Recent Dissertations
2019
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
2018
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
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
2017
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
2016
Emily Anderson
"Nowhere to Go But Forward: The Fiction of Octavia E. Butler"
Advisor: Lois Cucullu
Jessica Apolloni
"Tales of Resistance: Combating Legal Power from Italian Shores to London Streets"
Advisor: John Watkins
NaRae Kim
"Of Bodies and Things: The Korean as Commodity Fetish"
Advisors: Josephine Lee and Timothy Brennan
Caitlin McHugh
"The Afterlives of Shakespeare's Tragedies"
Advisors: John Watkins and Katherine Scheil
Eunha Na
"Empathic Imagination: Performing Interracial Intimacy in Contemporary Women's Drama"
Advisor: Josephine Lee
Katherine Robison
"The Path to Wholeness: The Therapeutic Potential of Bodily Writing in Late-Medieval Dream Visions"
Advisor: Rebecca Krug
Benjamin Utter
"'Fawty and Falce': Sin, Sanctity, and the Heroics of Devotion in Late-Medieval English Literature"
Advisor: Rebecca Krug
2015
Sungyoung Ahn
"The Human Against Itself: Posthumanism in Contemporary Novels"
Advisor: Timothy Brennan
Eric Brownell
"Gothic Heroines and Cultural Trauma in 20th Century Literature and Film"
Advisor: Lois Cucullu
Andrew Marzoni
"In the American Vein"
Advisor: Siobhan Craig
2014
Bozeman, Laura
"The Genteel Frontier: Westward Expansion of Womanly Refinement"
Advisor: Donald Ross
Lawless, Annemarie
"Face to Typeface: On Reading and Redemption"
Advisor: Jani Scandura
McWhorter, Rachel
“Conceiving Pregnancy as Narrative(s): Transgressive Maternities and Disability in American Reproductive Politics"
Advisor: Lois Cucullu
Mikos, Keith
“The Rise of the Small: Meaning, Metaphysics, and the Microscope"
Advisor: Jani Scandura
Olsen, Trenton
"Entangled Influence: Wordsworth and Darwinism in the Late Victorian Period"
Advisor: Andrew Elfenbein
Schumacher-Schmidt, Dana
"Monuments of Truth: Domesticity, Memory, and Politics in the English Civil Wars and Restoration"
Advisor: John Watkins
2013
Coleman, Taiyon
"Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire: Narrative Past-Time as a Temporal Site of Racialized Identity Deconstruction"
Advisor: Donald Ross
DeLong, Renee
"Missed Bridges: The Invisible (and Hypervisible) Lesbian of Color in Theory, Publishing, and Media"
Advisor: Maria Damon
Flack, Christopher
"Writing Conquest: Traditions of Anglo-Saxon Invasion and Resistance in the Twelfth Century"
Advisor: Andrew Scheil
Kanyusik, William
"The Wound at the Heart of Vision: Fraught Masculinities, Marked Bodies, and the 'Subject' of Disability"
Advisor: Siobhan Craig
Kim, Eun Joo
"Unreading Multilingualisms of the Korean Diaspora"
Advisor: Josephine Lee
Larkin, Christopher
"Iatrochemical Healing in Shakespeare and Donne: The Diseased and Cured Body in the English Literary Imagination, 1590-1638"
Advisor: David Haley
Liu, Sophronia
"A Shimmering Sea: Hong Kong Stories"
Advisor: Madelon Sprengnether
McNeff, Heather
"Finding Happiness: Interfaith Marriage in British Literature, 1745-1836"
Advisor: Brian Goldberg
Pistelli, John
"Modernism's Critique du Coeur: The Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925"
Advisor: Lois Cucullu
Schrag, Adam
"Surface to Surface: War, Image, and the Senses in the Screenic Era"
Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz
Van BeverDonker, Maurits
"Texturing Difference: Indigeneity, Tactility, and the Text of 'black consciousness philosophy'"
Advisor: Qadri Ismail
Woo, Jewon
"Performing Bodies and Performative Texts: The Bodily Culture of the Antebellum United States and Fleshy Writing"
Advisors: Josephine Lee and Michelle Wright
2012
Bonine, Lelaine
“Reel Consequences: Chasing the Trace, Leaving It Behind"
Advisor: Jani Scandura
Carlson, Erik
“The Old English Language of Fear"
Advisor: Andrew Scheil
Gage, Molly Kelley
"Feverish Fragments and Dis-eased Desire: The Archive as Fiction"
Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz
Hansen, Elisabeth (Elissa)
"Temporality in Fourteenth-Century English Contemplative Writing"
Advisor: Rebecca Krug
Mabie, Joshua
"Modern American Pilgrims: Dwelling and Religious Travel in the Lives and Works of Herman Melville and T. S. Eliot"
Advisor: Dan Philippon
Pawlowski, Lucia
"High Theory, the Teaching of Writing, and the Crisis of the University"
Advisor: Geoffrey Sirc
Roth-Reinhardt, Anne
"Frayed Homespun: Colonial clothing and literary revision in Melville, Sedgwick, and Hawthorne"
Advisor: Edward Griffin
2011
Cohen, Sara
“Medical Screening: Medical Imag(in)ing, the Body, and the Self"
Advisors: Paula Rabinowitz & Siobhan Craig
Cox, Ryan
"Premonition of a future line we will be writing: Politics, Language and Identity in Experimental English Canadian Poetry"
Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz
Griffiths, Amy
"'In a Shattered Language': A Feminist Poetics of Trauma"
Advisor: Maria Damon
Hengen Fox, Nicholas
"Texts as Tactics: How People Practice Politics with Books"
Advisor: Timothy Brennan
Hulander, Kelly
"Suffering Sisters: Fellowship and the Body in British New Woman and Socialist Novels"
Advisor: Donald Ross
Knight, Jessica
"Autobiography and the Making of Modernist Multiculturalism"
Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz
Riordan, Kevin
"The Time Machine and the Ghost: Attending to Life-and-Death in Literature, Cinema, and Theater"
Advisor: John Mowitt
Schroeder, Sharin
"Non-Consensus Realities: Fantasy and the Child in Victorian Religious Debates"
Advisor: Brian Goldberg
Sievers, John
"Silencing the Sirens: Patronage and the New World in Spenser, Daniel, and Shakespeare"
Advisor: John Watkins
Weaver, Rebecca
"The Urgency of Community: The Suturing of Poetic Ideology During the Early Years of the Loft and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics"
Advisor: Maria Damon