[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] "Ruin Nation: Antiquarian Objects and Political Narratives in the Long Eighteenth Century" examines representations of architectural ruins and archaeological artifacts...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The following is a collection of poems about the transience of the human world, poems which combine an elegiac embracing of our own insignificance and ...

This ethnographic study examines the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, a thirty-two-year-old, week-long event that features women performers and relies on an all female staff who produce the event for an audience of women ...

Deliberately playing on the word "tradition," in Re/Presenting Traditions: Identity, Power, and Politics in Folklife Programming, my research interrogates both current practices of re/presenting traditional cultures to the ...

My dissertation offers a culturally-based examination of the aid-driven western marketplace for Central Asian crafts based on detailed textual and visual analysis of websites, film, online and print catalogues, and comics ...

The aim of this thesis is to argue for the Arabian Nights as a work of verbal art whose roots are in the oral tradition of the Arab world. After a short premise meant to throw light on the status of oral storytelling in ...

as they negotiate their youth and first adult experiences in the shadow of the Iraq War, in an effort to bring a national issue closer to home. Through these pieces, I attempt to examine aspects of history that we tend to disregard: the young military population...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] "Of the Burning" is a hybrid collection of nonfiction essays and sermon-poems. The narrative threads weaved through the collection include original ...

Standing at the core of American culture, Thanksgiving is an invented tradition celebrated by millions of Americans. This dissertation examines contemporary representations of Thanksgiving in "the media of everyday life" ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Much of the scholarly work on Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler focuses on the importance of the R/reader in the text by looking at ...

The critical introduction: "Improbable Florida" : Imperialism, Surrealist Tradition, and Gay and Lesbian Identity in Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” and Bishop’s “The Riverman” is a close-reading of those two poems through a ...

This thesis defines digital literacies for an audience of educators who want to integrate digital literacies into their existing curriculum. In this discussion, I examine how discipline-based faculty encourage and support ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This dissertation explores institutionalized racism in American culture that signifies through the Reconstruction era Klansman, the folklore of the ...

This dissertation focuses on the cinematic versions of the Robinson Crusoe story. Starting from the early 1900s, a significant number of films rewrite, reinvent, and rework the Crusoe myth. Instead of replicating Defoe's ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation looks at contemporary social movements and novels through the lenses of sociology and infrastructuralism. I argue that there is a ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] In this dissertation, I argue some contemporary authors intermingle modes of satire and transparency to encourage a twenty-first century reading ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation argues that an examination of innovative endings in both canonized and forgotten eighteenth-century prose fiction contributes to our ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This book examines religious travel in contemporary Paganism in three long-form creative essays. It looks at space, place, and travel within the modern ...

This dissertation focuses on contemporary literature in English produced by writers of Muslim origin. My study analyzes Laila Lalami's The Moor's Account (2014), Leila Abuela's The Kindness of Enemies (2015), Diana Abu-Jaber's ...

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Representations of the violently displaced black female self in contemporary African literature is a study of my broad interests in the peculiar ...