Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Leadership and Change

Anne Frank is linked to her contemporaries in about 80% of 18 English-language published and produced plays. The remaining plays pair Frank and African American icons Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Research on dramatic literature with Frank as a character, the writing of plays linking her with African American personages, or history, analysis, or comparison of the process of multiple plays about Frank does not exist. A few articles extant compare the Goodrich and Hackett play with the Kesselman rewrite, a dissertation on five plays about Frank (those five plays are in the 80% mentioned earlier). The central question of this dissertation is why the playwrights of Harriet and Anne: An Original Narrative, Janet Langhart Cohen's Anne & Emmett: A One-Act Play, and Letters from Anne and Martin unite Anne Frank and African American historical figures. What were the playwrights' intentions with this linkage, and how were they fulfilled? This dissertation intends to fill this research gap in theatre history. The playwrights were interviewed using a prepared questionnaire completed by mail, email, telephone, or Zoom to discover the reason(s) for writing the three works. The writers answered using their preferred methods, and results were compiled within the work's question/answer format. Articles and the playwrights' websites were mined for additional historical data about the works and writers. The research found the plays to be works of remembrance/cultural trauma written by playwrights who shared seminal experiences regarding Anne Frank and the African American icons. The writers were driven by intense feelings of social justice, inspiring their creative works. These playwrights used Anne Frank, Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till, and Martin Luther King Jr. to communicate their thematic messages of social justice. They urged their audiences to keep these icons' history from repeating itself and honor those entities. This dissertation is available in open (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2024, History

For the first century of its existence, colonial Puritanism in New England embraced anti-Catholicism. It first emerged out of anti-Catholic efforts to continue the Reformation in England, by removing Catholic rituals, symbols, ideas, and people from the English church, state, and society. Through the processes of migration and settlement-building in the unique contexts of the New England borderlands, their once “English” anti-Catholicism evolved and became “Americanized.” Puritans felt this new “Americanized” anti-Catholicism on an everyday basis, making colonial Puritan anti-Catholicism more intense than its English counterpart. Embracing an anti-Catholic “errand” into the New England borderlands, a region filled with new people and geography that was far from the reaches of the English state, colonial Puritans experimented with and crafted their religious, political, and social institutions, practices, and identities on anti-Catholicism. Catholics became “the Other,” imagined as violent and oppressive tyrants, plotters, murderers, and even the anti-Christ, from which colonial Puritans defined their community in opposition. Constant conflict with Indigenous peoples, New France, and “popery” raised anxieties and fears over the very survival of Puritan communities. As a result, New Englanders passed stranger laws—regulations, oaths, and other means to control the presence of alien peoples—to restrict Catholic “strangers” within their colonies. By exploring the relationship between the colonies of New England and Ireland, it becomes clear that the English language of civility and violence, which was employed in New England against both Indigenous peoples and Catholics, originated within the process of Irish colonization. This language was thus tied to that colonization's virulent anti-Catholicism, which was then transported to New England.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 0, English

This dissertation explores the concept of home in American culture and history through twentieth—and twenty-first-century Asian American and African American literature, employing relational and interdisciplinary methodologies to explore how it intersects with race, class, and gender. Focusing on representations of housing disparities and the quest for home, I examine how social and political practices related to property dispossession and exclusionary housing policies perpetuate racial marginalization and social stratification. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's concept of unhomeliness, I explore how systemic inequalities and social exclusion erode the feeling of being ‘at home,' extending beyond physical dwellings to encompass broader societal structures. By analyzing works by authors such as Brit Bennett, Chang-rae Lee, Toni Morrison, and Celeste Ng, this dissertation reveals how home —particularly in suburban contexts—becomes a contested site of belonging and memory. The dissertation demonstrates that the quest for ‘home' transcends the search for physical space, intertwining with struggles for recognition, equality, and belonging in a society marked by persistent color lines and class divisions. Set across various U.S. states, the examined narratives critically engage with suburban tropes, challenging socioeconomic realities of segregation and marginalization. By examining literary responses to institutional racism and the racialization of spaces, this dissertation elucidates the complex relationship between idealized notions of home and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. It highlights how literature serves as a critical site for understanding the interplay of race, class, and identity in the American experience of home. This dissertation offers valuable insights into the ongoing negotiation of identity, belonging, and spatial politics in American society by juxtaposing literary representations with historical and sociological contexts. This interdiscipli (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2024, English: Creative Writing

Debridement is a collection of poems about subjects including the modern gay male experience and the ways difficult and even traumatic events can become negotiated parts of the self. The collection focuses on the dissolution of a marriage between a man and woman, male intimacy, queer fatherhood, violence and navigating grief. By employing narrative, particularly fable, beside lyric forms, and through the use of images related to mycological phenomenon, the collection asks the reader to consider how shame and feelings of worthlessness might be transformed into self-validation and understanding. The poems encourage the reader to view life as involving calculated risk and liminality, to step foot into a world where arrival is an illusion and becoming is a constant.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

As a topic of study, utopia is often broken into three aspects: utopian social theory, intentional communities, and literature. Thus, a study of utopia best suits an interdisciplinary approach. While utopian scholars have often accepted the invitation for diverse approaches, there is one unifying aspect of the three aspects of utopia yet considered. In this dissertation, I posit a theory of utopian and dystopian rhetoric which explains the affective, persuasive dimension of each of utopia's aspects. Although I propose a wider application of utopian and dystopian rhetoric, I narrow my focus in this dissertation to investigate the connections between utopianism and eugenics. I analyze how nineteenth-century eugenicists leverage utopian and dystopian rhetoric to promote eugenic practices and beliefs. I argue that the hierarchy of eugenics and utopia – the privileging of certain populations and rejection of others as being suited for the future – are assured and enforced through ideological and repressive state apparatuses.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Leadership and Change

This dissertation project used an interpretivist qualitative research design to study how the right-to-read claim made by seven teenagers attending Detroit public schools in 2016 reflects, addresses, or describes contemporary discussions about educational access. Using situational analysis (SA) as a theory/method, the entirety of the claim comprises the situation of the social phenomenon being studied, not the people. This research combines critical race theory (CRT) with Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems and uses situation analysis to map historical discourses to conduct a study that examines the history of a present situation of inquiry as presented by this question: How does the 2016 right-to-read claim made by high school students in Detroit, Michigan reflect, address, or describe contemporary discussions about educational access? The study collected data to allow me to construct a prosopography that articulates an answer to the question that claims access to literacy is a public school policy right. Because situational analysis (SA) is designed to open research data to aspects of a circumstance that may have been overlooked, marginalized, or silenced, I was not certain the research results would answer this exact question. Additionally, critical theory and SA were used to conduct this qualitative research, examining historical data that addresses the right-to-read claim as a Foucaultian programmatic social problem. As such, it seeks to understand the complexities of recurring and historically situated education practices that limit actualizing U.S. education policies that embrace access to basic literacy skills as a human right. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2024, English

In “Reforming African American Literature in High Schools,” I explore how Black standpoint theory and reader response theory affect the instruction of African American novels and related books in the classroom. Namely, I examine how To Kill a Mockingbird is used in the classroom, whether or not the novel should be continued to be used in the classroom, and whether it can be used well as an introduction to the subjects of race, class, systematic oppression, and intersectionality. To do so, I analyze the contents of To Kill a Mockingbird, deconstruct my interviews with fifteen participants on how their teacher's instruction of To Kill a Mockingbird impacted their education, and examine how and when To Kill a Mockingbird succeeds in the classroom. I also determine whether or not To Kill a Mockingbird could be replaced by briefly diving into other prominent Black literature that is used in the classroom.

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

Negative Ease is a full-length poetry manuscript. The poems in this collection explore visual representation and viewership, the limits of categorization, documentation and measurement, public and private space, and thresholds in fraught internal and external worlds

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

Chorona is my second poetry collection, one that follows the same speaker from my first collection, More Salt than Diamond. But while the speaker in the first collection still believes in magic, that “a new immigration law could be signed any day now,” in Chorona, she is tired and unraveling. The word chorona means crybaby in Portuguese, my native language, and the title implies the self-awareness and wry humor of the speaker in this collection. This collection of poems covers themes such as loss, family, belonging, migration, among others. It is my goal to humanize and complicate undocumented immigrant narratives through my writing, and my hope that this collections does that.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

This dissertation considers the relations between time, narrative, and autism. Chapter 0 introduces a kinship model of autism and describes “aesthetic kinship,” the phenomenon of autistic readers recognizing fictional characters as autistic. Chapter 1 describes the eponymous theory of kakokairos, unpacking the contours of neurodivergent temporalities through analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 and Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life. Chapter 2 describes the theory and method of “time maps,” the graphs which are produced by graphing a narrative's fabula against its syuzhet. Chapter 3 is a preliminary analysis of fifteen interviews with autistic adults about their experiences of time in narratives.

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

A collection of short stories in which a cast of various women characters believe to see themselves reflected in objects, in artworks, in other people—both those closest to them and total strangers. Within these mirrors and doubles as perceived by the characters is an escape from the confines of traditional domestic life into a territory far murkier, a realm that is at once both quotidian and surreal, intimate and strange, blurring the divisions between memory, imagination, and reality. This collection is a call to question what it means to embody a place, a state of being—what it means to embody a body.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

This dissertation project is focused on a narrative medicine approach to the comics written during the pre-vaccine period of COVID-19. By analyzing these texts from a narratological perspective, informed also by various approaches in comics studies, its aim is to identify the affordances of the comic medium in order to understand its efficacy when artists choose to utilize it. The selected narratives range from fictional narratives, autobiographical accounts from “frontline workers” at the height of the pandemic, and comics utilizing reportage and informative style of writing. The goal for this project is to learn as much from the selected stories as possible in order to identify its applications towards COVID-19 and pandemic discourse, potentially contributing insight into surviving a pandemic.

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Creative Writing/Fiction

The Dead Come to Carcal is a new-adult fantasy/adventure which centers around a multi-pronged mystery in the Inca-inspired city, Carcal. The novel follows five characters who become connected to that mystery and drawn together to solve it. Enrel Leolore, a militia warrior who lives in Carcal, haunted by a curse she bears from a spirit; Adwynn Theyros, a mage bounty hunter who is blood-bound to an arcane contract by the prestigious Candlelight University, attempting to save her mother from debt; Lumiseth Amruus, a skilled cleric who is chosen by the Rutaran god of the sun to halt an ancient evil rising in the land of Atrea; Vaen, Lumiseth's personal handservant and childhood friend, who is tasked with caring for his charge on his prophesied journey; and Howler, a wandering thief who is following a recurring dream in search of revenge for their shattered family. When mysterious circumstances bring each of these individuals to the city of Carcal, nestled in the mountains of the Atrean Collective Territories, they find themselves pulled into a secret plot of disappearances, would-be spirits, and the cryptic machinations of the magical forest, Yuko. They must find a way to collaborate with one another in spite of their varied upbringings and agendas to get to the bottom of Carcal's mysteries. Else their lives, and the lives of everyone in Carcal, fall to a mounting threat of unimaginable depths—depths which the world of Harrigon hasn't seen for centuries. The novel explores multiple, intertwining points of view, inspired by the popular tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons. By doing this, it reveals its characters' troubled lives, engaging in themes of societal and structural inequality, imperialism, privilege, family, love, mental health, neurodivergence, growth, redemption, and healing. It crafts a unique and rich fantasy world that is inspired by historical cultures of our own, and is written in the feminist fantasy tradition, featuring a diverse cas (open full item for complete abstract)

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

The religious content of nineteenth-century American sentimental texts is often overlooked as a subject of study itself and is instead analyzed as a means to another end, such as its contributions to the abolition of slavery or to women's rights. Both are powerful uses of religion in writing; by contrast, this dissertation analyzes the use of religion in nineteenth-century American sentimental texts as an active and evolving blueprint by which to live everyday life. Utilizing the sociological/historical theory of ‘lived religion' and emphasizing the literary mode of ‘surface reading,' I explore how women writers of sentimental texts—Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances E. W. Harper—implemented religious themes and lessons in their sermons, essays, speeches, novels, and poetry in serving the purpose of faith itself. The analysis of lived religion focuses on how these women and their personal theology and religious practices interacted and evolved, which they then taught to society through their writing and speaking.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

The title of this dissertation, The Problems of Leisure in the Industrial-Era US, riffs on a phrase that became common amongst American academics in the 1970s: “the problem of leisure.” For the industrial-era American bourgeoisie, however, leisure wasn't a problem but many problems. The crystallization of leisure in its modern form—clearly defined, regularly recurring, and commercially exploitable periods of free time—created a host of fears and desires that, in turn, precipitated many different responses, including the two that I examine in this project: mid-nineteenth-century liberal efforts to control working-class uses of leisure time by “improving” working-class tastes, and the later efforts of modernists to distinguish their own uses of leisure from the purportedly more commercialized and degraded leisure practices of others, especially other within the middle class. The former efforts were spearheaded by William Ellery Channing, whose gospel of culture did two critical things. First, it insisted that culture, which Channing defined as the development of our God-given powers, required spiritual, as opposed to economic, forms of wealth. This argument helped to neutralize what I claim was the anti-capitalist potential of culture, the way it, more so than the older bourgeois conception of legitimate leisure (recreation), had the capacity to inspire a critique of the division of labor and of industrial capitalism more generally. Second, Channing's gospel posited the spread of “the means of culture” (“Self-Culture” 22)—in the forms of parks, picture galleries, lectures, and other publically provisioned, non-commercial forms of leisure—as the most effective solution to the amusement problem, the problem of working-class people consuming commercialized forms of pleasure that social reformers deemed morally degrading and socially disruptive. But my case studies of two other writers, Henry Thoreau and Ernest Hemingway, suggest that, as the demand for culturally san (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2023, English: Creative Writing

LEISURE SUITE is a collection of poems written between September 2021 and April 2023. The first section, “The Perfect Season,” engages histories of football and capital to construct odes for members of the Miami Dolphins 1972 “perfect season” team. The second section, “Poetry Foundation,” intervenes in the discourses of and around contemporary poetry. The third section, “Epigrams,” explores the short form, with an awareness of the miniature as a possible “gimmick." The fourth section, “A State Where Everything is Explained,” is more concretely grounded in responses to daily life in Southwest Ohio. The final section, “Tenderness,” is an attempt to write a love poem; it is, in a way, a plea for tenderness.

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2023, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Both literary and scientific texts often demonstrate the powerful role that stories serve in helping to shape humanity's beliefs and behaviors. In his climate fiction novel Appleseed (2021), Matt Bell deploys the polyphonic method to follow three main character storylines. This technique provides the opportunity for heteroglossic dialogue, and Bell also utilizes metaponsdialogue to ensure the reader is invested and understands his/her complicity and function in the climate emergency, which leads to a reflection on personal responsibility and culpability. Theories from Mikhail Bakhtin's essay “Discourse in the Novel” from his collection called The Dialogic Imagination support the examination of multi-perspective texts. Additionally, French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that in the age of modernity, people should move away from metanarratives and toward scientific findings as well as localized stories told by a diverse cross-section of the population to determine truth and credibility. Bell weaves Western metanarratives, such as Pagan mythology, Judeo-Christian religious doctrine, and capitalistic tales in the form of the American Dream, throughout his novel, and the nature of these narratives is anthropocentric. Bell comingles the plotlines, narratives, and timelines, and culminates the events into a global disaster based on current climate change theory and fact as presented and supported by Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Naomi Klein's text This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Scientific theory reinforces that believing in and acting according to these anthropocentric narratives holds dangerous systematic consequences. When these narratives and multi-perspective tales are in conversation with one another, they reveal Bell's ultimate warning: these narratives are anthropocentric in nature, and adhering our identities and value systems to these narratives will bring about the do (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

Despite the ways in which Appalachia's complexity has been overshadowed by the narrowness of many of prominent stereotypes about the region that have been portrayed in popular fiction, many Appalachian writers, most significantly Appalachian women writers, are producing narratives that push back against limiting conceptions of the region. Two such novels, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver and Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake, provide narratives that resist these hierarchal structures by presenting women characters and environments that challenge them. Through ecological feminist analysis of these texts, both of these novels are situated within a larger context of Appalachian-set work by women writers that have advanced feminism, providing opportunities for women to find moments of hope, peace, and agency despite capitalistic environmental violence, restrictive gender norms, and living in a traditionally patriarchal culture. Both of these pieces, in various ways, compare the subjugation of women and environmental violence as well as depict women as overt challengers of frameworks of Western thought and idealism, including the division between the human and nonhuman, rigid gender roles, and patriarchal structures of power.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2023, English

This thesis analyzes the relationship of female novelists to women's literary history through a study of the use of the woman writer character across five novels published in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Women writer characters and the metafictional texts they produce inside these novels reflect common threads across women's literary history, providing a way to categorize these novels not only by the gender of their authors but also by their engagement with this character—and by extension with this specific vein of women's literary history. The novel, which has undergone several transformations across genres, has been accused of feminization, while also being used to categorize the work of female novelists as outside of the Anglo-American canon. Each of the five novels included in this project reflect these literary biases through metafictional texts that are similarly restricted by socially constructed boundaries of oppressive systems, including gender, race, and class.

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

This dissertation explores three American cultural works at the turn of the 21st century with a focus on representations of illness. These works are Todd Haynes' film, Safe (1995), William Gibson's novel, Pattern Recognition (2003), and Colson Whitehead's novel, Apex Hides the Hurt (2006). The dissertation analyzes these texts as allegories and situates them in the political and historical contexts of the AIDS epidemic, 9/11 and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the election of the first African American president, and the consolidation of white nationalism. The dissertation focuses on the process of neoliberalization as the underlying historical background of the three texts. It also centers on the cultural dynamic of reclaiming and re-signifying stigmatized social experiences of illness that were central to the formation of queer studies through the 1990s, as well as on recent discussions about queer and crip studies. The dissertation has three related objectives. The first is to explore the possibilities of representations of illness in allegorical texts. I pay special attention to cultural representations of those with illness resisting the historical conjuncture that afflicts them. The second objective, which is related to the first one, is to interpret works in which a dialogical relationship can be found between representations of illness and what the texts offer as allegorized social realities. The third objective is to study how representations of illness in each text are embedded in and responding to the contradictory processes of neoliberalization.