Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, English (Arts and Sciences)

In 1972, a distracted nurse accidentally switches two newborn baby girls on Long Island. The sharp financial, class, and ethnic disparities of these families offer both protection and disadvantages to each daughter. When the truth is discovered over twenty years later, the young women and their birth families must reckon with all that connects and divides them—and what choices and commitments to make (and not make) in the aftermath.

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

Furrows is a novel about the consequences of blood – blood both in terms of family and violence, and what it means to recover from family violence. The novel is set in Northern Minnesta, Chicago, and Central Ohio and told in two POVs with chapters spanning 1973-2003 – thirty years of the history of the Hartmann family. Paul and Harry are eight years and one father apart. Paul's alcoholic father created a tense childhood full of violence and fear, and when Paul's father is arrested, Paul, Harry, and their mom must attempt to remake “family,” while Paul and his mom struggle for the title of the head of the household and Harry pushes his physicality through sports to mask latent fears and insecurities. Fast forward to 2003, Harry is a firefighter in Chicago, battling a failing relationship with his girlfriend, Elise, and difficulties in balancing fear and duty at work. Paul now owns his maternal grandparents' ranch, the land his parents were supposed to take over before they eloped and before his mother's affair, while he struggles to determine how to move on from the land and his past and define what his future looks like when he's not acting out of a place of someone else's need. After an accident at work lands Harry in the hospital, his mom and Paul meet again for the first time in over ten years, reigniting past resentments and unresolved questions and revealing the possibility of reconnecting a broken family.

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)

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

With her body of work, Virginia Woolf joins a host of female novelists decrying the lack of power that women in general wield in a patriarchal society. Specifically, her novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando provide a hopeful response to the dismal depiction of the female artist in Victorian literature, namely Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because of its subject matter of domestic abuse, unfortunately the experience of too many women in a society in which husbands are given too much power, Tenant was not regarded with respect in Bronte's lifetime. The novel so obviously portrays a woman without power in such dire circumstances it is indeed unsettling for most audiences. However, in her novel, Bronte's inventive techniques of using embedded and nonlinear narration to bring this mistreatment to light illustrates how the unbalance of power debilitated the expression of the female artist in her character Helen Graham. Although there is no direct evidence that Woolf read Anne Bronte's novel, Woolf responds to this hopeless depiction with modernist experimental and more nuanced strategies such as free indirect style and interrupted narration to paint a much more hopeful picture of the possibility of the female artist confronting the power of the patriarchy with success and freedom of expression. In doing so, she upends Victorian tropes and expected narrative structure to provide a scathing critique of the Victorian patriarchal culture in which she, herself, was raised.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

This project aims to interrogate modernist symbolism of the dog as representations of human alterity by focusing on the importance of the dog as a robust modernist trope used to articulate the problems of being human in an increasingly industrialized, modernized society. This dissertation explores how the dog functions as a symbol with attention to class, hierarchies, kinship arrangements, sex and sexuality, but also considers the dog as a literal dog, outside of human constructs. While Darwinian theory undermines the supremacy of the human by showing how species interrelate, the dog is of particular importance because of its coevolutionary partnership with humans, having the capacity to expose the precarity of human ascendency and dissolve the human/animal boundary. The dog's capacity for destabilizing the category of human can convey humanity's degradation, but the dog is also an analogue for human constructions, articulating questions of class, gender, and sexuality. Intimacy between humans and dogs also issues new ways of thinking of kinship. Lastly, this dissertation examines modernist texts for their subtle advocacy for the better treatment of animals by imagining animal subjectivity, by humanizing the animal, or by carefully studying animal behavior.

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2023, English

1001 Nights Preparing to Die: Meditations in Song and Verse is a memoir in short essays that explores the transformative power of music, spirituality, and the indomitable human spirit. Born with a congenital heart condition obscured by the courts during her adoption, the author's life is marked by countless medical procedures, hospital visits, and the constant shadow of mortality. The author navigates the intricate worlds of chronic illness, adoption, substance misuse, and mental health while discovering the profound healing potential of Kirtan chanting—a form of devotional music originating from the ancient traditions of her husband's home country of India. Through personal anecdotes, introspection, and HinDruid spiritual practices, the memoir explores how the author's engagement with Kirtan becomes a lifeline that reconnects her to her body and provides solace, hope, and acceptance of her mortality. Shedding light on the broader significance of meditative practices in the context of chronic illness and the human experience—and providing a platform for raising awareness and fostering empathy—this work offers compassionate and insightful perspectives on the challenges faced by individuals who are adopted, who live with congenital heart disease, and who live with and love family members with substance misuse disorders.

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.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Spanish and Portuguese

A constructed practice of homage has historically omitted women's legacies and granted nearly exclusive support for the ten male poets considered the originators of the avant-garde artistic group known as the Generation of 1927. Only recently have the modern women writers known as “las Sinsombrero” been incorporated into the homage traditions of the Generation of 1927, though an existing corpus of written, performed, and recorded homages has long been available in Spanish archives and libraries. However, the materials of homages have not yet been critically analyzed for how they reveal the gendered, classed, and sexualized ways that the literary history of the generation has been constructed. This project interrogates literary canon formation through the study of homage to make women visible within the formative spaces of early twentieth-century artistic production in Spain. The Generation of 1927 offers a special case study in the ways homages serve as mythmaking projects that center androcentric prestige formations such as anthologies. However, as a reconceptualized concept, homage can also provide lifemaking opportunities for scholars and writers of all genders and genres, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 3 in my analysis of the “Academy of Witches” gatherings of en dehors garde women. This project examines how writers like Vicente Aleixandre, Carmen Conde, and Amanda Junquera moved between their public-facing literary careers and the lifemaking impulses of cohabitation and queer futures in their shared home, Velintonia. I provide textual and cultural analyses of poetic tributes, newspaper clippings, gatherings at Velintonia, Elena Fortun's "Oculto sendero", and Amanda Junquera's "Un hueco en la luz" to interrogate the gendered dynamics of literary canon formation in homages to the Generation of 1927. Drawing on feminist critiques of the literary canon, queer theory, archival studies, memory studies, and cultural heritage studies, the present work proposes alte (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Creative Writing

The Frailty of Fruit is a young adult post-apocalyptic thriller, set in a far future subterranean farming community. The novel follows protagonist Qari Hofler, a reluctant tomato farmer, who must develop a hybrid tomato to earn her family's stewardship or be banished to the Deep Dark. Her 33rd great-grandfather's tomato strain cured violence. But because their cultural understanding of violence didn't include sexual violence, Qari develops an asexually reproductive strain with the naive hope of curing gender. Little does she know, she's not the only one with the seeds of that idea. Told in intertwining narratives, a second protagonist Iona also must race against time to beat Qari at her own hybrid game. But once the two of them find each other, with the help of a humanoid sexbot-turned-scientist named Misty, Qari and Iona realize that finding a place where they could grow together was the point all along. Told in the dystopian tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Frailty of Fruit draws upon themes of reproductive justice, hegemony, posthumanism, and the subaltern. Written in a traditional narrative structure, the novel invents an accessible story with textured social imaginings. It posits a poetic truth that utopias will always become dystopias, that will then become utopias, and so on. Like nature, human social conditions have birth and death cycles. In this way, the novel employs contemporary feminist methodologies which utilize post-structural theories to challenge the notions of stable concepts. The ground, literally and conceptually, is always shifting.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 0, English (Arts and Sciences)

In this lyrical childhood memoir, I reconstruct my experience of my parent's explosive divorce. The manuscript begins and ends in court, where at 12 I testified I no longer wanted to continue my relationship with my father. It is a moment that exists outside of linear time for me. To mimic the experience of trauma, I loop back to this scene throughout the book, each time getting closer to the moment I speak my truth. Between these courtroom sections, I flash back (and forward) to examine the relationship I had with both my parents and the relationship they had with each other, trying to make what sense I can of the way things fell apart. Written from the perspective of my younger self, I elevate the child's voice because, during all this, that voice was often not counted. As subtly as possible to avoid disrupting the reader's occupation of the child's point of view, I invite my adult perspective when necessary to provide context or future insight. At its heart, this book seeks to show that, while lacking language or the ability to articulate an experience, a child is a full person whose experience of situations is no less complex or human than that of the adults around her.

PHD, Kent State University, 2022, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

Much of the research in Translation Studies conducted on African literature in French and in English in the postcolonial context has focused on the hybrid nature of some of the literary works: these are seen as the site of power struggles between the European language in which they are written and the oral indigenous language(s) which influence them. This literary production is thus often framed as a form of translation of an absent oral indigenous original or at least seen as a hybrid third space, to use Homi Bhabha's term. In the context of Nigerian literature, a small body of texts by Chinua Achebe or Gabriel Okara is often used to illustrate this notion of writing as translation. Written, for the most part, during the independence era, their experimental use of English was politically loaded. It was meant, as Achebe puts it, to make English “carry the weight of [his] African experience.” More than fifty years after Nigeria's independence, however, what seems to characterize Nigerian literature is no longer an experimental use of English, but rather its multilingualism, which can be seen as a reflection of the country's linguistic plurality, a characteristic not yet addressed by Translation Studies or African Literary Studies scholarship but which this dissertation seeks to analyze. This dissertation creates a comprehensive comparable corpus including all the Nigerian literary works of fiction that were published between 2002 and 2018 and translated into French (that is 31 source texts and 31 translations) in order to: first, examine the heterolingualism of “original” contemporary Nigerian literature, by surveying its distribution (including Nigerian Pidgin and indigenous languages), typographical presentation, and the various translation strategies used by the authors to make the presence of heterolingualism more visible and accessible to the readers; secondly, to analyze the ways in which this heterolingualism is rendered in the French translations. It mak (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

More Than Reading: Narrative, Medial Frames, and Digital Media in the Contemporary Novel explores the narrative effects of medial experimentation in contemporary American and British novels. This project argues that the production and reception of many recent novels are influenced by a range of forms and practices common in digital media, and that these influences have a profound impact on contemporary storytelling techniques. Through analyses of novels by Kate Atkinson, Salvador Plascencia, Steve Tomasula, and Mark Z. Danielewski, I consider how (sometimes subtle) shifts in authors' use of media is changing the way that the novel form operates, reflecting audiences' familiarity with new media even as the novel remains a vital literary form in the twenty-first century. In order to study these issues, I introduce the new analytical category of the medial frame, a particular type of social frame used to identify and describe the conventionalized rules and expectations that readers apply to specific uses of media. Medial frames, developed from a diverse set of linguistic and phenomenological approaches, are defined as social contexts that pair technological materials with the wealth of conventions that govern how those materials are used as part of communicative acts. Medial frames can be employed as interpretive tools to analyze how a text's use of medial technologies (e.g., printed text, images and color, page layout, paratextual materials) prompts audiences to apply certain reception practices over others. I show how medial frames are particularly suited to examining the complex medial environment of twenty-first-century storytelling, in which creators often use a diversity of technologies to communicate with audiences. The print novels of this era ask readers to adopt surprising medial frames, such that persuasive interpretations of these texts are only available to those who are prepared (whether implicitly or self-consciously) to adopt and adapt digital and (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, English (Arts and Sciences)

“‘An Odd Monster': Essays on 20th Century Literature” focuses on intersections of history, place, gender, race, and imperialism in twentieth-century modernist literature. Within these discussions I assert that western conceptualizations of history or the past work to erase the non-white bodies and cultures pivotal to imperial success, to subsume women into patriarchal subordination, and to present a historical progression antithetical to the experience of those relegated to subalternity. In discussions of Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, I argue that defiance to authoritarian containment—whether from within or without—often takes unlikely forms with seemingly feeble results. In analyses of characters who write back, talk back, rebel, do nothing, and/or commit small acts of violence, I contend throughout that insubordination to systemic oppressions for the purposes of prioritizing individual agency over moral triumph do not have to be “successful,” to be revolutionary. Utilizing foundational voices such as Sara Ahmed, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, among others, I argue that these acts are transcendent despite little to no substantial change emerging because the characters and writers themselves make and claim their own autonomy and belonging. This work participates in and urges for a continuation of the work of “New Modernist Studies,” which seeks a more expansive understanding of modernism through collapsing the rigid (often exclusionary) spatial and temporal boundaries.

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2022, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Modern literature is rife with examples of authors dramatizing the various stressors suffered by families populating the American suburbs. Within this theme, two such authors, Richard Yates and Gillian Flynn, use their craft to explore not only the social orthodoxy expected by suburban residents, but also the performative aspects applied when that conformity is challenged by these inherent pressures. The presence of these social strains as it's examined by each author, both of whom are writing 60 years apart, furthers the commentary on the toxicities of suburban living in post-WWII America (Yates) and the modern technological age (Flynn) by surveying the changes affecting husbands and wives once they choose a neighborhood residency and find themselves struggling to manage. In this study, the analysis aims to prove how both Yates and Flynn use literary devices such as metaphor, irony, characterization, and symbolism with a subtle blend of dark humor to expose the tensions underlining suburban life. For Yates, writing in 1961, framing the social and emotional fatigue emerging steadily among suburbanites in 1950's America offers an intimate portrait of ambition soured by conformity; and by 2012 when Flynn publishes her novel, many of those same factors bridge the years between these respective publications through a more sardonic and savage narrative that considers how media and culture further perpetuate domestic pressures.

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2022, English

This thesis is a creative nonfiction account of the 2010 murder of Tina Herrmann, Kody Maynard, and Stephanie Sprang, and kidnapping and rape of Sarah Maynard, by Matthew Hoffman. The author read an extensive list of true crime works to prepare for this project. True crime is a genre that, for centuries was not regarded with the same literary importance as others, yet it is an exceptional indicator of what society values at a given point in time. The recent surge in true crime fascination is not isolated, but rather has occurred many times throughout history and can serve as an indicator of conflict. The voices and narratives that are now more prevalent in crime writing change how we address crime and the very nature of our language surrounding it. The author critiques some of the tendencies found in true crime novels such as In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, including using the passive voice to distance the responsible body from the crime, which this project seeks to avoid.

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2022, English

As The Awakening explores feminist ideals and themes of women's empowerment through the protagonist Edna Pontellier, so too does it highlight the privilege and prejudice both Edna and author Kate Chopin embody as wealthy white women existing within a white supremacist society. In the final scene of the text, as Edna swims out into a sea rich with metaphor and symbolism, reminiscing about an idyllic childhood, to her assumed death, readers are forced to contemplate the impact of the protagonist's death on the feminist ideals set forth in the novel. Through Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness, queer theory, and Black feminist studies, readers are able to imagine a space in which marginalized people can thrive under oppressive social structures hostile to their happiness, present satisfaction, and social progress via beloved community and collaborative advancement, in a way which Kate Chopin and, therefore, Edna could not. Ultimately, Edna's perspective was shaped by the white patriarchal society she was raised under to her detriment, as, I argue, she is limited by the supremacy mindset of her presumed centrality that she is unable to fully escape, leading to her being incapable of imagining a fulfilling life for herself by the end of The Awakening. The novel fails, in my view, to move past the limiting and internalized mindset of patriarchy and the dominant society's conceptions of future-oriented happiness. Ultimately, the ending and Edna's death redefines all feminist themes through the context of Chopin's version of white-centered feminism. I assert that Chopin's participation in white supremacy and investment in the privileges afforded to whiteness, is closely tied to her character, Edna's, resulting death and failure to imagine a future outside of that privileged space.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, English (Arts and Sciences)

WISLAND KIRK E, Ph.D., April 2022, English The Long Road Director of Dissertation: Eric LeMay The dissertation is comprised of two sections—a critical introduction titled “Pinning the Butterfly: Masculinity, Queerspawn, and the Living Elegy” and a book manuscript titled The Long Road. In “Pinning the Butterfly: Masculinity, Queerspawn and the Living Elegy,” Wisland explores the concept of “Queerspawn” and the genre of Queerspawn Memoir, seen in the nonfiction works of Abigail Garner, Alison Bechdel, Alysia Abbott, Susan Cheever, Alison Wearing, Gregory Martin, Stefan Lynch, Meema Spadola, Ariel Chesler and Jenny Gangloff-Rain. Based on his reading of these texts, Wisland elucidates five universal elements common to the Queerspawn Memoir: “Timestamp,” “Discovery,” “Otherness and Stigma,” “Secrecy and Silence,” and “Coming Out as Queerspawn”. He argues for the classification of Queerspawn Memoir as a genre within creative nonfiction as demonstrated by the above authors and his own work. He further identifies an additional subgenre of the Queerspawn Memoir—HIV Elegies—before noting that his own dissertation is an “Elegy for a Life Unlived,” a rare, tragic case that applies to the small band of long-term HIV survivors from his father's generation of gay men. On a chilly October night in 1986, Kirk Wisland's father shared earth-shattering news across a table in a crowded Wendy's restaurant: he, and his partner Dave, were HIV-positive. While shocking, this news was hardly surprising. HIV had been ravaging the gay community for years already, and fourteen-year-old Kirk mutely absorbed this news, and the expected short-term horizon of his father's life. Kirk's father starts setting grim calendars for the future: I want to make it to see your high school graduation. Fast-forward seventeen years, and Kirk's father, now a long-term HIV survivor living in Alaska, arrives in Minneapolis in mid-July at the helm of a motorhome, to begin a thirteen-day journey to San (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2021, German (Foreign Language)

This study examines the characteristics of the traditional German Kunstmarchen in Susanne Rockel's 2018 novel Der Vogelgott. Although the Kunstmarchen tradition is generally associated with the literary movement of Romanticism, I contend that Der Vogelgott unites contemporary topics with Romantic elements and is therefore a modern-day reimagination of the traditional German Kunstmarchen. Using Ludwig Tieck's Der Blonde Eckbert (1797) as an example, I examine the key motives characteristic for Romantic literature and analyze their representation in Rockel's novel to support my thesis. At the core of my research lies the examination of the Doppelganger motif, as it is the key element to understanding how reality and the world of the fantastic converge in Der Vogelgott. The theoretical framework of this study is informed by literary and philosophical theories of the late 18th and early 19th century in Germany. I draw on German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel's Athenaums Fragment, which outlines his poetic and aesthetic concepts for a Progressive Universalpoesie and investigate traces of Schlegel's concepts in Rockel's novel. The findings of my study shed new light on the German Kunstmarchen and prove that this tradition is not limited to the Romantic era but continues to the present day.

Bachelor of Music, Capital University, 2022, Music

Theatre is an art form with the capacity to enact real change in our communities. Because of the wide array of topics theatre explores, it can help us to hold up a mirror to real life, critique and comment on proceedings within it, hold space for human emotion and therefore catharsis, and get viewers invested in a good story. This begs a responsibility for theatrical professionals to tie in aspects of community outreach to create a more enriching show, and harness the true power of this art form. In this project, I will be producing and directing Indecent, as well as creating opportunities for community outreach through talkbacks, service projects, and campus engagement opportunities. I will be creating a directorial concept, choosing actors, designing a rehearsal plan, finding costumes, set design elements, lighting, sound, and anything else needed to produce the show, all while organizing the opportunities for community engagement, complementary to the show's themes of LGBTQ+ rights and the history of Yiddish theatre. I have received permission also to conduct interviews and surveys of audience members directly after the show as well as check-ins to measure how the themes resonated with them, and later, how they have noticed them appear in their lives since, or any changes they have made. In the final paper in the execution semester, I will then explore these effects through the findings of this production and outreach components to demonstrate that theatre has the ability, and therefore responsibility to benefit others.

PHD, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

J. R. R. Tolkien has been revered as the father of twentieth century fantasy, however many initially criticized him for his handling of textual matter as male-centric magical lands that did not feature prominent female roles or significant female characters. In this discussion I present the argument that Tolkien created a vast community of powerful female figures within his fantasy writing, that stem from the distinct and dominant female forces he creates within his academic translations and poetry. Therefore, my aim in this discussion is to highlight the powerful and female forward translations Tolkien creates within his writing of original medieval, Norse, and Celtic figures, and unveil how these characters lend shape to the powerful and dynamic female characters that appear within his original poetry and transform into the central figures that shape Middle-earth. My research brings together these women as a culmination of female community, not just singular figures, who comprise the dynamic and prominent figures who shape Tolkien's creative art. Through careful research, study, and using the medieval model of triptych, I illustrate the transient power of the community of female strength; a fluid and diverse repertoire of influential characters that culminate into the Triptych art of women in Tolkien's writing compendium.