English Language and Literature Electronic Theses and Dissertations (UMKC)
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The items in this collection are the theses and dissertations written by students of the Department of English. Some items may be viewed only by members of the University of Missouri System and/or University of Missouri-Kansas City. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
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Item Investigating the role of teaching circles in composition GTA development: narratives of professional growth and identity formation(2025) Schmidtlein, Kristin Nicole; Byrd, Antonio; Schlein, CandaceThis dissertation investigates the application of Teaching Circles (TCs) as a peer support system for Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) in composition courses, with a particular focus on the development of their professional identities and pedagogical practices. Despite the increasing reliance on GTAs in higher education, many existing professional development programs neglect the informal, ad hoc peer mentorship that GTAs engage in naturally. Drawing on narrative inquiry, this study examines how narrative-based TCs, led by the GTAs themselves, can provide a consistent and structured space for peer interaction that supports both professional growth and identity formation. By exploring the narratives of GTAs at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), this study highlights the ways in which these informal mentorship opportunities contribute to the development of teaching practices, the sharing of pedagogical experiences, and the formation of a professional identity grounded in peer collaboration. This research fills a gap in GTA professional development literature by offering an alternative to traditional, hierarchical training models and advocating for the integration of peer-driven mentorship structures into GTA education. Ultimately, this study presents a scalable model for fostering a supportive, collaborative environment where GTAs can thrive both as educators and as individuals within the discipline of rhetoric and composition.Item "To keep Christmas well": gender and consumerism in the Age of Industrialization(2025) Gray Rabin, Angela; Phegley, Jennifer; Burke, Diane MuttiChristmas evolved as an outgrowth of the mid-winter pre-Christian festivals of Saturnalia, Kalends, and Yule, to an overly commercialized, mass-market driven enterprise. Modern Christmas celebrations are inextricably connected to place, family, and food, but today’s observances have one thing in common with their early predecessors—excessive indulgence of food and drink. Although Christmas—the combined term referring to Christ mass—introduced Christ’s birth to the solstice festivities, the annual holiday has been associated with secular tendencies since Gregory, Archbishop of Constantinople, issued his warning against dancing and feasting to observers late in the fourth century. This secular side would expand dramatically—and transatlantically—centuries later after Washington Irving published Knickerbocker’s History of New York in 1809, Clement Clarke Moore published his famous poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, in 1823, and Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. Not only did St. Nicholas, who morphed over time into the figure known as Santa Claus, usher in a new and popular dimension of the holiday that included children, he encouraged widespread consumerism, propelled further by the Industrial Revolution. This dissertation examines how industrialization altered Christmas and guided women’s participation in the holiday in select urban centers of England between 1840, the year Queen Victoria and Prince Albert marry, and 1861, the year Albert died. My goal is to produce a literary and historical comparison of the impact of industrialization on three forms of consumerism—foodways, print materials (particularly how the press marketed the Christmas tree), and charitable spending—during the Christmas holiday. Christmas had been associated with secularism and indulgent eating long before Victoria’s coronation, but holiday meals took on new meaning during her reign. Most notably, in the middle-class home they were prepared and served by women. These meals, like gifts of food, formed and maintained familial bonds, and played a central role in “manufacturing” the correlation between Christmas observance and domesticity. But holiday fare, such as the quintessentially English plum pudding, likewise served as print culture symbols to make political statements about British global trade and colonization, another variation of consumption. Periodical artists and editors, especially those associated with Punch, or the London Charivari, frequently satirized the holiday to make social and political statements, and more than one issue of Punch featured the English plum pudding to illustrate food’s ability to transmit national identity within political discourse. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the periodical press, with the assistance of Victorian women readers, ushered in and popularized the “new” domestic Christmas. In addition, the Christmas holiday created a means by which women could challenge and circumvent patriarchal order and enter the public sphere in ways complicit with yet defiant to the cult of domesticity. Such an intriguing paradox exemplifies the rich complexities of women’s lived experience in the nineteenth century. Thus, the Industrial Revolution redefined Christmas, as women, then as now, became essential to proper observance.Item Interstitial passages: re-enactment of queer bodies of color in art and literature(2024) Gomez, Milton Javier; Shiu, Anthony; Hartman, Joseph R.My project explores the connections between literature and visual art to re-enact and re-imagine queer bodies of color in liminal spaces or porous passages as a means of contesting invisibility, exclusion, and displacement. I engage in the literature of James Baldwin and John Rechy and the conceptual art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to conceptualize symbolic and physical in-between spaces where racial and gender alternative projects of community, same-sex desire, and love are possible. My analysis focuses on the surveillance of the public sphere in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, the constant inhabiting of the upper and underworld of same-sex desire in Rechy's City of Night, and Gonzalez-Torres candy piles and curtains of blue beads. These literary and visual art pieces contributed to my theorization of queer bodies and queer bodies of color that disrupted hetero norms through the re-enactment of the queer body as a locus for participation and community building. I theorize on the unfolding or destruction of the queer body as an opportunity to create an alternative set of signifiers to expand the solidified boundaries around bodies, desires, and belonging. The queer body of color navigates hetero spaces and uses its displacement and exclusion to reimagine itself in interstitial or porous passages as an alternative communal project of otherness.Item The killer shepherds: hunters as pastoral figures in the Early National period(2024) Shawver, Brian; Barton, John Cyril; Burke, Diane MuttiThis dissertation explores the role of the backwoods hunter in American literature and culture during the Early National period, especially as it was embodied by Daniel Boone and by James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. I use these figures to examine how popular perceptions of the sustenance hunter underwent significant transformation after the Revolutionary period, and how Boone and Bumppo came to exemplify American attitudes about nature, individualism, and western expansion. In exploring the evolution of perceptions about the hunter, I argue that this f igure came to function as the shepherd in a new conception of the pastoral mode. My argument involves an original framework of the pastoral that I construct by integrating theories presented by William Empson and Paul Alpers in their landmark works Some Versions of Pastoral and What Is Pastoral?, respectively. This framework asserts that works in the pastoral mode are characterized not by the presence of an idyllic setting, but instead by the centrality of a shepherd or shepherd-equivalent who is of a lesser social status than the pastoral author and the intended audience, but who possesses an innate dignity and moral sensibility that allows him to serve as a representative of a culture’s aspirations. My framework is further influenced by the work of Leo Marx, in arguing that the pastoral in North America invokes a literal rather than metaphorical understanding of the “middle landscape,” i.e. the physical location that allows a pastoral shepherd to fulfill his representative function. Incorporating Marx’s analyses in his seminal book Machine in the Garden, I also propose that the North American pastoral differs from the European version in identifying a more specific representative function for its protagonists; whereas the Empsonian pastoral operation involves a shepherd whom its author uses to portray model behavior in a general sense, the American hunter-shepherd of this period depicts the ideal way of interacting with the natural world in particular. As such, I also explore how Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo laid a foundation for future considerations and behaviors related to western expansion, environmental degradation, and interaction with Indigenous people.Item The distances between stories, sketches, and essays(2024) Reed, Ryan Steven; Pritchett, Michael, 1961-This collection represents a zoomed-out view of my work as a master’s degree candidate at UMKC. It contains six pieces of fiction (seven if you count my experimental piece, Please Consider the Cone), the beginning of two novels, and three pieces of nonfiction. I did not include the poetry I wrote beyond a single instance which tied in strongly to Take Flight, for this I hope you will be appreciative. A number of these pieces have been submitted for publication. Not Gone Yet was published by the web journal Worlds Within, and It Was Never a Joke was written for and is under consideration by the editor of The Pitch. They all represent some attempt at quantifying the distances between, as the title states: between people, between versions of ourselves, between time, and between understanding. I believe the only true understanding of anything in this existence is to thoughtfully consider it in the context of proximity. These pieces aim to do just that.