Recent Thesis Titles
2022 Graduates
Edi Kim, Diplopia
William Knight, Extended gutters : sequencing space and the narrative power of the panel in Watchmen
Tyler Kwon, A nut and the dream within
Lydia Hoyt Mead, [Some sentences & phrases I wrote once]
Rafael S. Monkarsh, Imagining Africa : representations of colonialism in Heart of darkness and the river between
Charlie Parker, It's a bitch being butch : finding a home for masculine lesbianism in 20th century narratives of development
Amelia Pillifant, "That while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore she made a good end" : conflicts of love and duty in the Arthurian romance
Ellie Pobis, Disrupting nature and narrative patterns : coming-of-age in Where the crawdads sing and the Morgesons
Dan Primka, Betrayal within : family drama as microcosm for the Irish civil war in Juno and the paycock
Anjali Alla Reddy, The power of the novel : recognizing the subaltern in the Ramayana
Eliza Brooks Vizard, "A woman's thinking and no mistake!" : differing perspectives on female agency in the Old IrishTáin bó cuailnge and Remscéla
Allison Devins Wallace, Per astra ad automata : three stories
Kelly Wenzka, Tumultuous listening : tone of voice in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry
2021 Graduates
Brian Blum, Stories About Storytelling: An Analysis of the Power of the Spoken Word in Beowulf, its Capabilities, and its Presentation
Fiona Brackley, THIS WAS OUR FIRST ARGUMENT
Lindsey Calderon, The Honor Principle: Examining Revenge Tragedies of Early Modern England
Allison Dennis, An American Revelation: The Need for a Historical Reckoning in Tony Kushner's Angels in America
Jordan Hennessee, "Is this love to come from out there?": Self-love as an Act of Defiance in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays
Isabel Lafky, Queer Wests, From Cather to Proulx
Gabrielle LaFratta, What is your substance, whereof are you made?: Gender, Sex, Bodies, and Love in Frankenstein and FranKISStein
Ethan Lambright, The Radical Doubt of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi
Sara Metzger, Woman Divided: An Analysis of Dichotomous Female Archetypes in Dickens’ Great Expectations
Faye Parks, F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition: The Challenge of Representing Trauma in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Bluebeard
Caleb Saussy, Ars Memoria and Heteroglossia in Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies
Elise Tangedal, Desire! Decay! Depravity!: Expressions of Decadence in Federico Fellini's Films of the 1960s
Aidan Walker, On Online Lines: The Place of the Reader in Web 1.0 Electronic Literature
Caleb Weil, A Boggy, Soggy, Squitchy Picture: The Ambiguity and Anxiety of Capitalist Discourse in Moby Dick
2020 Graduates
Jacey de la Torre, Ghost stories: discovering and disintegrating homespace
Jilian de la Torre, I felt myself a phantom: spacemaking and radical self-representation in the literature and filmmaking of homeless Bay Areans
Ella Fisher, Laughing at some fucked up shit: an investigation into the relationship between trauma and stand-up comedy
Parker Matias, The matter of citation:historical materialism and The Arcades Project
Miranda McGough, Lifting the "enigmatic veil": uncovering the artist figure in the life and writings of Mary Butts
Maya, Nesbitt-Schnadt, Hear
Hadley Parrish-Cotten, Alligator dreams
Zia Pollis, How to eat a woman
Karley Quadros, Watershed
Kashaf Qureshi, The self as text: Augustinian reading and the legible corpus in Donne and Milton
Chloë Thompson, Bobo and the poems
Drew Veltrop, Meursalt's linguistic metamorphoses
Analisa Venolia, Let's do a makeover!: an examination of the modernization of Jane Austen in Clueless and The Lizzie Bennet diaries
Alan Yang, Painbird: a poetic thesis on coping with vague anxieties and particular sorrows
Jonathan Zisk, Intermittently studden to be alive :Jewish American authorial reincarnation in Philip Roth's The ghost writer and Nicole Krauss' Forest dark
2019 Graduates
Emma Adest, Occidental murder: Agatha Christie's critique of enabling crime through British trans-locational hierarchies
Ginger Bell, America's got problems: how (literary) vampires expose American culture
Maya Broder, To die as lovers may :the predatory lesbian gothic
Josh Dassa, Enough, alright!
Raquel Diaz, Love you for 10,000 years: how Wong Kar-wai contextualizes love and desire in three films
Pauline Fleming, An absurd idea
Sadie Harmon-Pierce, Austen and emotional cataclysm :feeling and connection in Persuasion
Jossalyn Holbert, Filial and sisterly love :the anatomy of family in Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion
Quincy Kitson, Peculiar stains
Anna Ladohkin, Sharing imagined space with Shakespeare
Clementine Morse, The still, sad music of humanity :towards a critical aesthetics in Wordsworth and Keats' odes
Naomi Nabahe, Paradise driven
Siena Nesbitt-Fox, Barriers to diversity in the high school literature curriculum :the structures in place and why we need to tear them down
Kieran Nugent, An allegorical reading of theories of language in William Faulkner's As I lay dying
Claire Pask, In search of Katherine Mansfield's gardens
Natasha Perrino, Death becomes her?: politics of mourning, illness and the autobiographical I "in Joan Didion's autopathographies"
Joshua Pasterik, Alarums to truth :paradox in John Donne's Devotions upon emergent occasions
Joel Staudinger, The common breath
Claire Stevens, I just have to say: there's been a death in the family
Isabelle Sullivan, I am not a nice day
Samantha Timms, Poison apples and fruits of knowledge: the moral education of the female subject in Phillip Pullman's His dark materials and Angela Carter's The bloody chamber
Santiago Valencia, Say tomorrow
Jordan Witt, The fabric of identity: resistance and clothing in the modernist Bildunsroman
2018 Graduates
Zachary Laurent Beauregard, The once and prior king : an analysis of King Arthur in medieval literature as a representative of the inaccessible past
Mia Burcham, His own live body : embodied authority in the literature of the american civil war
Joshua Nicholas Byron-Cox, Where Neely and Mosley meet : tracing a genealogy of the black detective persona
Erika Enge, The defeat of the translator
Sarah Gelvin, The promise and perils of changing forms in two works by Angela Carter
Clara Gross, Cuckoo : a study of madness in Ken Kesey's One flew over the cuckoo's nest observed through R.D. Laing's The politics of experience
Duncan Herb, Wandering signifiers in traditional literature
Michael Kaplan, Machines of loving grace
Gwynne Leavitt, The Mars trope in twentieth-century science fiction : identity and society on a blank red slate
Emmet Martin, Unspoken
Caroline McCulloch, Letting bones dance : 're-membering' specters of slavery in Southern gothic literature
Alexander Moses, My house is constructed of dream-fabric : desire in selected short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and Dorothy West
Serena Offenbaker, Belly up, then float
Aaron Posner, Jews in space : instability and security of diasporic place, space, and home in Jewish-American literature
Jenna Routenberg, Patchwork : essays
Antonia Silva, La lotería
Elizabeth Stallings, The crises of our times : an examination of the two-worlds model in A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Allison Tardio, The meticulous mockery : the critical use of mock-gothic in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Lemony Snicket's A series of unfortunate events
Olivya Veazey, Unenclosures
Olivia Wetzel, Loving land : the environmental ethos in American nature poetry
2017 Graduates
Lucas Willie Mayer Binion, A Finely Orchestrated Paradox
Hayden Ellsworth Bunker, This cell's my court: Mimetic Fictionality, Reader-Character Engagement, and the Generation of the Possible Worlds in Shakespeare's The Tempest
Christopher Reid Creech, Human Weakness and its Exposure: The Ethical Model of The Master and Margarita
Lyle Robert Daniel, Materialist Poetics in Stein and Armantrout
Juliet Grace de la Huerga, Behind Closed Doors: The Use of Public and Private Information in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and the World of Lizzie Bennet
Sandra Esmeralda De Anda, The Construction of the Self through a Gendered Discourse in Ingmar Bergman's Films
Poppy Rae Ellard, "The country is diseased": Richard Fariña's Use of the Coming-of-Age Narrative as a Cultural Critique in Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
Hannah Catherine Erhart, bb girl's catalog of things otherwise forgotten
Alexander Pierce Girkin, This Whole Black and Brown World Heaving Upward: Reading the Land in Jean Toomer's Cane
Connor Arthur Greer, Glow
Sierra Faith Hill, Headwater: Poems
Peter Phillips House, Stop/Go: Time, Music, and Photography in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squadand W.G. Serbald's Austerlitz
Naima Medelia Karczmar-Britton, Mythologies
Hayden Dana Kinney, "An Abstraction Blooded": Reading as Embodied Thought in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Alexis Rose Leonetti, Cold War Life and Confederate Literature: Luce, Faulkner, and O'Connor as Voices of Mid-Century America
Louis Wilson Mendes, Narrative Poetic Form in Relation to Fideistic Epistemology in the Middle English Pearland Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Grace Elena Moon, The Language of Space and the Space of Language: How Diction and Form Create Virtual Topographies in Nonlinear Electronic Fiction
Alexandra Kirsten Parker, One out of Many: Singleness and Community in Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man
Daniel Michael Pogust, The Imitator's Garden: Four Varities of Mimesis in John Steinbeck's East of Eden
Taylor Jackson Pope, Mansplaining with Joyce: Queering Ulysses
Calyx Boden Reed, Some Author: E.B. White as an American Nature Writer
Noah Alexander Samel, Reconciling the Religious and Political in Graham Greene's The Quiet American
MaryAnn Elizabeth Shnell, Jane Austen Reception in the Victorian Period: Realism, The Social Problem Novel, and the Sensation Novel
Henry Cole Smith, Crab Canon
Nico Nicolas Villarreal, Creating an Identity
Jasmine Tintut Williams, Searching for Sayagyi: A Study of Anglo-Burmese Literature
Priscilla Shuk-Yeeng Wu, Weaponizing the Words of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston: Empowering Language, Myth, and Chinese American Feminist Identity
2016 Graduates
Zahra Booth, "it's words, unprintable but the tune, irresistible:" Continuity Subversion and Creation in Mumbo Jumbo
Lauren Alyssa Cooper, The Key to Rebecca: Genre, Gender, and the Question of Heroism in Ivanhoe
Henry Cordes, Frisco
Max Levy Diamond, The Programatic Approach to Interpretation
Grace Browning Fetterman, Father Welsh. Walsh. Welsh.: Character Confronting Caricature in the Dramatic Work of Martin McDonagh
Sage Alexandra Freeburg, Rotations
Hannah Hua Ying Fung-Wiener, Sounding Lines
Julie Laura Gourinchas, Homo Puellae Lupus (Man is a Wolf to Girl): Mapping the cultural influence of Nabokov's Lolita on the child-woman myth
India Rae Hamilton, Toothless: A Collection of Short Stories
Lily Dolores Harris, "A Uo Penn Byt Pont": The Politics of Magical Transformation in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi
Kasie Nicole Henderson, The Almost Nameless Contour: Space and Place in Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Benjamin Hemenway, The outer turmoil's veil : an analysis of Samuel Beckett's Novellas
Eric Chen Pei Ho, The Once and Future Chivalry: The Emergence of the Individual from Arthurian Legend
Erika E. Hurth, Zen, Jung, and the Poetics of John Cage
Luomeng Helen Liu, The Motif of Flowers in "Penelope" of Ulysses and "The Song of Burying the Fallen Flowers" in The Story of The Stone
Chloe Concetta Margherita, Connecting through the Unknown: Reading the Epistemology of Alterity in David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino
Nathan James Martin, Jimmy Corrigenda: Correction and Failure in a Great American Graphic Novel
Lauren Lollie Nelson, "The sweet snare of the flesh": Carnivalesque catharsis in Claude McKay's Banana Bottom
Perry Katharine Nelson, "The Theory of Narrative Causality": Metafiction and Carnival Humor in Terry Pratchett's Withces Abroad and Guards! Guards!
Brittany Lauren, Ohrt Friends and Flying Death: Dragons in The Hobbit and Dragonflight
Sterling Olson, Waning towers : problems of monarchy and chivalry in fourteenth century English poetry
Anne Astrid Osenbaugh, Two Kings and a Governess: Death, Feminism, and Classical Underworld in Jane Eyre
India Rose Ragsdale, Illuminating the Ineffable: Metafiction and Magical Realism in Everything is Illuminated
David Antonio Satten-Lopez, Book2
Marin Soquelle Sklan, The Book of Giving
Blake Stewart, Bloomin' Onion
Charlie Clarence Wilcox, Overwriting Experience: The Social and The Textual in the American Academic Novel
Ryan Christopher Wright, Ludic Hermeneutics: Interpretation as Play in Shakespeare's As You Like It and Jonathan Blow's Braid
2015 Graduates
Sterling Olson, Waning towers : problems of monarchy and chivalry in fourteenth century English poetry
Demian Lee, Repeated deconstruction : a phenomenological reading of "The waves"
Alexandra Corey, A song of multitudes : the French reception of Walt Whitman
Lael Pollack, A changing world : British and American anxiety and the postwar novel
Gabriel Zinn, Writing eros : utterance and desire in James Joyce's "A portrait of the artist as a young man" and "Ulysses"
Benjamin Hemenway, "The outer turmoil's veil" : an analysis of Samuel Beckett's Novellas
Ashley Brandt, Triangulation : locating the reader in Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" and Humbert Humbert's Narration
Evan Filkins, "Mont Blanc" and Shelley's sublime dialectic
Della Green, "I had not minded--walls--" : perils, possibilities and metapoetics in Dickinson's depictions of boundaries
Danielle Juncal, Japanese American internment poetry : Lawson Inada and Mitsuye Yamada's re-mappings of memory and identity
Elise Ringo, Woe unto world's end : apocalypse in Tolkien's "Silmarillion"
Sam Sexton, Hearts and minds : genre displacement in Vietnam War literature
Alexandra Wood, "Pierre; or, the ambiguities" : Herman Melville's denunciation of truth in literature
Serra Shelton, The semi-dialogic novel : children's literature, Lewis Carroll, and the effects of humor
Jack Taylor, Going beyond the zero : an examination of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's rainbow" as a source of insight into our contemporary creative moment
Sinclair Hong, Evolving representations of the metropolis in literature
Brian Merson McPherson, Narcissism and trauma in the verse of Golding, Milton, and Shakespeare
Alexandra Rachel Boss, Native American and First Nations oral and written literature : the problems with transcription and the power of the autonomous voice
Natasha Lelchuk, The new woman and the little girl business : new girls in the novels of J. M. Barrie, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Henry James
Amanda Rose Dempsey, Postmodernism for unbeginners : an exploration of the postmodern de/reconstruction of discourses of knowledge and metanarratives in literature
Jacob Krouse Strickland, About time : temporality and normativity in "Back to the future"
Sylvia Chase Randall-Muñoz, Clarissa Dalloway as the flâneuse : an exploration of the female sphere within the postwar metropolis
Kevyn . Tompkins de Garcia, Modern gothic literature of Joyce Carol Oates as a call to action