Master of Arts, Miami University, 2018, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis, written in English, offers a comparative analysis of communal trauma in the Post-Plantation fiction of Maryse Conde's Traversee de la Mangrove and William Faulkner's Light in August. More specifically, this piece of scholarship examines how traumas of absence, defined as those resulting from a missing experience rather than a lived one, construct communities through the acknowledgement of shared pain. By rejecting traditional narrative techniques, both authors tell the story of their fictional communities via what we call a communal recit, the totality of individual narratives collectively informing the reader's understanding of the particular community. In reading these individual recits alongside each other, the reader engages in a process we call Relational reading, which taking inspiration from Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, is a method of identifying shared experiences within a literary work. This reading practice is made possible through Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the rhizome and its advantages as a narrative device. For the reader, this style of narration yields topologies of the represented communities' thinking, thereby exposing how characters come to see themselves in relation to one another. Finally, this work considers literature's role as a functional monument to that which cannot be easily depicted.

Committee: Jonathan Strauss PhD (Advisor); Audrey Wasser PhD (Committee Member); Erin Edwards PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Caribbean Literature; Caribbean Studies; Comparative Literature; Literature

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Leadership and Change

The purpose of this theoretical case study was to explore the lived experiences of members within an inter-professional team about how they learn and adapt while dedicating their lives toward the well-being of students residing in and attending a rehabilitation home school. Although there is broad literature that addresses legacy learning theories and frameworks, as well as complex-adaptive organizations, very little shows how the application of rhizome philosophy principles address learning and adapting within an organizational context. This study is a step toward addressing that gap. Using interviews, thematic analysis, and storyline networking, the study explored in depth the lived experiences of 16 administrative, therapy, and educational staff who worked at the school. By using organizational storytelling as a means to unearth and analyze the team members' 194 stories, a rich web of connection and awareness emerged. Their stories demonstrated new ways of being, learning, and adapting both within and outside the school, and revealed alignment with rhizome philosophy principles of connection, multiplicity, heterogeneity, a signifying rupture(s), and cartography, as well as alignment with legacy and traditional learning theories and frameworks, thereby offering a new lens of learning within organizations called, Rhizomatic Learning in Organizations (RLO). This study is an opportunity to expand and enhance ways of considering learning and adapting within organizations by introducing and supporting rhizomatic behaviors and principles within collectives as they work together. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and Ohiolink ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Laura Morgan Roberts Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mary Ann Reilly Ed.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Educational Theory; Organization Theory

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2016, American Culture Studies

This dissertation studies the cultural significance of Canadian-American singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright's (b. 1973) album All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu (Decca, 2010). Lulu was written, recorded, and toured in the years surrounding the illness and eventual death of his mother, beloved Quebecoise singer/songwriter Kate McGarrigle. The album, performed as a classical song cycle, stands out amongst Wainwright's musical catalogue as a hybrid composition that mixes classical and popular musical forms and styles. More than merely a collection of songs about death, loss, and personal suffering, Lulu is a vehicle that enabled him to grieve through music. I argue that Wainwright's performativity, as well as the music itself, can be understood as queer, or as that which transgresses traditional or expected boundaries. In this sense, Wainwright's artistic identity and musical trajectory resemble a rhizome, extending in multiple directions and continually expanding to create new paths and outcomes. Instances of queerness reveal themselves in the genre hybridity of the Lulu song cycle, the emotional vulnerability of Wainwright's vocal performance, the deconstruction of gender norms in live performance, and the circulation of affect within the performance space. In this study, I examine the song cycle form, Wainwright's musical score and vocal performance, live performance videos, and fan reactions to live performances in order to identify meaningful moments where Wainwright's musical and performative decisions queer audience expectations. While these musical moments contribute to the already rich and varied lineage of the gay male artist in both classical and popular music, I argue that Wainwright's queer performativity and nontraditional musical choices speak to larger issues important to American culture in the contemporary moment. These issues include the visibility of male public mourning and the healing power of artistic expression in the face of traumatic loss.

Committee: Jeremy Wallach PhD (Advisor); Kimberly Coates PhD (Committee Member); Katherine Meizel PhD (Committee Member); Christian Coons PhD (Other) Subjects: American Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Glbt Studies; Music; Performing Arts

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, Art

Over the past few years my practice has been focused on and informed by images from warzones throughout the world. As an American civilian, I have come of age with an awareness of my tacit participation in warfare that I never witness first hand. Rather than as an event, war operates on the periphery, a vague affect diffused into the everyday. I wish to implicate myself as a participant as well as a spectator, an artist engaged in violence. The following paper is broken into to main sections. The first examines the experience of viewing the images of the dead on the battlefield, and the relationship between the viewer and the image referent that develops from that encounter. The second half examines a selection of my own artworks. A close examination of these works serves as a way to expand and reexamine the concepts contained in the first half. In conclusion I summarize my practice as an effort in “turning towards” the war victim.

Committee: Laura Lisbon (Advisor); Michael Mercil (Committee Member); George Rush (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism

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

My dissertation explores the sitar's rise and significance in post-independence India (1947-2009), primarily through the Imdad Khan Gharana and Vilayat Khan. Pioneering sitarists such as Ravi Shankar and Ustad Vilayat Khan were vitally important in forging India's cultural modern identity. By studying critically the role of individual creativity in the re-imagining of tradition, my dissertation investigates how contesting cultural heritages found expression in new artistic mediums that challenged and reached new audiences. In order to create a “non-linear” history of the sitar it is conceptualized as a “quasi-object” using the semiotic-material schema found in Latour's Actor Network Theory (Latour 2008). Musical analysis is informed by a Deleuzian approach for the perception of multiple “truths,” exploring performance as the interpenetration of the virtual and actual in assemblages.

Committee: Margarita Mazo Dr (Advisor); Ron Emoff Dr (Committee Member); Danielle Folser-Lussier Dr (Other); Jack Richardson Dr (Committee Member) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2011, English/Literature

This thesis argues that technology is not something to be apprehended from without, but rather is something primary to our proper ontological constitution, and which needs to be re-cognized from within. Following Martin Heidegger's line of thought, this project finds a primacy in the technology of language; and following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, it also finds a primacy in the technologies of desire (desiring-machines). In this sense, the primacy of language and desire are reflexive: there is no language without the impetus of desire; there is no “desire,” meaningful as such, without the inauguration of language. In addition, this thesis argues that both language and desire are not only primary and primarily technological, but inherently multiplicative. By way of post-structural and deconstructive semiotics, we find the multiplicity of language; and by way of Deleuze and Guattari's schizoid-rhizomatic-becoming, we find the promise of the multiplicity of desire. Finally, and most importantly, this thesis looks towards the manner in which new media technologies, as well as trans- and post-humanist discourse, have complicated and compounded these theoretical claims and suppositions.

Committee: Erin Labbie PhD (Committee Chair); Ellen Berry PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Science, University of Akron, 2008, Biology

The response of rhizome production to water level manipulation and seed production to pollinator exclusion were examined in the perennial herbaceous wetland plant Mimulus ringens. This species exhibits clonal growth and reproduction in the form of below ground stoloniferous rhizomes and aerial runners, while producing up to 300,000 seeds per plant from flowers historically recognized as bumblebee pollinated. 52 plants grown from seed and 48 grown from 1 year old ramets were subjected to 4 different water level treatments to determine the effects on rhizome production. Flooded conditions yielded significantly lower below ground rhizome mass and exhibited root and shoot decay that was not evident in plants grown under lower water levels. Plants grown from seed produced significantly greater below ground mass than plants grown from one year old ramets. Neither plant height nor flower production were influenced by water level manipulation and no relationship was observed between sexual and asexual reproduction. Flowers of 5 M. ringens plants were subjected to 3 pollinator exclusion treatments to determine the contribution of pollinators smaller than bumblebees. No statistical difference was found in seed production between flowers exposed to all available pollinators and those exposed only to pollinators not excluded by 3 mm mesh, while seed production was reduced for flowers with all pollinators excluded. These results demonstrate the previously unrecognized contribution of numerous small pollinator species in pollinating M. ringens flowers.

Committee: Randall Mitchell PhD (Advisor); Francisco Moore PhD (Committee Member); Jean Pan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Biology