Scholarly inquiry has yielded a wealth of evidence in support of narrative-based strategies for persuasion, and yet support for this approach is less consistent in relation to contentious or controversial issues. To better understand why this might be the case, the first part of this dissertation reports a theoretically-guided content...
In this dissertation, I assert that a contradictory aesthetic has remained and been reborn in the U.S. daytime soap opera through time and technology; I call this the “everyday implausible.” Using textual analysis and archival research, I follow this genre from its beginnings on radio, through its move to television...
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...
This project centers set design as the primary aesthetic, economic, and sociopolitical driver of the sitcom genre’s emergence and development during the first half of the twentieth century. My work treats sitcom set design as a category of historical architecture that can be (and has been) mapped, toured, built, and...
With more jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields available than people to fill them, the United States is extremely focused on increasing STEM education to address this gap in the future workforce. This focus is not exclusive to higher education and secondary schooling, but rather, it has...