Department of English

Doctoral Dissertations

2025

Suspended Form and Cold War South Asia

Arnav Adhikari

Psychoanalytics: Towards A Black Object Study

Devon Epiphany Clifton

Harrowed Brine: Lyric Vapors and Spectral Forms

MJ Cunniff

Black ‘Ungendered’ Maternity, a Poetics: Creative Enactments toward Black Relation

Tara Melody Holman

Unbodied Fluids 

Scott Jackshaw

Transpacific Vibrancy: Listening across Asian American and Chicanx Texts

Olivia Anne Lafferty

Critique of Extractive Reason: Time and the Elemental Coloniality of Capitalism  

Marah Nagelhout

“What, Then, Is the Question?” Contemporary American Poetics of Address

Katherine E.A. Preston

Home, Nation, and the Boundaries of Belonging in the Twentieth-Century English Novel 

Urszula Rutkowska

 

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

Left Behind: Modernism and the Aesthetics of Obsolescence

Nicholas Pisanelli 

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