Scholarly pursuits: A sampling of students' doctoral theses

The depth and breadth of graduate student scholarship is reflected in the listing of doctoral theses published each year in the Commencement program. Here is a look at some of them.

• Sarah Alexander Chase: ‘The Gender of Excellence: The Pursuit of Masculinity and Femininity at a New England Preparatory School’
  
• Brenda Foley: ‘Image as Identity: Beauty Contestants and Exotic Dancers as Merchants of Morality’
  
• Brian Zugay: ‘Towards a "New Era" in Church Building: Architectural Reform in American Protestantism in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries’
  

Student:Sarah Alexander Chase
Thesis: ‘The Gender of Excellence: The Pursuit of Masculinity and Femininity at a New England Preparatory School’

Living in a dorm at the New England preparatory school where her husband taught Latin, Sarah Alexander Chase was immersed in the population she was writing about for a doctorate in anthropology.

To study the behavioral differences among the teen-age girls and boys, Chase rode in the back of the football and field hockey buses to sporting matches. She took platters of hot brownies to the teens and chatted with them. With the girls, Chase shopped for prom dresses, and, with the boys, accompanied them to their tux fittings.

"I became fascinated by the different experiences the boys and girls were having," said Chase, who has three sons of her own. "There was an amazing dichotomy between girls who were focused on others, and boys, focused on self."

At first glance, Chase's findings appeared to confirm previous research on gender expression that pointed to a different psychological makeup wherein females focus on relationships and making connections, and males, on individuality and autonomy.

When asked about their most important belonging in their dorm rooms, said Chase, girls would point to something that connected them to friends or family, such as photographs or a tapestry that had been given to them by a grandmother. By contrast, boys would point out a guitar or hockey stick - items that lack a personal connection to another person.

But the more Chase learned, the more she became convinced the teens, who primarily ranged in age from 14 to 18, were "performing" cultural gender differences.

The students often presented themselves as being either "masculine" or "feminine" in an attempt to secure bonds with others, said Chase. The similarities between males and females were obscured because of strong cultural rewards and punishments that promote gendered behavior.

For example, girls talked about pretending to be drunk on alcohol so that someone would "take care" of them, said Chase. Boys talked about the pressure to drink large amounts of alcohol because of the desire to "keep up" with other boys.

"It's a conscious image management," said Chase. "As one boy put it, he can't do anything that will 'f--- his image.'"

It took 14 years for Chase to complete her 600-page dissertation titled "The Gender of Excellence: The Pursuit of Masculinity and Femininity at a New England Preparatory School."

The student body of the preparatory school (unnamed in her dissertation) was the ideal population for the study because it was a group of privileged students who are highly invested in their status and image, she said.

If a psychologist were tackling the same question, that researcher would get an office on campus and call students into the office to talk with them individually; the sociologist would ask each student to fill out a survey, said Chase.

As an anthropologist, Chase lived with them. And throughout her research, the students were as interested in Chase's findings as she was.

The school was also interested in her area of expertise. Next year, Chase will teach anthropology at the New England preparatory school to the very population she studied. - Kristen Cole

Student:Brenda Foley
Thesis: ‘Image as Identity: Beauty Contestants and Exotic Dancers as Merchants of Morality’

To the average American, beauty pageant contestants appear to have little in common with strippers and pole dancers. Indeed, the two groups represent the opposite extremes of our society's stereotypical notions of the "good girl" and the "bad girl."

Brenda Foley spent 14 years working in theater, however, and she recognizes a performance when she sees one. Exotic dancers and pageant contestants are both performers, she argues, despite our longstanding, continuous effort to segregate them from one another on various moral, ethical and social grounds.

To earn her doctorate, Foley studied and interviewed many of the women on these two seemingly different stages. In her dissertation, "Image as Identity: Beauty Contestants and Exotic Dancers as Merchants of Morality," she details the remarkable parallels between pageant contestants and striptease artists, linking them through their performance approach and movement patterns or "gestural vocabulary," as well as in the marketing and regulation of the two industries.

"That beauty contests share so much of the same theatrical language as the strip shows whose ethos they repudiate should not be surprising, since their primary text - the woman's body - is the same," said Foley. "The question is, why are we so culturally invested in the disassociation? We are grounded in our moralistic ideal of good girl versus bad girl."

Both forms of performance date back to the mid-19^th century's socially-accepted tableaux vivant - i.e., live imitations of famous Greek paintings of nude women. With the emergence of burlesque and vaudeville a few decades later came a compartmentalization of the two variations as "dirty" and "clean."

Today that same kind of labeling is assigned to the Miss America pageant and the Miss Exotic World competition. Although the audience may see the contestants of each in terms of virgin and whore, the participants themselves are "very smart and very aware of what they're doing as performance," Foley found. "Both speak in terms of acting.

"The Miss America contestants may hate the swimsuit competition, but they know that's what keeps the audience watching - and that it brings in the scholarship money... . If you're playing for a team, you wear its jersey, and in the Miss America pageant, it's the swimsuit."

Foley added, "We don't accept different notions of beauty. Our cultural requirements equate pink with being feminine and a pelvic thrust with being sexual... . This has masked the overriding truth, which is that both of these forms are performances of our expectations of a woman's place in our culture."

Foley earned an M.A. in theater studies at Brown in 2000 and will now receive an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in special graduate studies. In September she will begin a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of English at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada, where she will direct productions and teach. - Mary Jo Curtis

Student:Brian Zugay
Thesis: ‘Towards a "New Era" in Church Building: Architectural Reform in American Protestantism in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries’

On paper the late-19th century church architectural plans seem simple enough that a novice with meager means or a nascent congregation might construct a humble but attractive minster within a reasonable timeframe.

The eye-catching lithographs were intended for their aesthetic appeal. Easy-to-understand floor plans for frame-built structures were selected for their ease of use, according to history of art and architecture graduate student Brian Zugay, who studied 19^th- and early 20^th-century church building traditions among several major evangelical Protestant denominations.

"We tend to have an idea of churches being very cosmopolitan and sophisticated," says Zugay, "In many cities they had substandard churches; in frontier regions a lot of congregations didn't even have buildings to worship in, or worshipped in shacks or sheds," he says.

Hence in the 1850s, against a backdrop of national expansion, population growth and active competition for new members, several Protestant denominations formed church-extension societies comprised of a few clergymen who raised funds, and developed and marketed attractive and affordable church architectural designs, addressing the need for new churches, particularly in the West and Midwest.

Zugay says that although architecture historians acknowledge the role that American churches have played within architecture, the modernization of church architecture and the denominational infrastructures governing church design warrant further attention.

Churches also offer something deeper to historical study, he says. "Aside from their own houses, people don't make those kind of meaningful connections with other buildings," says Zugay.

Through 19^th-century church-extension societies, largely heterogeneous approaches to church building by individual congregations gave way to increasingly centralized denominational support including recommendations for building, coordination with architects, mail-order guides and a series of inexpensive plans that could be used by any congregation.

Designs for a modest two-room church comfortably seating 100 could be obtained from these denominational guides for as little as $4 and, dependent on if labor and materials were cheap, constructed as inexpensively as $800.

As to the exact number of churches these societies helped establish, Zugay's research points to a small but significant percentage of the tens of thousands of churches created during this era. Between 1870 and 1890, the number of church buildings in the United States nearly doubled to more than 140,000 - at a rate of five per day at one point - due largely to the growth of evangelical denominations.

By the early 20th century both the infrastructure governing church design as well as the designs themselves grew more formal. Several denominations, including the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Southern and Northern Baptist Conventions, formed professionally staffed bureaus of architecture to oversee building and cater to their congregations' building needs.

These bureaus greatly impacted the contemporary practice and understanding of church design and effected substantial improvements across the country. "Everyone wanted to build a new church with an elaborate Sunday school complex, gymnasia, bowling alleys and social and recreational spaces," says Zugay.

Ironically, this bureaucratic infrastructure, which originated in the mid-19th century, would also reexamine the church buildings established before 1900. "Churches built according to the mail-order plan were cheap and shoddy, and by the 1920s, they were thought old fashioned and ugly," says Zugay. - Ricardo Howell