Senior Essay Topics 2011 - Present

2023-2024

An, William. “The Pruning of a Peril / Readership and the Sensibilities of Feeling in Victorian and Contemporary Poetry,” advised by Naomi Levine

Atwater, Josh. ““Such a Heartless Immensity”: Madness in Dickinson and Moby-Dick, advised by Richard Deming

Bynum, Georgia. Understanding the “Bad Mom:” Motherhood in Late Twentieth Century Literature, advised by Margaret Homans

Cajski, Grace. “Ecology of the Literary Sea Beast:”  Examining the Record of Our Environmental Attention, advised by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Golden, Adriana. “Affect, Consumerism, Media, and the Question of Art in Postmodern Novels,” advised by Anastasia Eccles

Hodgman, Lucy. “Forsake Thyself”: Passion and Renunciation in the Heroines of George Eliot, advised by Stefanie Markovits

Lechner, Maude. From Archive to Text: A Journey into George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Victorian Gender Roles, advised by Naomi Levine

Millen, Judah. A.R. Ammons’s Skeletal Poetics: Format, Vulgarity, and Equivocation, advised by Ben Glaser

Ocken, Jack. Left, Right, Above, Below Brain Hemispheres and Faith in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris, advised by Paul Grimstad

Ori, Alex. “IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY JUST WHAT I MEAN”: Longing and the Search for Form in Flaubert and Eliot, advised by Joe Cleary

Runsewe, Kamiye. A Black, Queer Poetics of Illness in Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, advised by Sarah Mahurin

Sidransky, Annie. Eden Sounds a Lot Like Idealism: Spaces and Their Inhabitants in Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, advised by Feisal Mohamed

Sulkowski, Julia. The Power of the Graphic Novel: The Illustrated Memoir’s Unique Ability to Share Lived Experiences, advised by Jill Campbell

Vanlandingham, Katia. A Portrait is a Portrait is a Portrait: Woolf, Stein, and the ‘Painterly’ Writer, advised by Margaret Homans

Wang, Jean. Becoming-Crocodile: Kinships, Worldmaking, and a Genealogy of Possible Lives An Existentialist Reading of Notes of a Crocodile (1994), advised by Michael Warner

Warolin, Hillary. Layers of Meaning: Moby-Dick and Immersive Storyworlds, advised by Richard Deming

Weiser, Aaron. Strangers, Wafers, Dating Apps, and Disease The Polyvalence and Enjambment of Jericho Brown’s “Host,” advised by Anastasia Eccles

Wolterbeek, Wren. Linguistic Acquisition and Exclusion in Frankenstein, advised by Jill Campbell

Zappley, Christion. Visible Men: An Analysis of Hegemonic Masculinity in Contemporary American Literature As Seen In Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, advised by Juno Richards

Zhang, Hanwen. “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears”: Dickens’s Sentimental Dilemma, advised by Ruth Yeazell

Zhao, Yingying. “Boldly Faking”: The Fracture of Lived Experiences in Chinese American Literature, advised by Jill Campbell

2022-2023

Birmingham, Thomas. “Choosing Truth in an “Objective” World: The Jungle Models an Embrace of Journalistic Subjectivity,” advised by Sarah Stillman

Brown, Ali. “A Humanized Soul: The Wordsworthian Lyric as Shakespearean Tragedy,” advised by David Bromwich

Dillman, Theodora. “Structures of Terror: Gothic Architecture in The Monk, Dracula, and The Turn of the Screw,” advised by Paul Grimstad

Feder, Adin. “Echoing Spinoza in “A”,” advised by Peter ColeGoddu, Beasie. “Forster’s Muddle: The Construction of Female Freedom in A Room with a View,” advised by Stefanie Markovits

Galloway, Alexandra. “A Garden of Jamaica Kincaid’s Own: Kincaid and Her Revision of the Caribbean Garden in Autobiography of My Mother, The New Yorker, and the Archive,” advised by Steph Newell

Gonzalez, Luis. “The Wage of the Tube Hopper” On the Politics of Filmmaking in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” advised by R. John Williams

Handler, Rachel. “Nature, Including Human Nature: An Ecocritical Reading of the Poetry of Robert Frost,” advised by Langdon Hammer

Lin, Serena. “Pain as Language: Embodied Resistance in Ottessa Moshfegh and Han Kang,” advised by Marta Figlerowicz

Meadows, Jaden. “Tagged then Bagged: Slasher Films, Injury, and the Aesthetics of Disability,” advised by James Berger

Park, Clara. “The Location of Korean Literature: Pachinko as Born Translated across Marketplace and Medium,” advised by Cajetan Iheka

Park, Ruby. “Reimagining The Post-Colonial Childhood & Children in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” advised by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

Rice, Nicholas. “Still Songs to Sing Beyond Capital: Reckoning the Human in Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo,” advised by Joe North

Rosinplotz, Noa. “Adding Wonder to the Universe: Religion and Science in Ted Chiang’s Biblical Cosmologies,” advised by R. John Williams

Tong, Michelle. “Reconciling the Irreconcilable in Emily Dickinson’s Subjectivity,” advised by Richard Deming

Schwiebert, Kennedy. “SPOILERS AHEAD: Solving the Mysterious Case of Detective Fiction, Metafiction, & Their Invasion into Reality,” advised by Paul Grimstad

Tucker, Olivia. “Of Beauty Faded, and of Empire Lost”: Interrogating Womanhood in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Court Eclogues,” advised by Langdon Hammer

Ware, Helena. “To be Born Woman is to be Born Mad: a Record of Violence, a Revision of Romance, and a Reclaiming of Rage in and beyond Jane Eyre,” advised by Ernest Mitchell

Yao, Katherine. “Re-tracing George Eliot’s History of Medicine: Cells and Social Responsibility in Middlemarch,”  advised by Ruth Yeazell

2021-2022

Barker, Jack. “Ain’t No False Prophet”: Bob Dylan’s Visions of Sin and Salvation in Rough and Rowdy Ways, advised by Landgon Hammer

Duong, Cathy. “Paris and Literary Parentage in Vietnamese American Literature,” advised by Sunny Xiang

Guo, Roger. “When Hell Freezes Over: The Nativization of Christian Hell in Early Medieval England,” advised by Emily Thornbury

Lee, Kiki. Hester Pulter’s Double Lives Confinement and Escape in “Poems Written by The Right Honorable H.P.,” advised by CatherineNicholson

Lyng-Olsen, Helena. “Beyond the Individual Bildungsroman: George Eliot’s Enlarged Vision of Identity,” advised by Stefanie Markovits

Saji, Yuka. Reading Trash: Material Deviance in The Book of Form and Emptiness and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki,” advised by Sunny Xiang

Steinkamp, Audrey. “SUPPOSE YOU LET ME LOOK AT MYSELF” Interactions with Visual Art in George Eliot’s Romola, advised by Ruth Yeazell

Sun, Curtis. “Nothing is any longer one thing:” Virginia Woolf, Video Games, and the Aesthetics of Perception, advised by Margaret Homans

2020-2021

Back, Isabella. “Deus, Елень, Rod, Eustace The Legend of St. Eustace and Tangible Manifestations of Christian Faith,” advised by Emily Thornbury.

Rivers, Logan. “By Powere Femynyne” Lydagate’s Life of Saint Margaret and Ending the Devonshire Canterbury Tales, advised by Jessica Brantley

Thomas, Amanda. “The University of Chicago Can Take A Flying Fuck At The Moooooooooooooooon: Kurt Vonnegut’s Social Anthropology in Cat’s Cradle,” advised by Sunny Xiang

Wu, Alan. “Kanye West as the Shakespeare in the Flesh: A Shared Excess of Language Between Two Cultural Icons,” advised by David Kastan

Fast Dog, Luta. “Inherited Ghosts: Indigenous Kinship and Supernatural Storytelling in 21st Century Fiction,” advised by Alanna Hickey

Glesby, Laura. “House Keeping Claims to Property and Architecture in Toni Morrison’s Ohio Novels,” advised by Jacqueline Goldsby

Smist, Anna. “Reremembering Oklahoma: Lynn Riggs and Identity Formation in Two Plays,” advised by Alanna Hickey

Wang, Ruiyan. “Stomaching the Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Reading Nervous Conditions through the Alimentary Tract,” advised by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

2019-2020

Ballard, Andrew. “The Matrix of the Heart Destruction in the Love Poems of Hart Crane,” advised by David Bromwich

Blackwood, Nicole. “The Perfect Appearance of Reality”: locating Symbiosis Between Romance and Realism in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion, advised by Anastasia Eccles

Boguraev, Anna-Sophia. “HOW TO SWALLOW THE WORLD: Magical Realism and Historical Narratives in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” advised by Juno Richards

Carabatsos, Julia. “How cleverly she’s arranged her drawing room”: Edith Wharton’s Interior Design and Fiction, advised by Stefanie Markovits

Chung, Vanessa. “Silence” in James and Woolf, advised by Ruth Yeazell

Coney, Alexus. “Active Witnessing and Tetual Intimacy: Engaging with Traumatic and Reparative Sight in Toni Morrison’s Text,” advised by Daphne Brooks

Fu, Gillian. Your “Other” Stands Between Us: The Feminine Foundations of the Imperial Gothic, advised by Naomi Levine

Graham, Max. “Tending to Wild”: Wilderness and the Trouble with Ecology in Paradise Lost, advised by John Rogers

Herschkowitz, Seth. “Prevent With Thy Humble Ode: Reevaluating Shakespeare’s Influence on Milton,” advised by John Rogers

Jin, Janice. “The Right to Freedom: Human Rights and the North Korean Defector Testimony,” advised by Sunny Xiang

Kelly, Marlee. “It Began with a Story: How Indigneous Literatures Incorporate Traditional Practices and Look Toward a Brighter Future,” advised by Alanna Hickey

Kreutter, Mariah. “The Embedded Epistle, The Embodied Epistle: Letters, Truth and Desire in Women’s Fiction, from Jane Austen to Sally Rooney,” advised by Anastasia Eccles

Laguarda, Sofia. “New consciousness of interdependence”: Pip, Fred, and the Bildungsroman in Middlemarch, advised by Katja Lindskog

Lampo, Jordan. “The Representation of Non-White Characters in the Works of Dr. Seuss,” advised by Heather Klemann

Lee, Charles. “Narrative and Identity in Joyce’s ‘Circe’,” advised by Joe Cleary

Lieu, Alice. The Gangster We Are All Looking For & On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: Reimagining the Running Refugee, advised by Sunny Xiang

Lynch, Sean. “History’s Vise: The Tenacity of Trauma in Absalom, Absalom!,” advised by Ben Glaser

Mannino, Carrie. “The Monster of Masculine Anxiety in Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale and Othello,” advised by David Kastan

Newman, Jared. “All We Know is Ears: Diacritics, Voicing and Dialect in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs,” advised by Michael Warner

O’Banion, Devin. “Patrilineal Performance in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy,” advised by David Kastan

Rouner, Helen. “William Blake and the Limits of Limit,” advised by David Bromwich

Street, Laura. “Render me more equal”: The Paradoxes of Equality in Milton’s Paradise Lost, advised by David Kastan

Tinone, Marina. “We bought the book, took it home and read it:” A Kid of Color Looks Back on 2009 Scholastic Book Club Flyers with 2020 Vision, advised by Sunny Xiang

Van Nostrand, Liana. “Eliza Haywood’s Experiments in Persona: Constructing the Eighteenth-Century Woman Reader and Writer,” advised by Jill Campbell

Vu, Minh. “Photographic Kinships & (Anti-) Imperial Intimacies in Contemporary Vietnamese American Cultural Productions,” advised by Sunny Xiang

2018-2019

Brannon, Charlotte. “Where she, where she”: Evaluating Ecriture Feminine and Womenhood in Postcolonial Women’s Poetry, advised by Steph Newell

Ciancarelli, Luke. A Time to Love: Toward a Dialectical Reading of Paradise Lost,” advised by John Rogers

DePoy, Amy. Boundaries and Excess in Her Body and Other Parties,” advised by Steph Newell

Margolis, Eric. “The Power of Translation in 20th Century Jewish-American Literature,” advised by Amy Hungerford

McCoole, Veena. “Becoming British: Transatlantic Cosmopolitanism in T.S. Eliot’s Early Poetry,” advised by Langdon Hammer

Pineda, Arturo. “Understood by no white”: Black Illegibility in Gendolyn Brooks’ The Bean Eaters, advised by John Rogers

Robinson, Henry.  “Understood by no white”: Black Illegibility in Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Bean Eaters, advised by Anthony Reed

Shy, Katie. “Women’s Coming of Age: Between Housekeeping and Painting,” advised by Katie Trumpener

Tang, Oriana. “Live Greek female torso sitting still at a ‘cello”: Race as Perception in Nam June Paik & Charlotte Moorman’s Opera Sextronique (1967), advised by Sunny Xiang

Yaffe-Bellany, David. “A Singular Coincidence”: The Influence of Paradise Lost on Moby-Dick, advised by John Rogers

2017-2018

Balaji, Dhikshitha. “Re-envisioning Health: The Creative Force of Illness for Virginia Woolf’s Women,” advised by Margaret Homans

Burton, Olivia. “The Last Island: Lafcadio Hearn’s New Orleans and the American Mythos,” advised by Joseph Roach

Carroll, Claire. “Untranslatable: Towards an Understanding of the Caine Prize for African Writing and its Mediation of Cultural and Economic Capital,” advised by Steph Newell

Castillo, Grace. “Zombies, Ambiguity & Folklore: Neil Gaiman Goes Back to the Garden,” advised by Caleb Smith

Chang, Luke. “Talking about Trauma: Failure of Cartharsis in Moby Dick,” advised by Richard Deming

Cloutier, Michaela. “The Complication of the Medieval Queen in Medieval and Modern Literature: An exploration of endearment through internal narrative, public and private roles, and homosocial relationships in Emma of Normandy, Empress Matilda, Elizabeth Woodville, and Elizabeth of York,” advised by Alfred Guy

Cusano, Tom. “My Natural Form”: The Construction of Authenticity in the Essays of Charles  D’Ambrosio, Brian Blanchfield, and Leslie Jamison, advised by Briallen Hopper

Fosburgh, Callie. “Linguistic Estrangement on the Contemporary Stage: The Alienating Potential of Dialect and Verse in Theater, 1987-2014,” advised by Marc Robinson

Hosmer-Quint, Dylan. “Asking Better Questions: A Literary Critique of International Development in South Africa,” advised by Steph Newell

Huber-Weiss, Zoe. “Popular Tales of Peasants and Savages”: Hierarchical Social Structures and the Fairy Tales of Andrew Lang, advised by Katie Trumpener

James, Shalisa. “Shared Vulnerabilities: Reconceiving Mental Disability Through the Nonhuman,” advised by Wai Chee Dimock

Kempf-Harris, Zoe. “Tethering Orlando: A Reading of Material and Place in Virginia Woolf’s Novel,” advised by Ruth Yeazell

Kim, Noah. “Olympia in Gettysburg: The Living Doll in Baker, Nelson, and Hoffmann,” advised by Richard Deming

Lynn-Green, Erica. “Truth Dragged to Light”: Empirical Mysteries, Biopolitics, and Racialized Bodies in Maria Edgeworth, advised by Jill Campbell

Ng, Jonathan. “A Trading Post, A Garden”: Transcending the Law in Disgrace’s and Life & Times of Michael K’s Fictional South Africas, advised by Jill Richards

Nguyen, Rosa. “Synesthesia of Sound: How Phonesthemes Shape Literary Perception,” advised by Ben Glaser

Schaitkin, Simon. “Fun Home in Performance: Image Analysis, Musical Adaptation, and Queer Theory in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Novel,” advised by Jill Richards

Schick, Finnegan. “Monody Wakes the Mariner: The American Revival of Hawthorne and Melville,” advised by David Bromwich

Shi, Grace. ”The Maturing Sun”: Poetic Anxiety in Keats’s 1819 Odes, advised by Paul Fry

2016-2017

Cappello, Christopher. “Consuming Consummation: The Fatal Films of Cronenberg, Roszak, and Wallace,” advised by John Crowley

Elkind, Zachary. “To Double Business Bound”: Shakespeare’s Theatrical Doubling, advised by David Kastan

FitzPatrick, Delaney. “The Editorial Influence on Punctuation in Emily Dickinson’s Texts,” advised by Ben Glaser

Guo, Joyce. “The Temporality of Peace: Experiencing time in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace,” advised by Sunny Xiang

Houghton, Eve. “Pretending to Read: Humanist Culture and the Anxieties of Abridgement,” advised by Catherine Nicholson

Hyde, Susannah. “Never two ladies loved as they do”: An Examination of Female Friendship in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, advised by Joseph Roach

Jacobson, Sarah. “So Strange an Adventure”: Geographies of Transgression and Generic Imperialism in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, advised by John Rogers

Lopez, Sergio. “Shakespeare and the Making of Lincoln,” advised by David Kastan

Mansfield, Alison. “Thumbing My Nose at You Know Who”: Bergsonian Humor, Moral Vision, and Religious Conversion in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, advised by Ryan Wepler

Meyer, Cara. “Th’unsearchable dispose of highest wisdom”: John Milton’s Samson Agonistes and the History of Sacred Violence, 1671-2008, advised by Cara Meyer

Osherov, Artem. “Emotional Cripples: Faulkner’s Journey from Physical to Psychic Disability,” advised by Wai Chee Dimock

Sanders Schneider, Ivy. “More Terror Than Delight”: Racial Anxiety and Exogamous Relations in Trans-Atlantic Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century, advised by Jill Campbell

Switzer, Emily. “The Nearest Thing to Life: George Eliot and the Representation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Painting,” advised by Janice Carlisle

Van Bronkhorst, Hope. “Do not judge her too harshly”: Maternal Inheritance and Progeny Morality in the Potterverse, advised by Heather Klemann

2015-2016

Bollier, Renee. “E. E. Cummings and the Reinvention of Nature Poetry: The Influence of Early 20th Century Modern Art on Non-Representational Poetic Technique,” advised by Paul North    

Fleming, Lucy. “A Far and Bright Continent:  The Melding of Imaginative and Insidious in the African Space of Charlotte Brontë’s Angrian Saga,” advised by Joseph Roach

Garris, Katie. “For the benefit and use of life”: Speculative Fiction and the Two Culture Gap in Early Modern and Contemporary Literature, advised by John Rogers

Kentor, Corinne. “He will carry this island home in his pocket”: Examining Power, Magic, and Structure in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, advised by John Rogers

Lee, Grace. “Crises Involving Cups of Tea: Redefining Femininity in Women’s Novels,” advised by Katie Trumpener

Lee, Kristen. “Transcending the Immobility of the Mother: Characterizing Maternity and Sexuality in Victorian Medicine and Literature,” advised by Janice Carlisle

Miller, Alyssa. “I took thee for thy better”: A Reexamination of the First Quarto of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, advised by Brian Walsh

Orbison, Jake. “Across the Killing Field: Race and Aesthetics of Offense in the Poetry of Frederick Seidel,” advised by Langdon Hammer

Rothchild, Julia. “The Science of Decision-Making in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda,” advised by Ruth Yeazell

Rubins, Dan. “Under a Rhyming Planet: Reading Shakespeare’s Plays for Rhyme,” advised by Stefanie Markovits

Schwarz, Julia. “Searching for Kerouac: The Development of His Style,” advised by Langdon Hammer

Shultz, Margaret. “Wild Growth, Vegetable Love: The Radical Liminality of Bessie Head, Octavia Butler, Chigozie Obioma, and Nnedi Okorafor,” advised by Steph Newell

Steinmeyer, Theresa. “A Resurrection of the Old South: Conversion Journeys and Racial Violence in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction,” advised by Justin Neuman

2014-2015

Amna, Dur e Aziz. “Postcolonial London: Migration and Metaphor in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know,” advised by Wai Chee Dimock

Blanc, Virgil. “Horror or Pleasure or Amazement”: Reading Absalom, Absalom! As An Event, advised by Caleb Smith

Chow, Janine. “At Eye Level: An Adaptive Vision of Parenthood in Matilda The Musical,” advised by Joseph Roach

Csorny, Shannon. “I Find People Confusing”: Adapatation Through the Lens of Autism in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” advised by Marc Robinson

Groundwater, Colin. “Do you take it I would astonish?”: Negative Responses to Leaves of Grass and their Influence, advised by James Berger

Hahne, Jessica. “American Literature and the Advent of Germ Theory: Living Spaces, Women, and Immigrants at the Turn of the 20th Century,” advised by Caleb Smith

Halgren, Courtney. “Fancy as Forbidden Fruit: The Redemption of the Shakespearean Imagination in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” advised by David Kastan

Harper, Gwendolyn. “Henry James, George Eliot, and the Ethics of Attention,” advised by Ruth Yeazell

Hoge, Connor. “The Holographic Novel: Optical Physics in Infinite Jest,” advised by Justin Neuman

Hoyt-Disick, Gabrielle. “The Unseen Scene: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and Modernism in The Portrait of a Lady,” advised by Ruth Yeazell

Jensen, Carlee. “Fain Give Succor”: Subversive Vocabularies and the Ethics of Belonging in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, advised by Richard Deming

McDonough, Erin. “Anthologizing the Arab Spring: A Collection of Digital Anglophone Poems,” advised by Wai Chee Dimock

Morris, Kyra. “Reading Milton: Paradise Lost in Dickens, Eliot, and James,” advised by John Rogers and Ruth Yeazell

Palacios, Kane. “Love me, love me love, me…I’ll be anybody you want me to be”: Performance Narratives in Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters and the Cry for Authenticity, advised by Joseph Roach

Pincus, Katharine. “To What End Are All These Words?”: Adaptation as Restoration for The Taming of the Shrew, advised by Joseph Roach

Pollak, Alexandra. “Dragging the Enemy Voices out into the Light: Feminist Dialectic and Self-Recognition in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man,” advised by Margaret Homans

Rizzolo, Miranda. “I Will Be Free…In Words”: Claiming Stage Power and Freeing the Female Actor in The Taming of the Shrew, advised by Joseph Roach

Rutland, Emily. “Waste, Toxicity, and Pollution in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld,” advised by Justin Neuman

Shan, Joy. “To Cure or to Kill?: William Wordsworth, J.M. Coetzee, and the Literary Dangers of Representing Disablities,” advised by Jill Campbell

Sheehy, Felicity. “The Novel Can’t Just Leave the War Out”: Explicit and Implicit War Representation in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction, advised by Margaret Homans

Wang, Yanan. “Our Curse and Mirror”: New Journalism, Experimental Form, and the Pursuit of Truth in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, advised by Justin Neuman

Zhang, Claire. “Hopeful Romantics: Modes of Romance in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway,” advised by Margaret Homans

2013-2014

Atkins, Sarah. ‘His object has been to present…pictures of life and manners as they really are’: Charles Dickens and Social Criticism, advised by Janice Carlisle

Damrongpiwat, Pichaya. “Three Organizing Metaphors in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,” advised by Ben Glaser

deButts, Juliet. “Eyre on the Side of Caution: Re-Imagining Jane Eyre in Modern Contexts,” advised by Alfred Guy

Helm, Sally. “Just Rhetoric: The Poetry and Oratory of Black Arts and Black Power,” advised by Joseph Roach

Kofman, Ava. “Styles of Fact: The Reception Case of Poe’s Valdemar,” advised by Michael Warner

Lee, Margaret. “Modernist Consciousness: Parallels of Character and Technique in Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway,” advised by Margaret Lee

Lu, Keyi. “Subjectivity, Ambiguity, and Revelation in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” advised by Richard Deming

Mandel, Eli. “Pity Should Begin at Home”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Object Relations, advised by Langdon Hammer

Mattison, Julia. “Inscribing Albion: Reading and Owning the Middle English Prose Brut in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, A Study of Takamiya MS 12,” advised by Jessica Brantley

Nguyen, Sophia. “Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor and Innocence on the Open Market,” advised by J.D. Connor

Nicholson, Sofia. “A Fight for Paradise: Exploring America’s Conflicted Relationship with Nature Through the Glen Canyon (Dam) Controversy,” advised by Linda Peterson

Ortiz, Isabel. “Reflective Tears: Anne Carson’s Tango with Tradition,” advised by Catherine Nicholson

Pinon, Michelle. “Praying, and Paying, for Enlightenment: Examining the Commodification of South Asian Spirituality Through the Figure of the Guru in Eat, Pray, Love and The Buddha of Suburbia,” advised by Shital Pravinchandra 

Price, Lydia. “The Ethics of Traumatic Narrative: Duong Thu Huong and the Literature of the Second Indochina War,” advised by Justin Neuman

Reiter, Julia. “Fictional Portraits of Victorian Women: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s Paintings, and the Problem of Realism,” advised by Ruth Yeazell

Sisgoreo, Daniel. “Finding a Place for White South Africa: A Postcolonial and Ecocritical Analysis of the Race Politics of Nadine Gordimer’s Fiction,” advised by Justin Neuman

Stambler, Arielle. “An Epic Where Every Line is Erased: Adamic Poetics in Derek Walcott’s Omeros,” advised by Emily Greenwood

Steward, Katie. “The United States Poet Laureate and the Politics of Poetry,” advised by Amy Hungerford

Suterwala, Anisha. “Imperial Bruises: Madness, Identity, and Alienation in Three Postcolonial Novels,” advised by Justin Neuman

Yap, E-Lynn. “Allusion as a Magnifier of Readerly Assumptions: The Case Study of Critical Discourse on T.S. Eliot’s Buddhist Allusions,” advised by R. John Williams

2012-2013

Barnes, Caroline. “To Make the Line of Her Gown Perfitt”: Female Craft in the Writing of Mrs. Oliphant, advised by Katie Trumpener

Dinh, Catherine. “Time and the Courtship Plot: Tracing Temporal Orientations of Elizabeth and Anne in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion,” advised by Stefanie Markovits

Fisher, Julia. “Some White Whale: The Grammar of Ambiguity in Moby-Dick,” advised by Caleb Smith

Foxhall, Emily. “Establishing Reality: A Search for Truth in the Work of Joan Didion,” advised by Richard Deming

Hernandez, Orlando. “We say”: The Poetics and Ethics of George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous,” advised by Richard Deming

Huber, Sam. “Two Tyrants: Gender Construction and Literary Form in the Writings of Virginia Woolf,” advised by Margaret Homans

Levy, Nicole. “Beyond Religion and Reason: How the Games of Metafiction Reflect the Human Quest for Meaning through Belief,” advised by Paul Grimstad

Matthews, Aisha. “Taking Back the Darkness: The Young Adult Science Fiction of Scott Westerfeld in the Larger Narrative of Dystopian Literature,” advised by Alfred Guy

Pollock, Ryan. “Thick Symbolism in D.H. Lawrence’s Late Prose and Painting,” advised by Ruth Yeazell

Sathian, Sanjena. “Dream City and the Imagined “We”: Modern Publics in Zadie Smith’s London,” advised by Justin Neuman

Sestanovickh, Clare. “Marilynne Robinson’s Theology of Indirection: The Quest for Intimacy in Her Novels and Letters,” advised by Amy Hungerford

Smilow, Claire. “Frances Burney the “Scribbler”: Child Authorship as Reception Strategy,” advised by Wendy Lee

Steele, Alexis. “An American Duet: A Study of Cotter’s Third Poetry Collection,” advised by Anthony Reed

Stromberg, Kirie. “News Has a Kind of Mystery: CNN Opera,” advised by J.D. McClatchy

Taylor, Michelle. “The unities are smashed”: The Modern Totemism of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris,” Anthony Reed

Werrell, Alex. “A Room with a View: Robert Browning as Artist and Art Historian in Florence,” advised by Harold Bloom

2011-2012

Carter, Kathleen. “Visions of Tiresias: The Changing Face of a Blind, Transsexual Prophet,” advised by Claude Rawson

Cohen, Correna. “The Critical Cleopatra: Women and Art Museumsin Villette and Middlemarch”“Staging Orpheus and Philomel: Silenced Voices in Early Modern English Drama,” advised by Linda Peterson

Cooper, Maggie. ”A Blog of One’s Own: Writing Femininity in the 21st Century,” advised by Katie Trumpener

Droge, Abigail. “The Importance of Place: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as London Novels,” advised by Ruth Yeazell

Fernandez, Chantal. “ ‘Life Stand Still’: Moments of Vision in the Short Stories and Novels of Virginia Woolf,” advised by Margaret Homans

Gellman, Lindsay. “Flannery O’Connor and the Nationalizing of the South,” advised by Amy Hungerford

Homans-Turnbull, Marian. “The Ideas of Wilderness in Four Old English Poems,” advised by Roberta Frank

Jacobson, Samuel. “The Lady’s Welsh Song: Music and History in 1 Henry IV,” advised by David Kastan

Keegan, Marina. “Among Her Cloudy Trophies Hung: Fitzgerald’s Men and Keats’ Odes,” advised by Harold Bloom

Kim, Stephen. “Knowledge and Acknowledgment for Milton’s Satan,” advised by John Rogers

Peters, Elizabeth. “Child Friendly Atrocity: Introducing the Holocaust in Literature for Young People,” advised by Amy Hungerford

Rustum, Roohi. “The Trauma of Assimilation: Dysfunction in South Asian Identity and Narrative,” advised by Joseph Gordon

Saxton, Kathryn. “The Shadow of Beowulf in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Children’s Literature,” advised by Roberta Frank

Schultz, Rebecca. “The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma: Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of Seeing,” advised by David Bromwich

Singleton, Michael. “The Cost of Celebrity: an analysis of the Zoё Wanamaker / Ranyevskaya dyad in the National Theatre’s 2011 production of The Cherry Orchard,” advised by Joseph Roach

Stone, William. “ ‘Physician to All Men’: John Keats and his Poetry of Earth,” advised by Paul Fry

Welljams-Dorof, Jakob. “The Surprisingly Similar Works of Pop and Jay-Z,” advised by Anthony Reed