Department of English

Doctoral Dissertations

2024

Untimely Forms: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Literary World-System

Daniel Byrne

The Comedy of Defeat

Fabrizio Ciccone

After Disillusionment: The “Minor” Idioms of Diasporic Life

Kiran Lam-Saili

The Ornamental Unconscious: Modernism, Psychoanalysis, and the Functions of Form 

Michelle Rada

Affecting Labors: The Novel and the Antinomies of Bourgeois Production 

Rithika Ramamurthy

2023

The Slash Between: In/authenticating Burmese American Literature

Ashley Aye Aye Dun

Readerly Identification in the Realist Novel from Austen to Hardy

Christina Gilligan

The Anatomy of Suspense: Rethinking the Victorian Bildungsroman

Soomin Kim 

Questionable Histories and the Aesthetics of Historiography from Shakespeare to Milton

Ali Madani

'The Bright Future of All Humanity': Liberal Criticism and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century

Stephen Marsh

Leftovers: A Critical Disability Ethic of Surviving, Healing, and Gathering

Hilary Rasch

Fictional Brains: Reflecting on the Neural Subject in the 19th c. American Novel

Dorin Smith

 

2022

Caribbean Women's Literature and Afro-Asian Intimacies, 1948-2001

Lubabah Chowdhury

Ordinary Subjects: Being British, the Border and the Bildungsroman

Eleanor Rowe-Stefanik

Essentially Shimmering: Contemporary Poetics at the Edges of Materialism

Emily Simon

 

2021

Unspectacular Violence: Narrating Trans/Queer Death in Contemporary American Culture

Christopher J. Lee

Estranging Citizenship: U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II, Forms of Memory and Address

Jennie Snow

2020

Early Modern Rhetorics of Color 

John Casey

Stereo Types: Sounding Race in Twentieth-Century America 

Nicole Fung

The World Before Us: Blackness, Narration, and the Photography

Cole Morgan

Tuneless Numbers: New Media, Poetry and the Oulipo

Ian Sampson

Forms of Rearrangement: Habit, Injury, and Mourning in African American and Caribbean Literature

Anna Thomas

Ugly Americanism: American Literature, Culture, and Aesthetic Judgment

Dashiell Wasserman

2019

Translational Futures: Asian/American Environmental Fiction and the Transpacific Turn

Claire Gullander-Drolet

Bad Style: Feminism and the Ethics of Heading in 20th and 21st Century Global Anglophone Literature

Jerrine Tan 

Race After Identity: Forms of Racial Configuration in Contemporary North American Literature

Jennifer Wang    

Cosmopolitanism and the Horizon of Romance: The Poetics of the Nation in Spenser, Ralegh, and Milton

Minta Zlomke    

2018

The Biomatters of American Modernity

David Hollingshead     

Pluralism and Pathology in Afro- and Native American Fiction

Sara Pfaff  

A machine which winds its own springs: Fictions of Self-invention in the Eighteenth Century

Swetha Regunathan    

2017

Our Kind of Seriousness: The Reintegration of Judgment in Contemporary American Culture

Andrea Actis   

Out of Time: Sentimentalism and Temporality in Long Nineteenth-Century American Literature 

Matthew Beach     

Between Law and Justice: Legal Authority, Liberal Democracy, and Postwar Fiction 

Katie Fitzpatrick   

Reading Character in George Eliot and William Thackeray

Peter Kim     

Unformed Feelings: Reading Affects in the Mid-Victorian Novel 

Joel Simundich     

Pained Measures: Forms of Suffering in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne 

Jessica Tabak     

Paper Boats: The American Sea Travel Narrative and Archives of Knowledge, 1815-1850 

Stephanie Tilden     

Autobiography's Queer Forms: Modernist Self-Writing from Auden to H.D. 

Rebecca van Laer