Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2008, English

Nushu is a Chinese women's script used by uneducated rural women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, in China to communicate and correspond with one another, cope with their hardships, and promote creativity. In the field of rhetoric and composition, despite the enormous interest in women's rhetorics and material culture, sources on Nushu in relation to the two fields are scarce. In relation to Nushu, examinations of American domestic arts, such as quilts, scrapbooking, and so on, material rhetoric are becoming popular. In my research, I examine Nushu through public and private discourse as well as aspects of material rhetoric. My research comprises real voices, collected data from previous researchers, and some Chinese history. A benefit of my proposed research for both western and eastern scholars in the fields of rhetoric and women's studies is that the interviews that I will conduct, particularly those with teachers and students of Nushu, add individual practitioners to a body of scholarship that is characterized more by the voices of scholars than practitioners. This research contributes to Western scholars' study of women's rhetorics and material culture, adding yet another literary practice through which to view the intersections of gender, culture, and language to a field where women's rhetorics and material culture have been studied extensively. And for the small emerging academic discussions of Nushu, this study will help draw the attention of Western scholars to this interesting and unusual literate practice.

Committee: Dr. Sue Carter Wood (Committee Chair); Dr. Kristine L. Blair (Committee Member); Dr. Richard C. Gebhardt (Committee Member); Dr. Jaclyn Cuneen (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2021, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

The history of women's rhetorical education is diverse, combining issues of access and exclusion, and intersecting with other factors of social location and identity such as class, race, and geography. Scholars like Gere, Johnson, Logan, and VanHaitsma have all explored the various ways women have pursued education in rhetoric and writing outside of the formal space of classroom settings, through women's clubs, parlor rhetorics, letter-writing, and more. Additionally, scholars such as Costa and Kallick and works like the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing have considered the role that habits of mind play in shaping writing education. This project has two primary goals. The first is to analyze the role of self-culture (the process of seeking out knowledge and education of one's own volition) as an element of rhetorical education for diverse women living and learning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through an investigation of self-culture texts and women's archival records. The second is to analyze the role of habits of mind in women's self-culture practices, and to draw connections between the historical evidence and contemporary research. I employed a feminist historiographic methodology, relying on digital archival research and textual analysis. The project outlines key elements of self-culture as an aspect of rhetorical education, focusing on texts' instructions related to speaking, reading and writing; analyzing diverse women's uptake and modification of self-culture advice; and uncovering the interconnected and multilayered importance of habits of mind. The findings of my analysis offer insight into modes of writing and rhetorical education that occurred alongside and outside of formal educational settings, showcase diverse women's uptake of those educational methods, and describe the interconnected role played by habits of mind in extracurricular learning activities. This project draws connections between the practices of self- (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sue Carter Wood PhD (Advisor); Jean Marie Gerard PhD (Other); Neil Baird PhD (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Black History; Composition; Education; Education History; Gender; Gender Studies; History; Literacy; Pedagogy; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2012, Communication Studies

This study focuses on two prominent evangelists, Ida Gage and Clara Wetherald, who served as two of the earliest women delegates to the Free Methodist General Conference and argued in defense of their ministries. Rhetorical artifacts include historical writings from both Gage and Wetherald. To illustrate the tension these women faced in gaining acceptance for their ministry, the 1890 and 1894 General Conference debates on ordaining women are analyzed to provide a broader religious and cultural understanding. Using archival research methods, the dissertation emphasizes constructing a rhetorical history narrative about the debates in the Free Methodist Church on women's place in ministry and in the home. The rhetorical concept of “passing” is used to illustrate how both Wetherald and Gage had to construct their narratives in a way that would allow them to be accepted in the male dominated profession of ministry. Additionally, the concept of silence as a rhetorical device is also used to demonstrate how both Wetherald's and Gage's ministries and impact in the denomination quickly vanished after the issue of women's ordination was defeated and both became divorcees. However, while their ministry gains suffered setbacks within the Free Methodist Church, the fact that Wetherald went on to have a thriving preaching career and Gage inspired both her children and grandchildren to start successful ministries outside of the denomination illustrates their long-lasting impact on nineteenth century ministerial culture.

Committee: Ellen Gorsevski Dr. (Committee Chair); Alberto Gonzalez Dr. (Committee Member); Catherine Cassara Dr. (Committee Member); Ellen Berry Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2023, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

This dissertation examined media rhetoric in the Los Angeles Times about 51 murdered marginalized women in the “Southside Slayer” serial killer cases. The “Southside Slayer” was five different Black men who did not fit the profile of a serial killer and were able to continue murdering women from 1983 to 2007. The victims and/or killers were all associated at one point with the “Southside Slayer” moniker and/or task force, even though some of the killers were later given different nicknames in the press. The goal of this study was to identify harmful narratives against marginalized women victims, and how they were perpetuated through the Los Angeles Times. Through qualitative archival research and a feminist social constructionist lens, language and word/phrase choices in 126 articles from the Los Angeles Times dating from 1985 to 2020 were examined for the use of synecdoche, derogatory language, and negatively connotative language when referring to the fifty-one women. In addition, use of the victims' names, use of the killers' names, and use of killer-friendly language were examined. Using critical discourse analysis and grounded theory, harmful narratives and dehumanization of the women were perpetuated through the underuse of victims' names combined with overused combinations of synecdoche, derogatory, and/or negatively connotative words/phrases. Digital media of today was also examined, and perpetuation or disruption of the harmful narratives and dehumanization varied.

Committee: Lee Nickoson Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Christopher Ward Ph.D. (Other); Radhika Gajjala Ph.D. (Committee Member); Chad Iwertz-Duffy Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Rhetoric; Social Structure; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2008, English

In this dissertation I analyze the public writing produced at the Hindman Settlement School, a rural social settlement founded on the banks of Troublesome Creek in Appalachian Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth century. Modeled after urban settlement houses, the Hindman school was founded by two women who sought to redress the perceived poverty and illiteracy of Appalachia with classes on reading, writing, and domestic arts. Methodologically informed by both classical rhetorical analysis and feminist historiography, I reclaim the settlement women as savvy rhetoricians who deployed their arguments through the letters, pamphlets, and serialized novels mailed frequently to a nationwide donor base. In Ciceronian terms, the settlement founders would likely have claimed that these fundraising documents were meant to move readers-to exhort them to action. In so doing, however, the settlement women were also instructing a bourgeois Bluegrass, Midwestern, and Northeastern readership, defining eastern Kentucky (and, accordingly, the entire mountain region) for readers wholly unfamiliar with the land, people, and customs. In their rhetorical stances and methods of appeal, the settlement women construct a simultaneously compelling and troubling version of Appalachia for an audience removed from the mountains in nearly every imaginable way. The rhetoric of the Hindman Settlement School-which includes the invention of mountain topoi, the use of fiction as a rhetorical genre, and the manipulation of testimony as a rhetorical strategy-therefore constitutes an important chapter in the evolving history of "Appalachia" as a cultural invention.

Committee: Dr. Katharine Ronald (Committee Chair); Dr. LuMing Mao (Committee Member); Dr. Morris Young (Committee Member); Dr. Mary Frederickson (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2009, English: Composition and Rhetoric

This dissertation analyzes the American Delsarte movement—a largely white, upper- and middle-class women's performance phenomenon from the 1880s to 1905—as well as Delsartists' work in creating what they called the “New Elocution.” Scholars of rhetorical history such as Nan Johnson and Robert Connors have touched on the Delsartists in their research and have begun the work of analyzing women's participation in the American elocutionary movement; nevertheless, extensive turf remains wholly unexplored concerning women's study of oratory in this era, in particular, considering why these women thought it the most vital discipline to study. My research therefore consists largely of a recovery project, bringing archival evidence to light and arguing that in the midst of what elocutionists called this “oratorical Renaissance,” American women were flocking in surprisingly large numbers to the study of expression and elocution—not as a “social grace,” as Leila McKee, one President of a woman's college of oratory put it in 1898, but as a means of “social power.” Turn-of-the-century women believed that this power was theirs for the taking if they knew how to speak with more eloquence and confidence in public; this motive has been overlooked, I argue, as has the means by which women meant to procure oratorical ability—by the study and practice of what I term “rhetorical performance.” This dissertation defines and analyzes the concept of rhetorical performance as it occurred within three different Delsarte-influenced sites: competition in oratorical contests, the demonstration of elocutionary skill via public recitals, and finally the use of rhetorical drama to advance arguments regarding women's rights.

Committee: Dr. Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Dr. Katharine Ronald PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Dr. Katie Johnson PhD (Committee Member); Dr. Charlotte Newman Goldy PhD (Advisor) Subjects: Education History; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2009, English

This dissertation is a situated rhetorical analysis of four women's organization websites: the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada, the National Federation of Women's Institutes in England and Wales, the Associated Country Women of the World, and the General Federation of Women's Clubs in the United States. These four organizations have similar histories which date back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. Each offers social, educational and activist opportunities to its members. Research for the study followed two phases: direct contact with members and staff of each organization to interview them along with close reading of the website texts. The collected data analyzes the websites based on design and format, interactive opportunities, photographic images and rhetorical language and seeks to comment on the persuasive potential and rhetorical traces of identity found for each organization through its website. The study is restricted to specific dates when the websites were observed; it is further limited by the opportunities for contact with organization members and staff who were willing to participate in the research. The online presence created by the four organizations and its significance to them contributes to the development and growth of each organization by promoting the work and activities the women engage in. The websites offer evidence of an important community to which the members belong and gives the women information on opportunities to meet together, support issues which are important to them and their communities and work to improve the lives of others. However, the sites are primarily used for promotional purposes, advertising activities and campaigns at a national/international level rather than offering direct engagement and interactive opportunities for members. Finally, this dissertation contributes to the study of women's rhetoric, particularly women writing on the web.

Committee: Diana Royer PhD (Committee Chair); Jennie Dautermann PhD (Committee Member); Michele Simmons PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, English/Literature

This thesis puts into conversation the work of four influential late medieval writers whose lives or writings skirted the fringes of Christian orthodoxy - Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, John of Morigny, and Marguerite Porete - in order to explore the way "autobiographical" theological and/or mystical writers asserted spiritual authority and subjectivity under the constraints of both the threat of condemnation for heresy and the inherent inexpressibility of mystical or visionary experiences. Beginning with Marguerite Porete and reverberating out, the performance-based rhetorical strategies in storytelling, in self-narrativization, in discernment, and in revision employed by writers in response to the dynamic, complex, and in many ways increasingly hostile social and religious environments of the long fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in France and England provide an important window into the relationship between these writers' ideas and the environment which shaped them. Each of these writers struggles with the limitations of the written word to express the truth of their spiritual experiences, and each engages in an experiential and bodily performative, rhetorical, and/or apophatic discourse in order to understand, assert, or make real their encounters with and understanding of themselves, the divine, and the relationship between the two.

Committee: Erin Labbie Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Casey Stark Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Medieval History; Medieval Literature; Rhetoric; Spirituality; Theology

Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing​, University of Findlay, 2020, English

In this thesis, I rhetorically analyze two landmark texts in the academic advice genre: Michelle Ballif, Roxanne Mountford, and Diane Davis' (2008) Women's Ways of Making it in Rhetoric and Composition and Elizabeth A. Flynn and Tiffany Bourelle's Women's Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition: Choice, Chance and Serendipity. To analyze these guides, I first give a brief overview of the genre standards and then compare the composition of the two books. Next, through coding for emerging genre trends based on my frame as a potential female in the rhetoric and composition field, I analyze the two books' feminist methodologies and locate the general rules and the comprehensive attitudes imposed on young women entering and beginning in the field. I also situate the two advice guides for better or for worse into the genre of self-help books. Academic advice guides are a part of the self-help genre because they present a challenge and subsequently offer strategies and solutions. I then discuss how these findings provide results to four targeted research questions. My primary goal is to establish the patterns and problems with the academic advice guide genre targeted towards rhetoric and composition women in order to house a more productive research space where women can safely find a sisterhood. This genre research is crucial to the field as a whole because a) self-help style books retain reader popularity especially among women so the messages should be monitored and b) the rhetoric and composition field remains a difficult place for women to achieve academic advice guide's version of “success” (a constant eye to the next publication, tenured professorship, AND a life).

Committee: Christine Tulley (Committee Chair); Christine Denecker (Committee Member); Megan Adams (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Educational Leadership; Families and Family Life; Gender Studies; Language; Teacher Education; Womens Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Arts and Sciences: English

Enabling Spaces: A Rhetorical Exploration of Women Writing in Community is a qualitative study of women writing together in a gendered core writing class at a non-profit community writing center called Women Writing for (a) Change®. This study explores how diverse women experience and value rhetorical practices and surroundings as they write and collaborate in a gendered group. The study illuminates how women view and bring to life feminist principles and guidelines implemented to support personal growth and change, in the self and in writing. Using a feminist relational approach grounded in participant observation of two consecutive course terms of fifteen weeks in total and the voice-centered analyses of semi-structured interviews, this study explores how these practices and contextual dimensions help and hinder women in developing their confidence, voice, and personal growth. While paying specific research attention to the stories of women who have survived traumatic experiences, Enabling Spaces, reveals that aspects of environment, audience, and change hold relevance towards empowerment and change across all participants. The study shows that the perception of safety connects with ritualized, multi-sensory interactions in a women-only writing environment. Specifically, rituals provide vulnerable women with a needed sense of structure and bonding, helping them to situate themselves in the sheltering boundaries of a gendered group. Findings foreground the importance of engaged listening and collaborative practices in creating a growth-fostering environment where women can build the trust to share their life stories. The cross-case analyses demonstrate that even women who initially felt skeptical, alienated, or restricted by guidelines to provide feedback and implemented ritualized acts, such as marking the writing circle as a safe space and symbolizing one's right to speak by holding a speaking stone, validate these interactions over time as a recognizable st (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Russel Durst Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Laura Micciche Ph.D. (Committee Member); Miriam Raider-Roth Ed.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

From 1901-1938, the ecumenical Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions (CCUSFM) published a series of annual textbooks intended for American Protestant women, members of local branches of women's foreign missionary societies, to study and teach each other. The United Study texts constructed a version of women's rights rhetoric that I refer to as modern missionary feminism. They positioned their readers as heirs to the history of Christianity, participants in contemporary political and social movements, and sisters to “heathen” women around the world who needed their help. In these ways, the United Study series created interrelated exigencies for American women, who were told that because of their privileged status as educated, modern, Western women, they were required to help other women and that the way to do so was through their support of Christian evangelism. To CCUSFM members and the authors they commissioned, the conversion of the world to Christianity, the spread of women's rights, and modernization through Western cultural imperialism were inseparable. In particular, they believed that modern Christian women needed to act on behalf of missions in order to bring about the ideal, unified, egalitarian, and peaceful Christian utopia of the future. The contradictions inherent in their rhetoric (which utilized opposing ideas such as conservative/progressive, professional/familial, international/local, and unity/diversity) went largely uninterrogated; rather than viewing such binaries as either/or, their rhetorical positioning of modern missionary feminists allowed them to embrace multiple sides of various debates, revealing new ways in which rhetorical scholars can consider women's and religious rhetorics.

Committee: Nan Johnson (Advisor); James Fredal (Committee Member); H. Lewis Ulman (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Religious History; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

This project is situated in scholarship surrounding the rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription of historical women rhetors, particularly those within religious spaces. It places a lens on the rhetorical practices of two religious women: Jessie Penn-Lewis and Margaret E. Barber. I argue that it is important to investigate these women, for doing so reveals not only an area that has not received extensive critical attention, but also informs how scholars look at pedagogy, particularly in religious spaces. The project and methods are grounded in feminist research practices. This project is historical in nature and will thus draw upon feminist historical and archival research methods as my primary methods of investigation. Further, this project is framed as two case studies, which examine closely through textual analysis surviving work produced by these women to begin to extend our knowledge of pedagogical and rhetorical practices in religious spaces. The heuristic used to investigate these texts and women bring forward key themes for study and application such as: how space is used, whether rhetorical or physical; what kind of tools can be used or appropriated for teaching practices; how texts and women circulate and under what conditions and intentions. Finally, I argue for their inclusion within the rhetorical canon as well as rewriting histories of women's rhetoric; for their work is not only worthy of recognition from the past but more importantly for future scholarship that acknowledges the ways in which institutions of power are still over girls and women. This dissertation points further to the need to research literate practices of “ordinary” people and the barriers of public and private still existing today.

Committee: Sue Wood PhD. (Advisor); Ellen Gorsevski PhD. (Other); Kristine Blair PhD. (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson PhD. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Religious History; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2017, Communication Studies (Communication)

In this dissertation, I examined how the capabilities of networked digital platforms enable and constrain women as public communicators. Specifically, I studied how female food bloggers can selectively embrace or reject norms of domesticity in order to further their brand and increase their digital sphere of influence (and what influence those tactics have on their audience). After a critical textual analysis of 15 women-authored food blogs and a representative subset of in-depth qualitative interviews, informed by both traditional rhetorical and mass media theories, this project aims to emphasize and strengthen the connections between traditional rhetorical studies and the burgeoning field of social media studies. Three major findings emerged during the course of this research. I discovered that bloggers use the structural capacities of their websites (including hyperlinks and site archives) to create a similar guided reading experience for a variety of visitors; the capabilities of these digital rhetorical platforms alter the processes of rhetoric, particularly invention, arrangement, and Kairos. Bloggers also express some tension between their roles as self-employed businesswomen and the public perception of women who spend the majority of their time in a home kitchen. Finally, I end this study with an exploration on how bloggers use their websites to rhetorically provoke a parasocial relationship with their readers.

Committee: Christina Beck PhD (Advisor); Stephanie Tikkanen PhD (Committee Member); Michael Butterworth PhD (Committee Member); Julie White PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Gender; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

PHD, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This dissertation offers a feminist visual rhetorical analysis of Jewish women's Holocaust art. The project explores the art's use of visual rhetoric, specifically, the use of the topoi of amplification and synecdoche, to create arguments about women's Holocaust experiences. To that end, my study examines how professional female artists who are Holocaust survivors represent their experiences, memories, bodies, and selves. Relying on feminist rhetorical theory, Disability Studies, and visual rhetoric scholarship, this study positions the art as non-discursive narratives and examines the intersections between identity, the body, lived experience, and ethos. In so doing, the dissertation recognizes the body as a source of knowledge and privileges alternate voices and modes of meaning-making; thereby, this effort complicates the grand narrative of the Holocaust and our understanding of what it means to be a female survivor. The study focuses on themes of survival and resistance, and examines how metaphors of motherhood, community, and isolation function within the art. The project's theoretical basis is formed by Vizenor's concept of survivance (survival + resistance) and Och's and Capp's concept of the self as having a connection to one's past, recognition of the present, and hope for the future. The study argues that the women's self-representations reveal evidence of agency and self-determination and, thus, the creation of art becomes an act of resistance. The project honors the female Holocaust experience and examines the art in order to expand our understanding of the Holocaust. Applying visual rhetorical analysis to the art moves the field of rhetoric, as well as public perceptions of the Holocaust, away from the privileging of persuasive discourse, towards an inclusive, experience-based, feminist concept of survival and resistance.

Committee: Sara Newman PHD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Composition; Holocaust Studies; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2016, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

In my project, "Towards a Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Caribbean Rhetoric: African Guyanese Women from the Village of Buxton Transforming Oral History,"I build a Cultural Rhetorics approach by listening to the stories of a group of African Guyanese women from the village of Buxton (Buxtonians). I obtained these stories from engaging in a long-term oral history research project where I understand my participants to be invested in telling their stories to teach the current and future generations of Buxtonians. I build this approach by using a collaborative and communal methodology of asking Wah De Story Seh? This methodology provides a framework for understanding the women's strategies in history-making as distinctively Caribbean rhetoric. It is crucial for my project to mark these women's strategies as Caribbean rhetoric because they negotiate their oral histories and identities by consciously and unconsciously connecting to an African ancestral heritage of formerly enslaved Africans in Guyana. In my project, I enact story as methodology to understand how the rhetorical strategies of the Buxtonian women make oral histories and by so doing, I examine the relationship between rhetoric, knowledge, and power.

Committee: Andrea Riley-Mukavetz Ph.D (Advisor); Sue Carter Wood Ph.D (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson Ph.D (Committee Member); Alberto Gonzalez Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: African Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Caribbean Literature; Caribbean Studies; Composition; Cultural Anthropology; Gender Studies; History; Literacy; Pedagogy

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2014, English-Literature

As mental illness came to have a greater social presence during the second half of the nineteenth century, cultural interpretations regarding the characteristics of the mentally ill and how physicians can provide treatment, in addition to how the insane were being managed socially were portrayed in popular fiction novels, primarily in Gothic and Sensation traditions. Although scholarly attention has been paid to fictional portrayals of madness and its cultural implications, the asylum memoir has been overlooked in historical, literary, and cultural analyses, especially in relation to women. During the rapid growth of the asylum system, women in particular were marginalized by early psychiatric theory and practice. Their personal narratives represent a uniquely feminine literary tradition that incorporate elements of contemporary fiction authors to function as political documents that seek to expose, criticize, and challenge the assumption on which social definitions like “madwoman” are based. This thesis uses a range of theoretical approaches to explore an analysis of how women organize, describe, and interpret their experiences within the insane asylum. It is my contention that memoirists publish their accounts as literary and public performances that question societal and cultural signifiers of sanity and insanity in an attempt to inspire a public desire for social reform for female patient rights. In doing so, women memoirists encounter medical and legal logic, in addition to cultural portrayals of madness in literature to portray what they consider is a more accurate representation of mental patients, as well as suggest the deficits of the asylum system and in some cases, propose change.

Committee: Hillary Nunn Dr. (Advisor); Jon Miller Dr. (Committee Member); Heather Braun Dr. (Committee Member); Joseph Ceccio Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2013, English

16th and 17th century women's writing contains a pervasive language of self-effacement, which has been documented and analyzed by scholars, but the focus remains on the sincerity of the act, even though humility was often employed as a successful rhetorical tool by both classic orators and Renaissance male writers. Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum has been read in this tradition of sincere humility, and even when it has not, scholars have focused on the dedicatory paratext, thus minimizing Lanyer's poetic prowess. I argue that Lanyer's poem-proper employs modesty as a strategic rhetorical device, giving added credibility and importance to her work. By removing the lens of modesty as sincerity, I hope to encourage a reexamination of the texts of Renaissance women and remove them from their 'silent, chaste and obedient' allocation by/for the modern reader.

Committee: Elizabeth Mackay Ph.D (Committee Co-Chair); Rebecca Potter Ph.D (Committee Co-Chair); Sheila Hassell Hughes Ph.D (Other) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Gender; Literature; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, English

“The Women's Elocution Movement in America, 1870-1915,” examines late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women's contributions to the American elocution movement, a rhetorical education movement devoted to the study of the uses of voice, gesture, and the body in public speaking and dramatic performance. The elocution movement was a popular cultural force during its own time and brought rhetorical education to a large, diverse population of students and private learners. In particular, the movement made rhetorical education accessible to women who became not only students of elocution but also prominent figures in the teaching and theorizing of elocution. Women were prolific in the publication of elocution and Delsarte textbooks, compilations for recitation and performance, and physical culture manuals. This dissertation recovers a canon of women's published elocution texts to demonstrate the ways in which women regendered elocutionary training as a site of women's rhetorical education. Such training had direct influences on women rhetors as they began to take up the speaking platform in larger and larger numbers at the turn of the century. Specifically, the women's elocution movement taught the novice woman speaker regendered notions of feminine eloquence, delivery, ethos, and persuasion. Women elocutionists also provided female speakers with new speaking genres such as poetry recitation and tableaux, which they could use as they argued for social reform. Influenced by the expression theories of French vocal and acting coach and philosopher Francois Delsarte, late nineteenth-century women elocutionists emphasized the rhetorical power of an affective mind, body, and soul in tune with the impressions it receives and able to express those internal feelings, thoughts, and emotions to others. Women elocutionists appealed specifically to female readers and students. In their elocution and Delsarte manuals, elocutionists like Genevieve Stebbins employed a woma (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Nan Johnson (Advisor); Dr. Beverly J. Moss (Committee Member); Dr. H. Lewis Ulman (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, English

Historical scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition has flourished in the last thirty years and developed a rich and diverse picture of the history of American women's rhetorical practices. Much of the recent research surrounding women's clubs has focused on written documents and an analysis of rhetorical strategies to demonstrate how nineteenth-century women advocated for political and social change. Scholars like Karen Blair (1980), Theodora Martin (1987), Anne Meis Knuper (1996), Anne Ruggles Gere (1997), and Jacqueline Jones Royster (2000) have focused on the civic accomplishments and reading and writing practices of African American, Jewish, Mormon, working-class, and white middle-class clubwomen. My dissertation, “Training a Nation: The General Federation of Women's Clubs' Rhetorical Education and American Citizenship, 1890-1930,” extends existing scholarship to include a focus on how white-middle class clubwomen developed and sustained their own programs of rhetorical education during a historical era in which women were still excluded from educational institutions, barred from most professions, and lacked any formal training in rhetoric in the United States. Existing scholarship has not focused on the connection between the seemingly less significant activities that occurred in individual women's clubs and the public efforts of the General Federation of Women's Clubs to educate and train better American citizens. These internal and external programs of rhetorical education established the General Federation as an influential cultural institution. My study focuses on the concrete and self-conscious pedagogical tools that women used to educate one another and develop a model of social change rooted in education, which had mixed results. My archival research demonstrates how the white women's clubs of the General Federation advocated structured pedagogical techniques, such as prescribed reading lists for children and adults, uniform club programs an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nan Johnson Dr. (Advisor); Beverly Moss Dr. (Committee Member); Jacqueline Royster Dr. (Committee Member); Jim Fredal Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, English

“Incarcerating Rhetorics, Publics, and Pedagogies” analyzes how cultural beliefs about empowerment and rehabilitation inform contemporary prison art and writing, as well as how activists mobilize prisoners' creative work in order to humanize the incarcerated and re-educate the public about incarceration practices in the United States. I argue that art and writing behind bars provides us with an opportunity to better understand the multiple discursive contexts that shape prisoner experiences as well as representations of prisoner experiences. Rather than taking a position in arguments over whether prison art and writing is or is not “empowering,” I look critically at discursive assumptions of empowerment, as well as how such assumptions are negotiated rhetorically in acts of art and writing by individual prisoners. I provide a critical framework for looking at art and writing by prisoners that moves beyond questions and assumptions of empowerment and provides instead a means for understanding the rhetorical and discursive conditions that shape its production as well as its reception. Throughout my dissertation I investigate the interaction of physical and discursive contexts in prisoner art and writing. I track the history of prison pedagogies, examining not only the development (and subsequent dismantling of) education programs in U.S. prisons, but the other ways in which institutional practices as well as rhetorics of reform and retribution have developed contemporary understandings of criminality. I provide ethnographic research to analyze how incarcerated youth use art and writing to respond to the conceptions of criminality and victimization applied to them in their treatment and programs at a juvenile corrections facility for girls. Finally, I investigate how activist mobilizations of prisoner writing, as well as prison writers themselves, often redeploy conventional discourses of criminality in their efforts to “humanize” prisoners. This research enhances cur (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Wendy Hesford PhD (Committee Chair); Amy Shuman PhD (Committee Member); Beverly Moss PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology; Education History; Gender; Literacy; Rhetoric; Womens Studies