Not for an age, but for all time : Shakespeare\u27s Romantic Comedies on Film

From Sam Taylor’s 1929 Taming of the Shrew to Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 Love’s Labour’s Lost, nine comedies have been filmed and released for the mainstream film market. Over the course of the twentieth century a filmic cycle developed. By the late 1990s, the films of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies included cinematic allusions to films produced and distributed in the 1930s. This cycle indicates an awareness of and appreciation for the earlier films. Such awareness proves that the contemporary films’ meaning and entertainment value are derived in part from the consciousness of belonging to a larger tradition of Shakespeare comedy on film. Recognizing the intertextuality of Shakespeare’s comedies on film challenges the notion that Shakespeare’s comedies do not merit the same critical attention as their tragic counterparts. The cinematic conversation between directors—as played out on screen—illustrates the relevance and cultural significance of Shakespeare’s comedy. This dissertation explores these comedic adaptations chronologically and offers analysis of the films as they enter the cinematic Shakespeare tradition. Each decade in which the comedies were produced reveals a unique view or understanding of the role of comedy in Shakespeare. For 1930s audiences, the three comedies offer innovative performances by big-name stars as some of them transitioned from silent films to talkies while others tried to flex their acting muscles. 1960s movie audiences saw Shakespeare comedy that was less about the theatrical tradition and more about cinematic realism and social relevance. Kenneth Branagh would move to capitalize on this approach and take populism to the next level with his two comedies in the 1990s. Branagh’s contributions to the comedy tradition proved to be both monumental and overconfident; however, the impact Branagh himself had on the field of Shakespeare on film is undeniable. His influence would inspire other directors (including Trevor Nunn and Michael Hoffman) who pay homage to Branagh stylistically and thematically. Recognizing the history of Shakespeare’s comedies on film allows us the opportunity to revisit and reexamine the comedies’ place on the Shakespeare-on-film canon by calling attention to what these films attempt to accomplish through cultural, social or cinematic means

Closest to the Heart – The Life of Emerson Hynes: A Biographical Study of Human Goodness with a Focus on the College Years

This study examined human goodness as lived through the life of Emerson Hynes with a focus on the college years. Emerson Hynes was an ethics and sociology professor at St. John’s University during the 1940s and 50s before he became legislative assistant to Senator Eugene McCarthy. He cared deeply about ethics and was a leader in family life, teaching, rural life and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, publications, advising, and legislative work. Influenced by Rev. Virgil Michel and the Benedictines, Hynes was a proponent of Catholic social justice, personalism, and distributism. He lived by an ethic of conversation and philosophy of the soil, and promoted flourishing rural life as the best possibility for a healthy society and culture. Primary research methods were biographical, historical, and social science portraiture. Biographical methods were influenced by John Shoup’s synthesis on influences of exemplary leadership. Historical methods included archival research, oral histories, geography of place, and writings by Hynes. Portraiture methodology was attentive to context, voice, and relationship in order for themes of goodness to emerge to illuminate the aesthetic whole. An overview of the life of Hynes is provided. The study then focused on three aspects of Hynes’s college years at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota: the influence and mentorship of Rev. Virgil Michel, his formal education, and his rich extracurricular life. These three key influences intertwine with the purposeful nature and ethical outlook of Hynes’s adult life. Five reflective themes emerged: a philosophy of the soil – the soil that brings forth food to feed all beings and is the basis of growth for the oxygen all beings breathe – as foundational for all activity of life including love, ethics, and relationships; the importance of mentorship and its unique possibilities in the college years and implications for college teachers; a pedagogy of student engagement and conversation as a primary platform toward supporting transformational learning in the ethical realm; an ethic of conversation as fundamentally necessary toward action in the world; and accessing human goodness as an approach to support human flourishing

Navigating disruption: mobile society and hurricanes Juan and Igor: a travelogue

In the course of a decade, two record-breaking hurricanes made landfall in Atlantic Canada: Juan (2003) and Igor (2010). During each hurricane, mobility networks central to the movement of people and goods (i.e. road, marine, air and rail) were disrupted, interrupting emergency services, commercial operations and personal transport. In some cases, alternate transport modes and routes emerged, while in other cases people and goods were rendered immobile. The anchoring idea for my research is that fossil fuel-powered transport contributes to climate change and climate change disrupts transport. The energetic boomerang comes full circle with severe weather events disrupting complex, weather-exposed transport networks. While linking specific weather events to climate change is tenuous, I explore these hurricanes as examples of the type of conditions (e.g. high winds, intense precipitation, storm surges) that are expected under a changing climate. To build societal resilience to extreme weather events, we need both theoretical and applied approaches to transport that incorporate recognition of climate change. Through this project I ask what responses and frames, particularly related to socialecological interactions, emerge when mobility networks are impacted by hurricanes. I examine sources of resilience and vulnerability (e.g. social, ecological, infrastructural), as well as ask how greater social and ecological resilience can be achieved. Using an inductive case study approach and drawing on media articles, legislative transcripts, policy documents and semi-structured interviews with key informants, I identify and analyze the resulting responses and frames as they pertain to social-ecological resilience and vulnerability. This research is grounded within the mobilities literature and informed by the disaster literature to elaborate an ecopolitics of mobility. I complement the applied areas of sustainable mobility (i.e. climate change mitigation) (Banister 2008) and resilience (i.e. transport, infrastructure, social-ecological) (Brown 2014; Folke 2010), with the theoretically oriented mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006), including the politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010). Further, I inflect the politics of mobility, which provides a nuanced approach to the analysis of power within mobility systems, with Foucault’s work on governmentality and circulation of societies and ecologies. In terms of practical contributions, I find that in the aftermath of Hurricanes Juan and Igor, reinstatement of mobility was an uppermost priority with a dominant tension between the frame ‘we’ve never seen anything like it’ and ‘we need to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.’ I develop a list of practices used for managing mobility in the preparation, response, recovery and mitigation phases of disaster, as well compare the resiliencies and vulnerabilities of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland’s mobility networks. In the case of Nova Scotia, a key source of vulnerability in the context of Hurricane Juan was the entanglement of trees and power lines. Key sources of resilience include the cultural instinct to batten down the hatches, the adaptable role of transit and the coordination of emergency services. Residents successfully, if somewhat precariously, governed their own mobility (i.e. governmobility). Further, the experience of successive intentional, technical and ecological adversities fostered a culture of all-hazards disaster readiness. In the case of Newfoundland and Labrador, a key source of vulnerability in the context of Hurricane Igor was the scale of road washouts combined with limited routes, modes (e.g. car, truck), fuel types and fuel storage. Key sources of resilience were coordination and cooperation among different levels of government, the private sector and residents demonstrating a high capacity to restore the road network to functionality within ten days and coordination among residents to cope in the interim. Based on the empirical case studies, I develop and elucidate three ideas that are valuable in reconceptualizing the social and environmental power dynamics inherent in transport networks: mobility webs, the ecopolitics of mobility and climate routing. I describe this set of concepts as an ecopolitical approach to mobility. Borrowing from the ecological concept of food webs, I use the term mobility webs to reflect the environmentally exposed, but also diverse and adaptable dimensions of contemporary transport networks arguing for an approach that cooperates with, rather than dominates, the environment. To underscore the view that transport networks and ecological flows are interwoven and, in an anthropogenic age, co-constructed, I forward the concept of an ecopolitics of mobility. Adapting Cresswell’s (2010) six elements of the politics of mobility – motive force, velocity, rhythm, route, experience and friction – to the interface of the environment and contemporary social-technical assemblages of mobility, I analyze socialecological power dynamics, including related sources of resilience and vulnerability to disrupt and reframe interactions between mobility and the environment. Informed by the disaster sociology of Freudenburg (2009), Klinenberg (2004) and Murphy (2009), I consider the possibilities for an ecologically reflexive modernization in the field of transport, extending the focus of transport resilience from restoring the status quo to include reflecting on the role of mobility in contemporary society (Beck 2015). I adapt the marine navigation concept of weather routing – the practice of altering a ship’s course to take maximum advantage of tidal, current and wind conditions to reduce the physical resistance of the ship moving through water – and posit the concept of climate routing. As conceived, climate routing involves six measures: creating a transport resilience task force, deliberating decentralization, internalizing externalities, planning for green and blue flows, rebranding redundancy and thinking flex. Primary considerations are lessening social-ecological contention, increasing resilience, questioning mobility practices and maintaining or increasing quality of life. In sum, my research offers innovative contributions by orienting mobilities research to social-ecological considerations – extending previous work on sustainable mobility even further – and orienting disaster sociology to mobility and related transport considerations

“Try to Lift Someone Else as We Climb”: 120 Years of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh and the Women’s Movement

In 1891, the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh met in the offices of the old Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette for the first time. Over the next 120 years, the women comprising this club found places for women in the public sphere by opening doors for newswomen. The clubwomen thus actively challenged widely held conventions about feminine limitations, and, as Hazel Garland, one of the club’s few African American members and the first woman managing editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, said, they reached behind and pulled up those women who came after them. WPCP members flew in hot air balloons, covered both WWI and WWII, funded scholarships for younger women, stood up to racism within their own ranks, and were some of the first women to enter post-game locker rooms with male sports reporters. Some activists in the women’s movement have called newswomen traitors for adhering to masculine frames of news coverage that dictate covering “both sides” of an issue, which sometimes means highlighting and publicizing an anti-women’s rights viewpoint in a story. However, this dissertation argues that mainstream female reporters should be considered in the stream of the broader women’s movement. Conventional presswomen, even those who worked on the widely excoriated woman’s pages, often were the voice of the women’s movement for a mainstream audience. While alternative presses preached to the converted, mass-audience presses persuaded the everyday person of the acceptability of previously unconventional ideas. By actively presenting themselves as the harbingers of change, seeking out and reporting issues of importance to the women’s movement, and creating opportunities for women’s professional advancement within the journalism profession, women’s press clubs like the WPCP made themselves an important resource for spreading activist ideology far and wide. Through the use of archival and oral history evidence, this dissertation shows how one of the United States’ longest-lived women’s press clubs, the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, challenged conventions and gave voice to the nascent women’s movement, even as its members were apparently observing the dictates of the male-dominated news establishment