Even as environmental scholars agree on the urgency of climate change, the crisis is less often linked to the US education system itself, which continues to operate as if we were not in the midst of a planetary emergency. As more environmental educators advocate for substantive change, little attention has been paid to how the study of literature…

The study and characterization of the literary uses of non-standard American English writing systems was once a topic of research central to the study of American literature. "Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930" argues that the emergence of new computational tools and theoretical insights…

This dissertation examines the relationship between American fiction and computing. More specifically, it argues that each domain explored similar formal possibilities during a period I refer to as Early Postmodernism (1965-1980). In the case of computing, the 60s and 70s represent a turning point in which modern systems and approaches were…

This dissertation aims to illuminate divergent ideologies of literacy and personhood in the United States and England, utilizing literary and non-literary texts from the nineteenth century to shed light on the historical constraints and conventions shaping our current moment. My version of the nineteenth century is a long one, since I look at…

Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to…

Creative Dissertation: "The Connoisseur of Pain" is a comic noir set in Hollywood in 1962, and its central conceit is that cartoons are real, live-action films starring anthropomorphic animals that cartoonists later replicate frame by frame in order to make the violent content palatable to children. The book's protagonist and narrator is…

For over a decade, America's educational policymakers have devalued the role of literature in K-12 classrooms. By welding federal funding to initiatives such as Reading First, government officials have downplayed the importance of reading literature and have argued against giving children voluntary, free reading time in which students can select…

This dissertation attempts to explain how nineteenth-century American Spiritualist literature may have made readers feel like they were hearing voices, touching the dead, seeing celestial spaces, or enjoying other sensory proofs of the afterlife. Spiritualists believed that, while all human beings possessed faculties designed to perceive the dead,…

This dissertation examines the rise of the creative writing program in American higher education and considers its influence on contemporary American poetry. I investigate how the patronage of the university has impacted American poetry and reconfigured the contemporary literary landscape. Using Mark McGurl's (2009) groundbreaking research on…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of adding historical fiction novels as a supplement to the textbook in an eighth grade social studies course. This qualitative study focused on student interest and feedback as their social studies class was altered through the addition of historical fiction novels. The research questions were…

This study focused on the effectiveness of standards-based testing and was designed to determine the relationship of student scores on the locally constructed, standards-based, criterion-referenced test (CRT) for approximately 280 eleventh grade students at a Midwestern, Class III district, operating a Class A high school, and the scores of those…

Within the last decade the phrase "redefinition of identity in the age of globalization" has become yet another rarely elaborated cliche prevalent in literary scholarship that addresses cultural identity politics. In my dissertation I analyze how post-1990s novels in American, Ukrainian, & Polish literatures narrate cultural identity formation,…