Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2025, English

President Eisenhower's 1953 UN speech, “Atoms for Peace,” helped to define the mounting concerns of the atomic age. He demanded that the global community accept the “significant facts” of their midcentury existence, or the domineering threat of global annihilation. This pervasive anxiety, reinforced by early Cold War political maneuverings like the US containment policy, would stricken the American people with “Cold War fatalism,” or a prevailing sense of alienation and submission in the earliest years of the Cold War, wrought by the new atomic age. The midcentury literary scene embodied such fatalism, as well, creating sect of nuclear first responders who grappled with new cultural questions and worries. High among them is J. D. Salinger, author of the 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye, whose later works captured the necessary acceptance of fate in order to survive in the new, dichotomous, nuclear world. My paper follows Salinger's character, Seymour Glass, and his appearances across three different works – “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” (1948) Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction (1959), and Franny and Zooey (1961). He is the eldest sibling of the cerebral Glass family, both a brilliant poet and highly spiritual, and commits suicide while on vacation with his wife. Through Seymour, Salinger displays the consequences of failing to adhere to Cold War fatalism; by embodying themes like artistic and spiritual purity, Seymour was incompatible with his historical moment and took his own life. I argue that, by reading Seymour Glass as inextricably bound to the Cold War era, Salinger may take part in a larger Cold War literature conversation, illuminating other avenues of study while deemphasizing The Catcher in the Rye and its relentless critical attention.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2025, English

This thesis studies the psychological and emotional tensions embedded in the mother-daughter relationship in Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird through the framework of Sigmund Freud's “The Family Romances.” By examining Lady Bird's narrative arc, this study demonstrates how development and maturity can only be achieved by separating ourselves from the parental figures in our lives. It also shows how the protagonist's desire for autonomy is linked to her turbulent relationship with her mother, who functions as both a mirror and an obstacle.. Through close textual and visual analysis, the paper argues that Lady Bird's rejection of her given name, her fantasies of wealth and belonging, and her eventual geographical and emotional departure from her family home all constitute a Freudian process of individuation known as the “Family Romances”. It is only through this painful detachment that the protagonist begins to view her mother not as a limiting force, but as a complex individual. This understanding marks the emergence of a more integrated and autonomous self.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2025, English

Edgar Allan Poe's fiction does not simply depict masculinity — it dissects it, exposing its contradictions and fragility. This project examines how Poe constructs and deconstructs masculinity through the figures of C. Auguste Dupin, Montresor, and the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” each of whom enacts a distinct, performative version of male identity. Drawing on Judith Butler's theory of gender as performance, the study argues that Poe anticipates modern understandings of masculinity not as essence but as unstable enactment. Dupin asserts power through reason and detachment; Montresor through silence and calculated revenge; the narrator through obsessive control that unravels into confession. Through close readings of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” this study explores how Poe's male characters model competing and collapsing performances of masculinity. While previous scholarship has examined Poe's narrative and psychological complexity, this project offers a sustained focus on masculinity as a site of crisis. Poe's fiction ultimately suggests that when masculinity is performed too perfectly, it begins to dismantle the self it was meant to protect.

PHD, Kent State University, 2025, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This dissertation focuses on the depictions of similar exploitations suffered by Black peoples and the environment within literature of the American South. My study is notable for its focus on the new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene or, as it has alternatively been called, the plantationocene. The plantationocene, or thinking about the plantation as central to the economic forms of resource exploitation which have caused the Anthropocene, offers new flavors to existing scholarly conversations that I have brought to the fore. Where the dominant discourse surrounding race and nature finds Black peoples reduced in the eyes of whites to a status akin to domestic animals; I argue these depictions model the exploitation of land. My argument helps to focus on the agencies of Black peoples in the exploitative paradigm. Instead of defining themselves in opposition to these white depictions, Black peoples have presented multi-cultural, varied expressions of Blackness with nuance and vibrancy which does more than resist racist depictions—it negates them.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2025, English

By employing the psychological theories and models of Dan P. McAdams and Marsha M. Linehan, this thesis approaches Gillian Flynn's depiction of narrator Camille Preaker's nonsuicidal self-injury in her 2006 novel Sharp Objects. Three chapters, structured according to Linehan's dialectical model as used in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), examine the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of Camille's self-cutting. By attending to the elements of language Flynn depicts in Camille's behavior, this project aims to recognize the narrative significance of her self-injury according to McAdams' narrative identity theory. Ultimately, this reading of Flynn's novel prompts re-evaluation of how we read self-injury from fiction into individuals' real life stories.

MFA, Kent State University, 2025, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Heart Off Center: A Memoir-in-Essays tracks the writer's conceptions of queerness, love, sex, and displacement through personal-narrative essays that detail events the writer has never spoken aloud to anyone before. The writer details the trajectory of his young queer life as he also closely interrogates his attachments to his parents, to celebrity, to love and sex. He examines how these attachments (and their complexities) led him into the arms of an emotionally abusive relationship in high school that has haunted him for over a decade. Heart Off-Center attempts to answer the question of how young queers who were not gifted a roadmap to successful relationships may still experience connection, belonging, love, and reclamation of self in a world that so frequently attempts to extinguish queer joy. Methodologies used within this work incorporate the use of memory, personal research, and cultural observation to fully explore the nuances of patterned relationship behavior; how obsession influences personality; and the importance of discovering queer sexuality when heteronormativity is the elevated standard.

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2025, English: Creative Writing

This thesis, BORN OF FIGS, is a collection of poetry and hybrid works and an experiment in performing and modeling powerful transformations in language. Through wordplay that layers languages preceding modern English as well as languages other than English, the manuscript models and explores how histories intersect with the personal. Some poems about the speaker's encounters with plants, animals, and other products of the earth offer opportunities to witness and dwell in growth and change. These poems engage connections between ecological phenomena and infertility, miscarriage, and womanhood. Other poems are explicitly magick spells. These take inspiration from early Old English metrical charms, adapting their genre conventions, dramatic situations, and formulaic vocabulary, along with their performative nature as speech acts with the power to heal or harm. A third style of works appear in prose (lyric essay) and might be described as confessional. Through language-play that draws from abandoned vocabularies and modes, this manuscript is interested in developing a poetics of personally transformative ritual.

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2025, Creative Writing

This collection of short stories is a kaleidoscopic journey through the tangled intersections of class, identity, and power, filtered through a lens of biting humor and absurdist provocation. Each tale dissects the social machinery of modern life with a surgeon's precision and a satirist's flair, where the mundane collides with the surreal and the deeply political erupts in moments of chaotic intimacy. From stories of goblins being denied crack rehabilitation due to their green skin, to a pair of humans wandering the ashen wasteland once called Cleveland Ohio, to a journal about the post war life of a man trying to navigate a volatile political landscape and feed his kids—these stories are populated by characters caught in the crossfire of systems too vast to name but too personal to ignore. Comedy is the scalpel; absurdism, the anesthetic. But underneath the laughter lies an unflinching gaze at the violences—structural, emotional, ideological—that define and deform our lives. The narratives oscillate between satire and sincerity, protest and poetry, destabilizing binary thinking in favor of complex entanglements. These are not neat parables or moral lessons—they are messy, vivid, and unapologetically intersectional examinations of a world teetering on the edge. In them, chaos isn't the enemy—it's the mirror. And violence, both overt and insidious, is not merely depicted but interrogated, complicated, and sometimes reclaimed. With sharp dialogue, fractured structures, and a refusal to coddle the reader, A Case of Distilled Mania invites laughter in moments of collapse and demands thought in moments of ease. It is a project both literary and political—unafraid to be contradictory, irreverent, and radically human.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2025, English

In this thesis, I work to determine why people from a variety of cultures across thousands of years have retold the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I analyze how three central components of the myth interact within four adaptations. Engaging with both New Historicism and adaptation theory, I explore the interactions between music, magic, and power, the roles and agencies of women, and the impact of the ending on audiences and interpretations of the story in each text. When analyzing Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 CE), I argue that Orpheus uses his musical magic to challenge Hades's power, that Eurydice's actions within the limitations of the text demonstrate her agency, and that the audience is actually not left with a tragedy by the end. When exploring Sir Orfeo (circa 1250-1350), I claim that Orfeo and the Fairy King engage in a political conflict, that Heurodis is a symbol within that conflict with limited agency, and that the poem depicts a romance and a tragedy. When examining Christoph Willibald Gluck's and Ranieri de' Calzabigi's Orfeo Ed Euridice (1762), I contend that Orfeo's musical magic is restricted by Amor's godly power, that Euridice has gained and lost agency in her songs, and that the opera's conclusion contains the happiest ending. When evaluating Anais Mitchell's Hadestown (2019), I conclude that Orpheus uses both his musical magic and the power of the collective to try changing the world, that Eurydice and the other women display a range of agency, and that the ending encourages the audience to work together and improve our world. Ultimately, I show how the four texts respond to each other across time and determine why people have continued to retell the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

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

As visual-textual mediums, comics and maps have a surprisingly intertwined historical and formal development, and it is productive to view them in conversation with each other. This dissertation, titled Cartographics: Comics, Maps, and Storytelling, examines how comics and maps organize visual information by graphically charting it onto the space of the page, making them both effective when representing space, time, and narratives. As comics studies increasingly turns to expanding the definition of what comics can be, and geography studies increasingly turn to popular and accessible geographic and cartographic public-facing work, my dissertation project adds to this evolving discourse by analyzing how maps can be used within comics to bridge their historical (high art/low art; objective/subjective) and formal (supposed) disparities. I reimagine the boundaries of what comics and maps are and can be. I propose cartographics as an approach to the entanglement and assonances between comics and maps as storytelling mediums that graphically represent spatial and temporal relationships.

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, The Ohio State University, 2024, Comparative Studies

This dissertation follows Jameson's “Antinomies of Utopia” as a discursive model for thinking through the conceptual displacement from utopia to speculation and what happens with their attendant theories and ideologies in cultural critique when such a displacement is followed through. As a figure of the dynamic relation between form and content, Jameson's text advances by turns practically and theoretically, at one moment treating matters separately and in the next leaping toward ever provisional systematization. The three main chapters that follow each foreground textual reception. However, where chapters three and four examine the critical reception of a novel and a film, respectively, in the way of case studies, chapter two examines the broader conceptual reception of utopia and speculation, primarily in the Marxist tradition. The second chapter of this dissertation follows Jameson's text as it attempts to set a framework for the subsequent case studies. As a series of “Theses on Utopia and Speculation,” it develops an understanding of the two concepts progressing from relative isolation to greater complexity, interference, and incoherence. Across the contexts of literary genre, etymology and rhetoric, Marxism, theory, technology, and social life as such, the chapter endeavors to show how speculation displaces utopia in the historical present. The third chapter, “Climates of Speculation,” turns to contemporary literary fiction to see this displacement in action. Jenny Offill's 2020 Weather provides its case study for the intersection of climate fiction and autofiction, two “genres” which, when combined, problematize what Juha Raipola refers to as the “utopian propensity of speculative fiction.” Through a close reading of Offill's novel as well as its critical reception, the chapter argues that the very distinction between the speculative and the so-called realistic mobilized to assert the powers of the former actually conceals what may be most utopian about it. T (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation answers the guiding question how do the narrative elements of character, plot, and storyworld work together to create the young adult contemporary realistic romance (YACRR) genre? With a textset of fourteen YACRR narratives that have been published since 2010, I identify nine generic codes that occur frequently enough to be considered significant to the formulaity of the genre. Through methodologies of desire-centered research (Tuck 2009) and perpetual girlhood (Doermann 2022), I consider which type(s) of girl(s) have historically gotten to see themselves as a love interest and as desirable and how a young reader might metabolize those representations in relation to themself since identity is often shaped through cultural representations and the media provided to them. I employ rhetorical narratology, more specifically, the Rhetorical Model of Audience (Phelan 2020), because of its function in guiding the reader to find the point of the narrative. The point of YACRR narratives, I found, is that they are engaging, as all genre fiction is, but they are also pedagogical in that they provide models to young readers of what a safe and respectful relationship looks like. In this way, YACRR protagonists are both mimetic and thematic characters. Since young adult literature is mostly about first experiences and uncharted territory (Carpan 2004, 2009), being provided with healthy models of romance can help the implied reader, or the narratee, as they navigate new-to-them experiences. In order for this navigation to happen, YACRR protagonists and storyworlds are written to be ordinary so that the reader can slip themselves into the protagonist position and superimpose their own hometown in place of the storyworld in the narrative. In this way, the engagement into the narrative and the pedagogical implications can merge. A double consciousness is at play here because the narratee feels an affinity with the protagonist and the storyworld all the while knowing (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).

M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, 2024, English

This thesis explores John Steinbeck's enduring literary legacy and his portrayal of the complex relationship between America and religion in 20th-century America. Through an analysis of To a God Unknown, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath, this study delves into his examination of the American Dream and its connection to religion, particularly Christianity. In these novels, Steinbeck portrays his vision of a successful America as a nation characterized by interdependence, empathy, and equality, regularly placing these traits in a religious context and aligning them with Christian symbolism and ideology. By emphasizing the responsibility that man has for his fellow man, Steinbeck places the American everyman into a Godlike role, bypassing traditional religious beliefs that America has been founded on and centered around and introducing a new idea of religion within America that Steinbeck envisioned as leading the nation to fulfill its potential for greatness.

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.