Sonic Movie Memories: Sound, Childhood, and American Cinema

Though the trend rarely receives attention, since the 1970s many American filmmakers have been taking sound and music tropes from children’s films, television shows, and other forms of media and incorporating those sounds into films intended for adult audiences. Initially, these references might seem like regressive attempts at targeting some nostalgic desire to relive childhood. However, this dissertation asserts that these children’s sounds are instead designed to reconnect audience members with the multi-faceted fantasies and coping mechanisms that once, through children’s media, helped these audience members manage life’s anxieties. Because sound is the sense that Western audiences most associate with emotion and memory, it offers audiences immediate connection with these barely conscious longings. The first chapter turns to children’s media itself and analyzes Disney’s 1950s forays into television. The chapter argues that by selectively repurposing the gentlest sonic devices from the studio’s films, television shows like Disneyland created the studio’s signature sentimental “Disney sound.” As a result, a generation of baby boomers like Steven Spielberg comes of age and longs to recreate that comforting sound world. The second chapter thus focuses on Spielberg, who incorporates Disney music in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Rather than recreate Disney’s sound world, Spielberg uses this music as a springboard into a new realm I refer to as “sublime refuge” - an acoustic haven that combines overpowering sublimity and soothing comfort into one fantastical experience. The second half of the dissertation pivots into more experimental children’s cartoons like Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951) - cartoons that embrace audio-visual dissonance in ways that soothe even as they create tension through a phenomenon I call “comfortable discord.” In the final chapter, director Wes Anderson reveals that these sonic tensions have just as much appeal to adults. In films like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Anderson demonstrates that comfortable discord can simultaneously provide a balm for anxiety and create an open-ended space that makes empathetic connections between characters possible. The dissertation closes with a call to rethink nostalgia, not as a romanticization of the past, but rather as a reconnection with forgotten affective channels.

The Ethics of Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters

A pressing challenge for the study of animal ethics in early modern literature is the very breadth of the category “animal,” which occludes the distinct ecological and economic roles of different species. Understanding the significance of deer to a hunter as distinct from the meaning of swine for a London pork vendor requires a historical investigation into humans’ ecological and cultural relationships with individual animals. For the constituents of England’s agricultural networks – shepherds, butchers, fishwives, eaters at tables high and low – animals matter differently. While recent scholarship on food and animal ethics often emphasizes ecological reciprocation, I insist that this mutualism is always out of balance, both across and within species lines. Focusing on drama by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the anonymous authors of late medieval biblical plays, my research investigates how sixteenth-century theaters use food animals to mediate and negotiate the complexities of a changing meat economy. On the English stage, playwrights use food animals to impress the ethico-political implications of land enclosure, forest emparkment, the search for new fisheries, and air and water pollution from urban slaughterhouses and markets. Concurrent developments in animal husbandry and theatrical production in the period thus led to new ideas about emplacement, embodiment, and the ethics of interspecies interdependence.

Three Voices in the Wilderness: Foote, Bloch, and Korngold in the Early Twentieth-Century America

Barbara Hanning points out in her book Concise History of Western Music, that "Twentieth-century American music was in large measure an extension of European music" (Hanning 1998, 515). My dissertation/perforrnance project features cello works written by three contemporary composers who lived in America but were connected to the European heritage in different ways; each contributed significantly to the development of American classical concert life, music education, and even popular culture. Programs of my performances are intended to illustrate their unique compositional styles. The first recital consists of five cello compositions of Massachusetts-born Arthur Foote (1853 - 1937): Drei Stucke fur Pianoforte und Violoncello, Op. 1; Scherzo, Op.22; Romanza, Op.33; Aubade, Op.77; and Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, Op.78. Foote was influenced by the German-trained John Knowles Paine at Harvard University; he composed music famous for its extensive chromaticism in both harmony and melodic line, and for clearly-defined formal structure. The second recital explores the music of Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch (1880-1959): a short Meditation Hebraique, a Suite No. I for Violoncello Solo and the famous rhapsody Schelomo. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, and settling in the United States in 1916, Bloch is a composer deeply influenced by the European late-Romantic tradition and is also well-known for employing "Hebraic" elements into his works. The final performance comprises two other of Bloch's cello works and one cello concerto by the Austrian-American composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897- 1957). Bloch's Voice in the Wilderness is a symphonic poem for orchestra and cello (accompanied by piano in this performance), consisting of six movements performed without pause. His Suite No.3 for Cello Solo is shorter and has a simpler style than the first Suite. Korngold was recognized as a child prodigy in his native Austria. After a Nazi-induced exile, he immigrated to America and became a film music composer in Hollywood. The Cello Concerto was used in the movie "Deception" (1 946), for which Korngold provided the film score. The impassioned harmonic language and lavish melodic lines inherited from the high-romanticism make this work one of comparative discordant beauty among other compositions of his time.

Archaeological Excavations at 18AP44: 193 Main Street, Annapolis, Maryland, 1985-1987

193 Main Street (18AP44) is located between Main Street and Duke of Gloucester Street. The property was used ass a yard related to residential and commercial buildings during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1930's a movie theatre and parking lot were built on the property. That structure was torn down in the 1980's and a three-story commercial building was constructed. Archaeological excavations were conducted on the property from 1985-1987. A preliminary report was written in 1986 by Paul A. Shackel. This report is the final report on the archaeological investigations at 193 Main Street.

Screening Diversity: Women & Work in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture

Screening Diversity: Women and Work in Twenty-first Century Popular Culture explores contemporary representations of diverse professional women on screen. Audiences are offered successful women with limited concerns for feminism, anti-racism, or economic justice. I introduce the term viewsers to describe a group of movie and television viewers in the context of the online review platform Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Screening Diversity follows their engagement in a representative sample of professional women on film and television produced between 2007 and 2015. The sample includes the television shows, Scandal, Homeland, VEEP, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Wife, as well as the movies, Zero Dark Thirty, The Proposal, The Heat, The Other Woman, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Temptation. Viewsers appreciated female characters like Olivia (Scandal), and Maya (Zero Dark Thiry) who treated their work as a quasi-religious moral imperative. Producers and viewsers shared the belief that unlimited time commitment and personal identification were vital components of professionalism. However, powerful women, like The Proposal’s Margaret and VEEP’s Selina, were often called bitches. Some viewsers embraced bitch-positive politics in recognition of the struggles of women in power. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproductive labor, often compromises their ability to live up to moral standards of work. Unlike producers, viewsers celebrated and valued that labor. However, texts that included serious consideration of women as workers were frequently labelled chick flicks or soap operas. The label suggested that women’s labor issues were not important enough that they could be a topic of quality television or prestigious film, which bolstered the idea that workplace equality for women is not a problem in which the general public is implicated. Emerging discussions of racial injustice on television offered hope that these formations are beginning to shift.