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

My thesis, titled “The Weeping Women of Tahad,” is a novel set in Rajasthan, India. The story explores patriarchy, casteism, and gender dynamics within royal societies through familial relationships and social interactions. At its core is Thakurain Maitreyi, a woman with roots tracing back to rudaalis, lower-caste, marginalized women hired as professional mourners in some regions of Rajasthan. Now the wife of a Rajput zamindar, Maitreyi aims to secure her wayward son Dev's marriage to Rajput princess Parvati Rajye. However, as the wedding approaches, Maitreyi grapples with a haunting past and unfolding sinister events. The narrative weaves external conflicts and internal struggles, intensifying her dilemmas against a backdrop of a lawless desert borderland that shapes the lives of its inhabitants. The novel comprises fifteen chapters, alternating between two timelines—odd chapters depicting the past and even chapters the present, with titles referring to specific days on the Hindu lunar calendar leading up to Dev's wedding. This structure establishes a consistent chronological pattern in both storylines. To craft this narrative, I have drawn inspiration from a curated reading list, including works like “The Palace of Illusions,” “The God of Small Things,” “Kaikeyi,” “House of Jaipur,” “Rudaali,” “The Secret Keeper of Jaipur,” and “The Twentieth Wife.” These books provide a foundation for exploring themes of survival, ambition, identity, isolation, and the evolution of traditional Indian societies. By unraveling the layers of mystery in Maitreyi's past, present, and future, my novel aims to authentically resonate with readers, reflecting cultural nuances and complex character dynamics.

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

This dissertation explores how organizations in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds (LCBD) microregion in Appalachian Ohio collaborate and negotiate tensions as they work to build an eco-tourism economy. This economic development is focused on the region's natural environment and labor history in the aftermath of a post-extractive mining economy. The LCBD microregion is generally defined as the historic Hocking Valley Coal Mining region in Perry, Hocking, Athens, and Morgan counties. The name, Little Cities of Black Diamonds, refers to the history of coal mining in the region. After extractive industries in the region declined, the Wayne National Forest took its place, though there are still remnants of acid mine drainage, stories of underground coal pit fires that still burn today, and historical landmarks, like Robinson's Cave where the United Coal Miners Union formed, that inform the place-based identities in the region. This dissertation asks the following questions: How do diverse stakeholders negotiate a shared, though sometimes conflicting, interest in place? How is power negotiated within and beyond grassroots organizations? How do different generations approach place-making? What role does technical and professional communication play in grassroots place-making efforts? What is at stake in place-making efforts in rural areas that have a history of resource extraction? To explore these questions, I engage in rhetorical field methods and analyze texts ranging from archival documents, technical and professional documents, speeches, public-facing websites, and interviews. I look to the rhetorical practices of place-making that exist within grassroots coalitional networks, individual nonprofits, and between nonprofit and for-profit organizations. My dissertation posits that technical communication acts as an essential element in crafting shared narratives of place/environment, history, and community that circulate from the underground and intergenerational (open full item for complete abstract)

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

This project functions as an examination of the folkloristic question of the generic category of the “fake”, “fictitious”, or “invented” legend. Using The Blair Witch Project (1999) motion picture as an example text, case study, and vehicle for this exploration, this project engages with historical folkloristic discourses of authenticity, extant taxonomies of legendry and legend performance contexts, and the novel category of the “folkloresque” system of folkloric popular culture allusion. These domains are examined in order to reimagine an allegedly “fake” legend complex (the marketing campaign surrounding The Blair Witch Project's initial premiere) as nevertheless engaged in certain critical contexts of folkloresque legend performance – namely, process and participation. These contexts, this project ultimately argues, serve in part as public platforms through which the generic boundaries of “fake” legend texts (like The Blair Witch Project) are generically reinforced or renegotiated by emic interlocutors through a pronounced reliance on commensurately folkloric rhetoric, performances, and other processes.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Comparative Studies

This dissertation applies a queer methodological approach to the folkloric analysis of LGBTQ communities. Lesbian queer communities are an effective space in which folklorists can study how the policing the boundaries of legitimate identity and practice threatens vernacular growth. Gathered at a time of increasing lesbian visibility and organizing for community spaces between 2019 and 2024, my ethnographic data examines three sites to demonstrate how queer people find each other and form communities: lesbian meme pages, Slammers (Columbus, Ohio's lesbian bar), and dyke kitsch. I focus on the process of identity formation, foregrounding both the importance of dyke desire and the fluidity of what that the category can look like. Focusing on what I call “zones of social reproduction,” I explore how lesbian queer communities refuse atomization while simultaneously allowing for expanding and shifting queer identities. Contemporary lesbian queer communities are engaging in vernacular identity practices to develop a conception of lesbian that moves beyond a shared biology to view trans and lesbian traditions as always already intertwined, revealing how marginalized communities flourish in when in solidarity.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2024, English (Arts and Sciences)

At the crossroads of Middle America and the Appalachian Mountains, there is a small town called Hallowed, West Virginia, where the veil between worlds thins. Over 123 years, many different people of this town realize that this place that should be their safe haven is a breeding ground of horrors, all while combating the typical worries of rural America.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

During the Great Patriotic War (that is, the Soviet-German War (1941-1945) as part of the Second World War), performances of music and songs were an important part of the life of soldiers in the Red Army. This study examines how these songs could function in unofficial aspects of the lives of frontline soldiers. There was a “cult of folklore” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, which meant that depiction of folklore in film and literature was an official policy. However, the fact that such performances featured in officially sanctioned artistic works raises the question, how much was propaganda and how much reflected actual practices? To answer this question, I looked at all of the references to performances of songs in over fifty Russian-language diaries and volumes of letters written by members of the Soviet military. I did not use journalism to avoid propaganda, nor memoirs to avoid the problem of transformations of memories over the years; instead, I used sources written during the war itself that reflected the everyday life of the soldiers.

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

You Have to Save Something is a collection of nonfiction essays about growing up in Appalachia as the eldest daughter in a blue-collar, working-class family. The writer narrates profound moments with her family, especially with her brothers and their friends in a small community where they gained insight into their economic place, their losses, their abilities, their father's tremendous work ethic, and their mother's depression along with her particularly harsh methods of punishment. Memory and story are often connected to and shared through treasured objects that were and remain connected to the fabric of the family's life and to the writer herself. At the heart of these essays is a fondness for the place and the people that endures throughout the writer's life and into the present day.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, American Culture Studies

Monstrous animals occupied a prominent role in the imaginations of the 18th and early 19th century European settlers in what would become the United States of America. This preoccupation with monsters among early Americans is clearly reflected in the life and career of Thomas Jefferson. A close examination of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), scientific papers prepared for the American Philosophical Society, documentation relating to the Louisiana Purchase, financing of the Louis and Clark Expedition, and personal correspondence all reveal a persistent obsession with living mastodons, giant moose, and colossal lions among other curious creatures. As a key American representative of the western intellectual tradition known as the Enlightenment, Jefferson's conviction that the North American interior harbored such monstrous forms of undiscovered animal life may seem counterintuitive as one would presume Jefferson would be nothing but skeptical of the reality of fantastic beasts. However, Jefferson saw evidence for the reality of such hitherto unclassified species of megafauna in an amalgamation of fragmentary fossil remains, euhemerist interpretations of Indigenous American legends, and tall tales told by early pioneers; the same type of ephemeral evidence marshaled by today's cryptozoologists to prove the existence of such creatures as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. It is with this later observation in mind that this dissertation seeks to reframe Jefferson as a pioneering cryptozoologist while also considering the important role which cryptozoological monster lore has played in the formation of American culture.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2023, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

We know that when children feel a sense-of-relation within local natural environments, they are more prone to feel concern for them, while nurturing well-being and resilience in themselves and in lands/waters they inhabit. Positive environmental behaviors often follow into adulthood. Our human capacities for creating sustainable solutions in response to growing repercussions of global warming and climate change may grow if more children feel a sense of belonging in the wild natural world. As educators, if we listen to and learn from students' voices about how they engage in nature, we can create pedagogical experiences directly relevant to their lives. Activities that relate to learners' lives inspire motivation, curiosity, and furthers understanding. Behaviors supporting environmental stewardship, environmental justice, and participation in citizen science and phenology are more probable when children feel concern for ecological landscapes. Internationally, some educators are free to encourage a sense-of -relation by bringing students into natural places. Yet, there are many educators who are constrained from doing so by strict local, state, and national education policies and accountability measures. Overcoming restrictions requires creative, relevant, and enjoyable learner-centered opportunities. Research shows that virtual nature experiences can provide for beneficial connections with(in) nature for children and adults. It is best to bring children outside. When this is not possible, a sense of wonder may be encouraged in the classroom. Our exploratory collaborative digital landscape-lore project makes this possible. We expand awareness about how we, educators, and children alike, are engaged within the landscapes and waterscapes significant to us. The term landscape-lore articulates the primacy of the places we find meaningful. Our intercultural investigations took place in collaborative public schools in colonized landscapes. New Hampshire and New Zealand, k (open full item for complete abstract)

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

This project focuses on historical and contemporary print cultures of the Ozarks, highlighting the vernacular dimensions of print and its connection with ideas of place and history. Rather than centering popular publications with broad circulation, I take a folkloristic approach to investigate how people collect and share information, news, traditions, and knowledge through everyday genres of print. The three primary case studies examined here include regional folk magazines from the mid-twentieth century, the newsletters of a lesbian social club at the century's end, and the digitized newspaper of a small Missouri town from a hundred years in the past. Each case study brings together scholarship from folklore and print culture studies, symbolized through the application of a conceptual pair tied to each discipline: region and assemblage; genre and network; and, finally, performance and news. By exploring the conceptual pair within each case study, I demonstrate how an interdisciplinary dialogue can address the connections between print technologies and local traditions. Tracing the ongoing remediation of oral tradition and older media genres and technologies, I uncover cross-temporal layering in the experience of rural regionality. At stake in this investigation of rural print culture is the concept of regionality: how mobile and dispersed place-based networks of access, resources, and communication are actualized and sustained. The study of rural print culture can help us better understand the ways in which people make use of print, both as a technology and as a modality tied to history and tradition, to envision and negotiate regional narratives in creative and unexpected ways.

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2023, Geography (Arts and Sciences)

The cities of Americana, Santa Barbara d'Oeste and Piracicaba in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, received a wave of emigrants from the southern United States following the Civil War. Employing mixed methods and field observations, this thesis analyzes the continued memorialization of the Confederacy in the interior of Sao Paulo state, particularly in a cemetery known as the Cemiterio do Campo located in Santa Barbara d'Oeste. Through interviews with descendants of Confederates (known as Confederados), museum curators, festival participants, academic experts, and a landscape analysis of local museums and the Cemiterio do Campo, the thesis argues that efforts to maintain cultural identity and memorialize the past persist, primarily through the continued maintenance and preservation of the cemetery and its associated material culture artifacts.

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

Based on a critical reading of colonial archives and extensive use of oral sources, this dissertation argues that indigenous custodians of the landscape in semi-arid regions of the Zimbabwean Lowveld have a longstanding experience of harnessing their environmental literacy and detailed knowledge of nature to combat climate change. Starting with colonial encounters and contested boundaries of knowledge in Southern Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe) since the early twentieth century, I demonstrate that oral traditions survived the onslaught of colonialism and offered new generations ways of responding to climate change. I use empirical examples to demonstrate that indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) have been obscured under the veneer of colonial historiography, hence, the importance of recovering African cultural achievements and indigenous agency to the historical record. This dissertation examines the adoption of various coping strategies and sustainable agricultural practices initiated by indigenous people to promote climate smart agriculture and identifies the factors that influence adoption of certain adaptive practices. Water has been a central and defining factor of Africa's development trajectory. A growing body of literature has demonstrated that agricultural yields have been declining in developing countries, including Zimbabwe, due to the impacts of climate change. Indigenous experiences, conceptions and perceptions have played a vital role in the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices. Indigenous farmers are at peace with modernity and modernization, but in the absence of modern technologies and state support, they have been going back to traditional forms of development. The interrelated objectives of climate change mitigation, adaptation and food security were simultaneously sustained through the hybrid integration of indigenous and modern farming practices in agricultural production and sustainable development planning. Indigenous knowledge sys (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, East Asian Languages and Literatures

The 1980s was a transformative decade when numerous ethnic minority writers began to emerge across a rapidly changing China, giving them an opportunity to tell stories about their people and cultures from their own perspectives. After restrictive policies on literature were relaxed in the late 1970s, poets began writing on themes, such as traditional culture, issues of representation, and conflicts between tradition and modernity. In addition to giving aesthetic form to their inner thoughts and emotions, many poets from this time expressed an interest in writing for their ethnic groups. Expanding on previous research on Southwest ethnic minority poetry by Mark Bender and D. Dayton, this thesis applies key aspects of Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework, including habitus, capital, and field, to the social aspect of writing poetry as a practice for writers from the Wa, Jingpo, and Lisu ethnic groups in China's ethnically diverse Southwest borderlands. Highlighting prominent authors, including Burao Yilu, Yimeng Hongmu, Yue Ding, Chen Hong, Mi Yingwen, and Li Guiming, this thesis argues that hybrid narratives found within the poems reflect the changing habitus of Southwest China. Further, using Bourdieu and Foucault's conceptions of power, this thesis demonstrates how poets take part in nuanced negotiations with social and political discourses to attain broader exposure and effect social change.

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

This thesis contains short stories, short nonfiction pieces, and a novel excerpt which represent the progression of my work through my time at Miami. Thematically, this work covers the experience of severe mental illness (depression, OCD, and CPTSD), the journey to monsterhood and beyond, and the desire to be good when that just isn't possible.

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2023, History

Medieval Europe was a period of development and change, none of which is more evident than through the transition of medical authority from women and magic to solely men and medicine. At the start of the Middle Ages, magic and medicine held an interwoven relationship, where women could freely practice and function as medical authorities within their communities alongside men. Their presence as healers provided them with a rare opportunity to escape from the traditional confines of the patriarchal society of the Middle Ages. However, the creation of medical universities, which excluded women from enrolling, sought to eliminate the role which magic held within the medical field. With its usefulness in through medicine relegated, an opposition towards magic begun developing and the connection between magic and witchcraft to the nature of women was solidified. Women's already vulnerable status within society added onto the perceived threat of witchcraft opened the door for direct persecution women. Medical practitioners, ecclesiastical writers, the Christian church, governing bodies, and local authorities all contributed to the curation of stereotypes surrounding witchcraft practitioners. As a result, the Inquisition and larger witch hunt movement developed, specifically targeting women. The witchcraft trials were the final deadly product of this movement and were overwhelmingly disproportionate in their indictment and execution of women.

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

This study looks at sexual fetishism and commodity fetishism of monsters in popular culture and what results have been made due to the development of combining these two forms of fetishism. The study goes into how the monster's image and effect on a culture has made a significant shift. The shift being how the monster's imagery and presence within a culture had switched from undesirable to desirable. The main reason that is brought up within this study is that the monster's image has undergone a process of being fetishized. This applies to both the image of the monster being subjected to sexual transformation in imagery, as well as the imagery of the monster being fetishized as a commodity and having that imagery bought and sold in stores by appropriate settings. The significance of this work highlights the process of how older concepts of our culture find a new place and why they have ended up in these places. Finally, the study will point out how these forms of fetishism combine and can be found in the modern distributions of luxury goods because of the fetishism.

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

The makers of commercial popular culture often incorporate folklore into their works. Although their definition of folklore is generally restricted to pre-modern narratives and beliefs that form only a small part of what folklore is, their works relate to traditional content in a more expansive way. This dissertation examines a contemporary television genre that not only incorporates traditional content but, I argue, functions as folklore in its own right by negotiating truth and belief, constructing social Others, and, at the meta-level, constituting an archive. Since the 1990s, serial narratives in which everyday people investigate and solve supernatural disturbances in a procedural format have become a mainstay of North American television and streaming media. Such programs, including The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have generally lacked a cohesive genre designation. I argue for “supernatural procedural” as the genre's preferred term and trace its history from predecessors in Victorian-era occult detective fiction to early forms in 1970s television, through solidification in the 1990s into its current permutations. I outline conventions that include, among others, realistic worldbuilding, a blend of episodic and serial storytelling, and, notably, a tendency to engage with folklore. Employing an approach blending folkloristics and popular culture studies, I argue that specific characteristics of the supernatural procedural allow series to function as televisual folklore: folklore not just adapted by, but actually occurring within the television medium. This emphasis contributes to newer avenues in folklore studies, which has only recently begun seriously analyzing television, and popular culture studies, where folkloristic perspectives are often overlooked. This work considers the abovementioned series at length alongside subsequent programs like Supernatural and Grimm, using supporting analysis from Lucifer, Evil, SurrealEstate, and Wellington Pa (open full item for complete abstract)

MFA, Kent State University, 0, College of the Arts / School of Art

Loss is a major component of my lived experience and informs much of the work in my thesis exhibition, Oh, Horse Hockey! Herein, I explore my personal and familial relationship to grief. I utilize a working narrative of symbolic, metaphoric, and literal interpretations of grief. Through the use of recurring visual symbols of addiction, childhood, and celebration, I call attention to avoidance. Most glaring, however, is the inclusion of party ephemera. Its significance enlivens a contrapuntal read of this body of work, wherein the seemingly oppositional concepts of loss and celebration are made interdependent.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1966, English

PHD, Kent State University, 2022, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The origination and application of a textual analysis of identity, identity formation, and perception of the self and the individual is, as a part of a specific time and space, something that is sociological in nature. The anthropological links between fiction and its sociological aspects highlight symbols of identity and interactions between the self, the other, and the individual. The end goal of this project's articulated theoretical model is to contribute to readings and analysis of the self and identity in different, othered spaces. This project works towards locating patterns and understanding that make the text and its underlying archetypal and mythological structures work so well with contemporary readers. It is grounded in the serious nature of contemporary storytelling as a part of the self, individual identity, and its place in society and culture. There is no shortage of specific work in literary analysis that relies on aspects of the hero's journey, the archetypes, and identity. This theoretical model of analysis adapts myth and C.G. Jung to incorporate much of this material into something cohesive and applicable to contemporary genre fiction. Because of this, this project necessitates the introduction of a definition of myth that situates contemporary genre texts as uniquely anthropological artifacts and as items worth analyzing and containing content capable of explicating overarching themes of the individual, the self, and the other in relation to identity formation in opposition. This new and adapted terminology from both myth and Jung assists in reorganizing a vocabulary that allows the analysis to delve into discussions on the creative representation of self, other, gender, sexual identity, the mind and body, transhumanism, and trans(inter)national identity, as well as help highlight how these representations are internalized or externalized by those who read these works of contemporary genre fiction and how these representations and internalizati (open full item for complete abstract)