the figure of “the Muslim” and reformulate the terms of citizenship and belonging in the U.S. I read these strategies in three different writings: Selma Ekrem's autobiography Unveiled: The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl (1930), Mohja Kahf's novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), and Leila Halaby's novel Once in A Promised Land (2007). Collectively, these texts articulate and address anxieties about the presumed “incommensurability” of Muslim/Middle Eastern identity with the imaginary ideal of normative Anglo-American modern society, and they offer a unique ethnic, religious, and cross-racial perspective that challenges dominant U.S. conceptions of the minority difference and exclusion. My project contributes to the theorizing of transnational minority literature in a context that goes beyond the simplistic framework of minor to major anti-hegemonic discourse. While I discuss these texts as counternarratives to hegemonic articulations of citizenship and exclusionary discourses of American identity, I also focus on minor-to-minor sensibilities, paying attention to the ways in which literature offers a space for articulations of cross-ethnic alliances, solidarities, and tensions amongst immigrants and other (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nina Berman (Committee Co-Chair); Pranav Jani (Committee Co-Chair); Theresa Delgadillo (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Comparative Literature; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Islamic Studies; Literature; Middle Eastern Literature; Middle Eastern Studies; Near Eastern Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, English

Many late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels utilize laughter as a social corrective, but this same laughter hides other messages about women's roles. As the genre's popularity widened, writers used novels to express opinions that would be eschewed in other, more established and serious genres. My dissertation argues that humor contributes to narrative meaning; as readers laugh at “minor” characters, their laughter discourages specific behaviors, yet it also masks characters' important functions within narrative structure. Each chapter examines one type of humor—irony, parody, satire, and wit—along with a secondary female archetype: the matriarch, the old maid, the monster, and the mentor. Traditionally, the importance of laughter has been minimized, and the role of minor characters understudied. My project seeks to redress this imbalance through focusing on humor, secondary characterization, and plot.

Committee: Clare Simmons PhD (Advisor); Leslie Tannenbaum PhD (Committee Member); Jill Galvan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2007, English

This thesis explores seventeenth-century autobiographical records of small-scale travels and physical relocations in the work of Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Clifford, Anna Trapnel, and An Collins. Existing work dealing with women as travelers often focuses on international voyages, especially in the context of imperialism and tourism in the nineteenth century; however, the narratives I focus on here demonstrate that shifts in location need not have been as dramatic as overseas and/or international travel in order to effect transformations in gender identity. Indeed, their more “minor movements,” as I am terming them, while much less far-reaching in geographical scope, nonetheless enabled women to represent themselves as having been radically redefined both as individuals and as members of larger female communities.

Committee: Katharine Gillespie (Advisor) Subjects:

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

Yeonmin Kim Dissertation Abstract POSTNATIONALISM, HYBRIDITY, AND UTOPIA IN PAUL DURCAN'S POETRY: TOWARD AN IRISH MINORITARIAN LITERATURE The main question for contemporary Irish poet Paul Durcan (1944-) is how to find a way out of a rigid concept of national identity established by the Roman Catholic, middle-class, nationalist majority group in Ireland. Wrestling with this question has led him to search for other homes abroad, for versions of postnationalist utopia; and it has served to classify him as a minoritarian artist because of his own staunch refusal to romanticize the Irish, their chauvinism, their provincialism, and most importantly, their violence. In an attempt to find a more flexible concept of nation, he reconstructs Irish identity in transcending religious, ethnic, and geographic boundaries of nation. Durcan's postnationalist project includes his quest for alternative identities in exotic places replete with utopian aura. In addition, by intermingling two different genres of poetry and painting, in his collections of ekphrasis, he produces a creative hybridity of the temporal and the spatial, the public and the private, through which he suggests a new sense of historicity, atemporality, which can withstand a nationalist logic of progressive history fit for the nation-state ideology. His postnationalist project culminates in Durcanesque metamorphosis, in which his poetic speakers freely transform themselves into a woman, an animal and something imperceptible. Those radical experiments serve to call into question the notion of a monolithic identity. Durcan not only recreates and amplifies what James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus vowed to create in the smithy of his soul – the uncreated conscience of his race – but also offers a twenty-first century “uncreated conscience” for Ireland and other nations struggling to move past nationalism. In that sense, he creates new assemblages of people to come.

Committee: Claire Culleton (Advisor); Kevin Floyd (Committee Member); Babacar M'Baye (Committee Member); Richard Feinberg (Committee Member); Patrick Coy (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2012, English

During the mid to late Victorian period, Euripides' tale of Medea was given new life by the suffragette movement. As Victorians began to question women's rights and capabilities, Medea's story resurfaced as a cautionary tale showing the damage that occurs when women repress and shape their identities to fit uncompromising social expectations for their gender. In this thesis, I examine two Victorian women poets who interpreted Medea as a feminist statement: Augusta Webster, whose “Medea in Athens” (1870) was featured as the lead dramatic monologue in her collection Portraits, and Amy Levy whose closet drama “Medea: A Dramatic Fragment” (1881) was published as a part of her collection A Minor Poet and Other Verse. Both these writers examine Medea's psychology and the context in which she lives. Through their use of poetic conventions, Webster and Levy are able to suggest ways in which Medea's autonomy and identity are co-opted by a patriarchal society. I argue that Webster uses the tactics of the dramatic monologue to explore Medea's disintegrated sense of self, depicting her as a woman whose identity has been usurped by her husband's view of her. Levy appropriates the techniques of closet drama to focus on the voice of a patriarchal culture that excludes Medea long before her act of filicide. Through close readings of these two poems, I show the cultural impact and relevancy of Webster and Levy as female voices in the Victorian literary tradition.

Committee: Melissa Valiska Gregory PhD (Advisor); Matthew Wikander PhD (Committee Chair); Christina Fitzgerald PhD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Gender; Womens Studies