Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation looks at nostalgic songs written in Mexico during the first half of the 20th century, with the purpose of reflecting on the origin of these nostalgic expressions, describing the characteristics and transformations that the nostalgic repertoire undergoes over time, as well as understanding the role that nostalgia had in the generation of the sense of belonging to different communities, including the imagined community. Through an interdisciplinary analysis, I observe and describe the poetic, musical and nostalgic characteristics of the corpus, in relation to the development of the migratory, cultural, and socio-political context of Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. I argue that it is possible to observe three major phases of the nostalgic musical repertoire written during the first half of the 20th century, which I have named: modern nostalgia, nostalgia ranchera, and national nostalgia. The repertoire of modern nostalgia is testimony and memory of internal migration and the emotions caused by this migratory displacement. The songs of this phase were characterized by their musical and literary heterogeneity and by expressing longing for abandoned lands due to rural-urban migration caused by the project of national modernization. The repertoire of nostalgic songs was used in comedia ranchera films, for which it was closely linked to the nationalist ideology of mestizaje and is usually considered as canciones rancheras. I argue that in the adaptation of nostalgic songs to the comedia ranchera, the longing, previously felt for the yearned-native lands, was transferred to the cinematographic locus of Mexicanness "el rancho". In addition, these songs were characterized by the tendency to homogenize their musical elements. The nostalgic expression took a turn in the 1940s when new cinematographic and ideological influences compelled composers to create nostalgic songs, whose object of emotion was the nation. In my dissertation I demonstr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Laura Podalsky (Advisor); Ana Puga (Committee Member); Ignacio Corona (Advisor) Subjects: Ethnic Studies; Film Studies; Foreign Language; Hispanic American Studies; Language Arts; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature; Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, EDU Physical Activity and Educational Services

Nostalgia has a long history; the term was derived in 1688 to refer to homesickness (Hofer, 1688/1934). Since the origination of the term, nostalgia has transformed to mean a preference for an object in the past (Fairley, 2003). A distinction between first and second hand experiences with the past has previously been termed personal nostalgia (Stern, 1992) and vicarious nostalgia (Goulding, 2002). This study uses Jim Thorpe, an athlete for which the sample was too young to have experienced first-hand. Therefore, vicarious nostalgia was used in this study. Current literature lacks understanding of nostalgia's antecedents and outcomes. The general purpose of this study was to expand the understanding of nostalgia antecedents and outcomes, especially as they relate to sport nostalgia. Specifically, this study explored the effects of familiarity with a vicarious object on evoked nostalgia. The study also explored the relationship between evoked nostalgia and nostalgic intended behaviors. Gender and race were also investigated in the study as they relate to evoked nostalgia and nostalgic intended behaviors. A non-random convenience sample consisting of undergraduate students from a large, Midwestern university were asked to participate in the study. The participants watched a video about Jim Thorpe and then complete a questionnaire. The purpose of the video was to evoke the participants with nostalgia. The Nostalgic Intended Behavior Questionnaire consisted of items designed to measure evoked nostalgia (NOST), intended behaviors as they relate to an object of nostalgia, familiarity with Jim Thorpe, nostalgia proneness (adapted TPI), and demographics. Of the 306 respondents, 303 of the questionnaires were useable. The results indicated a significant relationship between familiarity and evoked nostalgia. A significant relationship was also found between evoked nostalgia and nostalgic intended behaviors. No significant relationships were found for race and gender as they r (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian Turner PhD (Advisor); Packianathan Chelladurai PhD (Committee Member); Sarah Fields PhD, JD (Committee Member) Subjects: Marketing; Recreation

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2024, Musicology

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of tremendous change in American musical life. It was the early days of the American popular music industry, represented by the moniker “Tin Pan Alley.” One of its leading lights was Charles K. Harris, an American songwriter who wrote “After the Ball” (1892), a song that became synonymous with the industry and Harris himself. However, like the music industry, Harris's story may have begun with a hit song, but it did not stop there; motivating him over the next few decades was a quest—how to keep a popular song popular—that put him on the edge of several transformative moments and technologies in American music. This dissertation explores and interprets Harris's attempts at keeping his music, notably “After the Ball,” popular as representative of the ways in which the music industry transformed in response to shifts in technology along with the new relationships audiences formed with popular music. Building upon the existing literature on Charles K. Harris, in particular that of Charles Hamm, Esther Morgan-Ellis, David Suisman, and Daniel Goldmark, as well as secondary literature on marketing theory, film, cartoon, media, nostalgia, and American cultural history, I shed light not just on a fascinating and influential figure in the early popular music industry, but on the ways in which popular music, media, and advertising interrelated during the era in which mass media and many of the most salient features of modern life were born.

Committee: Daniel Goldmark (Advisor) Subjects: American Studies; Marketing; Motion Pictures; Music

PHD, Kent State University, 2024, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

This dissertation explores African market women's activities by analyzing and emphasizing the significance of their personal networks and connections, emotions, and spatial mobilities in sustaining their businesses and the informal economy in general. I argue that the social, economic, and political systems created by market women rest on their immediate ties to the household, their relationships, and wider networks of kin, friends, or other social connections as well as their performance and experience with emotions. I evaluate how these intricate connections impact women's success or failures in the market. I argue that competition and contestations over urban market spaces that are intensified by the Zimbabwean economic crisis led to different discourses by Zimbabwean citizens to claim spaces. Market women, for example, have used their life histories to make claims to the market and perceive ownership differently than other groups within the city. By primarily using life histories to recollect and explore women's experiences within the city and rural areas, I emphasize women's agency and perceptions of Zimbabwe's history. Starting in the 1960s when women nostalgically recollect their participation in markets, to the present, I follow women's markers of history and explore why they remember the past in that way. I expand debates on women's entrepreneurship and urban informality to emphasize why market women in Zimbabwe help us comprehend how women have reshaped urban spaces, economies, and political systems. In sum, I argue that in the different phases of Zimbabwe's economic volatility, market women have meritoriously supported the informal economy while bringing happiness to the residents.

Committee: Timothy L. Scarnecchia (Committee Chair); Sarah Smiley (Committee Member); Teresa A. Barnes (Committee Member); Elizabeth Smith-Pryor (Committee Member) Subjects: African History; African Studies; Aging; Economic History; Entrepreneurship; Families and Family Life; Gender Studies; History; Modern History

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

You Don't Have to Look Up Every Time and Other Stories is a collection of braided short stories set and reaching from the present moment into the future of Palestine.The collection grapples with themes of nostalgia and memory, generational trauma, spatial politics, hope, and joy. Told from a unique set of points of view, the stories explore a diverse set of experiences and voices ranging from the Palestinian diaspora, to Palestinians in Palestine, to the fauna of Palestine, where one story is narrated by a species of gazelle native to Palestine. This textured exploration of social and political diversity aims to weave the complexities and nuances of Palestinian identity and views on sovereignty. The collection situates itself in contemporary Palestinian literature, while drawing inspiration from other liberation movements including Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism. The collection plays with temporalization of space and memory, employing traditional, experimental, and fragmented forms to contemplate the state of wandering for refugees, exiled Palestinians, and those still living under occupation. You Don't Have to Look Up Every Time and Other Stories uses the speculative genre to radically imagine, or reimagine liberation and decolonization for Palestine, taking a daring leap into hope for a better future for Palestine.

Committee: Pauls Toutonghi Ph.D. (Committee Member); Reema Rajbanshi Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Fine Arts; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, English

A comparative and interdisciplinary study, this dissertation examines corporeal forms of nostalgic recollection in twentieth- and twenty-first-century global South Asian literature and performance. Studying a range of cultural material, I illustrate how writers and performing artists negotiate ideological constructions of the past through nostalgic narratives articulated in corporeal terms and through embodied acts. To this end, I first call for a theoretical reconfiguration of nostalgic recollection as a performative act that can “break and remake” narrations of the past, in keeping with Homi K. Bhabha's definition of performance as “kinesis.” Such a reconfiguration also accounts for nostalgia's cross-temporality, since the process of recollecting the past hinges on a disruption of the present and the ideation of the future. Secondly, building on the work of performance theorists like Diana Taylor and Rebecca Schneider, I study how memory is anchored to the body, where the body becomes both the means of recollection and the site for the projection of the past. The dissertation unsettles dominant historiography by calling attention to forms of nostalgia that posit the corporeal as its theoretical, epistemological, ontological nucleus. Thinking through Anuk Arudpragasam's novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), the first chapter theorizes the performativity of nostalgic recollections in the face of nationalist, imperialist, and heteropatriarchal narratives of history. In Chapter 2, I explore how Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake (2003), Asif Mandvi's play Sakina's Restaurant (1988), and Shyam Selvadurai's novel The Hungry Ghosts (2013) deploy corporeal nostalgic recollection to underscore the unfulfilled neoliberal promises of the first world where the bodies of diasporic women, queer, and working-class individuals are often gendered and sexualized. The third chapter focuses on the performativity of the war-torn body in Sri Lankan performance art by Janani Coora (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nalin Jayasena (Committee Co-Chair); Katie Johnson (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Gender Studies; Literature; Performing Arts; South Asian Studies; Theater Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2023, American Culture Studies

Good Times? is an examination of the American film industry of the 1990s, with a focus on how both the major studios and independent distributors capitalized on cultural recycling of the 1970s. On the side of the major Hollywood studios, intellectual property became increasingly important as established brands could effectively be revived and resold to audiences. In independent cinema, filmmakers sampled the music, stars, and their own personal experiences from the 1970s, in line with larger aesthetic trends of postmodernism. The films studied in this project essentially mark a meeting point between these multiple trends. An appeal to nostalgia, broadly defined, for the 1970s provided a useful strategy for both reviving brands of that time and using them in the new ways afforded by postmodernism (such as parody and sampling) and the diverse perspectives of multiculturalism. My central argument is that, in the 1990s, both Hollywood and independent cinema utilized “the seventies” as a product to be sold and the past as something to be marketed. The primary way studio and independent films achieved this was through marketing tactics that made the seventies into a brand on multiple synergistic channels. Chapter one surveys the industrial landscape impacting the entertainment industry of the time, while chapter two covers the cultural trends of multiculturalism and postmodernism. Chapter three shows how ‘70s-set coming-of-age films from Gen X filmmakers had a rather serious take on growing up while their distributors glossed over these elements to highlight elements associated with nostalgia. Chapter four analyzes the studios' role in the nostalgia wave through recycling brands via synergy, as Paramount/Viacom did with The Brady Bunch. Chapter five examines independents' sampling of imagery and stars associated with blaxploitation to promote their films and ancillary products. Employing an industry studies perspective, the project uses a diverse collection of text (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cynthia Baron Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Cortland Rankin Ph.D. (Committee Member); Andrew Schocket Ph.D. (Committee Member); Melissa Burek Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: American Studies; Film Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2022, Economics

An old, signed baseball mitt or your first tickets to a concert often hold more personal value than you originally spent on them. Nostalgia is a powerful force that can drive a consumer to purchase a product for the sole purpose of remembering a past time. This paper posits that one of the ways businesses in the video game market can utilize nostalgia is by timing the release of remakes. Using observational data on video game sales with information on genre, sequels, and remakes for each observation, I estimate that the length of wait time that generates the most sales for the release of a remake is between 9 and 20 years.

Committee: Mark Tremblay (Advisor); Gregory Niemesh (Committee Member); Peter Nencka (Committee Member) Subjects: Economic Theory; Economics

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

The romance was the preeminent French song form from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. These simple, strophic, often amorous songs permeated the French and French colonial musical scenes, appearing on operatic and concert stages, and in boarding schools, prisons, military barracks, and especially domestic spaces like salons and drawing rooms. The romance was the sonic emblem of French style and identity, a celebrated and central aspect of the French soundworld. Despite its historical significance, however, the genre and its myriad professional and amateur composers, poets, performers, and listeners have been all-but forgotten; the romance has been reduced to an immature foil for the later melodies of Gabriel Faure and Claude Debussy. In this dissertation, I shift focus back to the romance, to the culture with which it interacted, and to the people that produced and treasured it from the Revolution to the Third Republic (1789-1870). I argue that the romance functioned as a kind of melodic pedagogy, a musical means to mold the identities, values, and worldviews of its consumers. Composers, poets, publishers, and performers exploited the genre's emotional powers and inherent catchiness—along with a particularly French method of vocal production—to propagate largely conservative ideas of gender, class, race, history, the body, and the mind in an attempt to define and fix France's place in an increasingly disordered post-revolutionary and imperialist world. Chapter 1 explores the largely-forgotten performance practices that animated the romance, including issues of vocal production, expressive timbres, gesture, and ornamentation. I argue that these practices were heard as uniquely French, and that to understand how the music operated aesthetically, socially, and politically, we must first understand how it was performed. In Chapter 2, I position the romance as a tool of moral pedagogy for girls, focusing on ways in which it was folded i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Francesca Brittan (Advisor); Susan McClary (Committee Member); Christine Cano (Committee Member); Daniel Goldmark (Committee Member); Peter Bennett (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2022, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Small town culture reaches way beyond a small population count. When one considers a small town, they attach it to a certain kind of charm or deprivation. A small town is somewhere where everybody knows everyone, or a place with an inherent lack of privacy (not in the physical sense.) Generally rural, often conservative, and in many cases fighting to stay alive. This is sustainable for towns with a healthy local business and job culture to keep residents in town, but others are left to their demise. Small towns in America are being hit hard by a loss in industry and agriculture. With large commercial entities bogarting every market, the demand for farming and industry in rural areas is depleting. With no strong job base, citizens find themselves commuting elsewhere for work, bringing a lot of their cash-flow outside of their community. However, small-town culture is still appealing to many. Nostalgia will never leave us, it is what we as humans yearn for, and it is what will save small-town America. How can the future of the small town be analyzed in relation to recent events like the Covid-19 pandemic? How can we consider nostalgia as a commodity, bringing into fruition the idea of memory tourism? How might this save one town in particular, a small town in Kentucky called Falmouth? This thesis will analyze a four step process, diving deep into the Remediation, Representation, Revitalization, and Recreation of Falmouth, Kentucky.

Committee: Elizabeth Riorden M.Arch. (Committee Member); Michael McInturf M.Arch. (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Music History

When animators like the Fleischer Brothers and Tex Avery pioneered the new medium of film animation in the early twentieth century, they looked to earlier American popular culture successes like vaudeville and blackface minstrelsy to inspire their cartoons. Almost a century later, Studio MDHR remediated 1930s animation, big band jazz, the likeness of Cab Calloway, and other historical entertainment nostalgia points in their 2017 videogame Cuphead. This corresponds with a prominent trend in video games of the twenty-first century: nostalgia expression and formation through the remediation of past popular culture. Cuphead's connections to the past include game mechanics from the 1980s and 1990s, music recorded on vintage microphones and composed with historical compositions in mind, and visual aesthetics and animation processes that reflect those of 1930s American cartoons. These nostalgia points do not come without their problems. Amination in this earlier era catered to a majority white audience, and therefore included racist caricatures of Black people and Black music, like big band jazz. Remediating these visual elements opened Studio MDHR up to criticism. Composer Kris Maddigan brought direct musical quotations into some of the pieces in Cuphead's soundtrack, drawing on nostalgia points that have been remediation in popular culture throughout the 20th century. These examples of musical texturing connect to earlier media that bring their own baggage to the amalgam that makes up Cuphead's sonic and visual aesthetic. A large fandom has nevertheless grown up around the game since its release in 2017, creating fan music that represents different aspects of the game they now find memorable and even nostalgic.

Committee: Ryan Ebright PhD. (Advisor); Katherine Meizel PhD. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Consumer Sciences

Solo dining is on the rise, yet the existing hospitality and tourism literature offers little guidance regarding how to market solo diners. By conducting three studies, the current dissertation focuses on three marketing strategies—service robots, consumption rituals, and nostalgic ads—and examines how they affect solo (vs. group) diners' decision-making. Study 1 focuses on the online booking context and examines how service robot type (i.e., non-humanoid vs. humanoid) influences solo (vs. group) diners' responses, including attitude toward the restaurant, visit intention, and e-WOM intention. Results from Study 1 suggest that group diners exhibit more favorable attitudes and behavioral intentions toward restaurants featuring humanoid (vs. non-humanoid) service robots, whereas solo diners respond more favorably to restaurants featuring non-humanoid (vs. humanoid) service robots. Furthermore, anticipated psychological comfort is revealed as driver of the congruency effects between robot type and diner type. Study 2 focuses on the tourism dining context and investigates the impact of consumption rituals (i.e., absence vs. presence) on solo (vs. group) diners' responses, including food evaluation and purchase intention. Results from Study 2 show that for group diners who travel with others, the presence (vs. absence) of consumption rituals leads to more favorable food evaluation and greater purchase intention, whereas the presence (vs. absence) of consumption rituals backfires and results in less favorable responses among solo diners who travel alone. Furthermore, anticipated pleasure is identified as the underlying mechanism explaining these effects. Study 3 focuses on the restaurant advertising context and explores how advertisement type (i.e., nostalgic vs. non-nostalgic) influences solo (vs. group) diners' responses, including food evaluation and purchase intention. Results from Study 3 show that for group diners, the nostalgic (vs. non-nostalgic) ad gen (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stephanie Q Liu (Advisor); Jay Kandampully (Committee Member); Caezilia Loibl (Committee Member); Laurie Wu (Committee Member) Subjects: Experimental Psychology; Marketing

MFA, Kent State University, 2021, College of the Arts / School of Art

Video games are often the source of controversial discussions due to the majority containing some form of violence and the notion that they are addictive. People tend to forget that the very purpose of a video game is to play. Brian Sutton-Smith spent his lifetime as a theorist analyzing the importance of play in our childhood and adult lives. As Sutton-Smith says, “We study play because life is crap. Life is crap, and it's full of pain and suffering, and the only thing that makes it worth living — the only thing that makes it possible to get up in the morning and go on living — is play. Art and play.” 8-bit Hunger is about the connections between human interaction and fabricated environments. This work is for those who are nostalgic for an environment that was before their time, where a community spirit was commonplace and play was an important part of those connections. It isn't solely about video games; it's about the power of nostalgia.

Committee: Taryn McMahon (Advisor); Andrew Kuebeck (Committee Member); Isabel Farnsworth (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 0, Popular Culture

We are used to seeing books, handling them, reading them, but we are not so used to analyzing our relationship to the form of the object, yet in this thesis, I argue that the very shape and composition of books has an impact on our interactions and relationships with them. By looking at the material book, we must confront the cultural, social, and individual significance that these material objects are imbued with. The physical attributes of books, from the smell of ink and paper to the distinct feel of a hefty hardback or flexible paperback, contribute specific things to culture and an individual's experience as physical books carry commercial, aesthetic, and emotional value. By looking at material culture studies, memory and commemoration, as well as theory behind nostalgia, I argue that the physical book can be both a powerful object and carrier of social meaning by utilizing Grant McCracken's notion of displaced meaning, academic studies of nostalgia, the science of book scent, bookshop curation, and book collecting, along with essay compilations by booklovers. From the affective power of the sensory aspects of books to book collecting and book spaces, the materiality of the book is revealed not as a mere vessel for texts but as essential to the physical book's ability to anchor memory, emotion, and identity.

Committee: Kristen Rudisill Dr. (Advisor); Esther Clinton Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

This dissertation considers how individuals, families, societies and nations pursue connection and belonging. When the present appears, at best, to lack an essential, or, at worst, to denigrate possibilities for human flourishing, people glance backwards to identify what they are missing. Within cityscapes, this sense of lack or longing appears related to urban living: anonymity despite crowds, financial stress despite jobs, discomfort despite amenities, artificiality despite infrastructure. Responses to dissatisfaction include remembering one's own past or the pasts of forebears, and then revisiting, reevaluating, rehearsing and reclaiming them. “What do we need that we left behind?” “What is essential to our well-being?” Such questions and related activities may be analyzed via concepts of nostalgia. In light of developments in nostalgia studies since the “productive” turn of the late 1990s, there are numerous helpful approaches for contemplating how people discuss, leverage and utilize their real and imagined pasts. I situate my research in contemporary Turkey, claiming that Turkey is an apt case study for evaluating nostalgia on several registers. Contextual reasons include: 1) Nostalgia has been integral to nation-building processes, 2) The growth of cities along with rural-to-urban migration has occurred rapidly and recently, especially since the 1950s, and 3) Connections to places of origin are intentionally explored, cultivated and maintained. I also note that tendencies for nostalgic re-evaluation are inspired by disillusionment with state discourse, dissatisfaction with city life and disturbance over perceived geopolitical threats. Turkey is thus a promising context in which to observe a plethora of situated, overlapping and imbricated nostalgias. Such nostalgias are multi-scalar, as they facilely shift from the individual to the state and from the vernacular to the official. This renders them observable for analysis from numerous vantage points. Alt (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Morgan Liu (Advisor); Johanna Sellman (Committee Member); Katherine Borland (Committee Member); Kendra McSweeney (Committee Member) Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2020, English

This paper looks at Donald Trump's rhetoric of nostalgia and how it influenced voting within Appalachia and the Rust Belt. I argue that many voters within the two regions—often colloquialized as spiritual “others” within the United States—exemplify a desire for a past time in which they were of extreme importance to the country's industry, culture, and politics and how they influence the structure of modern day political campaigns. In 2016, both regions became the target of Donald Trump's popular message to “Make America Great Again” in which he promised to stimulate their economies through deregulation, new trade deals, and a reversal of numerous energy policies made by President Barack Obama and presidents before him. I argue that the politics of race and populism, as well as the rhetoric of nostalgia, play extremely important roles in how Appalachia and the Rust Belt vote and that the 2016 election created both a newly reinvigorated interest in politics and a step back into anachronistic beliefs of xenophobia, racism, and distrust in the system.

Committee: Stephen Wilhoit Dr. (Committee Chair); Jennifer Haan Dr. (Committee Member); Tereza Szeghi Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2020, Psychology-Adult Development and Aging

Nostalgia, or the fond remembrance of one's past, is a common experience hypothesized to increase across the lifespan. Though nostalgic remembrance has been conceptualized as ubiquitous, its specific features (e.g., frequency, environment, and affect) have yet to be examined. The current study, using a lifespan sample, sought to address this limitation in the literature by assessing the daily experience of nostalgia with the overarching goals of clarifying the emotional outcomes, situational triggers, and overall frequency of occurrence. A total sample of 108 participants (47 young, 31 middle-aged, and 30 older adults) completed a two-week, twice-daily experience-sampling study that yielded quantitative data describing the frequency and emotional consequences of nostalgic episodes, as well as details about environmental triggers (i.e., social partners, location, and activity). Audio recordings of participants' descriptions of nostalgia were coded into specific categories and subjected to content analysis. Nostalgia was found to increase in a linear manner across the lifespan with young adults reporting the least likelihood of experiencing daily nostalgia, while older adults reported the most. The experience of nostalgia was further associated with both positive and negative affective outcomes for all ages, but older adults reported even more negative affect, perhaps demonstrating a link between poignancy and nostalgia. Triggers of nostalgia were found to be primarily idiosyncratic regarding activity and location, however middle-aged adults were the most likely to report being with social partners during their nostalgic experience. This research was the first to document age differences in the frequency and experience of nostalgia and provides increased support for the differential functions of nostalgia with age. For older adults, nostalgia may serve as a mechanism to promote self-continuity by providing a touchstone to the past, whereas for young and middle-aged ad (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jennifer Stanley PhD (Advisor); Eric Allard PhD (Committee Member); Toni Bisconti PhD (Committee Member); Maria Hamdani PhD (Committee Member); Andrea Snell PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Aging; Developmental Psychology; Psychology

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2019, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Critics have frequently commented on the nostalgic tone of Brideshead Revisited. Their assessment has been largely negative, with most considering Brideshead too sentimental about England's aristocratic past. This current characterization fails to recognize Waugh's critiques of such thinking in Brideshead, wherein he upends the nostalgic tropes of popular Oxford novels, illustrates the dangers of both insulated upper class living and thoughtless presentism through his depictions of various characters, and proposes a greater metaphysical drama through memory is at play in the novel. Brideshead offers nostalgia as an enlivening force which allows Charles Ryder to maintain a vibrant understanding for who he was and who he is now as a result, and consequently empowers him to move forward into an uncertain future. Waugh sees the past as a method for making sense of the present with memory bridging the gap between the two, while simultaneously rejecting any pretensions to preserve the past in its entirety. This theory is built into the narration of the novel itself, which is presented as an extended remembrance. Decoding the nuances of this narration reveals a shift in the narrator's consciousness after interacting with his memories. By the epilogue, Charles as narrator has become inexplicably hopeful, which Waugh suggests is due to remembering, even that which must give Charles pain. Ultimately, I propose that Waugh's nostalgia manages to be both melancholic and realistic, and as a result the elegy of Brideshead is more complex than critics have previously allowed.

Committee: Rachel Carnell (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard (Committee Member); Julie Burrell (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Language Arts; Literature; Modern Literature

Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Ohio University, 2019, Business Administration

For my honors tutorial thesis, I created a professional research project in the form of a qualitative film with supporting survey data. The demand for video-based deliverables in research and industry are growing in popularity. The film is an example of one of those deliverables and this paper aims to explain the process of the creation of this film, the methodologies utilized for the project, and the conclusions drawn. Our qualitative video explores the behaviors and driving motivators for video-game players to choose what game to play, namely the powers of nostalgia and socialization capabilities and the link between the two. Two surveys were conducted for additional quantitative support and further exploration of the subject.

Committee: Jacob Hiler Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Business Administration; Marketing

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Popular Culture

This thesis places action figures, as masculinely gendered playthings and rich intertexts, into a larger context that accounts for increased nostalgia and hyperacceleration. Employing an ethnographic approach, I turn my attention to the under-discussed adults who comprise the fandom. I examine ways that individuals interact with action figures creatively, divorced from children's play, to produce subjective experiences, negotiate the inherently consumeristic nature of their fandom, and process the gender codes and social stigma associated with classic toylines. Toy customizers, for example, act as folk artists who value authenticity, but for many, mimicking mass-produced objects is a sign of one's skill, as seen by those working in a style inspired by Masters of the Universe figures. However, while creativity is found in delicately manipulating familiar forms, the inherent toxic masculinity of the original action figures is explored to a degree that far exceeds that of the mass-produced toys of the 1980s. Collectors similarly complicate the use of action figures, as playfully created displays act as frames where fetishization is permissible. I argue that the fetishization of action figures is a stabilizing response to ever-changing trends, yet simultaneously operates within the complex web of intertexts of which action figures are invariably tied. To highlight the action figure's evolving role in corporate hands, I examine retro-style Reaction figures as metacultural objects that evoke Star Wars figures of the late 1970s but, unlike Star Wars toys, discourage creativity, communicating through the familiar signs of pop culture to push the figure into a mental realm where official stories are narrowly interpreted. I conclude by suggesting that in response to media oversaturation and the rise of nerd culture, action figures, as objects rooted in the physical world that communicate with popular codes and speak to deeply-held emotions, represent unique sites of meaning, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Montana Miller Ph.D. (Advisor); Esther Clinton Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jeremy Wallach Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Folklore; Gender; Mass Media