This dissertation examines the legal, economic, and social transformations experienced by American widowed women from the Salem Witchcraft Trials to the Civil War to expand how scholars of literature, the law, and American history define women’s citizenship prior to suffrage. Emphasizing literature’s importance to nineteenth-century nation-building during the era of...
Christian artists use dramatic license and theatrical representation to mold idealized versions of the Bible into recreational spaces for popular consumption, such as immersive theaters, theme parks, and museums. For these Christian artists, the impulse to evangelize through theatrical representation overcomes deeply ingrained religious sentiments of antitheatricality and result in...
This dissertation examines how racially, ethnically, and sexually minoritized women embodied and contested competing images of national identity between World War II and the Cold War. I challenge dominant narratives of modern dance, which overlook gender politics as women left the art form and white men gained prominence in it...
“Embodying Race, Performing Citizenship” investigates racial and ethnic impersonationsin American popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, between the 1870s and the 1920s. I
focus my analyses on first-generation Irish, Chinese, and Jewish Eastern European artists and
their American-born children during a time when the United States had absorbed the highest
number of...
“National Acts: Performance, Commemoration, and the Construction of American Public Memory” explores how sites of public commemoration created during and after the American Civil War crafted conceptions of American public memory and identities through performative processes. This dissertation looks at three commemorative efforts: the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln,...
Guided by under-studied archival documents, including public-health and pharmaceutical advertisements, as well as contemporaneous visual art and performance pieces by queer artists of color, this dissertation analyses the critical and evolving role that aesthetics have played in combatting HIV/AIDS since the early days of the pandemic. Drawing on methods and...
There is a paradox at the center of twenty-first century American poverty. On the one hand, American poverty seems to have become an object of significant interest (at least to scholars and to the reading public)—as evidenced through the surge of wildly successful non-fiction books about poverty. On the other...
In a political climate where it is assumed that there are no alternatives to capitalism, architectural design and design-based activism are often heralded as providing solutions to capitalism’s negative effects. This dissertation is concerned with how contemporary architectural design naturalizes the organization of racial capitalist labor as it purports to...
Although Jewish studies, sociology, and performance studies texts abound with productive scholarship on Jewish men and their contributions to comedy in the mid-century United States, there is remarkably scant attention devoted to the equally significant contributions of their female counterparts. Nowhere is that bias clearer than the peculiar case of...
Between the 1880s and the 1980s, typography mutated from an entirely manual, craft-based practice to a comprehensively mechanized, then a fully digitized one. With the arrival of Apple’s Macintosh computer in 1984, the graphic design profession found itself in the midst of a deep transformation of its tools, techniques, and...
This dissertation argues that network television was a vehicle for the promotion and enactment of female intellectualism in the US during the period directly following World War II. Beginning in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, network television included among its offerings programs that were designed to appeal to...
“American Sediments” is a study of Black, white, and Indigenous literatures and complementary visual culture centered on the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, in texts written after Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—still the archetypal version of the Mississippi, but inevitably unaligned with historical changes, cultural diversities, and economic shifts...
This dissertation argues that the U.S.’s World War I experience helped condition Americans to relate to war primarily through cinematic recreations. The country’s geographical distance from the fighting provided Americans a degree of geopolitical spectatorship from which they could imagine their nation’s role in an ever-changing world through film. Onto...
This dissertation examines anti-Black race-based ideologies prevalent in early American musical theatre through a multi-faceted case study concerning Morgan Benson, a child actor of the early musical theatre stage, Target Parades of the long nineteenth-century, and The Black Joke. This is an excavation project, seeking to unearth conceptual underpinnings for...