Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2020, Experimental Psychology (Arts and Sciences)

Americans have debated the appropriateness of displaying statues of Confederate soldiers since the monuments were popularized in the early 20th century. Only a few research studies have investigated predictors of attitudes toward these controversial statues. In four studies, I establish a causal relationship between White privilege beliefs and attitudes toward Confederate statues. Participants who are induced to experienced increased belief in White privilege report more negative attitudes toward Confederate statues. I also identify both symbolic threat (i.e., feelings of threat related to a group's culture, values, or identity) and outgroup empathy (i.e., an understanding of an outgroup's feelings) as parallel mediators of the relationship between White privilege and Confederate statue attitudes.

Committee: Kimberly Rios PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Dominik Mischkowski PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Mark Alicke PhD (Advisor); Keith Markman PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Experimental Psychology; Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, Musicology

The animated statue represented one of the central magical figures in French musical theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the period covered by this dissertation, 1661-1748, animated statues appeared in more than sixty works of musical theater of almost every available genre. This number does not include the many works containing statues that demonstrated magical or otherworldly properties through means other than movement or song. Some of the works of this period that feature living statues are well-known to musicologists—e.g. Moliere/Jean-Baptiste Lully's comedy-ballet Les Facheux (1661), Lully's opera Cadmus et Hermione (1673), and Jean-Philippe Rameau's one-act ballet Pigmalion (1748)—while others have received little recognition. This dissertation is the first study to consider the history of animated statues on the French stage during this period, and the first to reveal music as a defining feature of these statues. Over the course of nearly ninety years, music assumed an increasingly important role in the theatrical treatments of these figures that operated in the space between magic and mechanics. At the beginning of Louis XIV's reign, animated statues appeared with some frequency in both public and court spectacles. By the mid-eighteenth century, the animated statue had become the central focus of many works and had transformed into a potent symbol of, among other ideas, the power of music and dance, as most dramatically realized in Rameau's Pigmalion. This dissertation traces the history of this transformation.

Committee: Georgia Cowart (Committee Co-Chair); Francesca Brittan (Committee Co-Chair); Susan McClary (Committee Member); Elina Gertsman (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Dance; European History; Music; Theater