Recent Dissertations

The past five years of PhDs awarded by the Department of English.

  • Amanda Niedfelt. "Literature of Warning: The State-Private Network, Cultural Patronage, and the Emergence of Foundation Literature during the Cold War." Advisor: Paula Rabinowitz

  • 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

  • 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