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

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

FUTUREHAUNT is a collection of poetry exploring existence in the Anthropocene. The poems within FUTUREHAUNT explore the author's experiences with mixed identity & queerness in the Catholic church alongside self-harm and other traumas through the lens of rapid technological acceleration within capitalism. The poems play with tradition through deconstruction of classic forms with a focus on the American sonnet. FUTUREHAUNT as a title is in reference to Mark Fisher's work on hauntology. FUTUREHAUNT as a collection applies Mark Fisher's theory on capitalist realism & hauntology to Anthropocene aesthetics, and queer studies through exploration of the author's personal experience and theoretical background. FUTUREHAUNT as a collection utilizes the recurring subject of suicide as a mode of relation to the theme of hauntology.

Committee: Kathy Fagan (Committee Member); Marcus Jackson (Advisor) Subjects: Literature; Mental Health; Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

“Hushed Articulations: Theorizing Representations of Black Women's Post-Violence Sexuality” interrogates representations of Black women's sexuality in the aftermath of sexual violence - what I term “post-violence sexuality.” Following feminist and anti-rape activism of the 1970s and 1980s, the prevalence and ramifications of sexual violence gained public, activist, and intellectual attention. However, neoliberal subject formation and entrenched public reliance on personal empowerment rather than social, political, or institutional intervention have converged and contributed to increasingly polarized conceptualizations of victimhood and survivorship in the 21st century. Black women's relationship to these post-violence identities is especially fraught. “Hushed Articulations” intervenes in rape crisis and anti-rape feminist debates by considering Black women's specific cultural relationship to the prevailing linear conceptualization of trauma recovery that delineates transformation from victim to survivor or discursively prioritizes survivor over victim when addressing people who have experienced sexual violence. Adding to a growing body of Black feminist literary and cultural criticism that theorizes the relationship between violence, autonomy, and Black women's sexuality, this dissertation examines the murky overlap of arousal, trauma, and compulsory performative heroism in Black women's articulations of post-violence sexuality to demythologize both victimhood and survivorship. “Hushed Articulations” argues that a fuller range of Black women's post-violence sexuality and possibility is represented in Black women's fiction and memoir – a range that is not reliant on dichotomized social constructions of victimhood and survivorship, and that other forms of media created for and about people who have experienced sexual violence often leave unacknowledged. Chapter one is a broad overview of anti-rape activism in the United States, establishing how the nuances of (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Treva Lindsey Ph.D. (Advisor); Wendy Smooth Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mary Thomas Ph.D. (Committee Member); Shannon Winnubst Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; Comparative Literature; Gender Studies; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2020, Popular Culture

Dick Grayson, also known as Nightwing and Batman's first Robin, is an important but largely unexplored character within the Batman mythos in DC Comics. There has been much scholarship done on Batman, however, this scholarship fails to address the importance of Dick Grayson. This applies not only to his additions to the Batman mythos, but also to the role he has played in comic book history; he was the first sidekick in superhero comic books, and was one of the first superheroes in all of comics, being introduced shortly after industry titans Superman and Batman. Through Grayson, this thesis will illustrate how comic book superheroes work to inspire us, teach us valuable life lessons, provide social and moral scripts, and promote the development of positive morals, healthy masculinity, and coping mechanisms amongst their audience. Dick Grayson will be used as a specific example of this, as the scope of research must be narrowed to a specific hero, as trying to analyze multiple characters would be unwieldy. This thesis provides an analysis of how Grayson is constructed as a character through the application of Joseph Campbell's model of the hero's journey, and psychological theory including: Sandra L. Bloom's research in childhood and psychic trauma, Cathy Caruth's work regarding post-traumatic stress disorder, and the theory of heroic leadership dynamic from Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals. By using these theories and methodologies, this thesis will show how and why Dick Grayson is an exceptional example of the promotion of positive development in superhero comic books.

Committee: Jeffrey Brown (Advisor); Esther Clinton (Committee Member); Jeremy Wallach (Committee Member) Subjects: Folklore; Literature; Modern Literature; Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, French and Italian

At the crossroads of French Studies, Visual Studies, and Queer theory, my dissertation seeks to confront notions of risk and responsibility to argue that society's perceptions of risk have changed in relation to a pre-AIDS world and the onset of AIDS and that contemporary treatments such as PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) continue to refine our definition of risk. While much recent scholarship has been written about AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, I would like to address contemporary AIDS narratives that respond to advances in medication and a shift in our understanding of AIDS from a death sentence, to a chronic disease, and now to a preventable illness. In order to explore how gay men's relationship with risk has been articulated in artistic production and has evolved with the availability of PrEP in France, my dissertation confronts cultural production throughout the epidemic. Film and literature analysis of Herve Guibert's work establishes a relationship between taking risks with one's health and the feelings of shame often felt in the early days of the epidemic, while a critical look at Cyril Collard's Les Nuits fauves in tandem with public health campaigns demonstrate how beauty is manipulated in times of epidemic. Engaging with Erik Remes's allows for further nuancing of the question of responsibility, and suggest that the epidemic resulted in a vilification of behavior that was not only deemed risky, but also irresponsible. Finally, I explore contemporary notions of risk through a study of prevention campaigns, film, newspaper articles, and interviews. The HIV/AIDS narrative in contemporary France is one that is marked by new modes of communication, the creation of a digital queer space, and a revisiting of the trauma of AIDS. The first three chapters are in the tradition of medical humanities and film studies approach, and the fourth chapter requires a shift methodology to one that emphasizes cultural studies and oral testimonies, necessitating onsite rese (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lucille Toth (Advisor); Margaret Flinn (Advisor); Dana Renga (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Foreign Language; Gender; Gender Studies; Health; Modern Literature; Public Health

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

In this dissertation, I investigate American motion picture narratives from the 1990s in which detectives encounter the supernatural. These narratives did not originate during this decade, but there were a remarkable number of them compared to previous periods. I argue that the supernatural is often analogous to personal, national, or cultural trauma. I further suggest that a detective investigating the supernatural stands in for the psychoanalyst, who studies and treats this trauma. I then trace the origins of the supernatural detective in history, as well as in British and American popular fiction. To begin, I discuss Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999) as an example of a supernatural detective, who is himself traumatized but who also manages to solve the supernatural mystery in the eponymous village. That solution points to the obscured narrative of women's rights in the early-American republic. Next, I suggest that spaces can be traumatized like people. I introduce the concept of the chronotope of the traumatized space, which I then apply to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and its various film and television adaptations to argue that these influential haunted house tales have helped repress scientific research into the paranormal as a reputable field of inquiry and the paranormal researcher as an admirable calling. Next, the entire country of the United States is portrayed as a traumatized space in The X-Files, which presents its primary supernatural detective, Agent Fox Mulder, as an analyst of the state, exposing the national guilt concerning the treatment of Native Americans. Finally, I investigate several turn-of-the-millennium fake documentaries. I argue that in The Last Broadcast (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and the novel House of Leaves (2000), rational investigators are more likely to meet impossible moments than they are to meet supernatural entities. These impossible moments reflect a growing desensitization to the slippage (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jared Gardner (Advisor); James Phelan (Committee Member); Linda Mizejewski (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Motion Pictures

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2012, English/Literature

This thesis applies both postcolonial and trauma theory to explore filmic responses to September 11th and the “War on Terror.” I examine the Hollywood films United 93 and World Trade Center and compare them to the omnibus film 11”09'01 and the Bollywood release My Name is Khan in order to understand the different ways in which each work portrays the trauma of September 11th as well as each film's unique attempt to memorialize the attacks. Both trauma theory and postcolonial theory, I argue, help illuminate the different ideological responses to September 11th. I contend that the two Hollywood films both evacuate the surrounding context from the attacks and instead use the trauma of September to celebrate American heroism, ultimately reinforcing conservative notions of what motivated the attacks, as well as who can claim U.S. citizenship, and by extension, who can claim victimhood. This is contrasted with 11”09'01 and My Name is Khan, both of which return context to September 11th and also attempt to use the trauma as a means of potentially forging new alliances with disparate communities both within the United States and across the globe. It is by examining how the trauma of September 11th continues to inform discourses on terrorism that there exists the potential to contest mainstream discourses on terror and also form more potentially liberatory alliances with different groups of people across the globe.

Committee: Khani Begum (Committee Chair); Stephannie Gearhart (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

MFA, Kent State University, 2024, College of Communication and Information / School of Visual Communication Design

This thesis investigates the ways in which drawing can be used to improve memory. Human memory can often be unreliable. Because of this, memory refresher systems called mnemonics are frequently used in written and visual learning systems to aid in the recall of important information. Among the many forms of visual mnemonics, drawing has proven to be a successful aid. Previous research into the topic has shown drawing to be highly effective in elevating recall. Unfortunately, drawing mnemonics are not widely utilized. Additionally, there has been limited academic discussion or research from the perspective of artists or designers. There has yet to be any form of research into how skills developed as an illustrator can improve the success of drawing-based mnemonics. The improvement of perception has been shown to improve the memory of professionals when working in their fields. Additionally, improving in drawing has been shown to improve an individual's perception and mental visualization. This research aims to isolate the elements of drawing education that can be learned to improve one's perceptual skills and the mnemonic quality of drawing. The tests conducted throughout this research also utilize AI image generation to test and strengthen mental imaging and perceptual abilities. Findings from the thesis demonstrate the beneficial uses of drawing and artificial intelligence to improve mental processing in artists and non-artists.

Committee: Chad Lewis (Advisor); Jessica Barness (Committee Member); Gretchen Rinnert (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Artificial Intelligence; Design; Education

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Kurdish cinema represents a vital transnational and global art form that bridges the Kurdish community, uniting a stateless people through cultural expression. This dissertation explores common narrative threads of Kurdish cinema relating to identity, statelessness, trauma, and women's issues, despite the differences between Kurds of various nationalities in both the ancestral Kurdistan region and the diaspora. The first chapter examines how these artworks confront issues of identity, exile, and homeland. The second interrogates depictions of individual and collective trauma in Kurdish cinema, especially generational trauma resulting from racism, conflict, and displacement. Chapter 3 analyzes Kurdish cinema from a comparative perspective through the lens of Indigenous studies, examining how Kurdish cinema confronts settler-colonial oppression. The fourth and final chapter addresses the portrayal of Kurdish women's issues in Kurdish cinema, contrasting how male and female directors represent these issues and emphasizing the vital contributions of Kurdish women filmmakers especially with regard to telling Kurdish women's stories. Ultimately this work positions Kurdish cinema as a powerful artistic movement spanning national and international boundaries driven by the efforts of a distinct filmmaking community united in the desire to represent Kurdish identity and culture through cinematic storytelling.

Committee: Charles Buchanan (Advisor); Andrea Frohne (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash (Committee Member); Nukhet Sandal (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, German

Trauma has been an important facet of literature and German studies since the romantic era, and just as people grow and change, so do the ways trauma is represented in different times. Trauma studies has already been applied to many different forms of literature including crime fiction and romantic era novellas. This analysis expands trauma study into the realm of film and television. By defining the Netflix original series Dark as a trauma narrative, the therapeutic function of its structure, repetitions, characterizations of emotional attachments, and resolutions become apparent. The narrative style of Dark mirrors the effects of trauma on the brain while the characters in the series propose dramatized aspects of symptoms of trauma that can help the audience reflect on aspects of their own lives. The characters in Dark create a representation of Tannhaus's trauma by showing different aspects of Tannhaus's grief. This aspect of the show distances the audience from Tannhaus while also creating an emotional attachment towards other characters. At the end of the series, the removal of the characters displaces the emotional grief, caused by loss, from Tannhaus to the audience. German forms of literature have been playing with these tropes of displacement, of fractured identity, haunting of the past, death, and new beginnings, for over two centuries. They appear in the romantic period, e.g. in E.T.A. Hoffmann's works and find further reflection in Freud. This analysis will show how film and a modern made-for-TV series like Dark can also help their audiences to attempt healing through reflection.

Committee: Christina Guenther Ph.D. (Committee Member); Edgar Landgraf Ph. D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Germanic Literature; Romance Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2018, English/Literature

Comics featuring LGBTQ children have the burden of challenging cis/heteronormative versions of childhood. Such examples of childhood, according to author Katherine Bond Stockton, are false and restrict children to a vision of innocence that leaves no room for queer children to experience their own versions of childhood. Furthermore, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) community has taken a “progressive”-based approach to time, assuming that newer generations have avoided the trauma of the past because ideas about sexual orientation and gender have advanced with time. Newer generations of the LGBTQ community forget that many have struggled for change to occur, instead choosing to forget the wounds of the past. By analyzing two comic works—Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home and Sophie Labelle's web comic series Assigned Male—I argue that we must let go of our suspicion towards LGBTQ child characters and open ourselves up to what can be learned from them. I also argue that both the past (with its wounds and trauma) and the future must be accepted into the present in order to give children the childhood they desire, rather than the childhood we recall. Both Fun Home and Assigned Male demonstrate that childhood is far from the simplistic happy time of life and can be just as fraught with complication as adulthood. Rather than try to protect children from this, these authors argue that we should empower children to locate their own sense of authenticity, in terms of both gender and sexuality. I argue that children are full of possibility and wisdom to guide current populations and change the future for the better through their struggles.

Committee: William Albertini Dr. (Advisor); Erin Labbie Dr. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; Literature

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 Arts, Miami University, 2016, English

Imagine if This Were in Comic Sans is a collection of poems that acts as an exploration of scripted womanhood and sexuality as well as an examination of the physical and emotional body as a site of both trauma and desire. With no formal sections, the collection is composed of poems along with sparse images and cellphone screenshots that deal with the admiration of viscera, tortured movements through the mundane, and the warped filters trauma presses upon women's desires. As a corrective to the assumptions that equate women's emotional expression with melodrama and sentimentality, the work adopts a deliberately melodramatic, even grotesque tonality. The conversational style of the speaker in these poems is intended to solicit the reader's empathy and/or identification with painful, sometimes shocking issues, traumas, and desires. Visuals added throughout embody the social, sexual subconscious that surrounds the speaker.

Committee: Cathy Wagner (Committee Chair) Subjects: Gender Studies; Mental Health; Multimedia Communications; Personal Relationships; Psychology; Recreation; Theater

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2014, Theatre

This thesis takes a Performance Studies approach to explore the relationship between collective memory and imagination through the lens of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904) and Laura Ferdinand's adaptation of the play produced at Miami University (2014). Both the thesis and adaptation emphasize performance and play as critical modes of transmission of collective memory. Considering both the archival (text-based) and non-archival (performance-based) transmission of the Peter Pan myth throughout its century-long history, this thesis examines the evolving role of Peter Pan's performance of childhood and gender in simultaneously shaping and subverting ideologies of masculinity. Rooted in Peter Pan's relationship to the paradigmatic shifts in the construction of boyhood during the early twentieth century – especially World War One, this thesis uncovers the tensions between “real” and “imagined” bodies and the reciprocal relationship between memory and imagination that shaped Peter Pan.

Committee: Ann Elizabeth Armstrong PhD (Advisor); Elizabeth Mullenix PhD (Committee Member); Lisa Weems PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Performing Arts; Theater; Theater History

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2013, English

This dissertation traces the recurrence of melancholia in post-1980 American culture and literature about the psychological consequences of atrocity and sudden loss. Narratives within this subset often concern Vietnam combat, slavery, rape, the Holocaust, the perpetration of violence, the attacks on September 11, or the suicide of loved ones, and critics have frequently analyzed such works within the context of trauma studies. I argue that such a critical lens, with its postmodern attention to representation, deemphasizes subjective states of ambivalence, reality-testing, mourning, and self-negation, which are major components of melancholia that Sigmund Freud described in his 1917 essay, "Mourning and Melancholia". After demonstrating how these subjective states uniquely surface in novels by Tim O'Brien, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo, I reveal how melancholia emerges within the contemporary cultural mindset as a symptom of postmodernism's rejection of the reality principle - a metaphysical foundation necessary for mourning. Mourning, these writers all demonstrate, is simultaneously wanted and rejected within a postmodern milieu composed of overlapping realities, infinite translation, and representational aporia. From this argument I thus bring the following postulates to the surface: that the framework of melancholia has an ethical advantage when it comes to addressing the subjectivity and complicity of victims of atrocity and loss, especially as it concerns their individual recoveries; that the framework of melancholia has an analytical advantage when it comes to theorizing mourning, loss, and the management of desire; and that the framework of melancholia reveals an underlying cultural condition of impossible mourning within the period known today as the postmodern.

Committee: Timothy Melley (Advisor); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Member); Andrew Hebard (Committee Member); Robert Thurston (Other) Subjects: American Literature; Literature; Mental Health; Philosophy; Psychology