51ÁÔĆć

Kristin Prins, ’15 PhD in Rhetoric and Composition

Dissertation: Materiality, Craft, Identity, and Embodiment: Reworking Digital Writing

Update: Kristin is an associate professor in the Department of English & Modern Languages at .

As a graduate student in Rhetoric and Composition, I study multimodal writing—how people compose with words, images, sounds, videos, textures, gestures, etc.—and I’m interested in connections between crafting (or making things) and writing (or composing things).

Traditional and digital crafts have enjoyed huge popularity in the past fifteen years, and groups like Stitch ’n Bitch and Sparrow Collective, activist organizations like Cast Off, websites like Craftster and Ravelry, and places like the 51ÁÔĆć Studio Arts & Craft Centre and Milwaukee Makerspace are all parts of that movement. It has become common in our society for regular people to make digital and physical objects to meet their needs, shape other people’s thinking, circulate information, and amuse their friends. And there’s a lot of excitement and pleasure that comes from that kind of work.

Crafters have a lot to teach us about building better writing practices and better communities. I want to leverage the excitement and pleasure of craft work in ways that help writers get better at, and feel better about, actually writing. My dissertation digs into craft and do-it-yourself (DIY) histories and practices to help writers pay attention to the range of choices they can make as they compose multimodal texts and, of course, to help them choose better. My goal is to get students excited about what their writing can do, such as engaging readers or helping readers see things from a new perspective. I also want students to see exactly how they can accomplish those things, by writing really smart sentences or by combining images and sounds in more compelling ways.

Beyond my dissertation, I’m interested in researching the work that craft and DIY do as productive social practices that touch many areas of our lives. How do multimodal projects shape public discussions? How have yarnbombers redefined urban spaces and the ways people use them? How have digital crafters made political arguments by Photoshopping images on social media? How have acts of self-provisioning like urban gardening changed national conversations about production and consumption? Craft and DIY are complex rhetorical activities, and my research is trying to understand how that work works.

Molly Kessler, ’17 PhD in Professional and Technical Writing

Dissertation: Bodily Boundaries: Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Rhetorical Enactments of Self

Update: Molly is an Associate Professor in the Writing Studies program at the and the program’s director of graduate studies.

My work explores the ways in which women with chronic illnesses discuss their diseases, bodies, and minds. Focusing specifically on Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD), my research examines how patients justify, negotiate, and cope with their disease. Given IBD’s elusive, sometimes embarrassing, symptoms, IBD patients often find themselves in one moment struggling to convince healthcare providers their disease exists, and in the next moment, attempting to hide their disease from everyone else.

Patients with IBD commonly spend years assessing their symptoms, everyday experiences, medical test results, and physician examinations in order to reach an eventual diagnosis. And, when and if an official diagnosis is reached, how to treat IBD—physically, mentally, and emotionally—often remains an amorphous task. Even more, because IBD’s symptoms typically are invisible, patients must confront the difficulty of revealing or concealing their disease to family members, spouses, friends, coworkers, etc. Communicating about IBD, however, isn’t always confined to language. In fact, in many cases, patients rely on visual cues, such as displaying an ostomy bag or revealing abdominal scars, to express aspects of IBD.

Every different audience and context presents a new rhetorical dilemma in which sufferers of IBD must establish and maintain a different disease identity. They must persuade outsiders that their invisible disease is both real and valid, in addition to communicating any necessary accommodations. For instance, posting a picture of abdominal scars on Twitter requires different rhetorical finesse than justifying an unusual number of trips to the bathroom to your new boss.

My dissertation first traces the medical and social histories of IBD, examining the root of the stigmas surrounding IBD and analyzing the demand for visual evidence, particularly with chronic illnesses, in order for diseases to be deemed real. My chapters then turn to interview and observational data to further examine how IBD patients navigate life with IBD, from work to body image to sexual activity, and how patients with IBD selectively reveal and conceal their disease to specific audiences.

I hope my work sheds new light on the communication challenges IBD patients face and the rhetorical adaptations they have to develop to navigate their lives.

Louise Zamparutti, ’18 PhD in Professional and Technical Writing

Update: Louise is an Assistant Professor of English at the .

The Basovizza Monument in northeast Italy was inaugurated as a national memorial in 2007. The monument commemorates victims of a so-called “Italian genocide” instigated by Yugoslavians at the end of World War II, a claim that is not substantiated through physical evidence. The designation of the site as a place of national memory and the narrative that it produces were initially very controversial and the monument was widely regarded as the brainchild of Italy’s far-right political parties. Today, however, the monument is a popular site for tourists from all over Italy and for classroom visits, and its popularity is enhanced through its evocative website and social media presence. It is no longer controversial or political.

My dissertation investigates how this monument transformed a politically divisive issue into a publicly accepted national narrative. I show how the monument combines claims of objectivity and fact with evocative, emotionally charged imagery in order to produce a new version of Italy’s World War II history. The motive and intent behind the monument’s narrative is invisible due to a form that invokes credibility and legitimacy.

I collected multiple forms of data, including photographs, interviews, and texts and media in support of the monument’s construction. I tracked recurring themes and motifs expressed in the monument and the supporting discourse. I identified specific argumentation strategies and showed how those strategies, by reinforcing established discourse, legitimize the narrative presented by the monument.

My research allows us to analyze how controversial issues become legitimized discourse, and invites inquiry into how the reverse might occur; that is, how non-controversial issues, discourses, and artifacts (such as monuments) might become controversial. Ultimately I hope to identify the incremental steps by which extreme viewpoints and actions manage to achieve normalization and public acceptance.

Kevin McColley, ’20 PhD in Creative Writing

I am currently writing a novel (entitled Man of God) that explores the early settlement of the uppermost of the upper-midwestern United States and the clash of the Ojibway, Lakota, and European-American cultures that occurred there as the American frontier pushed west, culminating in the 1862 Lakota Uprising in southern Minnesota that resulted in the deaths of as many as three thousand European-American settlers. Writing historical fiction is a research challenge: ferreting accounts that can be trusted, and, for those that can’t be, understanding why they were written as they were written. For Man of God, I was fortunate to find memoirs of the first missionaries to the region in the 1840s, as well as eye-witness accounts of the uprising from both Lakota and European-American perspectives. My job now is to meld all that information into an engaging, yet accurate, account. At a deeper level, Man of God explores the nature of historical fiction in contemporary America—a “western,” in a time and place where the assumptions and mores of the traditional western novel are, thankfully, either seriously challenged or already overthrown.

I have published six novels, the last two of which were nominated by their publisher, Simon and Schuster, for the National Book Award. I am a military veteran, and a thread that runs through all my published work (as well as Man of God) is the theme of war and especially war trauma, how those who suffer from war deal with that suffering, and how American society accepts or refuses to accept the war-wounded who have returned to it.

Jeremy Carnes, ’20 PhD in Literature and Cultural Theory

Update: Jeremy is on the graduate faculty of the English, Rhetoric & Composition program at the Univeristy Of Central Florida.

We usually arrange American literature in historical categories from realism to modernism to postmodernism and beyond. To think around the continually overstretched reach of this historical schema, I look to a type of literature that has, for many years, existed and flourished outside the realm of academia: comics. As Jared Gardener puts it, “almost never being respectable, comics has been left to develop its own language and its own unique relationship with readers, often for long periods.” Because of its independent development, comics require not only different historical categories but different assumptions about the relationship between literature and history.

My dissertation begins by focusing on Art Spiegelman’s 2004 collection In the Shadow of No Towers, which chronicles his experiences during and after the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Through his consistent mixing of the past with the present, Spiegelman practices what I call transhistoric reading, where texts exist simultaneously within and beyond their historic moment. Reading in this way allows these texts to complicate our relationships with events, stories, and cultural productions across histories and periods. Transhistoric reading opens new pathways for studying literatures of minoritized groups, and reading across history also starts the process of bringing equity to comics studies. My latter chapters focus on Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men, Black Panther, and the Indigenous comics collection Moonshot to argue that such a broadening of historical understanding pushes literary studies to rethink how we approach history, especially as it is tied to various identity categories including gender, sexuality, race, and indigeneity.

Eric Herhuth, ’15 PhD in Media, Cinema and Digital Studies

Dissertation: Animating Aesthetics: Pixar and Digital Culture

Update: Eric is now an associate professor in the Department of Communication at .

My teaching and research focus on the study of animation and film, modernization and technology, media theory, and globalization. My dissertation examines how the Pixar features of the 1990s and early 2000s emphasize the role of aesthetics in socio-cultural change. Rather than relegate animation to the domain of children’s entertainment or obfuscate its distinction from live-action film, my work demonstrates how Pixar films actively explore the effects of technological change. Whether depicting a boy frightened by his toys coming to life or a rat becoming a great chef, these films examine the challenges of living in a world in which knowledge is limited and plural, and in which nature is always subject to change.

Analyzing Pixar’s features also helps us understand what we mean by the terms “animation” or “animated film.” This is useful given that all films are actually animated, and digital production is often understood as having more in common with animation techniques than with the techniques of live-action cinema. In light of the ongoing transition to digital media, which includes the expansion of animated media, it is useful to understand the historical and cultural significance of animation’s distinct aesthetics and interpretive communities.

The chapters of my dissertation detail the uncanny integrity of digital commodities in the Toy Story films, the transition from a technological to a postmodern sublime in Monsters, Inc., the role of exceptional bodies and spaces in The Incredibles, and the political work of sensation and mediation in Ratatouille. Overall, my project demonstrates how popular animated media engage contemporary philosophical questions about how we know the world, how technology influences that process, and how aesthetics are fundamental to political thought.

In my broader work, I’m engaged in debates about the relationship between animation, film history and theory, and digital production, as well as discussions about the cultural and political effects of the expansion of animated, moving image media through digital culture. My work on animation and media has been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Cinema Journal.

Danielle DeVasto, ’18 PhD in Rhetoric and Composition

Update: Danielle joined in 2019 as an Assistant Professor in the Writing Department.

Riddled with geologic faults, Italy has a long history of earthquakes and other seismic activity. So, the 6.3-magnitude earthquake (and its ensuing damage) that struck the central Italian city of L’Aquila on April 6, 2009, while tragic, is not surprising. Italy does not, however, have a history of holding trials over such seismicity. In the wake of the devastating earthquake, which resulted in over 300 deaths and 10 billion euros in damage, seven scientists were charged with manslaughter for failing to appropriately warn the public. Relatives of some of the victims argued that the victims changed their habits (i.e., staying at home the night of the earthquake) after hearing the interviews and press conferences. Lengthy public trials ensued from 2011-2015. The indictment, conviction, and now partial-acquittal have elicited international uproar, adding earthquakes to a growing body of high stakes scientific controversies – such as GMOs, vaccines, and climate change – in which publics must interact with scientists. This earthquake and its trial entangled the public, the political, and the technical, foregrounding the specific challenges of communication between experts and publics about risk and uncertainty. As the unprecedented occurrence of a criminal trial indicates, the stakes surrounding the communication of risk and uncertainty – for experts and publics alike – have never been higher.

My dissertation, then, explores the L’Aquila controversy, which provides a unique opportunity for studying the communication between scientists and publics. Seismology as a science is young, and, when it comes to understanding earthquakes, rather uncertain with no resolutions on the horizon; it involves complicated systems on a time scale that spans billions of years. Communication about these technical aspects is inherently difficult, let alone accounting for the political, personal, environmental, economic, and so forth. Ultimately, with this project, I want to understand how situations such as L’Aquila can be better negotiated both by expert and by public stakeholders. I suggest that rhetorically-oriented approaches can improve this fraught communication, and I explore new synergies among three concepts which rhetoricians have treated separately but which are inextricably entangled in situations like L’Aquila: agency, expertise, and uncertainty. I believe that contemporary rhetorical theory can help develop methods and frameworks that will improve communication about risk and uncertainty and support civic agency in risk communication, including in situations of potentially cataclysmic geological events.

Ching-In Chen, ’15 PhD in Creative Writing

Dissertation: Recombinant

Update: Ching-in is an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the .

Recombinant is a hybrid collection of poems that investigates female and genderqueer lineage in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. In this book-length project, I examine the challenges of communal memory by juxtaposing voices from Asian, African and indigenous communities in the Americas. Set in a speculative future, these voices simultaneously inhabit their own spaces and share pathways, a theme developed through manipulation of white space on the page.

The narrative speculates about the origins of M. Lao, a snakehead matriarch who has created a business empire from a fictional edu-tainment park, CoolieWorld, which traffics in the history of coolie labor. In the narrative, M. Lao is forced to confront her troubled relationship to her gender-non-conforming child who has disappeared as she considers her own history of migration, trauma, survival, self-invention and complicity in the trafficking of migrants.

These writings force voices from various communities to interact with each other through the poems’ innovative graphic and representational practices. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan asserts that “diasporan realities do show up the poverty of conventional modes of representation with their insistence on single-rooted, non-traveling, natural origins. But this calls for multi-directional, heterogeneous modes of representation.” By drawing on Radhakrishnan’s ideas, I create a diasporic poetics that contains multiple voices within a single space on the page.

Poems that attempt to make sense of historical remnant share space with M. Lao’s fragmented narrative. I also blend historical incidents such as the 1899 anti-Chinese Milwaukee riots with the speculative realm of Coolie World, and in doing so think about how a city renegotiates its identity during long periods of constant redevelopment. To this end, I utilize historical artifacts including photographs, newspaper articles, maps, city directory listings, and records of immigration, birth and death, as well as scholarly research and archaeological records. These kinds of materials contain the shared memory of a community, and by juxtaposing, re-mixing, re-combining and erasing these found texts, Recombinant examines both the erasure and reconstruction of community history.

In addition to my creative dissertation, I am working on a critical introduction that draws upon my research in diasporic literatures, speculative poetries and queer and trans literatures. In the introduction, I trace the lineage of Recombinant by considering “genre-queer” texts including Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution; Sharon Bridgforth’s performance novel Love/Conjure Blues and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! These books, and many others, share an interest in communal trauma and in the ethical dilemmas that narrating horrific events entail.

Brittany Cavallaro, ’18 PhD in Creative Writing

Update: Brittany is the author of the New York Times bestselling Charlotte Holmes series for young adults. In addition to the four Charlotte Holmes books, she has a young adult duology set – Muse and Manifest. She is also an Instructor of Creative Writing at Interlochen Arts Academy.

Dissertation: Unhistorical

My poetry manuscript and creative dissertation, Unhistorical, combines transformative writing, historical narratives, and detective fiction to tell the story of a contemporary romantic relationship that begins in Scotland and falls apart in America, as the narrator finds herself in the role of spectator to her partner’s genius. Many of these poems are written in the elegiac mode, following a speaker who is, as turns, tourist and historian. These poems bookend the manuscript, while a Sherlock Holmes murder mystery is at the manuscript’s center I wanted to tell a mystery story through diary entries and monologue, obscuring the actual whodunit in order to foreground the emotional relationship between detective and detective’s assistant—that is to say, again, genius and spectator. In the bookending sections, I pull antiquated language from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories to underscore the emotional parallels between this relationship and the Holmes and Watson narrative. As a whole, the poems in Unhistorical are interested in inheritance and expectation.

In addition to my poetic work, I’m the author of the Charlotte Holmes series of young adult novels for Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. The first of these, A Study in Charlotte, was released in early 2016, with sequels to follow in 2017 and 2018. These young adult novels reimagine Sherlock Holmes as a brilliant, flawed teenage girl at a boarding school. Along with her best friend Jamie Watson, Charlotte is framed for the murder of her rapist. Like Unhistorical, A Study in Charlotte is interested in ideas of inheritance and expectation: here, those expectations are family ones, as Charlotte and Jamie are the great-great-grandchildren of the original Holmes and Watson. In many ways Unhistorical and the Charlotte Holmes books feel like two sides of the same project, albeit for different audiences.

Avery Edenfield, ’16 PhD in Professional and Technical Writing

Dissertation: Collective Management in a Cooperative: Problematizing Productivity and Power

Update: Avery is an associate professor in the Department of English at . 

My dissertation examines communication practices in a cooperatively owned, collectively managed company, the Riverwest Public House Cooperative here in Milwaukee. The Public House was one of the first cooperatively owned venues in the United States. It is collectively run by workers with oversight by an elected Board of Directors.

Using actor-network theory, I’m analyzing the rhetorical construction of the Public House over time. One area in particular I’ve focused on is the formation and dissolution of the founding network, the network in which the organization’s bylaws were originally designed. I designed a qualitative research project that includes observations, interviews, and textual analysis over a year with participants that included past and present Directors and employees.

One complication I examine involves the production of workplace texts like employee handbooks, incident reports, signs, and codes of conduct. These are not only collaboratively produced, but also collaboratively enforced. Over time, however, the meanings of such documents can shift, and that can affect the community in ways other than originally imagined.

For example, Chapter 185 of Wisconsin State Statue dictates that after bylaws are adopted by a temporary board, they “can only be changed by members unless the members adopt a bylaw which permits the board to make and amend specified bylaws” (185.07). Currently, the Public House doesn’t have such a stipulation, which makes bylaws very difficult to alter. The existing Board must interpret the current bylaws, written four years ago, to apply to present business needs. My dissertation, in part, looks at the interpretation process of the Public House bylaws in light of a recent crisis and the events that followed.

I hope to expand this research to examine communication in other alternative economic models, especially in light of the growth of the sharing economy, including peer-to-peer companies like Uber and Airbnb. In the classroom, my research has made me more interested in open-source materials, which can thought of as a more informal cooperative venture. My technical writing courses feature an open source documentation project, and I’m excited about how this research can inform collaborative learning in the classroom.