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The novel Someplace Else scrutinizes spaces begging for examination—places of asphyxiation, of undiscussed power structures and violence—that do nothing to prepare those living within them to be their examiners. Through the lens of Lumi—a small-town Wisconsin adolescent on the verge of womanhood—the novel examines how childhood innocence is exemplified and threatened by the homes in which females are raised and raising themselves. Someplace Else serves as Lumi's avenue for figuring out how to put to words what exactly it is she is coming to understand, including her relationship with her hometown, how this space has affected her mother and sister, and how this space has affected these women's relationships with one another; through story, Lumi is deciphering ways to speak, to talk about her world and perhaps find a way out. / Master of Fine Arts

In 1922 Carl Van Doren noticed that a revolt from the village was taking place in modern American writing, especially when it came to the midwestern United States. According to Van Doren, where James Whitcomb Riley and Booth Tarkington’s local color humor made the small-town Midwest the celebrated center of American values in the late nineteenth century, writers like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis used modern literary techniques like realism and symbolism to make the region a peripheral site of resistance to the forces of urban-industrialization and globalization that were reshaping U.S. culture and society in the early twentieth century. Since the 1920s, this assessment of the Midwest’s cultural parochialism has reinforced conceptions of the region’s political provincialism, which emerged thanks to regional politicians’ like Minnesota governor Joseph Burnquist and senator Frank B. Kellogg’s efforts to privilege domestic issues and local concerns over foreign affairs. As a result of this parochial reputation, the region has been largely overlooked in studies of U.S. literary modernism, which is typically associated with metropolitan centers and transnational exchange. By attending to Cather and Lewis’s representations of the transnational communities and economies that structured the Midwest’s growth in the Progressive era, this dissertation rejects assumptions about the region’s perennial parochialism to emphasize its historical cosmopolitanism. In doing so, it shows how Cather and Lewis mobilized the region’s history of migration, settlement, and urbanization to critique the failures of U.S. political progressivism, and asserts the midwestern hinterland’s participation in the development of U.S. literary modernism. Specifically, I argue that by representing the relationships between immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens in the modern Midwest’s social and cultural institutions, Cather and Lewis subvert the progressive themes and consensus-building impulses of literary realism to critique the rise of U.S. commercial capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism.

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Educational Leadership / Sarah Jane Fishback / This study examined how adult African American women experienced learning at two post-secondary institutions in the Midwest; a diverse, urban community college, and a predominantly white research university. The study also considered how barriers, challenges, responsibilities, and support systems impacted their learning experiences. Gender, race and age were variables of interest, and three theoretical lenses; Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule's Women's Ways of Knowing, McClusky's Theory of Margin/Adult Roles and Responsibilities, and Critical Race Theory were used to explore the participants' experience of learning. This topic was of interest due to the paucity of research conducted in the area of post-secondary institutions, with adult African American women in the Midwest. This study found that learners used active learning, linked their learning to their life experiences, encountered racism, experienced barriers; situational, institutional, dispositional, and information; utilized familial, instructor, peer and spiritual support systems, would benefit from career advising, and that career goal uncertainty was a common obstruction. The women participating in this research were determined, motivated and goal oriented, and served as role models for their children, sought education to improve their lives, and emphasized the importance of education to reach career and life goals.

Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Dana M. Britton / Even after 28 years the AIDS epidemic continues to affect the American population and HIV/AIDS remains a social problem. Living with HIV affects every aspect of an individual’s life. It involves a personal negotiation at the onset of diagnosis, a social negotiation when one decides to disclose to others, and finally, a communal negotiation when individuals seek formal support via ASOs (AIDS service organizations), and/or informal support through family members and friends. The purpose of this research is to investigate these negotiations over the course of HIV infection, how these processes inform decisions to disclose, how stigma influences lived experiences, and the importance of the HIV community. The data come from eighteen HIV+ individuals, ten men and eight women, living in various locations throughout the Midwest. Drawing on the experiences of these men and women, I explore reactions after diagnosis, disclosure patterns, experiences of stigma, and the importance of the HIV community.