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

My dissertation considers cross-cultural encounter represented in the nineteenth-century novel by focusing on the relationships between England's imperial nationalism and the novel. Whereas many postcolonial critics have situated the nineteenth-century novelistic process in the national context of English colonialism and have argued that the novel mainly sustained the hegemonic mode of conceptualization of England's cultural others, I argue that the story of cross-cultural encounters conceives an alternative vision that counters such a hegemonic conceptualization of English subjectivity and its subordinate otherness. The notion of cross-cultural encounter in my project is differentiated from that of the space of colonial encounter through which the colonizer from the metropolis seeks to assert his superiority and secure his innocence while he is involved with colonial practices. On the contrary, English characters in the texts that I consider experience the sense of guilt, ennui, or uncertainty that is frequently attributed to colonized subjects. Through actual encounter with their cultural others, English characters distance themselves from the dominant cultural order and the imperialist assumptions as to their superiority and engage with other cultures and people. I show how novels suggest the disruption of the claimed cultural hierarchy by addressing the positive alterity of other cultures and hybridity that the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter invoke. The individual chapters of my dissertation show that while the English nation confronted various other cultures in the nineteenth century, at the same time the novel was also engaged with such issues as the Irish Question, the Jewish Question, and the Indian Question to conceive a different world order in which the meaning and values of the metropolitan center and its peripheries are reconsidered. In five case studies of different subgenres of the novel such as the Irish national tale, the realist novel, the s (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, English (Arts and Sciences)

Distel's dissertation examines novels by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, focusing on the ways in which female characters in each text experience, negotiate, or reject allocations of shame. The project posits that discussions of shame took narrative form in the long eighteenth century, making this era particularly important to examine because of the drastic improvements in print technology and a rapidly expanding female readership. In analyzing the era's fiction, Distel argues that if female characters do not actually suffer shame, they frequently demonstrate an awareness of its potentially destructive power, and of the fact that patriarchal social structures often demanded women's obedience and shamefacedness. Ultimately, the dissertation posits that the genre of the novel exposes in detail the process by which patriarchal power structures assign shame and impose gender and social norms onto women, while also revealing alternatives to those norms. Additionally, the project offers a bridge between modern (often sexualized) shame and shame experienced during the long eighteenth century, which is, Distel argues, the era in which detailed representations of female shame take narrative form and become a crucial feature of fiction. The dissertation thus serves as a prehistory to contemporary theories of shame, positioning analyses and allocations of shame in their respective historical moments.

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

This document has been removed, as have many others, pending administrative updates to the University's publication system.

MFA, Kent State University, 2023, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Kids Can Be Cruel is an action Young Adult novel that uses domestic horror and subversive comedy to investigate the connections between people. YA novels cover many different topics, but in distillation, they work to explore relationships between people. Inspired by Daniel Handler's semi-absurdist drama A Series of Unfortunate Events, Bryan Lee O'Malley's very-absurdist action/romance Scott Pilgrim series, and Hiromu Arakawa's politically conscious fantasy adventure Fullmetal Alchemist (among others), Kids aims to emulate these works' bending of genres and conventions — and their relationship themes. Protagonist Maria may not always understand it, but her world is one where relationships are created, tested, and broken in sparks of fire.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

More Than Reading: Narrative, Medial Frames, and Digital Media in the Contemporary Novel explores the narrative effects of medial experimentation in contemporary American and British novels. This project argues that the production and reception of many recent novels are influenced by a range of forms and practices common in digital media, and that these influences have a profound impact on contemporary storytelling techniques. Through analyses of novels by Kate Atkinson, Salvador Plascencia, Steve Tomasula, and Mark Z. Danielewski, I consider how (sometimes subtle) shifts in authors' use of media is changing the way that the novel form operates, reflecting audiences' familiarity with new media even as the novel remains a vital literary form in the twenty-first century. In order to study these issues, I introduce the new analytical category of the medial frame, a particular type of social frame used to identify and describe the conventionalized rules and expectations that readers apply to specific uses of media. Medial frames, developed from a diverse set of linguistic and phenomenological approaches, are defined as social contexts that pair technological materials with the wealth of conventions that govern how those materials are used as part of communicative acts. Medial frames can be employed as interpretive tools to analyze how a text's use of medial technologies (e.g., printed text, images and color, page layout, paratextual materials) prompts audiences to apply certain reception practices over others. I show how medial frames are particularly suited to examining the complex medial environment of twenty-first-century storytelling, in which creators often use a diversity of technologies to communicate with audiences. The print novels of this era ask readers to adopt surprising medial frames, such that persuasive interpretations of these texts are only available to those who are prepared (whether implicitly or self-consciously) to adopt and adapt digital and (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, University of Dayton, 2022, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Event-based sensors are an emerging technology that hold the potential to change the computer vision field. Specifically, event-based sensors have increased dynamic range, increased temporal resolution, and lower power consumption. These qualities give a distinct advantage over traditional framing sensors in a variety of computer vision applications including high speed imaging, feature extraction and detection, etc. Event-based sensors have just recently begun to be tested in the context of space situational awareness, namely with the detection and tracking of slow moving objects (i.e., stars and satellites). The feasibility of event-based sensors to detect and track fast-moving, short-lived, and unresolved objects in the context of space situational awareness is a fairly novel approach with limited supporting literature. This question is investigated through the context of meteor detection and tracking with the purpose of pushing the event-based sensor capabilities to their limit. Two data collections are performed and a data set containing both meteors and distractors (i.e., stars, airplanes, etc.) is captured. A processing pipeline is developed to allow for denoising of raw event data and subsequent detection and tracking of meteors. A simple tracker with several thresholding methods is chosen to detect and track the meteors and is found to be the most computationally inexpensive method while providing reasonable results. A calibration process is also proposed to explain the logarithmic relationship between intensity and the generation of events. Lastly, the detection and tracking method along with calibration is compared to the hand-annotated ground truth obtained in the data collection to determine accuracy. Overall the simple tracker results in a majority of meteors being detected and accurately tracked over their entire duration. The calibration method also provides an accurate transformation from event magnitude to traditional pixel intensity.

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2018, Arts and Sciences: Spanish

In his book Novela historica en Colombia, 1988-2008: entre la pompa y el fracaso (2009), Pablo Montoya Campuzano demonstrates that historical novels have enriched contemporary Colombian literature. Among those Colombian historical novels relating the Spanish conquest, there is Muy caribe esta (1999) by Mario Escobar Velasquez, which narrates the encounter between Spaniards and Caribs, a South American indigenous tribe, in the area of Uraba, located on the northern coast of Colombia, at the beginning of the 16th century. My research question consists on identifying the literary and historical value of this novel. To this aim, I examine the presence of anachronisms in the book, caused by the dialogue between the author's present and the remote past that he writes about. My study starts with the following premise: the main character, who incarnates the novel's narrative voice, is anachronistic because his point of view of the conflict that he witnesses and in which he participates does not coincide with his own era. My hypothesis states that the literary value of the novel is defined by its narrative verisimilitude and vitality, which are based on the confluence between the extensive documentary knowledge of the history it deals with and the deep empirical knowledge of the environment where it occurs, Uraba. On the other hand, its historical value is defined by the modern anthropological judgment offered by the narrative voice, since it reconsiders the past, proposing new perspectives on it. In this M.A. Thesis, I firstly contextualize Muy caribe esta within the group of works that the author wrote specifically on Uraba. Secondly, I analyze Muy caribe esta from the traditional historical novel's perspective, presenting why it does not belong to this genre, since it does not respect the criteria. Thirdly, I analyze Muy caribe esta according to the perspective of Latin American's new historical novel, showing to what extent it does respect the criteria, designated by Sey (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Youngstown State University, 2015, Department of Languages

Candi's Cabaret is a novel in stories centered on place/theme/character. The stories are all tethered in some way to a strip club on the outskirts of Youngstown next door to a motel and focus (primarily) on the women who do/have worked there. Each section has its own plot but in the background of each it follows the story of Grace/Elliot, zir sister Lindsey, and Celeste. The overarching background plot follows Grace/Elliot and Celeste developing a romantic relationship while Grace/Elliot rejects zir assigned sex and starts to neglect zir younger sister in favor of exploring zir new identity. Eventually (about midnovel) Lindsey is abducted/goes missing which begins to erode the relationship between Celeste and Elliot, until the end when Lindsey's corpse is discovered hidden in the trees behind the club. Candi's Cabaret was written to display a sense of solidarity between marginalized women and explore the identities of women who do sex work (ranging from our societys most acceptable to our least). While doing so the novel also explores the attitudes and dangers surrounding this kind of work and the environment it creates, not only for the women themselves but female sexed children who grow up near it. Intersecting issues of gender, sexuality and poverty are examined through the different narrator's perspectives to try and reach a comprehensive view of how these things shape the world that marginalized women live in.

BA, Oberlin College, 2015, English

Journalists often write about the death of various print and media forms—deaths that have yet to occur, but which we continually anticipate in deference to a tacit law which discards the past as a “useless encumbrance” of outmoded styles of consumption. But is that encumbrance necessarily useless? In this paper, I argue that George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891), which narrates the deaths of two realist novelists and has been called an “epitaph for Victorian fiction,” lives out its own virtual death to good purpose. I discuss how Gissing uses the realist novel's transitional or partially exhausted state to conserve social possibilities excluded by consumer society and the newer, less novelistic commodities that circulate within it. I examine theories of consumerism, exploitation, and Realism in the 19th century novel to articulate how a surplus of meaning can so reside in a consumable object.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

Early children's literature took the forms of complex, distinct genres that, much more than the novels being published contemporaneously with them, were employed in the didactic effect of literary structures. These works, published roughly from 1750-1850, do not assume a simple, one-to-one relationship between fictional worlds and the real world. They are aware of the complexities of representation, and, written and read predominantly by women and girls, they are especially aware of representation's effects on gender. Early children's fiction, I argue, treats literary and social forms alike as structure-at-work in the world, and this treatment had a substantive impact on fiction that shares its interest in the subtleties of gender formation and the disparate treatment of gendered beings in fiction and in fact: the nineteenth-century realist novel. From one perspective, this project is a straightforward, genre-study of early children's fiction and its influence on the Victorian realist novel. I focus on four major genres, selected for their numerousness and their continued though adapted use in fiction, and I think carefully about the bids they made on readers. Rather than teach simple morals, I argue that these works teach people to analyze in culturally-prescribed ways: to see a situation in the world, understand what it means, and react to it accordingly. By emphasizing analysis as a response to structure, this fiction signals the construction of social categories. By adopting and adapting these forms, novelists like Dickens and the Brontes engage children's fictions' educational goals and emphasize the degree to which reality is defined by social, material, embodied, and familial forms. Ultimately, I demonstrate that that the didacticism which we have for so long assumed was simple and straightforward is, in fact, a kind of formalism, one that codifies structures of response and embodiment that belie its reputation as pure content.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2014, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation explores the development of a risky but empowering culture-specific women's consciousness by the protagonists of Sefi Atta and Laila Lalami's early novels. My insertion of Jameson's primacy of the national situation in the development of a woman's composite consciousness allows the reader to gain an understanding of women's marginalization and subsequent empowerment in a specific setting such as Casablanca, Morocco or Lagos, Nigeria. The composite factor is essential to understand the lived experiences of people in specific cultures within the postcolonial nation, for it acknowledges the importance of traditional resources but also the modern liberation tools available to the women. This study places Atta and Lalami's characters squarely in their cultural milieu so that they are read in their social, economic, political, racial, ethnic, and religious contexts. Just as Abouzeid argued that progress in studying women must be centered on women's social and political milieu because it is there that women's agency and oppression can be localized and contextualized, this study argues that women's empowerment is, in fact, grounded on what it means to be a woman in her particular society with its cultural expressions and norms. This approach focuses on a very practical and empowering experience for women as it ties them even more closely to their communities, even as they advocate for more options than were previously available to them. This culture-specificity empowers these characters to function even more efficiently as women who continually change and improve their communities in Nigeria and Morocco. Atta and Lalami's use of the concept of the composite consciousness in the frame of the local tradition serves as a unifying metaphor for each novel. This composite consciousness approach has the potential to answer Chandra Talpade Mohanty's call for a paradigm that is culture-specific yet creates solidarity across subjectivities and across the globe witho (open full item for complete abstract)

PHD, Kent State University, 2014, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

WAGONER, ELIZABETH A., Ph. D., December, 2014 ENGLISH INTERPRETING THE MULTIMODAL NOVEL: A NEW METHOD FOR TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP (# PP.) Director of Dissertation: Raymond Craig The recent proliferation of multimodal novels calls for a method of literary interpretation that addresses specific aspects of the genre that cannot be adequately addressed using existing literary critical tools. My project draws together tools from book design, narratology, and new media to investigate the ways multimodal novels communicate narrative detail in multiple modes. With this methodology, I analyze three multimodal novels, demonstrating that the multimodal novel makes meaning differently than the traditional novel. I argue that using this method to methodically gather a large data set before interpretation is necessary for a full understanding of the interactions of multimodal components in the novel, and of these elements as parts of a working whole. Chapter 1 reviews scholarship of the multimodal novel using narratology, new media theory, and book design. There is little critical consensus on a method for analyzing these texts, calling for a common methodology. Chapter 2 draws upon concepts from these three areas, developing a descriptive taxonomy to be used in a new method of textual analysis. Analyses of three representative multimodal novels in Chapter 3 show that textual elements with similar appearances function differently in each sample. In the first reading, The Fourth Treasure, I demonstrate that multimodal form functions to draw attention to narrative themes of the novel. With the second reading, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, I discuss challenges posed by less active multimodal elements, and explore how layout constructs the reading path, including ways reading paths can offer an additional level of meaning in multimodal novels. In the final reading, House of Leaves, I examine problems posed by multimodal novels that do not repeat layout patter (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, French and Italian

This dissertation is predominantly an analysis of urban (and suburban or peripheral) representations in four francophone postcolonial fictional narratives: Xala (1973) by Ousmane Sembene, Texaco (1992) by Patrick Chamoiseau, Les honneurs perdus (1996) by Calixthe Beyala, and La Belle Creole (2001) by Maryse Conde. My intention is to show how Sembene, Chamoiseau, Beyala, and Conde recreate the postcolonial urban geography and its inhabitants, and which coordinates they follow in this process of recreation. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, the introduction, I present the bio-bibliographical resources I have used, as well as the objective of this dissertation, the texts and the authors. In the second chapter, I attempt to analyze the representation of the city as a space of fulfillment or disillusionment, a space of hope or a dystopia. My intention is to emphasize the literary strategies and images that highlight the representation of the urban aspects, as well as some of the external factors, economic, social, racial or cultural, that preside over a specific recreation of urban reality. In the third chapter, my goal is to identify the modes of representation of some urban structures and territorial networks in the selected literary texts, showing how this effect of ‘spatialization' is obtained, and to what end, if other than purely esthetic. Another aspect I pursue is showing how the hierarchies and the interdependences of the urban spaces are represented in the four novels. The last chapter emphasizes the place of women in the postcolonial francophone city, their relationship with urban spatiality, their vision of the city, as represented by the selected authors. This dissertation attempts to analyze the aforementioned aspects in their close connection with the narrative substance.

Master of Science (M.S.), University of Dayton, 2011, Electrical Engineering

This research covers novel interdigital capacitor designs and explores the different parameters affecting the electrical characteristics of the devices. Interdigitated capacitors were designed using parallel electrodes in series and in shunt configurations. The main purpose of these devices is to enhance the tunability as compared to conventional IDCs while retaining the high voltage bias capability. The new devices were designed and simulated using Advance Wireless Research (AWR) software, fabricated using PLD technique, tested and analyzed using HP8720 Network analyzer and AWR software respectively. During this thesis, we successfully demonstrated the new parallel plate IDC devices with higher tunability and high voltage bias capability.

Master of Fine Arts, University of Akron, 2013, Creative Writing

A novel set in the late 1990s at a bar in Flint, Michigan.

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1923, Graduate School

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Arts and Sciences: Romance Languages and Literatures

In the last twenty years, Latinx literature has witnessed a proliferation of Young Adult novels in verse written by women. Because of their novelty and uniqueness, these novels have remained outside academic research; however, their study can shed light on the way in which current writers capture intersectional experiences. My thesis is divided into two sections: a theoretical section and a creative section. In the theoretical section of my work, I analyze the characteristics shared by three contemporary verse novels by Latina writers in the United States: The Poet X (2018) by Elizabeth Acevedo, Dreaming of You (2021) by Melisa Lossada-Oliva and Thirty Talks Weird Love by Alessandra Narvaez Varela (2021). My purpose is to demonstrate that the Latinx verse novel written by women in the YA context can be understood as a third space, that is, as a space of negotiation between different identities, rhythms and perspectives. The creative section of my dissertation consists of my own creative writing work, a coming-of-age verse novel about a Mexican teenager who is discovering her sexuality, and who is convinced of being a drum.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2024, English

Within the Gothic genre, most books incorporate visible specters or embodied monsters. Authors who produced monsters most often came from marginalized groups within their cultural contexts: Bram Stoker was Irish and Mary Shelley was a woman. Marginalized authors were best equipped to produce monster stories since the body of the monster embodies and enacts the author's personal and the wider culture's anxieties. Monsters remain relevant due to their adaptability to expressing and embodying new anxieties in new eras, independent of the author's original anxieties written into the monster. Monster Theory posits that the body of the monster represents and exhibits the larger culture's fears, desires, and values, and describes permissible and transgressive behaviors in order to teach and control the community. This paper, using Monster Theory to analyze the monster's body, examines the two most famous Gothic monsters, Dracula and Frankenstein's Creature, to see where anxieties are enacted and destroyed. Bram Stoker encodes anxieties of female sexuality, queerness, recolonization, and political tensions over Irish Home Rule within Dracula's, the vampire bella's and Lucy's bodies. The violent death of the vampires are attempts to reinforce English middle-class hegemony against the sexual and invading force of Dracula. Mary Shelley explores her anxieties about child- and parenthood, creation and death, knowledge in isolation, and failure of genius within the creation, growth, and death of the Creature. The Creature's offer to live in harmony with mankind and his extratextual death demonstrates Shelley's desire to accept her anxiety in order to de-threaten it. This research has implications for further study in other monster stories as well as asks pertinent questions about the nature and function of monsters within the cultural psyche.

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2024, Department of Humanities

A thief, Gwen, is given the task to earn herself an enormous amount of money by a very wealthy employer. The task, however, is not as easy as she might have thought. To earn her money, Gwen must travel across land and sea, navigating the world of the aristocracy and figure out a way to behave in front of a new social class. She is thrown into a world she has only ever heard of and must wear the right clothes, say the right thing and act a certain way all while trying to stay hidden for if she is caught, Gwen knows the rest of her days would be spent in prison. In one of four lands, this story takes place in Celdwyn: The Land of Song, following Gwen whose natural instinct is to fight back twice as hard with anything that comes her way, which proves to be difficult for her working relationship. How was she supposed to know it was not common to tackle your employer to the ground when you're upset. Gwen has one task, and one task alone: steal the oculus. Is it so bad if she steals a few extra pieces of gold and silver along the way? And cutlery? Artwork? Clothing? Lampshades and jewellery? What about the crown? The one that sits on the King's head, would it really be so bad if she found a way to take that and keep it forever?