Among the hundreds of hymnals published in the United States during the Second Great Awakening (1790–1850), the first official hymnal of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a rare example of a hymnal compiled by a woman. The Latter-day Saints wanted a hymnal adapted to their unique beliefs and emerging identity, and Emma Smith—the wife of founding prophet Joseph Smith—was given sole charge of selecting the hymns. The hymnal is also significant because Emma Smith selected and arranged hymns from 1830–1835, years of an emerging rhetoric for the early women’s rights movement. Nevertheless, few studies attend to Smith’s agency and priorities as a compiler, being preoccupied with the contributions of W. W. Phelps, the editor, printer, and most represented poet of the hymnal.

Drawing on Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s theories of agency and of feminine style as well as Kenneth Burke’s theory of form, this thesis uses close textual analysis and coding to examine the rhetorical strategies Smith employed in the hymnal’s preface and in the organization of the Sacred Hymns section. The analysis reveals the hymnal’s recurring themes as well as the ideas it circulates about sex, gender, agency, and community inclusion/exclusion. It also uncovers tension between Smith’s and Phelps’ priorities for the hymnal, particularly in how Smith and Phelps characterize those who should and should not be included with equal authority in Zion, the ideal community the Latter-day Saints sought to build.

Increasing numbers of biomedical products have become eligible for over-the-counter sale in contemporary American consumer culture. What was once the realm of the clinical has moved into the realm of the domestic, with the consumer as the interpreter of health issues and communication. This dissertation examines the user experience with the marketing and design of packaging of home pregnancy tests. Studies indicate that more than one-third of women of reproductive age in the U.S. have used a home pregnancy test, yet the test is marketed to a specific demographic of user: one who is white, affluent, and married. How are users’ experiences affected, and how do different methodological frameworks yield results for the study of these user experiences?

In this project, I conduct a series of methodological case studies to show how each reveal various aspects of the user experience of home pregnancy testing. I begin with a case study of three brands of home pregnancy tests, using visual-material rhetorical analysis to uncover the cultural values implicit in packaging. I then move to two case studies involving the results of a National Institutes of Health survey of pregnancy test users. I employ a thematic analysis framework to analyze demographic information about users and to contextualize their narratives. I also conduct corpus linguistics and semantic network analysis with the same data set to model patterns in language. From these varying approaches, each with different underlying assumptions, nuanced aspects of the user experience with the product and its communication emerge. For example, the user’s life circumstances change from initial to subsequent pregnancy test purchase and use so as to suggest more desire for a positive result with subsequent testing, yet many users across these categories express some degree of discomfort when purchasing this product.

I conclude with suggestions based on this research for more ethically informed pregnancy test marketing, and outline avenues for future research for evaluation of home pregnancy test user experience. I finally discuss the implications of multiple methodological approaches for transdisciplinary humanities project design, implementation, and evaluation, with emphasis on the digital and medical humanities.

Roald Dahl's books for children have often been characterized as deviating from "normal" plots in books for children because they feature elements and themes (e.g., violence, crude/rude behavior and humor, inversions of authority) that make representatives of the dominant culture (parents, school officials, teachers, librarians, etcetera) uncomfortable. Rather than view the stories holistically, challengers are quick to latch on to the specific incidents within these texts that cause discomfort, and use the particular as grounds to object to the whole. A deeper, and more critical, look reveals that instead of straying from established elements and themes in children's stories, Dahl's works have much in common with fairy tales--narratives that have endured in multiple iterations and over millennia. As with fairy tales, Dahl's stories for children offer readers ways to interpret--to make sense of and derive meaning from--their lives, while reflecting and reinforcing the ideological structures (family, appropriate behavior, capitalism) within which we find ourselves.

Composition historians have increasingly recognized that local histories help test long-held theories about the development of composition in higher education. As Gretchen Flesher Moon argues, local histories complicate our notions of students, teachers, institutions, and influences and add depth and nuance to the dominant narrative of composition history. Following the call for local histories in rhetoric and composition, this study is a local history of composition at Arizona State University (ASU) from 1885-1985. This study focuses on the institutional influences that shaped writing instruction as the school changed from a normal school to teachers` college, state college, and research university during its first century in existence. Building from archival research and oral histories, this dissertation argues that four national movements in higher education--the normal school movement, the standardization and accreditation movement, the "university-status movement," and the research and tenure movement--played a formative role in the development of writing instruction at Arizona State University. This dissertation, therefore, examines the effects of these movements as they filtered into the writing curriculum at ASU. I argue that faculty and administrators` responses to these movements directly influenced the place of writing instruction in the curriculum, which consequently shaped who took writing courses and who taught them, as well as how, what, and when writing was taught. This dissertation further argues that considering ASU`s history in relation to the movements noted above has implications for composition historians attempting to understand broader developments in composition history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Notwithstanding ASU`s unique circumstances, these movements had profound effects at institutions across the country, shaping missions, student populations, and institutional expectations. Although ASU`s local history is filled with idiosyncrasies and peculiarities that highlight the school`s distinctiveness, ASU is representative of hundreds of institutions across the country that were influenced by national education movements which are often invisible in the dominant narrative of composition history. As such, this history upholds the goal of local histories by complicating our notions of students, teachers, institutions, and influences and adding depth and nuance to our understanding of how composition developed in institutions of American higher education.