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

Displacement, voluntarily or exilic in nature, strikes such a deep chord within the immigrant that it permanently changes the global landscape to them, even if they remain abroad, and especially if they return home. The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan, published in 2021, takes the Nasrs from California, Austin, and New York and delivers them back to Beirut. At the head of the family are Idris and Mazna, first-generation immigrants, fleeing from Lebanon and Syria, respectively; their children, Ava, Mimi, and Naj are born in the US. The trip to Lebanon is made every summer until the Nasrs grow wary of this return due to various traumas. The propelling event for their ‘reverse immigration' years later is when Idris, a cardiovascular surgeon, hears a heart he's operating on telling him to return to Lebanon to sell his childhood home. This paper contextualizes and tracks the effects of transmobility of first and second generation immigrants and the different coping or defense mechanisms of processing diaspora. For the Nasrs, who long for Beirut with as much devotion as they resent it, the rearrival journey serves to demythologize their ‘home.' However, instead of reiterating the Arab-American conundrum of being Arab in the US and American in the Arab World, Alyan creates a new space where both the Arab and US identities are inherently changed due to the characters' transnational acts of mobility. The rearrival breaks through the hegemony and the veils nostalgia places on memory.

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

At the turn of the century there was an increase in social concern surrounding intellectualism and the role of the academic in a rapidly industrializing world. While anti-intellectualism is addressed in a variety of literary texts, detective fiction offers a unique insight into the emergent anxieties surrounding intellectualism. The Sign of the Four, published in 1890 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Man Who Was Thursday, published in 1908 by G.K. Chesterton, both address the increased cynicism surrounding intellectualism. I argue that Conan Doyle attempts to justify the work of the intellectual by proposing that they are necessary to prevent reverse-colonization; while Chesterton critiques the idea that intellectuals are openly planning the downfall of Western society. Chesterton and Conan Doyle's different approaches to addressing the fears surrounding intellectualism highlight the pervasive distrust of the intellectual through two decades and the efforts of literary authors to emphasize the continued importance of intellectuals in modern times.

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.

Master of Fine Arts, University of Akron, 2025, English-Literature

body, body, little body is a leap into a mind constantly questioning, undermining, and asserting itself. Through the lens of the midwestern transgender experience, this memoir-in-essays explores a complicated web of themes and images that are interlinked and complicated through the narrator—a young woman who, through a gauntlet of misery and elation and decomposition and artmaking, finds a way to step forward and experience selfhood, despite the suffocating weight of self-improvement. Suicide meets elementary school crayon drawings, bulimia meets Monet, and motherhood meets a fish tank filled with multicolored shrimp; all things looped, woven, like yarn in a loom.

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

A Documentary on Steel and Public Health [and the apocalypse] is a traditional two-act play that explores themes of industrialization, class, race, and anxieties about society's future. The play follows a group of activists in Birmingham, AL making a documentary about the effects of steel and public health in their communities. As they interview a family of steelworkers, tensions about industrialization and the creative process erupt. As the script takes place on a documentary film set, a critical introduction about theater's use of physical space to evoke social justice action has been included.

Artium Baccalaureus (AB), Ohio University, 2025, English

As Lily Briscoe suggests in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), art “make[s] of the moment something permanent” (165). Pieces of art also immortalize the minds of their creators to a certain degree; their thoughts, ideas, and feelings take real form, sculpted in the physical world, smattered upon canvasses, or detailed in book pages. It is a consequence of the profession, therefore, that audiences might demand more of the artist's mind. As audiences begin to ponder the “inspiration” behind art, it becomes difficult for the artist to hide. Inspiration implies that artwork reflects the artist as a person, leading to further questioning: what is it that made the artist that person? How did they develop as an artist? Is it temperament, experience, an amalgamation of things? Audiences turn, essentially, to psychology. Historically, classical psychoanalysis—or Freudian psychology—has been used as a lens for deducing meaning in artwork and literature, and psychobiographies are frequently written about artists of every variety. Although they may fascinate, entertain, and even educate, psychoanalytic interpretations and psychobiography are controversial and overrepresented in the literature on the intersections between art and psychology. Novels of formation such as the Bildungsroman (the “coming-of-age” novel), and the Kunstlerroman (the “artist-novel”), are particularly interesting from a psychological perspective. Theorists and literary critics, however, tend to focus almost exclusively on psychoanalytic interpretations rather than considering other psychological frameworks. The novels analyzed in this thesis are both Kunstlerromanne; addressing the question of how people become artists, novels of this variety depict a process of character development that is ripe for psychological study. In this thesis, I propose narrative psychology, with its emphasis on constructivism, as a fresher, less reductive lens for examining literature, particularly of the Kunstlerrom (open full item for complete abstract)

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

Religious stories have long been used in the genre of retelling, some as inspiration, some used to imagine alternative outcomes for characters, some to reimagine common archetypes and frequently used plot features in modern literature. In such retellings, the source text may be used or reused in a variety of different ways. An increasingly popular approach to retelling has been to search for the silence in literature and tell the stories of the gaps. Lying in the gaps of many religious and ancient tales are the stories of women, survivors of assault, and others who become silenced. When retelling the stories of these women, it is not enough to simply bring them back onto the page: it is not enough to revive these characters, portray their traumas, and abandon them in the gaps once more. The retellings of silenced women require more than representation; they demand a reimagining of their voices, lives, and beings that redefines their integral roles in our stories as meaningful and profound, giving them new life on the page. In this project, I will explore the retrieval of women's stories through retellings as well as the theories of the homo sacer relating to my novel Born of Ashes and its portrayal of the experiences of marginalized voices in a modern fantasy book.

Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2025, Theater

This paper details the process of creating a transgender adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, particularly an adaptation that centers around a transmasculine Victor Frankenstein. The medium of this adaptation is a play, meant to be performed live in a theater space. The adaptation focuses on the harm done to trans individuals by three factors: transmedical ideology, a lack of intersectionality, and internal/external pressure to be "trans enough". The original novel's obsession with perfectly reproducing the male form is adapted into a trans desire to be as indistinguishable from a cisgendered person as possible. After the theoretical foundation of the play is established, focus shifts to the process of writing the script, casting the play, and developing the visual identity. These elements are presented in the context of how they support the theoretical foundation of the adaptation. Finally, several appendices with production and script details are included in the paper.

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

Black Hair Intertextuality traces the evolving representation of Black female hair across literary texts, engaging with postcolonial, postmodern, and Afrofuturist frameworks to uncover the political, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions embedded in hair narratives. This thesis explores how Black hair operates as a site of identity, resistance, and reinvention, connecting historical trauma with future imaginaries. By analyzing texts from a range of authors—including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler—the study reveals how hair becomes both a literal and metaphorical thread weaving together diasporic consciousness and intergenerational storytelling. Grounded in theories of embodiment, semiotics, and speculative resistance, the project interrogates the interplay between Eurocentric beauty standards and self-fashioning in postcolonial contexts. Simultaneously, it examines how postmodern fragmentation and Afrofuturist reimaginings reconfigure hair as a vector for speculative identity and cultural continuity. Ultimately, Black Hair Intertextuality argues that hair in literature is more than an aesthetic marker; it is a richly coded symbol of autonomy, memory, and futurity within Black female experience.

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

Life is simple for Miranda. She lives with her family in the forest, where she and her mother work in the garden and go on walks through the forest. Uncle Peter goes out most days for food and supplies, and Grandma Nora keeps the house in order. Miranda is curious about the world outside her home, but she knows she can never leave. For you see, there are monsters not too far from home, and Miranda must stay with her family to keep safe. However, Miranda slowly begins to believe that there might be sinster things closer to home than she once thought. Her family is not always as nice and loving as she would like, and there always seems to be a fight happening and secrets only a moment away from being revealed. Miranda must discover why Uncle Peter and Grandma Nora want her to always stay near home, and why her mother seems so desperate to keep her away from them.

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2025, College of Arts and Sciences

A dark, Dickensian coming-of-age novel, The Martyr and Merv Spielman finds twelve-year-old Justin at his grandparents' house for Christmas Eve, 1999. Still smarting from a recent school bullying incident, Justin is in no mood to join his older brother and their cousins around a Ouija board. But the seance going forward, the four children receive a name: Merv Spielman. Thus commences a cosmic catastrophe, with the children being drawn, on New Year's Eve, as the clock strikes twelve, into Merv's malevolent dimension. As the children's relationships fracture, Justin must find a way to rescue his brother from the depths of darkness. A tall order, even for a child genius. But where darkness abounds, hope abounds all the more. This hope comes in the form of the novel's narrator—who is Justin's guardian angel, striding onto the pages of his own novel in order to enact a final, desperate deus ex machina.

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

Quantum Severance is a hybrid collection of personal essays and interlocking short stories primarily focused on the lasting effects of the most consequential romantic relationships in our lives after they have ended. The collection of personal essays follows the author as he navigates life after a long-term relationship. They are written with the immediacy and emotional vulnerability of journal entries logging events as they are happening (and thus are written in chronological order spanning from May 2023 through January 2025), while still maintaining the retrospective qualities commonly associated with the personal essay. The fictional work, comprising two short stories–one from the man, Cam's, point of view, and the other from the woman, Juliana's, point of view–offer an insight into two lives colliding again two years after ending their long-term relationship, with two vastly different outcomes. One of the most binding qualities of the fictional and nonfictional works, outside of dealing with the aftermath of relationships, is the role of associative thinking in the author and character's lives. We begin to see how the world can constantly remind us of people from our past, and the effects those continuous associations back to them can have on us.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2025, French and Italian

In my dissertation, I argue that nineteenth-century eugenic and proto-eugenic theories about crime and degeneration infiltrated the Italian cultural discourse in constructing the figures of the Italian woman and the mother. My work shows how, in Liberal Italy, between the 1860s and 1922, discourses and laws oriented toward the reduction of crime, preservation of respectability, and the control of sexual behaviors among the working class produced specific depictions of femininity in terms of gender and race in literature and early Italian cinema. In the three chapters, I show a continuity and pervasiveness of scientific positivism, criminal anthropology, and eugenic theories in Italian cultural production. I trace this trend in Italian literature and cinema to depict tragic stories about illegitimate mothers and working-class women through the identification of two tropes: the mater degenerata, degenerate mother, and donna degenerata, degenerate woman. These two terms, which better describe the particular Italian case than the “fallen woman trope,” show the presence of anxiety toward the reproduction and regeneration of the Italian nation that remains and finds new expression with the advent of fascism. While not directly covering the Fascist era, I argue that fear of degeneration and reproduction anxieties remain a central element of the Italian nation and eventually converge in neofascist movements and the current Italian government. Using historical, film, and literary analysis, this project is situated in Italian Studies, Film Studies, Gender and Cultural Studies. I analyze films and short stories using a biopolitical and feminist lens. This work is structured in three main chapters. In Chapter 1, I focus on the representation of the donna degenerata in literature and early Italian cinema through two specific arguments. First, I argue that the trope of the donna degenerata is presented as a character that disrupts and challenges the constructed bourgeois ideas (open full item for complete abstract)

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 in English, Cleveland State University, 2025, College of Arts and Sciences

Critics have investigated English heroines and othering English heroines in British courtships plots. This investigation is of an English heroine and two non-British heroines from Jane Eyre, The Woman of Colour and Wide Sargasso Sea. Although the heroines of all the three novels navigate the British marriage markets; Jane Eyre is the heroine who attains and sustains the ideal British marriage based on love and mutual respects due to her British identity. The two non-British heroines are not able to attain and sustain an ideal British marriage based on love and mutual respect due to non- Britishness. The non-Britishness heroines' marriage to English men was based on transactional wealth transfer but not based on love. The non- English heroines' anomalies make it difficult to attain the ideal British marriage resulting in resistance from the non- English heroines. Furthermore, the investigation through Said's Orientalism shows the relationship between Britain and her colonies in nineteenth and twentieth- century novels.

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

This thesis examines the intersections of memory, family, and identity within an Appalachian context, focusing on how personal history, loss, and resilience shape individual experiences. Through a hybrid form of poetry and narrative, the collection navigates a landscape of poverty, addiction, and a deeply rooted sense of place. Each piece, named after a crayon color, evokes the layered, fractured spectrum of memory. The work centers on familial bonds impacted by addiction, disability, and grief—especially the deaths of a sister and both parents. It addresses the permanence of loss and the cultural and familial legacies that linger. By anchoring each piece in vivid color and specific detail, the collection offers a visceral portrayal of Appalachian identity, honoring resilience forged through hardship while questioning the weight of inherited struggles.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2025, English

The dissertation investigates representations of community-defining processes in Latine-created television, literature, and music after 2016. Given the increasing prominence of Latines in popular and political US culture, this project emphasizes the shifting dynamics of Latine processes of self-definition. The dissertation traces the legacies of imposed labels for Latines in the US, with particular attention to current Latines' questioning and expanding of the labels. Specifically, the project asks: How do current representations open definitions of Latinidad? I answer these questions through close analysis of post-2016 texts: the Netflix original series Gentefied (2020-2022); Elizabeth Acevedo's young adult novel Clap When You Land (2020); Zoraida Cordova's fantasy novel The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina (2021); and Puerto Rican reggaetonero Bad Bunny's discography (2018-2023). Through the close analysis of audiovisual and literary texts, I argue that Latines are actively creating inclusive redefinitions for the community, one that is consciously rejecting historically imposed definitions that perpetuate colonial perspectives.

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.