Recent Dissertations
Comparative Literature
Djordje Popović
"The Concept of Statelessness in Second World Literature" (2019)
Advisor: Keya Ganguly
Michelle Baroody
"Archival Frictions: The Arab and Arab American as Image in Literature, Film, and Other Archives" (2019)
Advisor: John Mowitt, Shaden Tageldin
Courtney Gildersleeve
"Writing beyond Redress: Slavery and the Work of Literature" (2019)
Advisor: Keya Ganguly, Shaden Tageldin
Brendan McGillicuddy
"Drug Regimes: Cultural Pharmacology and American Literature, 1820-1940" (2019)
Advisor: Robert Brown
Aleksander Sedzielarz
"The Revolutionary Task of Cinema: Modernism and Mass Culture in Shanghai and Buenos Aires" (2019)
Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz
Thomas Patrick Cannavino
"Proved upon Our Pulses: Romanticism and the Life of Things Today" (2017)
Advisor: Robert Brown
Marla Zubel
"Literary Reportage and the Poetics of Cold War Internationalism" (2017)
Advisor: Timothy Brennan
Akshya Saxena
“Vernacular Englishes: Language and Democratic Politics in Post-Liberalization India” (2016)
Advisor: Shaden M. Tageldin
Timothy August
“Postcolonial Appetites: Vietnamese American Literature and Refugee Aesthetics” (2014)
Advisor: Keya Ganguly
Mathew Hadley
“Laboratory Literature: Science & Fiction in the Place of Production” (2013)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Niels Niessen
“A North Wind: the New Realism of the French-Walloon Cinema du Nord” (2013)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Alicia Gibson
“The End, or in the Nuclear Age: Aesthetic From and Modes of Subjectivity” (2012)
Advisor: Richard Leppert
Christian Haines
“A Desire Called America: Biopolitics and Utopian Forms of Life in American Literature” (2012)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
George Hoagland
“Reading for the Minor: Methodological Considerations in the Work of Paul Beatty, Erika Lopez, and Beau Sia” (2012)
Advisor: John Mowitt
Morgan Adamson
“The End of the Gold Standard: Finance, Crisis, and the Cinema of the New Left” (2011)
Advisors: Cesare Casarino and John Mowitt
Daniel Dooghan
“Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature” (2011)
Advisor: Timothy A. Brennan
Nathan Snaza
“Bewildering Education: Literature and the Human After Nietzsche” (2011)
Paige Sweet
“Marking the Untellable: A Theory of Reading Punctuation in the Work of Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector” (2011)
Advisor: John Mowitt
Melissa Licht
“Warring Opinions: An Investigation into the Sublime Aesthetic Narratives of Contemporary Warfare” (2010)
Advisor: Thomas Pepper
Cory Stockwell
“Open Secrets: Violence, Secrecy, Community” (2010)
Advisor: Thomas Pepper
Lindsay Green-Simms
“Postcolonial Automobility: West Africa and the Road to Globalization” (2009)
Advisor: Timothy Brennan
Eva Hudecova
“The Witness Who May Not Have Been There: Eastern European Authors Looking Westward” (2009)
Advisor: Jochen Schulte-Sasse
Julietta Singh
“The Edible Complex: Postcolonial Narrative and the Politics of Eating” (2009)
Yun Peng
“A U-turn in the Desert Figures and Motifs of the Chinese Nineteen Eighties” (2008)
Advisor: Thomas Pepper
Andrew Opitz
“Impassioned Sarcasm and Militant Irony: An Investigation into the Evolving Politics of Satire” (2007)
Advisor: Timothy Brennan
Jay Mininger
“Nothing Too Much: The Poetics of Anxiety” (2006)
Advisor: Ronald Sousa, Maria Brewer
Graeme Stout
“Arrested Images: Discourses of Terrorism in Italy and Germany” (2006)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society
Emily Fedoruk
"Poetry, or Elsewhere" (2019)
Advisor: John Archer
Andrea Gyenge
"Res Oralis: Mouths of Philosophy" (2018)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Koel Banerjee
"Commodity, Citizen, Copy: Bollywood and the Aesthetics of Consumption" (2018)
Advisor: Keya Ganguly
Rachel Schaff
"Melodrama and Memory: Historicizing Pathos in Czech Holocaust Films" (2018)
Advisor: Alice Lovejoy
Thorn Chen
"Moving Pictures, Empty Words: Cinema as Developmental Interface in the Chinese Reconstruction, 1932-1952" (2017)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino & Jason Carl McGrath
Jessica Lee Mathiason
"Engineering Kinship: Genetic Technologies, Economic Speculation, and the Queer Body" (2017)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Dag Sigurd Yngvesson
"Non-Aligned Features: The Coincidence of Modernity and the Screen in Indonesia" (2016)
Advisor: John Mowitt & Shaden M. Tageldin
Sara Saljoughi
“Burning Visions: The Iranian New Wave and the Politics of the Image, 1962-1979.” (2015)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Brad Stiffler
“TV Party, New Wave Theatre, and Subcultural Television in the 1970s and 1980s” (2015)
Advisors: Richard Leppert & Laurie Ouellette
Benjamin Fink
“Organized Ideas, or Defeating the Culture Wars (What We Need to Know, and How We Need to Know It)” (2014)
Advisor: Robin Brown
Benedict H. Stork
“Image-Documents: Found and Appropriated Images in Documentary Cinema.” (2014)
Advisor: John Mowitt
Cecilia Aldarondo
“The Documentary Encounter: Memory, Materiality, and Performance in Contemporary Visual Culture” (2013)
Advisor: Jane Blocker
Sean Nye
“Teutonic Time-Slip: Travels in Electronic Music, Technology, and Germany Identity, 1968–2009” (2013)
Advisor: Richard Leppert
Justin Schell
“We Rock Long Distance: Manifest and the Circulations of Diasporic Hip-Hop” (2013)
Advisor: Robin Brown
Mathew Stoddard
“The Lives of Film: Heritage, Restoration, and the Materialism of Cinema” (2013)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Joseph Tompkins
“Off-Screen Scares: The Critical- Industrial Practices of Contemporary Horror Cinema” (2013)
Advisor: Richard Leppert
Holly Wlodarczyk
“Somewhere That's Green? Visions of Sustainable Suburbia” (2013)
Advisor: John Archer
Meredith Gill
“The Clarity of the Cold War: Truth and Literary Communism Between the USA and the USSR in the Era of Postmodern Globalization” (2012)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Rachel Weiss
“Harbinger and Echo: The Soundscape of the Yiddish- American Film Musical” (2012)
Advisor: Leslie Morris
Courtney Helgoe
“Lines in the Sea, Words in the Sand: On the Refugee and the Politics of Refuge” (2010)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Sarah Loyd-Grey
“A Refusal to Play Along: Videogaming and Ludic Thought” (2010)
Advisor: Richard Leppert
Carlos Cordero-Cancio
“On the Intellectuals of the Future and the Left 'Re-armed'” (2009)
Advisor: John Mowitt
Amy Levine
“Phantasmatic Cinema: Delinkage and Disarticulation in Michelangelo Antonioni, Bela Tarr, Jean-Luc Godard and Alexander Sokurov” (2009)
Susan Shin-Hee Park
“Conceiving difference through alternative reading strategies: Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Post-Civil Rights US minority texts” (2009)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
John Conley
“Capital Cynicism: Literature and Production in the Post-Fordist Era” (2008)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson
“Design for Living: German and Swedish Design in the Early Twentieth Century” (2008)
Advisor: Jochen Schulte-Sasse
Stephen Groening
“Connected Isolation: Screens, Mobility, and Globalized Media Culture”(2008)
Advisor: Keya Ganguly
Hans Skott-Myhre
“Who Are We to Become If We Are Not This: Madness, Anti- Psychiatry and Literature” (2008)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Brynnar Swenson
“The Corporate Form: Capital, Literature, Architecture” (2008)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Marjorie Weinstein
“Reframing Law and Lens: Jacob Riis's Documentary Photography and Legal Discourse during the Progressive Era” (2008)
Labidi Imed
“Unlearning Western Pedagogy: Arab Schools in the Neocolonial Era.” (2007)
Advisor: John Mowitt
Mazher Alzoby
“Moderns and Others: The Location of Social Change.” (2006)
Advisor: Robin Brown
Thomas Haakenson
“Grotesque Visions: Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early- Twentieth-Century Germany.” (2006)
Advisor: Keya Ganguly
Kysa Hubbard
“Civilizing Childhood: The Rational Alienation of Adult-Child Relations.” (2006)
Advisor: Jack Zipes
Kjel Johnson
“[Re]Framing Violence: Hollywood Cinema & Late Capitalism 1967-2001.” (2006)
Advisor: John Mowitt
Thomas Roach Jr.
“Shared Estrangement: Foucault, Friendship, and AIDS Activism.” (2006)
Advisor: Cesare Casarino
Roni Shapira
“Switched-on Deutschland: The Sounds of Germany.” (2006)
Advisor: John Mowitt
Jacqueline Spicer
“Modern Texts: Autobiography and the Rise of the Individual.” (2006)
Advisor: John Mowitt
John Troyer
“Technologies of the Human Corpse.” (2006)
Advisor: John Archer