Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, Instructional Technology (Education)

This qualitative case study explores how the LGBTQ+ community is included in informal STEM learning environments (ISLEs) such as museums and science centers. One science center was chosen as a case study to identify how ISLEs may broaden participation to the LGBTQ+ community, how institutional stance impacts LGBTQ+ community members, and how the systemic power structures of ISLEs affect inclusive practices. Through semi-structured interviews, exhibit and signage audits, and document analyses, the researcher examines how practices and policies welcome or exclude diverse identities in informal STEM education (ISE) by adapting Dawson's (2014a) equity and access framework. Findings from this analysis include a need to remove barriers to broaden LGBTQ+ participation; to implement policies and procedures to improve institutional stance towards the LGBTQ+ community; to increase queer representation in ISLEs; and to acknowledge LGBTQ+ individuals as agents of social change.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, History

This project explores the labor history of the Appalachian region and the presence of American labor history in the museum space and in public memory. The first section is a proposal for a Museum of Appalachian Labor Action, detailing the administrative and exhibitionary organization of a museum dedicated to the labor history of the Central, North Central, and Northern Appalachia, situated in Wheeling, West Virginia. The second section, a museum exhibition design titled “The Mine Wars Experience,” attempts to tell the history of the early 20th-century labor conflict, the West Virginia Mine Wars. The final section is an essay titled “Labor in the Museum,” an overall exploration of the place American labor history occupies in the museum space and in public memory more generally.

Bachelor of Arts, Walsh University, 2022, Honors

The Underground Railroad was an abolitionist movement against slavery in the United States in the years leading to the Civil War (1861-1865). The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) 's Learning Standards for eighth-grade Social Studies focus on the history of the United States from 1492-1877; however, within these learning standards, the Underground Railroad is not mentioned specifically. Although American slavery is introduced as a topic, forced labor and the ownership of human beings are discussed only in the context of affecting sectional issues that would lead to the Civil War. Presentation of the Underground Railroad as a migration and as a response to the institution of slavery is critical for students to gain a full, unbiased understanding of American history. To support teachers who do broach this topic in the classroom, my website, “The Underground Railroad in Ohio: Curriculum Resources and Lesson Plans for 8th-Grade Social Studies Teachers”, will foster museum-school partnerships and outline three lessons that will focus on significant people and places associated with the movement. It will also examine the topic with information, resources, and links about related historic sites, works of art, artifacts, and other primary sources. Regional historic sites in northeast Ohio, artifacts, and art offer a way of learning about the subject as well as an opportunity for schools to collaborate with museums. The goal of this project is to support eighth-grade Social Studies teachers in Ohio public schools to incorporate this topic into existing Learning Standards. It is also aimed at fostering connections between public schools and the local museums that will host this resource for teachers. By using historic sites, artifacts, and works of art, the goal of this project is for public schools and museums to work together to teach students about an important part of American history.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2022, Leadership and Change

Reframing Leadership Narratives Through the African American Lens explores the context-rich experiences of Black Museum executives to challenge dominant cultural perspectives of what constitutes a leader. Using critical narrative discourse analysis, this research foregrounds under-told narratives and reveals the leadership practices used to proliferate Black Museums to contrast the lack of racially diverse perspectives in the pedagogy of leadership studies. This was accomplished by investigating the origin stories of African American executives using organizational leadership and social movement theories as analytical lenses for making sense of leaders' tactics and strategies. Commentary from Black Museum leaders were interspersed with sentiments of “Sankofa” which signify the importance of preserving the wisdom of the past in an effort to empower current and future generations. This study contributes to closing the gap between race and leadership through a multidimensional lens, while amplifying lesser-known histories, increasing unexplored narrative exemplars, and providing greater empirical evidence from the point of view of African American leaders. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, History of Art

In 1970, artist Robert Smithson created Partially Buried Woodshed on the campus of Kent State University, covering an abandoned woodshed with soil until its central beam cracked. Unsettling traditional notions of landscape and environmental art, Smithson's project also addressed a connection to Ohio's indigenous earthworks, many of which were destroyed—or willfully overlooked—by white settlers during the Frontier Era. In the decades since, artists have continued to approach Ohio's landscape as a site and a subject, challenging the conventional representations of the state's history and cultural legacy. Gathering works from a diverse group of artists, the exhibition Partially Buried: Land-Based Art in Ohio, 1970 to Now grapples with the state's history as a former frontier territory, confronting unanswered questions around land use, interpretation, preservation, and representation.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, East Asian Studies

This thesis examines the interpretation and representation of Korea and Korean people through Korean art and material culture at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1914 – 1945). To meet these ends, this research focuses on contextualizing the museum and its Korean art collection through an intersectional lens that considers both Japanese colonial and Western hegemonies. This contextualization reveals how the purposes of the modernist, universal survey museum and the hermeneutics of Japanese colonial historiography of Korea and Eurocentric Orientalism incorporated the ways that Euro-Americans appropriated Korean material culture into the museum to understand Korean civilization and people, thus reproducing Japanese colonial hegemony over Korea and validating Western colonial-imperial hegemonies generally. Based on articles from The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art and other primary sources, Korea typically occupied a position under Japan in the museum's iconographic program. Similarly, museum professionals at CMA, such as Langdon and Lorraine D'O. Warner, were directly involved with the Japanese colonial apparatus in Korea, and admired its colonial efforts. I argue that this resulted in the double Orientalization of Korea, as such researchers adapted Japanese colonial knowledge about Korean material culture for the purposes of Western enlightenment, resulting in Korea becoming both the West's and Japan's inferior Other in the museum space.

BA, Oberlin College, 2020, Anthropology

This thesis explores the "life history" of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It chronicles NAGPRA's story beginning with what created the perceived need for such an act, the work and the groups of people that went into its ultimate advent in 1990, the "nitty-gritty" details/language of the policy itself, and its various successes and failures throughout the years. With research conducted through the lens of legal anthropology, this paper focuses on the certain "requirements" (education, class, race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, etc.) that have allowed people(s) to actively participate in the formation/policy-building of NAGPRA, become NAGPRA representatives, and benefit from the policy.The primary focus of this thesis is on the question "What is the legal culture of NAGPRA?" It examines NAGPRA's legal culture by utilizing American sociologists Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey's legal consciousnesses of before, with, and against the law. It then goes on to show that a fourth, new consciousness --beyond the law -- presents itself in the legal culture of NAGPRA. This fourth consciousness is developed in this thesis and necessary to more fully address the spirit of the law -- a key force in building and sustaining the legal culture of NAGPRA.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2020, Theatre

This MA Thesis seeks to continue a longstanding conversation in Theatre Studies about the role of the audience by looking at the concept of active and passive spectators through the lens of play theory and establishing a new category of creative spectator. This study analyzes the way of conceptualizing and engaging visitors in a “visitor-centered museum” developed by the Columbus Museum of Art in 2012 to argue that this method can be adapted and applied to theatre spectators. Finally, I suggest various strategies for transforming theatre lobbies into audience-dominated spaces, which shifts the focus of scholarly conversation away from how spectators perceive what they see on stage, a space controlled by actors, designers, and directors, to what they see and how they interact with material in a space over which they can have more control in the process of making. Using this field of theory and praxis moves the conversation of spectatorship from the stage to audience-dominated spaces, in particular, the lobby.

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2020, Environmental Studies (Voinovich)

Urban stormwater runoff has become of increasing concern as urban sprawl has increased over decades. With more impervious surfaces, stormwater quickly passes into freshwater ecosystems with little to no water percolating into the soil. Even if there are not impervious surfaces, stormwater may pass over agricultural lands where nitrogen and phosphorus are easily available to flow into aquatic environments. Management plans are now using different strategies to filter out sediment and nutrients before they enter lotic or large lentic ecosystems. These small ponds or constructed wetlands have larger pieces of sediment settle before they have an opportunity to flow into a larger water body. While this has shown to be a successful and useful tool to filter out materials, horizontal (lateral) movement of water during flood events has become a concern. Species in a wetland can migrate in and out of the wetland into a lentic or lotic ecosystem, returning for refuge and breeding habits. If the wetland and larger water body become cut off they develop their own line of succession. The purpose of this study is to understand and characterize the water quality between an urban stormwater wetland and the headwaters of the Hocking River. Evaluate differences of biotic assemblages in the two water bodies and present information to the neighboring AHA! A Hands-On Adventure A Children's Museum. These goals are done by conducting: fish, invertebrate, crayfish and field parameter tests.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

From computational and scientific viewpoints, virtual reality (VR) is a well-researched technology, platform, and mode of communication. However, from an arts perspective, virtual reality has very few, if any, defined parameters as an artistic medium. This study aims to explore the technical affordances and the experiential and creative phenomena of art-making in virtual reality in an effort to establish VR as a contemporary artistic medium framed within an arts and museum education context. The embodied, open-ended play of art-making with the virtual medium presents a different kind of user experience than most other VR applications, which deserves alternative ways of classifying the immersive elements of virtual art-making. By using the social cognitive framework (Bandura, 1986) to guide my research, I consider the dynamic relationship between environment, person, and behavior in order to understand not only the technical elements, but also what type of immersive process and embodied creativity virtual artists experience and what types of art can they make. Through a phenomenological framework, design-thinking approach, and an arts-based research methodology, this study analyzes data collected from participants and uses data visualizations to bring the research to life and make it accessible for all audiences and fields of study. Additionally, this project aims to discover how artists and educators can use the virtual medium to inspire creativity and impactful art experiences within museum spaces in ways that transport the visitors from viewer-of-art to maker-of-art.

Bachelor of Arts, Ohio University, 2020, Political Science

This thesis explores how historical sites impact the collective memory of slavery in the United States.

Bachelor of Arts, Walsh University, 2020, Honors

According to the American Alliance of Museums, the national professional museum association in the United States, museums are intended to serve society. Of its various obligations, a board of trustees' most significant role is to oversee an institution's fiduciary responsibilities and to set policy. Trustees are accountable for implementing the mission and ensuring that the institution adheres to ethical standards. However, public confidence is not easily earned because a concrete benchmark of success for a board of trustees is nonexistent. Instead, a board's effectiveness is determined by the public's point of view and opinions. Museum leadership must therefore go above and beyond legal requirements in order to maintain the public's trust. This research consists of a review of previous research, an analysis of three case studies, and a culminating conclusion about the findings from each case study. The following designated financial gifts are examined: the Sackler family's $3.5 million donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974, Kenneth E. Behring's $80 million donation to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in 2000, and David H. Koch's $35 million donation to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in 2012. Based off the conclusions, the researcher created a rubric for trustees of American museums to use when evaluating a potential designated financial gift based off findings from the analyses. Building on research of financial gifts may promote healthy donor-trustee relationships and subsequently maintain the public's confidence.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2020, Art/Art History

The CoBrA art movement (1948-1951) stands prominently among the few European avant-garde groups formed in the aftermath of World War II. Emphasizing international collaboration, rejecting the past, and embracing spontaneity and intuition, CoBrA artists created artworks expressing fundamental human creativity. Although the group was dominated by men, a small number of women were associated with CoBrA, two of whom continue to be the subject of debate within CoBrA scholarship to this day: the Danish painter Else Alfelt (1910-1974) and the Dutch sculptor Lotti van der Gaag (1923-1999), known as "Lotti." In contributing to this debate, I address the work and CoBrA membership status of Alfelt and Lotti by comparing their artworks to CoBrA's two main manifestoes, texts that together provide the clearest definition of the group's overall ideas and theories. Alfelt, while recognized as a full CoBrA member, created structured, geometric paintings, influenced by German Expressionism and traditional Japanese art; I thus argue that her work does not fit the group's formal aesthetic or philosophy. Conversely Lotti, who was never asked to join CoBrA, and was rejected from exhibiting with the group, produced sculptures with rough, intuitive, and childlike forms that clearly do fit CoBrA's ideas as presented in its two manifestoes. Examining Alfelt's and Lotti's individual roles within CoBrA through the feminist art theories of Linda Nochlin and Laura Mulvey, writings by scholars and art historians, and exhibitions and collections, I focus on individual and institutional influences, and patriarchal contexts that shaped these two artists' status in relation to CoBrA membership. In doing so, I also pose questions about who belongs in any art movement, and who gets to decide who belongs, and how all of this is defined complexly over time.

Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 2020, Communication Disorders

Communicative accessibility is often sparse, preventing individuals with communication disorders from effectively participating in their lives and in society. Supported Conversation for Adults with Aphasia (SCA) teaches interlocutors to provide communicative supports to people with aphasia or other communication disorders so that they may rejoin the conversation and continue interacting in their communities. This study aimed to train volunteer docents at the Toledo Museum of Art to effectively provide aphasia-friendly art museum tours and aimed to understand the process involved in developing and executing that training. 13 volunteer docents were trained in SCA strategies during a 60-minute training program presented by a person with aphasia (PWA), a speech-language pathologist, and a speech-language pathology graduate student. A single volunteer docent was then observed across four art gallery tours for SCA strategy use. Triangulation between docent observation, questionnaires with PWA, and interviews with PWA indicate that training was beneficial and may have assisted the docent in providing aphasia-friendly tours. Interviews with project collaborators were additionally conducted, indicating that the project offered a variety of benefits for many potential populations. Feedback was provided to inform future training efforts.

MLIS, Kent State University, 2019, College of Communication and Information / School of Information

This study addresses the following research question: How do visitors describe the role of a technology-based interactive in their experience with associated museum objects? In-depth, semi-structured lifeworld interviews were conducted with three visitors to the Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. The interviews focused on the participant's experience with a touch table interactive and the associated objects located in the Antiquities Gallery at the museum. A qualitative approach that focuses on the lived experience of a small group of participants called Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to analyze data collected through the interviews. This study also uses the Object Knowledge Framework (OKF) developed by Wood and Latham (2014) to provide orientation throughout the study, and to help position the ways in which the visitor experiences the objects through the technology-based interactive. The research resulted in five themes which the visitors described in their experiences with the touch table interactive and the museum objects: 1) Visitor Expectations and Assumptions, 2) Who/What is it for?, 3) Social Interactions, 4) Personal Connections, and 5) Digital vs. Real. Overall this study helps us to understand the visitor's perspective on their experience with museum objects and role technology-based interactives play in that experience. It also revealed new questions that could become topics for future research on visitor-object experience.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

Although the first balloon flights in 1783 created a sensation throughout Europe, human flight had long captured the imaginations of scientific and literary authors alike. Prior histories of flight begin with balloons, but earlier centuries boasted a strange and colorful aviary that shaped thinking about flight long before the first balloon ever left the ground. Taking a cultural materialist approach informed by a broad familiarity with the development of early flight machines and a deep familiarity with the literary conventions of the period, I analyze historical materials ranging from aeronautical treatises to stage pantomimes, from newspaper advertisements to philosophical poems, from mechanical diagrams to satirical cartoons. This earlier culture possessed high hopes and anxieties about human flight. I argue that early flight was lively and varied before the invention of a successful flying machine, and that these early flights were important because they established an aerial tradition astonishingly resistant to change. Rather than revolutionizing the culture, ballooning was quickly incorporated into it. Although ballooning came to be regarded as a failure by many onlookers, the aerial tradition had long become accustomed to failure and continued unabated. Human flight has always promised tremendous and yet debatable utility, a paradox that continues into the present age.

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), University of Findlay, 2019, Education

Empirical evidence of docent training practices in nationally accredited museums in the United States is limited. Much information can be found in the literature on recommended educational theories that can serve as a basis for docent training practices as well as prescriptive advice for quality docent education; however, detailed information about the actual practices being implemented in docent training programs is sparse. Studies have shown that museum educators agree with and encourage documented educational theories in museums in terms of the exhibits and interpretive materials, however, when instructing the docents within their museums, the museum educators may not be utilizing the theories that they espouse. The evidence in teacher education as well as museum education shows that modeling of the intended strategies is the preferred method for instruction, but evidence of docent training practices gives little proof of this idea being practiced. The current study was designed to uncover the actual practices and theories being utilized in docent training programs across the United States in museums that are accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Additionally, the Adult Learning Model for Faculty Development (Lawler & King, 2000), a model recommended for the planning and implementation of adult education is applied as a map to guide the inquiry regarding docent training programs.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Biological Sciences (Arts and Sciences)

In a rapidly changing world, species are faced with habitat alteration, changing climate and weather patterns, changing community interactions, novel resources, novel dangers, and a host of other natural and anthropogenic challenges. Conservationists endeavor to understand how changing ecology will impact local populations and local communities so efforts and funds can be allocated to those taxa/ecosystems exhibiting the greatest need. Ecological morphological and functional morphological research form the foundation of our understanding of selection-driven morphological evolution. Studies which identify and describe ecomorphological or functional morphological relationships will improve our fundamental understanding of how taxa respond to ecological selective pressures and will improve our ability to identify and conserve those aspects of nature unable to cope with rapid change. The New World wood warblers (family Parulidae) exhibit extensive taxonomic, behavioral, ecological, and morphological variation. Ever growing museum collections, life history data availability, citizen science-collected behavior data availability, advances in statistical techniques, and advances in Parulid warbler phylogenetic relationships prime the family for modern ecomorphological and functional morphological study. I combined morphological and migration distance data from museum specimens and ecological data from the literature to explore ecomorphological patterns in a phylogenetic context at the level of the Parulidae. Morphological similarity among warblers mirrors genetic similarity except for traits associated with flight. Wing aspect and tail length have been shown to be influenced by both migration distance as well as foraging habitat structural openness. Selective pressures encountered during migration may drive a wing shape less suited for locomotion within the breeding and wintering environments and the shapes of modern migrant wings may represent functional trade-offs. Many w (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2019, Arts Policy and Administration

Using the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) in Columbus, Ohio as a case study, this thesis explores how American art museums can position themselves to become more diverse and inclusive institutions. The research comes at a critical moment when discussions concerning diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility are mounting in the museum field, the United States is consistently confronting problems with intolerance surrounding difference, and the nation's minority population is growing exponentially. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with staff members and volunteers associated with the CMA and the analysis of privately and publicly available documents. By examining the CMA's initiatives, relationships, and organizational priorities, four findings emerged: the visitor-centered focus of the museum positions the institution to better address diversity and inclusion work, the museum operates as an open system that leads to collaboration and innovation, the museum's emphasis on community relationships results in increased inclusion and diverse perspectives, and the museum provides varied programming that aims to serve a diverse audience. Based on the findings, this study concludes that museums striving to make a commitment to diversity and inclusion should consider operating as an open museum system with a visitor-centered focus and an emphasis on community relationships, as it may enhance diversity and inclusion work. The study also provides recommendations for improved diversity and inclusion work at art museums across the country.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Art Education

This study addresses two research questions: What are Latinx visitors' experiences of their conflicted subjectivity, in experiencing both enjoyment and alienation, within the context of encyclopedic art museums? Furthermore, how do Latinx visitors enact belonging within encyclopedic art museums? These questions redress a gap in the museum literature that discounts the impact of race and ethnicity on visitor experience and subjectivity in favor of universalized models of visitor learning and motivation. The study draws from the theorization of Latinx scholars and artists who have noted the dual experience of pleasure and alienation due to the museum's inattention to their racial and ethnic identity to further a culturally responsive study of Latinx visitor experience. Through this intervention, I advance theorization of how Latinxs both participate in, and contest, the Eurocentric narratives of national heritage that are proposed by encyclopedic art museums. I argue that the conflicted subjectivity experienced by Latinx visitors to encyclopedic art museums is a manifestation of an epistemic and ontological conflict: the ways in which encyclopedic art museums represent Latinidad does not accord with the ways in which some Latinx visitors figure their own subjectivity. By exploring how Latinx museum visitors experience this epistemic and ontological conflict the dissertation offers practical and theoretical guidelines for institutional change that will foster museum visitor inclusion and work toward the decolonization of the encyclopedic art museum. I also question the significance of belonging as a museum aim for its visitors, as well as suggest that the topic requires further study, and propose that welcome might be a more relevant type of experience for Latinx visitors.