Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and theLiterature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth CenturyThis dissertation examines the interstices of tourism, visual culture, and the literature of travel, including guidebooks, travel narratives, novels, and ephemera. Situating the origins...
The “Troubled Teen” behavior reform industry is comprised of financially interconnected wilderness programs, residential treatment centers, and reform schools that incarcerate thousands of minors each year by marketing a supposed cure to non-normativity, and monetizing the discrimination and...
My dissertation explores how sound informs the representation of cross-cultural interactions within early modern drama and travel writing. &ldquoSounding;” implies the process of producing music or noise, but it also suggests the attempt to make meaning of what one hears. &ldquoOtherness;” in...
This dissertation explores the historical developments and progressions that led up to the uprisings at Gallaudet University. The uprisings, the 1988 Deaf President Now and the 2006 Unity for Gallaudet (also known as Better President Now) protests, were not accidental nor were they even isolated...
"Force. Spirit. Feeling": Rewriting the Slave Ship in Contemporary African American Literature examines the trope of the slave ship in late twentieth-century African American literature. I argue that while the slave ship is a site of historical trauma, the ship space has been repurposed to...
This project is an attempt to draw attention to the ways in which contemporary formations of language ideology have influenced contemporary readings of the multilingual practice of the fourteenth-century English author John Gower. By unpacking the relationship between his role as an “English”...
This dissertation explores the relationship between the legal account of criminality and the cultural narratives sustaining it during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It considers how the singular importance of precedent to Anglo-American law resulted in an imagery of historical...
In this dissertation, I investigate the ways that spiritual narratives have been represented in secular modernist novels and examine and deconstruct the secular/spiritual binary commonly used in their critique. In light of revised theories of secularization that suggest the so-called secular age...
Ezra Pound has clear authorial intentions for his 40 year work, the Cantos, of which the Pisan Cantos form a pivotal evolution, as well as an independent series of 11 poems. Meanings do exist, at least in the author’s corporeal mental vision. Yet, the text remains notoriously difficult....