Recent Dissertations
The past nine years of PhDs awarded by the Department of English.
- Morgan Graham. "The Lives of Thomas Hardy." Advisor: Elaine Auyoung
- Andrew Hamilton. "All the World Was America: Property, Race, and Reification in Twentieth-Century American Fiction." Advisor: Nathaniel Mills
- Margaret Heeschen. "A Meeting of Minds: How the Conceptualization of the Mod Shaped Interpersonal Relationships in Old English Poetry." Advisors: Janet Ericksen and Rebecca Krug
- Emily Schoenbeck. "The Millennial Fandom: Shakespeare and New Media." Advisor: Katherine Scheil
- Clara Biesel. “The ‘Print o’Life:’ Transitions of Text and the Early Modern Stage.” Advisor: Katherine Scheil
- Stephen Ellis. “Self-Effacement and Natural Metaphors: On Responsibility and the Public Sphere.” Advisor: Timothy Brennan
- Hannah Jorgenson. "Bound by Contract: Fictional Representations of Women's Legal Autonomy, 1656-1788." Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
- Jacqueline Patz DiPiero. "In the Air: Atmospheric Totality and the Death of Plot." Advisor: Timothy Brennan
- Christopher Bowman. “Climate Change of Mind: Revisiting Dust Bowl Narratives in a Time of Climate Catastrophe.” Advisor: Daniel Philippon
- Moinak Choudhury. “Anxieties of Individualism: Autodidacts in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Advisor: Timothy Brennan
- Jennifer Jodell. “From the Mediatrix to the White Room: Affective Engineering Tropes in Early Media Science Fiction.” Advisor: Siobhan Craig
- Saeide Mirzaei. “Hijacking Islam: An Analysis of Positive Representations of Islam and Muslims in the U.S.” Advisor: Nathaniel Mills
- Caleb Molstad. “Alimentary Theology: Religious Experience and the Language of Food in Late- Medieval English Vernacular Literature.” Advisor: Andrew Scheil
- Brett Sigurdson. “We Know Jack!: On the Road with the Influencers Shaping the Legacy of America’s Most Misunderstood Author.” Advisor: Daniel Philippon
- Anne Spidahl. “Dressing Disaster: Apocalyptics After '68.” Advisor: Tony Brown
- Ali Zimmerman. “"I Will Not Be a Monster": Revising the Fairy-Tale Witch.” Advisor: Andrew Scheil
- Amanda Alexander. “Prescriptive Politeness: How Eighteenth-Century British and Dutch Periodicals Influenced Public Perceptions of Prescriptive Language Movements.” Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
- Matthew Brogden. “‘Security and Destruction:’ Reading the Sublime in the British Romantic Period. Advisor: Tony Brown
- Eunkyung Cho. “Metatheater in City Comedy with Prodigal Son Plot Structure in Shakespeare’s Time.” Advisor: John Watkins
- Jennifer Easler. “The Futility of Prophecy: Prophecy and Poetry in English Narratives of Troy.” Advisor: Andrew Scheil
- Jonas Gardsby. “The Unfolding of the Early Modern Essay.” Advisor: John Watkins
- Elizabeth Howard. “The Parted Voice: Polyvocal Utterance in Victorian Elegies.” Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
- Laura Price. “Things Fall Apart: Decapitation and the Quest for Certainty in Early Modern English Literature.” Advisor: John Watkins
- David Rodriguez-Martinez. “Film Noir Sensibilities.” Advisor: Siobhan Craig
- Laura Scroggs. “A-Lines: Texts, Dresses, and 1960s American Icons.” Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz
- Sung Jin Shin. “Personal and Vernacular Voices: Reimagined Relationship with the Past in Early British Romantic Literature.” Advisor: Brian Goldberg
- John Vanoverbeke. “Muir's Wilderness: Christianity, Indigeneity, and Postsecularism in America's National Parks.” Advisor: Daniel Philippon
- Samantha Crain. “Judicious Improbable as Critique: The Brontës’ Possible Fictions and Their Reception.” Advisor: Brain Goldberg
- Abhay Doshi. “Engaging the Right's 'Rhetoric of Dissent': New Directions for Political Criticism.” Advisors: Timothy Brennan and Ellen Messer-Davidow
- Youngbin Hyeon. “Reimagining Fathers and Sons: Race, Labor, Alienation, and Asian American Drama." Advisor: Josephine Lee
- Bomi Jeon. “From the Margins of History: Everyday Life and Narrating the Nation in British Fiction and Cinema After 1940." Advisor: Siobhan Craig
- Melissa Johnson. "’The Real World Represented’: Identity Politics and Diverse Representation in Shakespeare and Young Adult Lit.” Advisor: Katherine Scheil
- Jennifer Kang. “"Modernism and Its Other: The Making of Oppositional Aesthetics in the Era of High Modernism." Advisor: Timothy Brennan
- Jen-chou Liu. “Metaphors of Authorship: Eighteenth-Century Novelists' Imaginations of the Reading Publics, 1740–1810.” Advisor: Tony Brown
- Amanda Niedfelt. "Literature of Warning: The State-Private Network, Cultural Patronage, and the Emergence of Foundation Literature during the Cold War." Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz
- Kristina Popiel. "Mules of the World Unbridled: Race, Labor, and the Political Economy of 20th century American Women of Color's Writing." Advisor: Timothy Brennan
- Zoe Rodine. "'Living Enfleshment Otherwise': Articulating Embodiment Across Transatlantic Modernisms." Advisor: Siobhan Craig
- Amy Bolis. "Exporting Othello: Shakespeare, Race, and Adaptation in America (2008-2018)." Advisor: Katherine Scheil
- Ashley Campbell. "Just Trash."Advisor: Katherine Scheil
- Jenna Dreier. "'As you from crimes would pardoned be': Prison Shakespeare and the Practices of Empowerment." Advisor: Katherine Scheil
- Amy Fairgrieve. "I’ve Got a Bad, Bad Feeling: Rethinking Negative Affect in Literary Studies." Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
- Marc Juberg. "Satirizing the Audience: Shakespeare and the Uses of Obscurity, 1594-1601." Advisor: Katherine Scheil
- David Lemke. "A Critique from Within: The Early African American Utopian Tradition and Its Visions of a Better Society." Advisor: Timothy Brennan
- Charlotte Madere. "Creating Indian and British Selves: Life-Writing and Colonial Relations, 1794-1826." Advisor: Brian Goldberg
- Melissa Merte. "Formally Entangled: Plotting Economic and Romantic Desire in Victorian Narratives." Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
- Yon Ji Sol. "To Enlist or Not, for the Empire: The Citizens of the British Isles and Stories of War from the Four Kingdoms 1798-1853." Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
- Elisabeth Alderks. "Not the Truth But the Way’: the Ethics of Irony in World Literature." Advisor: Timothy Brennan
- Yuan Ding. "Capitalizing Race: Diasporic Narratives and Global Asia." Advisor: Josephine Lee
- Samantha Majhor. "We Are All Related: Contemporary Native American Literature and the Nonhuman Turn." Advisor: Josephine Lee
- Katelyn McCarthy. "Reading the Double Bind: The Death of the Good Woman in Early Modern Literature." Advisor: John Watkins
- Michael Rowe. "Aliens and Animals: Notes on Literary Lifeforms After Darwin and Freud." Advisor: Lois Cuculu
- Katelin Krieg. "The Victorian Mind’s Eye: perception as Form in Literature and Science." Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
- Adam Lindberg. "Playing Badly: The Heroic Cheat and the Ethics of Play." Advisor: Jani Scandura
- Grace Miller. "Babel's Apology: Religious Nostalgia and Literary Engagement with the Postsecular Age." Advisor: Daniel Philippon
- Asa Olson. "The Form of Selfhood: Elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England." Advisor: John Watkins
- Barbara Schulman. "Blackface Minstrelsy: Handbooks for the Amateur, 1899-1921." Advisor: Josephine Lee
- Jeffrey Squires. "The Exculpation of the Desperate: Comforting the Desperate in England, 1580-1680." Advisor: John Watkins
- Robert St. Lawrence. "The Good Life: Weakness in the Survival Years." Advisors: Jani Scandura and Maria Damon
- Jennifer Baltzer-Lovato. "Sound, Gender, Individual Will, and the Body in Nineteenth-Century British Literature." Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
- Wesley Burdine. "Feeling Out of Time: Phenomenal Bodies and Temporality in the Fin de Siècle." Advisors: Tony Brown and Jani Scandura
- Hyeryung Hwang. "Thinking Beyond Modernism: Peripheral Realism and the Ethics of Truth-Telling." Advisor: Timothy Brennan
- Stephen McCulloch. "The Total Train System: Technology and Progressivism in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature." Advisor: Lois Cucullu
- Amanda Taylor. "Fabricating the Martial Body: Anatomy, Affect, and Armor in Early Modern England and Italy." Advisors: Shirley N. Garner and John Watkins