“An Unoccupied Woman: American Women’s Writing, the Literary Spinster, and Feminist Care” takes seriously the question of what it means to care for and about a text—to like or even love a piece of writing and its author, in spite or because of its difficulties and its contradictions, its frustrations and its irrelevances. It considers what it means when to care for such a thing is embarrassing or unfashionable, or when that care is overlooked or underappreciated. It does so by tracking two connected yet disparate figures: that of the literary spinster and of the feminist critic. The spinster, in popular thought, hovers just outside the boundaries of legitimate care—neither maternal nor marital, any care performed by (or for) the spinster is inherently unproductive. The spinster herself, in fact, is inherently unproductive: she spins in place, never progressing toward marriage or reproductive coupledom and instead breaking or otherwise frustrating those plots for others. Despite these frustrating contradictions which so often render her illegible, the spinster is a figure to whom feminist criticism returns time and again, in a cycle of reclamation and disavowal that too often smooths over her messy incongruities. Across three chapters, “An Unoccupied Woman” reads the spinster as a particularly resonant figure for women’s writing at the end of the nineteenth century and a metonymic representation of the feminist literary critic as caretaker in the late twentieth century. Operating both as a thorough analysis of women’s writing in the late nineteenth century and as a theoretical revision of feminist critical practice, “An Unoccupied Woman” opens important lines of inquiry into gender and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, the history of feminist literary criticism, and the larger project of American women’s writing.

This dissertation discusses the terms and contradictions of a genre I term the “maturation serial,” series of books that document the work of growing up properly of a central girl character. The maturation serial emerges in the postbellum nineteenth century as an enormously popular and commercially profitable genre that left large audiences of girls eager for more content about their favorite characters and women authors with incentive to provide. Girl characters growing up come up against the societal demands of sentimental women’s culture, which pits the terms of seriality against those of maturation. What emerges is an impossible genre, yet one that is endlessly generative. This project thus builds on longstanding work by theorists of various “impossible genres” and deploys work on sentimentality and feminism to inquire why this particular “impossible genre” has remained relatively unexplored and why the texts of the maturation serial have enjoyed such a long popularity. I look at three series by three North American authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery (1909-1939), the Little Women series by Louisa May Alcott (1868-1886), and the Elsie Dinsmore series by Martha Finley (1867-1905).

A Markov model shows the degree of brand loyalty to Apple, Compaq, IBM, and Wyse personal computers by large corporate customers of Businessland, a large reseller of personal computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Because Businessland temporarily lost its franchise to carry Compaq for half a year in the middle of our sample, the model captures the effect on Businessland's sales of rival brands when a name brand is eliminated and then reintroduced. Large corporate customers were brand-loyal and relatively price insensitive. Their loyalty did not diminish over time. They did not view IBM-compatible computers as perfect substitutes. Eliminating and then reintroducing a brand has different short- and long-run effects. It is difficult to explain which firms diversify, but, contrary to reports in the popular press, most firms used both Apple and IBM-compatible machines.

My research examines racialized notions of nature and naturalness in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and literary criticism. Drawing on recent work in ecocriticism, critical race studies, and the history of reading, I argue that American Transcendentalists developed a practice of reading nature modeled on what they understood to be the linguistic practices of indigenous Americans, encompassed in Thoreau’s phrase “the eloquent savage.” Early twentieth-century American writers then repurposed the idea of a language emanating spontaneously from the environment to help establish the foundations of modern literary criticism. By tracing how they did so, I show that the discipline they founded was one rooted in racial exclusion. Starting in the antebellum era, traversing the rise of literary studies in the early twentieth century, and concluding in the 1930s with the consolidation of the modern university, my project historicizes the uses of nature and the natural in both American literature and the disciplinary formation of literary studies. My project argues that the conflation of nature and race assumed by antebellum writers served the New Agrarians as the basis of a literary canon whose quality emerged from its writers’ close and racially privileged relationship to nature. In this way, my project illuminates previously hidden aspects of the discourses that helped forge the discipline of literary studies. By arguing for the centrality of naturalized race and racialized nature to the literary history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my project suggests for American Studies and the Environmental Humanities the importance of attending not only to the ideas about nature transmitted by American literature, but the conditions under which naturalized and implicitly racialized notions of the literary emerged in the first place.

The Poetry of Origins reevaluates the ode’s influence on the history of lyric poetry. Rather than treating the ode as an ancient genre, I assert that its development is modern and transatlantic. Inseparable from the histories of colonization and race that formed the modern world, the ode would be illegible without reference to the racialized communities that it has excluded and that have remained marginal to the study of lyric theory and history. My research addresses this absence by offering readings of Anglophone poetry that attest to the centrality of colonialism and chattel slavery to the emergence of the ode. I begin by establishing that there is a fundamental discontinuity between the ancient and modern ode. Centering the sense of historical dislocation that would become emblematic of the ode’s reception, I draw attention to the ancient genre of the palinode, a genre that emerged from Stesichorus's claim that Helen never sailed to Troy. Tracing the interplay of the palinode and ode in early modern Britain, I reveal how it encoded ambivalences surrounding the intellectual foundations of historical time. In the poetry of Edmund Spenser, such anxieties were reconciled in the entwining of landscape and authority. I argue that, after Spenser, personification and apostrophe came to define the ode as tropes of domestication, which allowed poets like John Milton and Abraham Cowley to offer an ideological infrastructure for colonial expansion. My dissertation concludes by examining the ode’s role as a vehicle through which White British authors of the eighteenth century projected their visions of Europe’s archaic past onto colonial subjects. Turning to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, I posit that her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral engendered forms of literary recognition and community not circumscribed by the foundational pull of the ode.

The introduction of the IRS Form 990 Schedule H and the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable and Care Act (ACA) has challenged not-for-profit (NFP) health systems and hospitals to reassess the charitable practices that afford them tax-exemption. Many NFP health systems have been prompted to reexamine their roles, contributions, and impact in the communities they serve. These organizations have begun to explore alternative means to plan and strategically provide community benefit. As the regulatory landscape changes, the decision-making of leadership around community engagement may call for more transparent community engagement and efficient strategies that target specified needs. This will ultimately affect the goals and types of partnerships that are formed with various community stakeholders.

This research examines how large not-for-profit health care delivery systems establish partnerships aimed to improve community health. It is an exploratory project that examines the types of partnerships that these organizations engage in at system and hospital levels to affect the social and environmental conditions of their communities. Case studies were built around three different types of partnerships implemented by NFP health systems and hospitals through their projects and programs with community stakeholders. Each case study analyzed what took place before and while NFP health providers implemented partnerships directed toward community health. Through cross-case analysis, the degree to which principles of community-based public health and corporate social responsibility factor into the form, structure, and purposes of those partnerships were assessed.

Based on qualitative and quantitative data, four key characteristics were found to be consistent across the three partnership strategies examined. The findings emphasize the importance of purposeful strategic planning that is aligned with an organization's mission and responsive to its market environments. They also highlight the value of stakeholder engagement that is flexible, empowered, and sustained. I explore the implications of these findings in the context of the evolving policy and market landscapes shaped by new requirements of the IRS and the Affordable Care Act.

A new long-wavelength vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser structure is described that utilizes AlGaAs-GaAs mirrors bonded to AlInGaAs-InP quantum wells with an intracavity buried tunnel junction. This structure offers complete wavelength flexibility in the 1250-1650 nm fiber communication bands and reduces the high free-carrier losses and bonded junction voltage drops in previous devices. The intracavity contacts electrically bypass the bonded junctions to reduce threshold voltage. N-type current spreading layers and undoped AlGaAs mirrors minimize optical losses. This has enabled 134 degreesC maximum continuous-wave lasing temperature, 2-mW room-temperature continuous-wave single-mode power, and 1-mW single-mode power at 80 degreesC, in various devices in the 1310-1340 nm wavelength range.

We present principles for tunnel-juhction (TJ) design optimization for use in intracavity contacted long-wavelength vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (LW-VCSELs). Using the WKB approximation, we find that layer thicknesses of 10 nm on the n++ side and 10 mn on the p++ side are large enough to maximize quantum tunneling probability and small enough to yield low optical free-carrier absorption loss. We also conjecture that our experimental test structures and actual devices have far lower active acceptor concentration than we expect based on an analytical model. Finally, we calculate the necessary doping levels to enable single-mode operation of LW-VCSELs and incorporate these conditions into a complete optimized model of our VCSELs. Based on optimal I-V curves, we can expect an increase in single-mode output power from 2 to 3.5 mW.