Alumni

In the Department of English our hope is that the inquiries and conversations you begin here will continue in places far removed from campus and in times long after you've left the classroom behind. We provide the links on this page to help you keep the intellectual and creative life of the Department within reach. Here you will find news about upcoming events as well as the latest publications of Department graduates. We particularly invite you to register for e-mail updates via Facebook so that you can learn about important upcoming events and achievements as they happen.

2022-23
Name Dissertation Title
Marissa Fenley "Puppet Theory: The Mechanical Infrastructure of Personhood"
Tim DeMay "Occupations: A Repertoire of Experimental Political and Artistic Practices"
Jacqueline Dragu ""Al is Yliche Good": Melancholia and desire in Medieval Literature"
Arianna Gass "The Body in Play: Embodiment in and Through Videogames"
Jordan Pruett "Managed Abundance: A Quantitative History of American Fiction, 1931-2009"
Carrie Taylor ""To Labor and Toil as we Harvest the Coals": Mining, Modernity, and Deep Time in the Romantic Era"
Evan Wisdom "Seed Media"
2021-22
Name Dissertation Title
Upasana Dutta "Kashmir in/as Crisis: Theorizing the Crisis-Imaginary and an Ethics of reading"
Emily Nixon "Patience, Exemplarity, and the Affective Didactics of Middle English Literature"
Jennifer Pan "Chekhov's Guns: Technology, Design, and Intention in Narrative Fiction"
Shirl Yang "Letdown Aesthetics: Economic Withdrawal from 1970 to the Present"
Michal Zechariah "Unmoved Emotions in Shakespeare and Milton"
Eric Powell "THE POLITICS OF LYRIC: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF SHELLEY’S FORMS"
Sophia Sherry "Late Sun at Mid-Century: Empire, Modernist Aesthetics, Forms of War"
2020-21
Name Dissertation Title
Rowan Bayne "On the Spectrum: Genealogy of a Form of Differentiation"
Jacob Harris "Exquisite Schemes: The Aesthetics of Excess in the Late British Empire, 1980-1930"
Caroline Heller "The Times of the Seasons: Mediations of Climate Change in Eighteenth-Century British Literature"
William Hutchison "Love Among The Robots: Non-Biological Consciousness and the Pursuit of Kinship 1970 to the Present"
Christopher Kempf "Writing Craft: The Workshop System in American Culture"
Steven Maye "The Limits of Lyric Autonomy: American Poetry and it's Media, 1950-Present"
Katherine Nolan "She Objects: On the (Im)Mobility of Women in the Eighteenth-Century Novel"
Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz "Anational Poetics: US Minor Poetry, 1981-2020"
Matthew Boulette "Appetite for Ecstasy: Chronic Dispossession and Biochemical Governance in America, 1870-1920"
Andres Milan "penance terminable & Interminable: Form, Suffering & Activity in Piers Plowman"
Joseph Bitney "Passionate Exchanges: Melodrama and the Commodity Form"
Beatrice Bradley "Sweat and the Embodiment of Waste in Early Modern England"
2019-20
Name Dissertation Title
Rowan Bayne "On the Spectrum: Form and Difference in the Long Twentieth Century"
Ingrid Becker "Socio/Poetics"
Oscar Chavez "American Graphicity: Postwar Ethnic Literature and Visual Culture"
Bill Hutchison "Love Among the Robots: Non-Biological Consciousness and the Pursuit of Kinship 1970 to the Present"
Andrew Inchiosa "Found Among the Papers of the Early Republic"
Christopher Kempf "Writing Craft: The Workshop System in American Culture"
Katie Nolan "She Objects: On The (Im)Mobility Of Women In The Eighteenth-Century Novel"
Dave Thieme "Reading Algorithms"
2018-19
Name Dissertation Title
Hannah Brooks-Motl "War, Cities, Trash: Some Midcentury Pastorals"
Lauren Jackson "Black Vertigo: Attunement, Aphasia, Nausea, and Bodily Noise, 1970 to the Present"
Sarah Kunjummen "“Intrinsic Presence”: Revisions of Intimacy in Seventeenth-Century Britain "
Peter Lido "Queer Honor: Masculinity and the Disavowal of Shame in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature"
Martin Rayburn "The Styles Of Volition: Toward A Theory Of The Novelistic Will"
Amanda Shubert "Virtual Realism: Victorian Fiction as Optical Technology."
Chalcedony Wilding ""Skeletonization" and "Cameraflage": Learning to Read the Great War in American Poetry and Photography, 1912-1960"
David Womble "The Physiology of the Multitude: Mass Bodies and The Novel, 1748-1907"
2017-18
Name Dissertation Title
Jose Arellano "Presupposing Chicanos: Literary Criticism and the Emergence of Chicano Literature"
Hannah M. Christensen "Fantastic Worlds: The Work of Affect in Middle​ ​English Romance"
Michael Dango "Style as Action: Novel Adaptations of the Contemporary"
Amanda Davis "Housing, Character, and Artificial Life in Twentieth-Century American Fiction"
Margaret Fink "Ordinary Bodies: Disability, Race, and Belonging in American Post-War Fiction, 1952-2012"
Alexander Jacobs "Pedagogies of Failure in 19th Century America"
Kevin Kimura "West of What?: The Paradox of Western American Literature"
Peter McDonald "Playfulness 1947-2017: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Games"
Carmen Merport "Ripped From the Pages of Life: Sensation, Banality, and the Politics of Representation in Postwar American Art"
Jose-Luis Moctezuma "Spiritual Automata: William Morris, Mina Loy, Wyndham Lewis (1856-1936)"
Rebecca Oh "States of Complaint: Dissatisfied Citizenship, Environmental Harm, and The Demand For Welfare in Global South Literature, 1956-2017"
Nell Pach "Twentieth Century Fantastic: The Novel and the Re-Imagination of History"
Andrew Peart "Demediating Modernism: The Substrata of Modern American Poetry, 1917 to the Present"
Amanda Swain "Inventing the Personal: Ethics, Aesthetics and Psychology in the American Long Sixties"
Jean-Thomas Tremblay "We Don't Breathe Alone: Forms of Encounter in Anglophone North America Since the 1970s"
Allison Turner "Waste, Formations, And Remnants In The Eighteenth-Century Novel"
2016-17
Name Dissertation Title
Stephanie Anderson "Dating the Poem, 1930-80: Toward a Calendrical Poetics"
Hadji Bakara "An Empire of Dignity: A Literary History of Human Rights in the Twentieth-Century"
James Bassett "American Poetics and the Crisis of Millennialism: 1861-1876"
Jeffrey Boggs "The American Translation"
David Diamond "Credible Types: Calvinism, Credit Culture, and the Early Novel, 1660-1750"
James Duesterberg "Discovering Form: Aesthetics and Critique in American Literature and Culture"
Michael Hansen "Sensation Poetry and Social Imagination"
Kristian Kerr "Novel Classicism: British Historiography and the Empire of Prose"
Michelle Menzies "Archives of Experience: Toward a Digital Aesthetics"
Patrick Morrissey "Naïve Modernism"
Caryn O'Connell "Vegetal Life from Bacon to Milton: Incarnate Science"
Aleks Prigozhin "Arrival of the World: Atmosphere in the British Novel, 1900-1945"
Sam Rowe "Imaginary Wants: Desire, Villainy, and Capital in Eighteenth-century Fiction"
Suzanne Taylor "In and Out of Character: Moral Action in the Eighteenth Century"
2015-16
Name Dissertation Title
Philip Goldfarb Styrt "Local Habitations: Settings and Politics in Shakespeare's Plays"
Cassidy Picken "Landed Interests: British Romanticism and the Political Economy of Space"
Jonathan Schroeder "Prisoners of Love: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia, 1688-1925"
Tristan Schweiger "Planters, Mariners, Nabobs, and Squires: Masculine Typology and Imperial Ideology, 1719-1818"
2014-15
Name Dissertation Title
Daniel Harris "Experiments in Individuation: Physiological, Perceptual and Evolutionary Processes in Victorian Fiction, 1850-1907"
Kerri Hunt "Reality Effects"
Erin Nerstad "The Lyric Varieties of Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience"
Brady Smith "Red, Black and Green: Ecology, Economy and the Contemporary African Novel"
Joshua Weiss "Modernist Ecstasy: Sexuality and the Sacraments in Modernist Literature"
Andrew Yale "Museum Medium"
2013-14
Name Dissertation Title
Moacir de Sa Pereira "Sic Transit America: Novels In, Of, Beyond, and Below the United States, 1928-1941"
Ian Duncan "Reading the Postcolonial Cosmopolitan Novel: Ethical Encounters with the Literature of Incediary Circumstances"
Laura Kolb "Outward Worth: The Rhetoric of Credit in Renaissance Drama"
Michael Savitz "Poetics of Experience: Pragmatism and Poetry Discourse"
Henry Scotch "Oceanic America: A Literary Geography"
Johanna Winant "The Poetics of Explanation in Modern American Poetry"
Name Dissertation Title
Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield "Touching Menace: Artificial Intelligence, Aesthetics, and the Intimacies of Synthetic Sense"
Madison Chapman "MORTAL INTIMACY: DESIRE, DEATH & THE SUBJECT IN BRITISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE"
Zoe Hughes "Feline Modernism"
Leland Jasperse "Insignificant Others: The Literary Politics of Celibacy, 1880-1930”"