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Ash Evans, ’17 PhD in Rhetoric and Composition

Update: Congratulations, Ash! She is now a visiting assistant professor of English at Pacific University.

Dissertation: Expanding Composition Pedagogies: A New Rhetoric from Social Media

Social media permeates our culture, including so much of the writing that students do in their daily lives. Using this writing in the composition classroom makes learning relevant and practical for students. Turning this writing into a reflective process helps them become more critical thinkers, thoughtful readers, and capable writers in all contexts, digital and non-digital.

I hope students see the writing they do on social media as complex not just because they receive ‘likes’ or have a lot of followers, but because they have consciously analyzed the best possible way to deliver a message. In the composition classroom, students practice delivering messages by engaging in critical thinking, learning about audiences, and situating messages within appropriate communities. I want composition students to do all of this, but I also want them to bring their social media knowledge to this process, and to gain a sophisticated, even playful awareness of how the affordances of the media allow them to communicate. For example, many students understand that rhetorical practices shift because of digitality; by blending words, video, text, images, emojis, and audio, the medium becomes pivotal to their composing processes online. Because they can see this so readily in digital environments, they can use that awareness to begin to understand the complexities of many other kinds of writing.

My dissertation examines how the field of Rhetoric and Composition can use social media to give students a more sustainable rhetoric for all writing contexts. Students especially seem to struggle when writing academic essays. After all, writing in a Word document for a somewhat nebulous audience with very little feedback is much harder than posting an update on Facebook and receiving multiple likes, shares, and comments within minutes. Cultivating social media habits into purposeful writerly choices will help students develop an expanded rhetorical repertoire and the ability to navigate many other forms of media too.

My chapters explore classical and contemporary understandings of medium, audience, ethos, context, and purpose, and I ‘revise’ these concepts—with the help of 51���� students—to provide a theory of rhetoric that responds to the writing environments students encounter in the twenty-first century. As a whole, my project encourages the field of Rhetoric and Composition to address the fast-paced, digital lives of students while still emphasizing the value of long-form, academic writing.

Andrew Kleinke, ’22 PhD student in Literature and Cultural Theory

Update: Andrew is now a Research and Governance Coordinator at ASQExcellence.

I spent my time at 51���� exploring how the processes of globalization have completely transformed what Americans eat. Multinational corporations have granted American consumers greater access to new cuisines, while improvements in digital media technologies have allowed people from around the world to share their meals instantaneously. Magazines like Bon Appétit and Food & Wine, two of the most prominent food media outlets in the United States, encourage readers to celebrate this abundance by eating and cooking a wide array of foods from immigrant communities. But instead of democratizing food production and consumption, the globalization of food and the discourse surrounding it have mostly served the interests of agricultural industries and transnational media corporations.

My dissertation looks at a range of food-focused novels, travelogues, memoirs, and even TV shows. I argue that these texts push back against globalization’s simplistic narratives of abundance. The first chapter examines culinary memoirs to analyze how immigrant and diasporic communities reproduce specific dishes to maintain active connections to their homelands, critiquing nationalistic calls to assimilate and forget. Later chapters explore the function of major media figures, such as Anthony Bourdain, who serve as cultural translators and intermediaries to American audiences. My work ultimately encourages American consumers to engage more closely with the historical dimensions of our nation’s agricultural and dining practices.

Allain Daigle, ’19 PhD in Media, Cinema and Digital Studies

Update: Allain is now an Instructional Designer at Penn State.

My research tells the story of how lenses became cinema lenses. While lenses are essential for film production, we know very little about the early history of cinema lenses. Rather than just focusing on which lenses were used on certain movies, I recount the history of how lens production became an industry. Lenses were once ground by hand, but between the 1880s and the 1920s, lens production shifted from an artisanal craft to a commercial industry. By looking at how companies created lenses for film production and projection, I expand early film history to account for the creative work of opticians, engineers, advertisers, and scientists.

This history of “cinema lenses” gives us a new perspective on ideas central to film studies: perspective, objectivity, subjectivity, and realism. I examine four influential optical companies in Germany (Zeiss), France (E. Krauss), the United States (Bausch & Lomb), and England (Taylor-Hobson). While each of these companies supplied lenses for motion picture use, the lenses were discussed and used in each country in very different ways. By examining lens producers alongside film history, we can see that lenses were not just the product of remarkable inventors or ever-improving designs. As I came to discover, lenses were in fact shaped by a wide range of debates (social, cultural, and industrial) about the role that sight played in 19th and 20th century life.

Ae Hee Lee, ’21 PhD in Creative Writing

Update: Ae Hee’s forthcoming book Asterism (Tupelo Press) was selected as the winner of the 2022 Dorset Prize.

In the context of globalization, the rising awareness of the world as an interconnected place, my poetry seeks to explore writing across languages and creative translation; it engages with the multiplicity of identity, with cross-cultural experience and communication.

I am working on a lyrical and semi-autobiographical collection of poetry situated in different times and places I have lived in: mainly localities within South Korea, Peru, and the United States. I view the distance I have experienced not simply as a confession of alienation but as a powerful source of critical reflection and creativity.

I ask questions about how private histories interweave with public ones and how they can influence each other: What does it mean to be a citizen? What is one’s place in culture? How do culture and nation influence one’s life? How do we change history?

The poems in my collection move across languages and selves, and ultimately challenge traditional ways of understanding otherness, belonging, and love between people of differing cultural backgrounds. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldua’s notion of the “new mestiza,” I am not interested in binaries. I am interested in complications and in-between spaces. I wish to relish the strangeness of everything and everyone and have it reflected in my poetry.

Alison Sperling, ’17 PhD in Literature and Cultural Theory

Dissertation: Weird Modernism

Update: Alison is now an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Florida State University.

My work aims to theorize “the Weird,” named as such in the supernatural horror of H.P. Lovecraft in the early part of the twentieth century in America. For Lovecraft and other contributors to the Modernist pulp magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954), the weird referred specifically to the multi-headed and tentacled creatures of the magazine’s supernatural world. But it also referred to a nameless terror, a cosmic horror that is “un-nameable” or that always evades linguistic representation. In this sense, I argue that the weird refers more broadly to a problematic sense of embodiment found in many other more familiar literary texts. I’m most interested in weird bodies that are temporally oriented toward the future, or in moments when the body-in-flux appears to be out of control, rapidly developing and changing, or morphing into something that no longer feels human anymore.

While some would argue that weird literature has been around since at least Poe, I think weird fiction finds its truest form in Modernism. It’s true that most of the texts I study never use the word “weird” even once. Perhaps that is because the word was already over-associated with sensational Lovecraftian terrors. However, I think Lovecraft’s conception of the weird can help us think through other anxieties present throughout the period, but that went by other names. For example, the unnameability of the weird sometimes seems to express Americans’ alienation from their own bodies in a rapidly changing modern world. Swift industrialization, militarization, new medical practices, the eugenics movement, and many other developments rapidly and profoundly changed the ways in which modern people experienced their own bodies. In thinking through these issues, I’m influenced by queer and feminist theory, theories of embodiment, and disability theory, and especially in the rich overlap between these fields. I’m also invested in theories of the nonhuman, speculative realism, eco-criticism, and animal studies, all of which converge throughout the chapters to inform my sense of the weird.

In addition to a chapter on Lovecraft, other chapters take up the work of Carson McCullers and “freakish” adolescence, William Faulkner and pregnancy, and Djuna Barnes and animality. Each chapter opens up new aspects of the weird by emphasizing its embodied, future-oriented nature within the world of the narrative. Ultimately, however, I hope to show how Modernism might be connected to our contemporary moment by examining the emergence of New Weird fiction which has flourished since around the turn of the twenty-first century.