This dissertation is an ethnographic study about ecological displacement, affective encounters, the work of care, and human and animal subjectivities involved in rehabilitating endangered orangutans in Sarawak, Malaysia. Using participant-observation, interviews, archival resear…
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Critical intercultural communication (CIC) scholarship on hybridity emphasizes the necessity of examining hybrid performances within their cultural, political, and interpersonal contexts. Though telling, it overlooks a significant piece of the puzzle in understanding hybrid live…
This dissertation ascribes an extended methodology of auto-ethnography to the problem of apprehending the cultural and affective crossways symbiotic with post 911, late capitalism, in the United States and on the Transnational Stage. It introduces a performative approach derived…
Despite a notable lack of historiographic attention to medieval Iberian theatre, a golden age of performance existed on the Peninsula well before the appearance of Lope de Vega at the end of the sixteenth century. New archival discoveries and innovative research methodologies re…
This practice-based thesis explores the possibilities presented by dissonant relations between site and text in site-specific theatre. Identifying the under-examination, and so under-theorisation of site/text relations in site-specific scholarship, the thesis pursues an enquiry …
Magic realism, a term built from two seemingly antithetical concepts, has evolved over almost a century into an international, intermedial mode, yet at no point achieved status as a movement. It continues to hold the interest of critics working in literature, art history, film, …
This thesis is an affective history of abortion as told through the memories from four individuals; two retired medical practitioners who sat on Therapeutic Abortion Committees (TACs) and two women who accessed abortion services in Alberta between 1969 and 1988. Further, my anal…
The history of photography began with that type now called vernacular, the photographs that represent the non-artistic, the banal and commonplace. Many of these are portraits, kept in lockets, cases, wallets, and now today on phones to keep our beloved nearby. Because of the clo…
This dissertation asserts that Heschel’s work ought to be viewed as affective and emotional. Understanding Heschel’s work as both creating and encouraging particular affects enables a more robust and fuller understanding of American Jewish postwar life. Specifically, American Je…
One of the most pervasive challenges for liberal democracies is the ongoing tension between religious conservatives and the liberal state. Using as my central case study, the highly-charged debates over “family values” in Canada circa 1985-2015, I argue that despite claims that …
This dissertation examines reconfigurations of home and work, public and private, in the Silicon Valley-San Francisco Bay Area technology economy, and the implications they have for gendered hierarchies and cultures of work more broadly. Using fieldwork conducted amongst startup…
This dissertation historicizes the contemporary notions of student misbehavior through a critical study of 19th-century teacher manuals. Instead of reading the texts of the manuals as a window into the experiences of the past, I consider the manuals as discursive operations that…
This paper argues that Édouard Manet employed several tactics to reject an empathic viewing experience of his large canvas and Salon-submitted paintings in order to re-define the purpose of painting. It includes an examination of Manet’s use of awkward poses, ambiguous facial ex…
This dissertation draws on Romantic historicism, historical materialism and the philosophy of history to investigate literature’s function as a form of historiographic record. I arrange several works of British Romantic fiction to ask how each develops “history within history:” …
The United States has become severely polarized over the last five years with some commentators even comparing this time of entrenched division to the Civil War era. However, the impulse to unify or to make one out of many (e pluribus unum) has existed in the country from the na…
This dissertation explores the development of public access cable television programming made by and for LGBTQ people in New York City. Through archival research, interviews with the producers of these shows, and analysis of their content and textual features, I argue that LGBTQ…
This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study into unheard narratives of the 1947 Partition of India as they inform legacies of trauma, violence, and displacement for South Asian diasporic communities. In exploring the limitations of official state accounts of Partition, I tur…
This dissertation argues rhetorical studies can put affective atmospheres to productive use in studying contemporary public controversies as spaces of feeling that animate extended public engagement operating across various media. Rhetorical Studies has frequently focused on the…
This dissertation analyzes the cultural urgency of dread—a profound feeling of fear about the future—in a range of canonical and popular British novels, poems, periodicals, and philosophical treatises. In our own time, we tend to think of dread as a negative, paralyzing affect. …