2023

  • Benjamin Kirbach, “Neckerology: Fiction, Technology, and Theory after Postmodernism” (Garrett Stewart, dir.)

2022

  • Jaclyn Carver, “Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches: The Commonwealth Newspaper and Abolitionist Priorities” (Kathleen Diffley, dir.)

  • Danielle Kennedy, “Survival Poetics: AIDS, Affect, Form, and Time” (Naomi Greyser & Jennifer Buckley, co-dirs.)

  • Brandon Krien, “Magazine Ecology: Environmental Knowledge Infrastructures in Nineteenth-Century Periodical Publishing” (Eric Gidal, dir.)

  • Jeremy Lowenthal, “The Media Unconscious of Confessional Poetry” (Garrett Stewart & Marie Kruger, co-dirs.)

  • Brandon James O’Neal, “The Late-Life Whitman: Understanding the Creative Expressions of Senescence” (Ed Folsom, dir.)

  • E Mariah Spencer, "Lady of Contemplation: On the Education and Copia of Margaret Cavendish" (Blaine Greteman and Adam Hooks, co-dirs.)

  • Konrad Swartz, “Writing Against an Enlisted Audience: Reading War in Sterne, Barbauld, and Hogg” (Eric Gidal, dir.)

2021

  • Heidi Renee Aijala, "“The Steam that Is to Work the Engines”: Women’s Writing and the Rise of Steam Power in Victorian Britain" (Florence Boos, dir.).
  • Enrico Bruno, "Flying African Americans: The Trope of Black Flight in 20th Century Literature"   (Michael Hill and Lena Hill co-dirs).
  • Harrison Dietzman, "Thesis: Emancipation & Authenticity: Forms and Fictions of Gnostic Selfhood In Nineteenth-Century United States’ Literature" (Lori Branch, dir.)
  • Christopher Dolle, "Inter / -Species / -Net / -Sect" (Barbara Eckstein and Stephen Voyce, co-dirs.)
  • Ryan Furlong, "The Godforsaken Slave: Black Doubt and the Problem of Evil in American Antislavery Literature, 1760-1865 (Lori Branch, dir.).
  • Laura Hayes, "Vital Compositions: Writing Matter in Victorian Literature and Culture" (Florence Boos, dir.).
  • E Mariah Spencer, "Lady of Contemplation: On the Education and Copia of Margaret Cavendish" (Blaine Greteman and Adam Hooks, co-dirs.)
  • Makayla Steiner, "No Vague Believers": Postsecular Sensibilities in Contemporary American Fiction" (Lori Branch, dir.).

PhD Dissertaitons

2020
  • Alexander Ashland, "The Documentary Turn: U.S. Literature in the Age of Compromise, 1850-1877" (Kathleen Diffley and Stephen Voyce, co-dirs.)
  • Faith Avery, "Violence and Citizenship in 21st-Century American Documentary Poetics" (Claire Fox and Naomi Greyser, co-dirs.)
  • Benjamin Batzer, "Reading Literary Trauma: A Narratological Approach" (Marie Kruger and Doris Witt.co-dirs.)
  • Haley Larson, "Writing That Reads: Collage Poetics and Aesthetic Techniques as Media Literacies" (Stephen Voyce and Jennifer Buckley, co-dirs.)
  • Lydia Maunz, "Testament of Grief: A Cripistemology of Somatic Loss in Women's Writing of the First World War" (Florence Boos, dir.)
  • Annemarie Pearson, " A Land of Enchantment: Fictional Spain Through the Eyes of British Travelers, 1776-1867" (Laura Rigal, dir.)
  • Caitlyn Simmons, "Dispossession and Survivance in the Literature of Atrocity" (Kevin Kopelson and Loren Glass, co-dirs.)
  • Rachel Walerstein, "Masculine Gestures: Imitation and Initiation in American Modernism" (Kevin Kopelson and Loren Glass co-dirs.)

2019
  • Matthew Blackwell, "Creating the Cold War Canon: A History of the Center for Editions of American Authors" (Matthew Brown, dir.)
  • Chelsea Burk, "Poetics of the Document and Documentary Poetics: Documentary Poetry by Women, 1938-2015" (Stephen Voyce, dir.)
  • Ian Faith, "Gaming Literature: How Digital Games Have Changed Literary Fiction and Performance" (Stepehn Voyce, dir.)
  • Gemma Goodale-Sussen, "The Town, The Prison, and the Collection: The case for a Criminological Modernism" (Harry Stecopoulos, dir.)
  • Corey Hickner-Johnson, "Beyond the Attic: Mental Disability and Neurodiversity in Contemporary Women's Writing" (Doris Witt and Douglas Baynton, co-dirs.)
  • Akia Jackson, "The Mobility of Memory and Shame: African-American and Afro-Caribbean Women's Fiction 1980s-1990" (Miriam Thaggert, dir.)
  • Miriam Janechek, "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: becoming an adult in four Golden Age children's novels" (Lori Branch, dir.)
  • Katherine Nesbit, "Listening to Reading Aloud: Literacy and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century England" (Garrett Stewart and Judith Pascoe, co-dirs.)
  • Spenser Santos, "Translating the Past: Medieval English Exodus Narratives" (Jonathan Wilcox, dir.)
  • Anna Williams, "My Gothic Dissertation: A Podcast" (Jeff Porter, dir.)

2018
  • Nellene Benhardus, "British Literary Decadence and Religion" (Florence Boos, dir.)
  • Kelly Budruweit, "Believing in Books: Twenty-First Century Fantasy and the Re-Enchantment of Literary Value" (Claire Fox and Brooks Landon, co-dirs.)
  • Brett Defries, "Physical Affection: Philosophies of Lovability in Early Modern Manuscript Literature" (Blaine Greteman, dir.)
  • Samuel Fitzpatrick, "Descent into the Easy Rawlings Mysteries Series: Walter Mosley and the Return of the Black Detective" (Michael Hill, dir.)
  • Lisa Jackson,"Ocean Views: Elizabeth Bowen and Women's Transnational Modernism" (Mary Lou Emery and Florence Boos, co-dirs.)
  • Marija Reiff, "The Syncretic Stage: Religion and Popular Drama During the Fin De Siecle" (Lori Branch, dir.)
  • Lauren Rosales, "Dismissed Outright: Creating a Space for Contemporary Genre Fiction Withink Neo-Victorian Studies" (Florence Boos, dir.)
  • Stefan Schoeberlein, "Cerebral Imaginaries: Brains and Literature in the Transatlantic Sphere, 1800-1880" (Ed Folsom, dir.)
  • Bethany Smith, "Guilty Pleasures: Piety, Profanity, and Incongruity in the Land of Cokaygne, the Miller" Tale, and the King of Tars (Jonathan Wilcox, dir.)
  • Michelle Taylor, "From Sentiment to Sagacity to Subjectivity: Dogs and Genre in Nineteenth-Century British Literature" (Teresa Mangum, dir.)
  • Stephanie Tsank, "Eating the American Dream: Food, Ethnicity, and Assimilation in Amercian Literary Realism, 1893 - 1918" (Harry Stecopoulos and Doris Witt, co-dirs.)

2017
  • Jacob Bender, “Latin Labyrinths, Celtic Knots: The Modernisms of the Dead in Irish and Latin American Literature” (Claire Fox, dir.)
  • Nicholas Borchert, “Nameless Wonders and Dumb Despair: Rhetorics of Silence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century U.S. Poetry and Culture” (Ed Folsom, dir.)
  • Nicolas Cooley, “‘Extensions of Ourselves’: Hand Tools and the Construction of Nature in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” (Laura Rigal and Bluford Adams, co-dirs.)
  • Justin Cosner, “Make-Believe: Uncertainty, Faith, and Alterity in Nineteenth Century Supernatural Short Stories” (Lori Branch, dir.)
  • Jennifer Janechek, “‘A Machine to Hear for Them’: Telephony, Modernism, and the Mother Tongue” (Garrett Stewart, dir.)
  • Laura Kuhlman, “The Beat Goes On: Women Writers of the Beat Generation” (Loren Glass, dir.)
  • Brent Krammes, “What Kind of Gallery Is a Book?: Representation in U.S. Print Culture, 1880-1940” (Lena Hill, dir.)
  • Jillian Linster, “Books, Bodies, and the ‘Great labor’ of Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia” (Adam Hooks, dir.)
  • Annmarie Steffes, “Between Page and Stage: Victorian and Edwardian Women Playwrights and the Literary Drama, 1860-1910” (Florence Boos, dir.)

2016
  • Lacey Askeland, “Tapping Wires and Touching Nerves: Telegraphy and Embodiment of Antebellum Narratives” (Kathleen Diffley, dir.)
  • Raquel Baker, “Undoing Whiteness: Postcolonial Identity and the Unfinished Project of Decolonization” (Peter Nazareth, dir.)
  • Sean De Vega,” Translation and Transgression in William Morris’s The Aeneids of Vergil (1875)” (Florence Boos, dir.)
  • Nicholas Kelly, “The Freedom of Information Hacked: Console Cowboys, Computer Wizards, and Personal Freedom in the Digital Age” (Brooks Landon, dir.)
  • Zachary King, “Comic Book Realism: Sincerity, Ethics, and the Superhero in Contemporary American Literature” (Brooks Landon, dir.)
  • Jacquelynn (Jackie) Kleist, “Persuasion and Resistance: How Migrant Women Use Life Writing” (Claire Fox, dir.)
  • Sarah Livesay, “Literature as Countermemorial: Challenging Histories, Creating Memories, and Reckoning with Absences in Contemporary American Literature“(Stephen Voyce, dir.)
  • Jennifer Loman, “Shame, Christian Hospitality, and the American Writer” (Phillip Round and Kristy Nabhan-Warren, co-dirs.)
  • Christine Norquest, “‘The endless roar in which we live’: The Figure of Noise in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature” (Harry Stecopoulos, dir.)
  • Gemmicka Piper, “Black Intimacy in the Popular Imagination: Re-examining African American Women’s Literature from 1965-2000” (Michael Hill and Miriam Thaggert, co-dirs.)
  • Jennifer Shook, “”Unending Trails: Oklahoma-as-Indian-Territory in Performance, Print, and Digital Archives” (Matthew Brown, dir.)

2015
  • Cassandra Bausman, “A Noted Departure: Feminist Revision and Metafiction as Critical and Creative Strategy in a Tradition of Fantasy Literature” (Brooks Landon, dir.)
  • Shuhita Bhattacharjee, “The ‘Crisis’ Cornucopia: Anxieties of Religion and ‘Secularism’ in Victorian Fiction of Colony and Gender, 1880-1900 (Lori Branch, dir.)
  • Blake Bronson-Bartlett, “Whitman’s Inscriptions: Poetics in the Nineteenth-Century American City” (Ed Folsom, dir.)
  • Christopher Burgess, “Passionate Eloquence: Rhetoric and Emotion in Medieval English Poetry” (Jonathan Wilcox, dir.)
  • Dorothy Giannakouros,'"That Other World of Light and Rainbows and Possibilities": An Exploration of Child Narration in Post-Colonial Sub-Saharan African Literature and Film'   (Marie Kruger, dir.)
  • Robert Gillespie, “Shades of an Urban Frontier: Historical Resonances in the Cities of Black and Anglophone SF” (Brooks Landon, dir.)
  • Jessica Lawson, “The Subject of Bodies: Feminism, literature and the push beyond dualism” (Naomi Greyser and David Wittenberg, co-dirs.)
  • Elizabeth Lundberg “Reading Ruptures: Empathy, Gender, and the Literature of Bodily Permeability” (Brooks Landon, dir.)
  • Sonja Mayrhofer, “The Body (Un)Balanced: Humoral Theory and Late Medieval Literature” (Claire Sponsler, dir.)
  • Benjamin Miele, “God’s Spies”: Reading, Revelation, and the Poetics of Surveillance in Early Modern England” (Adam Hooks, dir.)
  • Joshua Miner, "Indian Agencies: Native Poetics of Resistance in a Bureaucratic Landscape" (Linda Bolton, dir.)
  • Jennifer McGovern, “The Captive Press: Captivity Narratives, Print Networks, and Regional Prospects, 1838-1895” (Kathleen Diffley, dir.)
  • Eve Rosenbaum, “Bringing Daylight with Them: American Writers and Civil War Washington” (Kathleen Diffley, dir.)
  • Elizabeth Sanders, “Enchanting Belief: Religion and Secularism in the Victorian Supernatural Novel” (Lori Branch, dir.)
  • Michael Sarabia, “The Extinction of Fiction: Boundary Breaking and The Acknowledgment of Character in Medieval Literature” (Jon Wilcox, dir.)
  • Timothy Robbins “Turn and Live with Animals’: Walt Whitman and the Making of the American Sociological Imagination, 1870-1940” (Ed Folsom, dir.)
  • Rebecca Roma Stoll, “The Aesthetic Pleasures of Pain, 1688-1805” (Lori Branch, dir.)
  • Andrew Williams, “Tolerable Faiths: Religious Toleration, Secularism and the Eighteen-Century British Novel” (Lori Branch, dir.)

2014
  • Katherine Bishop, “War in the Margins: Illustrating Anti-Imperialism in American Culture” (Harry Stecopoulos, dir.)
  • Thomas Blake, “Royal Materials: The Object of Queenship in Late Medieval English Romance” (Kathy Lavezzo, dir.)
  • Daniel Boscaljon, “Gothic Haunts” (Ed Folsom and David Wittenberg, co-dirs.)
  • Kelly Franklin, “Out of Place: Walt Whitman and the Latin American Avant-Gardes” (Ed Folsom and Claire Fox, co-dirs.)
  • Jacob Horn, “Tracking the Great Detective: an Investigation into Sherlock Holmes’s Persistence and Contemporary Relevance” (Corey Creekmur, dir.)
  • Katherine Montgomery, “Drear flight and homeless wandering”: Gender, Economics, and Crises of Identity in Mid-Victorian Women’s Fiction” (Florence Boos, dir.)
  • Anna Newnum, “The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to Immanence in British Women’s Writing, 1835-1925” (Florence Boos, dir.)
  • Taryne Taylor, “Remembering the Future, Redefining the Past: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Feminist Utopias” (Florence Boos, dir.)
  • Johanna Tomlinson, “Playing with Words: Child Voices in British Fantasy Literature for Children 1749-1906” (Teresa Mangum, dir.)
  • Angela Watkins, “Mambos, Priestesses, and Goddesses: Spiritual Healing Through Vodou in Black Women’s Narratives of Haiti and New Orleans” (Mary Lou Emery, dir.)