Dissertation Titles

The scholarly interests of the graduates from the four joint PhD programs are wide-ranging. Recent dissertations have explored how cultural ideologies about gender, race, and class influence social norms for appropriate and acceptable bodies; the history of perfume and how the sense of smell contributed to people’s understandings of self and culture; the role of gender, race, and class anomalies in the production of Black medical doctors in South Africa during apartheid: gender roles in intimate relationships; and Midwestern black and white racial and ethnic identities. The feminist scholarly contributions of more than 20 women in the disciplines of English, History, Psychology, and Sociology are detailed below.

Melanie Boyd, 2003. “Troubling Innocence: Convention and Transgression in Feminist Narratives of Incest.”
This dissertation identifies and explores a recent evolution within first-person narratives of father-daughter incest: the emergence of startlingly agential representations of victimhood. Breaking with the feminist conventions adopted by a wide range of incest testimonies published in the U.S. and Canada in the 1970s and ’80s, these new texts upset politically strategic models of incest that insist upon the binary allocation of helplessness and power.
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Theresa Braunschneider, 2002. “Maidenly Amusements: Narrating Female Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century England.”
This dissertation examines the relation between female-female affiliations and heterosexuality in a variety of eighteenth-century English discourses. Analyzing representations of four female figures—the macroclitoride, the passing woman, the coquette, and the paragon of virtue—I argue that intimacies between women play a central role in the definition of gender and sexual norms for women in the period. Further, these figures register the eighteenth-century development of an ideology of heterosexuality wherein gender conceptually precedes desire.
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Monica Burguera, 2007. “Liberalism and the origins of the social: Women, poverty, and the political meanings of philanthropy in nineteenth-century Spain (Madrid 1834--1843).”
Traditional Narratives of nineteenth-century Spain still remain unproblematized from a sociocultural perspective. The idea of a static and backward society is still prevalent. These histories still minimize the liberal rupture of the mid-1830s and the epistemological legacies of the Spanish Enlightenment. From a critical feminist perspective, this thesis shows how a number of philanthropic societies were created from 1838 also out of the revolutionary impulse given to a new active gendered liberal public sphere in Madrid
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Juanita Cabello, 2007. “Literary travel, the woman traveler, and twentieth century constructions of Mexican tourist spaces.”
Twentieth-century American travel narratives have created representations of travel in Mexico that have captured the tourist gaze, inspired travel at various historical moments and to various tourist sites, and anticipated the direction that 20 th century tourism in Mexico has taken. Through the figure of the woman traveler, this dissertation examines the construction of 20 th century Mexico as an "infernal paradise" in the gendered narratives of travel by modernist and postmodern American writers. Imagined places ignite the literary traveler's imagination. Travel narratives ignite the tourist imagination, helping to shape the sites the traveler wishes to visit and the way he or she will enter, inhabit, and leave them. Travel literature and the literary traveler inspire travel circuits, identities, scripts, and performances, all of which are complexly gendered in their effects and their representations.
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Cari Carpenter, 2002. “Seeing Red: Anger, Femininity, and the American Indian of Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Literature.”
My dissertation places the work of three early Native American women writers—S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca—in dialogue with texts by Lydia Maria Child, Ann Stephens, and Maria Susanna Cummins. Although these Native and Anglo-American writers are usually studied separately, I argue that by examining them together we can expand predominant conceptions of sentimentality and acknowledge anger as its long neglected counterpart. Cari's book, Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians will be published in March 2008 by Ohio State Press.
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Jennifer Churchwell, 2005. “Becoming an Academic: Factors that Influence a Graduate Student’s Identity Commitment.”
This dissertation examined the influence of personal and environmental characteristics on vocational identity commitment in a sample of 800 University of Michigan doctoral students. Theoretically grounded in Erikson’s ideas about identity, the purpose of this dissertation was to broaden our understanding of who decides to become an academic and why, as well as the factors that facilitate or hinder identification.
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Laura Citrin, 2004. “Disgust and ‘Normal’ Corporeality: How Cultural Ideologies about Gender, Race, and Class Are Inscribed on the Body.”
In this dissertation I argue that cultural ideologies about gender, race, and class influence social norms for appropriate and acceptable bodies, and that moralizing emotions, such as disgust, facilitate internalization of body norms by individual members of society. To test these premises, the everyday body practices of men and women were examined using qualitative and quantitative studies grounded in feminist theory and interdisciplinary approaches to social science research.
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Emma Crandall, 2006. “Gertrude and Her Boys: Collaborative Friendship, Masculine Styles, and Queer Affairs in the Modern World.”
This project explores Gertrude Stein’s friendships with prominent male figures of the American avant-garde—Ernest Hemingway, Virgil Thomson, and Carl Van Vechten—to investigate three of modernism’s most productive cross-gender collaborations. The dissertation considers Stein’s personal and artistic development by focusing on how her lesbian and aesthetic styles influenced, and were influenced by, her male friends. In theorizing Stein’s performance and embodiment of “masculinity” as a queer style, this study describes her modernist cross-gender friendships as sites that enabled gender and sexual experimentation alongside collaborative, avant-garde cultural productions. In an historical moment marked by new categories of identity (including the “homosexual”), friendship, masculinity, and collaboration operated as important navigational tools for these moderns who defied convention in their arts and sexualities.
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Andrea Dottolo, 2006. “Black and White Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Midwest.”
This dissertation explores some of the ways that social identities, especially racial and ethnic identities, are experienced and discussed by black and white women and men in the Midwestern United States. Using secondary analysis of 135 interviews conducted with individuals who graduated from a Midwestern high school in the 1950s and 1960s, analyses focused on three sets of questions regarding group membership, social movements, and racial identities. The mixed method research design included systematic content analysis that served as an entry point for closer readings more aligned with grounded theory.
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Holly Dugan, 2005. “The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England.”
This dissertation argues that there is an archive of early modern olfaction and that it provides a rich account of early modern materiality, the history of the body, and cultural experiences of embodiment. Early modern men and women, like modern men and women, understood themselves and the culture of everyday life through their bodily senses, including the sense of smell. Of all the senses, smell is usually understood as the most base, the most ephemeral, and thus the most resistant to traditional historical methodologies. Only very recently have scientists discovered how the human body recognizes and remembers over 10,000 different smells. Yet, smell’s role in the past remains a mystery, virtually ignored in historical scholarship. Implicitly, this makes sense: early modern smells, and any meanings they once held, surely must have faded long ago. I argue, however, that unlike other material objects lost to the historical record, smells were always conceived as ephemeral, invisible objects. Scent thus provides a unique methodological opportunity to expand understanding of historical relationships between the histories of the body, as a material entity, and the senses, as embodied, phenomenological responses to the material world.
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Julie Eastin, 2006. “Predictors of Maternal Satisfaction: The Experiences of LBGQ Mothers.”
This dissertation attempts to provide a better understanding of lesbian, bisexual, gay, and queer (LBGQ) family life by beginning to answer the question, “What is the experience of motherhood like for LBGQ women?” After first locating this query within theoretical conceptualizations of identity, the experience of LBGQ motherhood is explored in relation to identity interference, social support, and maternal satisfaction.
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Breanne Fahs, 2006. “Female sexuality after women’s ‘liberation’: Negotiating repression and performance norms.”
The two studies of this dissertation examined social norms about female sexuality, specifically the norms of repression (i.e., messages directed at women to deny or restrict sexuality), and performance (i.e., messages that encourage women to engage in sex because they must or should, rather than because they want to) in women’s sexual lives. This project was framed within several discourses, including feminist theory, historical analyses of sexuality, psychoanalysis, empirical literatures, and clinical treatment/diagnostic issues.
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Erika Gasser, 2007. “Manhood, witchcraft and possession in old and New England.”
This dissertation asks how men, as witches, demoniacs and possession propagandists, attempted to affect the outcome of witchcraft-possession cases. How, as gendered subjects with access to gendered language, did they struggle to retain male privileges and identities despite their involvement with these controversial--and traditionally gendered female--episodes? While historians have long recognized that not all witches were female, only recent attention has been paid to the ways that manhood, the culture-specific ideas about what constitutes a successful or unsuccessful man, played a role for these men. To that end, I investigate published representations of these men in early modern England and colonial New England in order to determine the various, and often contradictory, consequences of manhood in witchcraft-possession.
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Janice Habarth, 2008. “Thinking ‘Straight’: Heteronormativity and Associated Outcomes Across Sexual Orientation.”

Zaje Harrell, 2002. “Trait Self-Objectification in College Women’s Mental Health: An Examination of Smokers and Never-Smokers.”
Objectification theory provides a foundation for examining women’s mental health in context. The theory posits that the disproportionate value placed on the body and appearance causes women to learn to view their bodies from the perspective of an outside observer. This can lead to negative psychological consequences. Self-objectification is the personality dimension relevant to an individual’s assessment of the functional and ornamental aspects of the body. Individuals higher in self-objectification report more depression and disordered eating behaviors. Self-objectification has also been linked to impaired cognitive task performance and memory perspective.
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Julie Konik, 2005. “Harassment as a System for Policing Traditional Gender Norms in the Workplace: The Structure and Process of Sexual Harassment and Heterosexist Harassment.”
This dissertation explored various models of the structure and process of sexual harassment (SH) and heterosexist harassment (HH) using a sample of 1555 faculty and staff employed in higher education. After reviewing how both SH and HH are theorized to be rooted in maintaining traditional gender norms, it tested 13 hypotheses regarding the structure, incidence, and outcomes of these forms of harassment.
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Benita Jackson, 2000. “Gender and psychological correlates of use of alcohol to cope with emotional distress.”
This dissertation was a study of women’s and men’s use of alcohol to cope with emotional distress. Participants ( N = 740) were adults drawn from a community sample, originally recruited through random-digit dialing for a larger investigation on gender differences in depression across adulthood. For this study, participants completed questionnaires by mail. The two major questions explored were: (1) What are key psychological correlates of use of alcohol to cope? (2) Are these correlates the same for both women and men?
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Gabrielle Dawn Lawhon, 2004. “Individual Psychotherapy and the Patient’s Significant Other.”
The majority of outpatient psychotherapy consumers engage in individual treatments. Meetings are conducted one-on-one with the treating clinician, and the content and process of these sessions is seen as confidential and deeply personalized to the identified patient. Inherent in this work is the assumption that what goes on within the treatment relationship will intimately tie in to what goes on for the patient outside of it, but we know little about how this actually works. The present study was designed: (1) to assess individual psychotherapy’s effects on the patient-partner (P-P), his/her significant other (SO), and the relationship between the two; (2) to explore potential influences on these effects; and (3) to identify common outcomes for the couple, treatment, and SO attitudes toward and willingness to use psychotherapy.
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Sumiao Li, 2007. “Fashionable people, fashionable society: Fashion, gender, and print culture in England 1821--1861.”
This dissertation examines fashionable society as a "new" cultural realm in early nineteenth-century England--roughly from 1821 to 1861--in light of contemporary fashion, gender, historical and literary studies, as well as a variety of social theories ranging from Arendt to Bataille. Challenging the predominant view which confuses fashionable society with the aristocratic high society of the ancien regime , my thesis retrieves fashionable society as a discrete, dynamic, and cross-class entity. As a mobile institution, fashionable society was neither aristocratic nor bourgeois and yet integrated the values and interests of both in tandem with local circumstances.
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Michelle Lilly, 2008. “Shattered Assumptions, Coping and Religiosity in Intimate Partner Violence Survivors: A Partial Explanation for Variation in PTSD Symptoms?”

Emily Lutenski, 2008. “In the Land of Enchantment: Multiethnic Modernism and the American Southwest”
In the Land of Enchantment takes the American Southwest as a site to explore how race, gender, and region produce new geographies of identity in the early twentieth century. The modernist Southwest was mapped by the growth of regional tourism, the extension of statehood to New Mexico and Arizona, the continued negotiation of the U.S.-Mexico border, and a fascination with Native American and Mexican American folkways. At the same time race in the Southwest—and in the U.S. and Mexico at large—was being codified in venues such as legislation and the census. The writers in this dissertation—Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jean Toomer, Josephina Niggli, and John Joseph Mathews—both rely on and contest these codifications as they conceive of different versions of a “new race” made possible by the Southwestern geography. These new racial geographies produce multiethnic modernism’s break from the past, and look as strange to current ethnic literary canons as they did at the time of their invention.

Christa McDermott, 2007. “Understanding the psychology of unsustainability: Linking materialism, authoritarianism, attitudes toward gender and the environment, and behavior.”
A feature of materialistic values is their implicit incorporation of a hierarchical structure of naturalized, social differences, sustained primarily by an emphasis on social comparisons. It is hypothesized that people who hold these values will be more likely to express attitudes that encourage maintenance of a hierarchical distribution of power and resources, specifically authoritarian attitudes, than people who do not have materialistic values. In turn, these conventional, authority subservient attitudes will correlate positively with traditional gender and environmental attitudes, expressed behaviorally as a lack of engagement in pro-environmental behaviors.
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Maureen McDonnell, 2005. “Crossing the Line: Performing Cultural Identities through Global Shakespearean Drama.”
The canonical force of Renaissance drama contributes to its being a major player in the recent formations of many identities on the global stage. Crossing the Line begins with a single premise: the conviction that dramatic texts need to be considered not as inert relics but as a collection of scripts that offer theatre practitioners and audiences opportunities to negotiate identity. My analysis contends that theatre companies have transformed Shakespearean performance into a transnational text that serves as a shifting and evolving testament to how local communities grapple with contemporary identities of gender, sexuality, race, language, and nation.
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Kathi Miner-Rubino, 2004. “Beyond targets: Vicarious exposure to hostility towards women in the workforce.”
Most research to date on misogyny and hostility towards women in the workplace has examined specific incidents and direct targets of such behavior. Preliminary research also shows that working in a context where women are mistreated can have negative effects for employees, even when the mistreatment is merely observed or perceived. While research has identified a link between personal and bystander experiences of harassment and hostility to negative outcomes, few researchers have offered a theoretical rationale for how and why working in an anti-female climate affects outcomes. In this dissertation, I propose a comprehensive theoretical model of the mediating and moderating mechanisms involved in this relationship, and empirically test subcomponents of the model. Specifically, I examined (1) the direct relationship between working in a hostile context for women and outcomes, and (2) gender and job status as moderators of this relationship.
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Vanessa Noble, 2005. “Doctors Divided: Gender, Race, and Class Anomalies in the Production of Black Medical Doctors in Apartheid South Africa, 1948–1994.”
This dissertation examines the history of the creation of a deeply divided and unequal medical educational and health care system in South Africa. During the 20th century the training of medical practitioners and the type of health care services that they were to provide was directly influenced by racial segregation ideology and discriminatory policies. During World War II, it came to be realized that the training of “non-European” students had to be of the highest western biomedical standards; however, this training was to be provided in racially segregated institutions to produce black doctors to practice amongst “their own” communities in a racially divided health care service. This thesis focuses on the racially segregated training provided by the University of Natal’s “non-European” medical school in Durban. Due to apartheid restrictions on the provision of black medical training elsewhere in the country, this school was for many years the main institution dedicated to providing medical education for black students.
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Colleen O’Brien, 2001. “Contested Visions of a New Republic: Race, Sex, and the Body Politic in American Women’s Writing, 1850–1938.”
My dissertation analyzes representations of race relations in Progressive Era American fiction through focusing on the trope of the “octoroon.” From 1850–1938, both white women and African Americans struggled for inclusion in American politics and society. As mainstream anxiety about the place of blacks and women in United States culture and politics increased, the figure of the octoroon came to represent the fraught and unstable relationships among race, gender, and sexuality in constructing an inclusive template for American citizenship.
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Jennifer Palmer, 2008. “Atlantic crossings: Race, gender, and the construction of families in eighteenth-century La Rochelle.”
This dissertation shows that French families, faced with the contingencies brought on by colonialism and the presence of slaves and free people of color in France, demonstrated flexibility in modifying traditional strategies of parentage, godparentage, marriage, and inheritance to delineate whom they included as members. Positioning the family at the center of analysis demonstrates how slavery shaped gender roles and how both women and men in Saint-Domingue and La Rochelle manipulated the categories of race and gender for their own benefit. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that slavery and colonialism shaped family not only in France's colonies, but in France itself.
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Sheryl Pimlott-Kubiak, 2002. “Social Location and Cumulative Adversity in Traumatized Women.”
This study assessed a relatively homogeneous group of poor mothers to determine whether differences in exposure to trauma account for variation in the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It also explored whether the personality characteristic of cynicism mediates exposure and diagnosis. Pathological sequelae to trauma exposure are typically attributed to individual vulnerability without considering variation in exposure. However, since exposure to both interpersonal and organizational stressors varies according to social location, assessment across a stress continuum is more appropriate. Once cumulative adversity is considered, individual differences can then be examined. Personality characteristics have been shown to mediate the effects of stressors on mental health outcomes, either enhancing resiliency or vulnerability.
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Rebekah Pite, 2007. “Creating a common table: Dona Petrona, cooking, and consumption in Argentina, 1928--1983.”
This dissertation is a social history of twentieth-century Argentina that focuses on a cultural phenomenon deeply embedded in daily life-the preparation and consumption of food. Through a variety of sources including cookbooks, oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, nutrition surveys, and government documents, it explores the domestic experiences of Argentines in relation to their most famous cooking expert, Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo. Doña Petrona rose to national prominence through her live cooking demonstrations, magazine column, radio program, television show, and best selling cookbook. She maintained her predominance as Argentina's leading domestic expert over her long career (from 1928 to 1983) because she was able to remake herself in step with changes in gender roles and the nation's political economy. For this reason, analyzing Doña Petrona's career opens up our understanding of the gendered relationship between everyday life and economic and political dynamics.
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Cathleen Power, 2006. “Feeling class: How affect reinforces social inequality.”
Considerable research in psychology has examined prejudice and stereotyping, with particular attention to racism, sexism, and the role of cognition. Little of this literature focuses on classism, and only recently have researchers begun to investigate how intergroup emotions enable prejudice. This dissertation investigates how emotions maintain classism, addressing these gaps in the literature.
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Jinny Prais, 2008. “Imperial Travelers:  The Formation of West African Urban Culture, Identity, and Citizenship in London and Accra, 1925-1935.”

Diana T. Sanchez, 2005. “In the Bedroom and Beyond: Doing Gender in Intimate Relationships.”
Adherence to gender norms varies from person to person and depends on how much a person invests in gender ideals (Wood, Christensen, Hebl, & Rothgerber. 1997). Although some feminist theorists argue that the performance of gender is impossible to avoid if one is viewed as female or male (Butler, 1990; West & Zimmerman, 1995), it is important to examine the consequences for those who consciously engage in gender performances to meet gender ideals.
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Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, 2002. “Gender in the Contact Zone: Writing the Colonial Family in Romantic-era and Caribbean Literature.”
Utilizing Romanticist, postcolonial, and feminist literary criticism, this project posits the interconnectedness of ideologies of family, inheritance, domesticity, gender, sexuality, and race as central to the construction of notions of nation and family in both Romantic-era literature and contemporary Caribbean writing. I use novels by twentieth-century Caribbean women writers Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid as sites of entry into some of the most hotly contested issues in transatlantic studies. The twentieth-century novels I examine provide insight into the policing of boundaries of gender, sexuality, and race as the English and the Afro-Caribbean family and cultures became intertwined through slavery and colonization.
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Pavitra Sundar, 2007. “Sounding the nation: The musical imagination of Bollywood cinema.”
"Sounding the Nation" examines the construction of identity in mainstream Hindi cinema, or Bollywood. I combine musical, textual, visual, and historical analysis to reveal how the soundtrack of a recent Bollywood blockbuster, Lagaan (2001), constructs India. Taking this film as a case study, I situate it in the broader history of Bollywood and of populist discourse on nation, and I analyze the ideological work of song lyrics, timbres, melodies, rhythms, and orchestral arrangements. I contend that such musical elements work both in conjunction with, and independent of, this film's visuals and narrative to construct a national utopia. The Lagaan soundtrack reinscribes familiar nationalist rhetoric in at least three ways: by literally giving voice to Indian femininity, disciplining the male homosocial body in its militaristic fight songs, and marking time musically so as to render the nation modern.
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