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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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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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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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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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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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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