In the late Middle Ages, the Italian word fama had a wide semantic range that encompassed such vitally important topics as reputation, honor, community memory, and trustworthiness. In this dissertation, I examine how fama manifested within sodomy prosecutions in late medieval Italy and what insights such prosecutions can give into...
This dissertation is a contribution to the depth and breadth of prison media history. I position prison media of the 1970s as key antecedents to the prison reality television of the 2000s and today. The purpose of this arrangement is to bring attention to an era of prison media that...
Scholars of early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires—an international theatre hub— disproportionately emphasize Spanish-language performances. This tendency erases the histories of immigrant performing artists, such as Yiddish-speaking Jews who fled en masse to Argentina in order to escape rising antisemitism in Europe and Russia. By focusing on Yiddish theatre in Buenos Aires, this...
This dissertation elucidates the contemporary dance studio and stage in twenty-first century Senegal as privileged sites of knowledge production about gender and sexuality. Entangled within local and global dance lineages, funding structures, and modes of circulation, contemporary choreographers perform their bodies in ways that challenge predominant narratives, both those imagined...
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...
Infidel(itie)s of Colour: Unruly Black Bodies, Modernity and Performance in Post-Apartheid South Africa focusses on the ways that queer and feminist artists of colour draw upon their traditional black cultural heritage and spiritual practises as a means of laying claim to cultural citizenship and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. I...
ABSTRACT', 'Reinventing Television and Family Life, 1960-1990', 'Hannah Spaulding', 'In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the field of television changed. A series of new electronic devices that interfaced directly with TV technology video cameras, home recorders, cable boxes, video calling systemswere introduced to the American public. These devices promised to...
This dissertation analyzes archival materials to examine the relationship between reproductive governance in India and the political and scientific dynamics of the Cold War. In 1952, India became the first country to institute anti-natalist population control as a national policy goal, concentrating its efforts on female sterilization and the building...
Developing an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is an important precursor to pursuing a STEM career. Given the United States’ relatively low standings in science and math compared to similar industrialized nations and its desire to be competitive in an increasingly STEM-based global economy, policy makers are...
This study explores the history of Bugwere, Busoga and Buganda, societies in present-day east-central Uganda, from the late first millennium and it does so through a focus on motherhood. Motherhood - as ideology and biology - impacted on almost every aspect of life in these societies, but did so in...
