Recent BA Projects

2023-2024

  • Alec Abramson, "Tunnel Vision: Dispatches from the Paris Métro” 
  • Olivia Brooks, "How Does Perfection Align with Womanhood?"
  • Coulombe, "The Unspoken Trauma of Motherhood"
  • Jordan Goodwin, " 'Finding the “Beautiful World': The Material and the Abstract in Rooney’s Beautiful
    World, Where Are You
    and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion"
  • A'Nya Harrison, "Fantasy, Fabula, and Fiction: Identifying the Legendborn Series as Part of the Black
    Archive"
  • Chandler Hart, " 'It Bent the Light': Climate Change, Dread, and the Emergence of 'Climate Realism' in Jenny Offill’s Weather and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You"
  • Kelly Hui, "‘We, Like the Ghosts, Have No Memories’: Ghostly Autobiographical Acts in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War
  • Tatiana Jackson-Saitz, "Rooms, Streets, & the Exhibition: Constructed Typologies of Space in Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys" 
  • Esther Kim, "The Potency of Metaphor in Tragedy: A Power for the Powerless"
  • Harrison Knight, "Lunch/Time: A Historical and Literary Approach to Time, Work, and The
    Lunch Break"
  • Claire Levin, "Unsolid Objects: How Changeable Things Typify Virginia Woolf’s Characters in To the
    Lighthouse
    and 'Solid Objects' ”
  • Manon Lowth, "Contentious Bodies and Transgressive Voices: 'Articulating Spaces' and Imaginative Resistance in Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency and Nasim Marashi’s I’ll Be Strong for You"
  • Caitlin Lozada, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Unraveling Discomfort and Pleasure in Mary
    Gaitskill’s Erotic Short Stories 'A Romantic Weekend' and 'Secretary' "
  • Molly Morrow, " 'Till it worked its natural miracle': Shaker Celibacy and Sacred Motherhood in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland"
  • Jake Schroeder, "Romeo, Romeo! Take Me Somewhere We Can Be Alone: Cliché Character
    Constructions and the Roar of a Bardic Force”
  • Nora Schultz, " 'And what have kings that privates have not too': Henry V, Richard III, and the Performance of Kingship and Authenticity”
  • Merrin Seegers, "Dad Jokes: Homosociality, Reprosexuality, and Fatherhood in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America
  • Malena Solin, "Which March Sister Are You? The Utopian Implications of Sorting in Little Women"
  • Andrew Soto, "Cuando Yo Me Muera"
  • Nicole Stachowiak, "Postmodern Role-Playing: Perspective and Identity Formation in NieR Replicant"
  • Honor Torrance, " 'The Dreadful Expedient’: Dracula, the Franklin Expedition, and Victorian Anxieties of the Body.” 
  • Sheila Tume, "Something Newly Missing: River Transformations in Toni Morrison's Sula"
  • Cory Turnbaugh, "Composing a Living Tradition: Setting Text to Music as Translation”
  • Rachel Wan, "Gastronomic Grief: Reimagining Generational Loss in Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like
    War
    and Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart”
  • Justice Yoo, "Light Leaves Water" 
  • Sammy Zimmerman, "Haunted Empire: Gothic Japanism in British Literature of the Fin de Siècle"

2022-2023

  • Lyssa Albertson, "The Reconciliation of Blackness and Romance in Get a Life, Chloe Brown and Seven Days in June"
  • Lila Alonso, " 'We Are on the Moon at Last': The Destruction of the Domestic in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle
  • Jonathan Badonsky, "The Poet as Reader as Author: Influence, Reception, and Audience in the Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley" 
  • Katarina Birimac, "The Art of Advising Rulers: A Comparison of Ghazali’s, Sa’di’s, and John of Salisbury’s Construction of Authority in their Medieval Mirrors for Princes Texts"
  • Emily Cheng, " 'Literature’s Most Awkward Man': Re-reading Darcy’s Embodiment of the Feminine Mode of Desire in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice"
  • Bella Constantino, "Documenting the Failure of Collaborative Care for Queer Subjects: How the Graphic Memoir Restores Interdependency in 7 Miles A Second and Kimiko Does Cancer"
  • Josephine Dawson, "Terror, Seduction, Voracity: Monsterizing Sainthood in the Anonymous Old English Vita of Saint Mary of Egypt"
  • Leo Diamond, “Our Physical Nature: Elucidating the Nature/Society Divide and the Body’s Place Within It”
  • Alexander Gonzalez, "First Generation Immigrant Latinidad and Frameworks of Success"
  • Simone Gulliver, " 'The Ship’s Inventory': Recovering the Enslaved Women of Robin Coste Lewis’s
    Voyage of the Sable Venus"
  • Sophia Koock, " 'It was all, generally, going to hell': The Affective Dimension of Instability in Three Rooms and 'The One Hundred and First Resume and the First Commute'"
  • Zachary Lee, "The Long Good-bye: Unresolved Trauma and Convention in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans"
  • Amy Lu, " 'Please Look After This Bear:' Immigration, Assimilation, and Historicization in Michael
    Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington"
  • Kalya Luu, " 'Synthetic Ghosts in the Machine': Feminine Suicidality in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
    Woman Warrior"
  • Frances Schaeffler, "Subverting Subcultures: The Fashionaization of Punk and Prep by Ralph Lauren and Vivienne Westwood in Vogue, 1982-1983"
  • Kathryn Sinyavin, "The Ethics of Beautiful Language in William H. Gass’s 'Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s'"
  • Lillie-Rose Tritt, "Beatniks, Buddhists, and the Bay: Lenore Kandel’s Sex and Spirituality in 1960s San Francisco"
  • Amina Washington, "Crafting a Black Reality: Examining Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as Contemporary Folklore"
  • Caroline Webber, "A Crime of Culture: Detection, Guilt, and Community in Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold"
  • Winona Zhang, "Making the Invisible Visible: 'Women’s Intuition' in Trifles"

2021-2022

  • Mahima Akula, Justice for Bleeding Women: Resisting the "Doctor-God" in Deluge 
  • Alexandra Bartholomew, Making Medea Monstrous: Moral Liminality in the Heroides and the Legend of Good Women  
  • Chloe Bartholomew, Foreign Women: Operation of a Gendered and Racialized Guest-Host Framework in Medea and How Much of These Hills Is Gold 
  • Matheu Boucher, Disobeying the Narrator: How the Stanley Parable Informs Our Conception of Narration in Videogames 
  • Hannah Burnstein, The Case for Comparative Discourse in Adaptation Studies 
  • Kathryn Davis, Unburying the Hidden Narrative of Spofford’s ‘Desert Sands’: Gendered Landscapes, Realms of Repression, and Cosmic Symbolism 
  • Madelieine Domecq, “Let’s Not Talk About What You Don’t Want Out”: Self-Building and Celebrity Informing Narrative in Real Housewives 
  • Sylvia Ebenbach, Knowledge and Truth in The Things They Carried 
  • Andrew Farry, The paradox of a transcendent connection to nature: Robinson Jeffers’ Inhumanist as Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith 
  • Caroline Galt, “Trusty Pages” and “Kinde Lovers”: Wives, Pages, Students, and John Lyly’s Gallathea 
  • Rosa Glen-Rayner, Toni Morrison's Sula: Temporal Alternatives and Reimagined History-Telling 
  • Won Young Jang, Indispensable Countersigns: The Deconstruction of Gendered Literary Tradition in James Joyce’s Ulysses 
  • Peyton Jefferson, Grief, Trauma, and their Racialized Representations: Black Beings, Gender, and Class in Shakespeare’s Literary Canon 
  • Airi Kogishi, Paintings and Photographs: How Virginia Woolf Might be Read as Combatting Authoritative Writing Through the Visual 
  • Derek Kost, The Rhetorical Power of Figurative Language in Literature and Political Speech: Mobilizing Metaphor in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Beyond 
  • Philip Kuhn, Edenic Temptations: More Plentiful than an Apple — Passion and Desire as Evoked by the Garden in Milton’s Paradise Lost 
  • Vivian Lei, Writing Affect In/Through Body Parts: The Aggressive Affectivity of Melancholia in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée 
  • Kitty Luo, The Still Carnival 
  • Mallory Moore, Queering Autobiography in the American West: Accessing Desire through Transubstantiation in I Await the Devil’s Comingby Mary MacLane 
  • Jennifer Morse, Truth is a Matter of the Imagination:” Feminist Utopias, Reproduction, and Redefining the Natural 
  • Sophia Salvato, Being and Desire in Audre Lorde’s Zami
  • Caleigh Stephens, Binding the Body with Language: The Poetics of Hijikata’s Dance-Writing 
  • Madison Thân, The decapitated forms.’: Dictee’s Rhizome 
  • Aviva Waldman, Israel in America: Reading History, Utopia, and Nation in Isra Isle 
  • Devon Wenzel, Conversations with Myself: An Investigation into the Authorial Eponym of Rooney-ness 
  • Evan Williams, Nothing Happens Next and It Looks Like Us; The Devastation of Hope in Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords vol. 1 
  • Elizabeth Winkler, Paradise Queered: Speaking Eve's Body Language in Paradise Lost 

2020-2021

  • Maetal Gerson, The Babbling of a Wandering Child: The Child’s Perceptions and Adult Misperceptions in Call it Sleep by Henry Roth  
  • Imaan Yousuf, Domesticity and Debauchery: Genre Multiplication, Archival Silence, and the Exertion of Queer Solidarity in In the Dream House  
  • Olivia Yardley, Anywhere is One Step from Here: Magic, Realism, and the Refugee Experience in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West  
  • Mingxin Xu, The Scentscape in Lolita  
  • Renee Wehrle, “Experience is Revelation”: An Anti-Capitalist Model of Porous Experience in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the roses  
  • Connor Tree, Novelizing British Socialism: Stories of Scarcity and Healthcare in the 20th Century United Kingdom  
  • Brinda Rao-Pothuraju, Democratizing the Dead: The Iliad’s Poetic Conventions for Memorialization in Modern Applications  
  • Alexa Perlmutter, Telling the Truth: Trauma Healing in Autobiographical Narratives by Jeanette Winterson and Alexander Chee 
  • Nicholas Peno, Gameplay as Queer Experience: Twine’s Affordances to Queer Storytelling and Archival Presentation  
  • Orliana Morag, “It Would Be Better for Her to Die at Once”: How Elizabeth Gaskell Subverts the Trope of the Fallen Woman and Forges Her a New Path in Ruth  
  • Natalia McCormick, Life off the Beaten Path: Mapping Irish Women’s Agency in Migration Narratives During the Medieval and Immediate Post-World War Two Eras  
  • Alice May, “To one, who yearns for sunset land”: Angelina Weld Grimké and the Poetics of Abolition  
  • Serin Lee, “My Life” as Everybody’s Autobiography: Memory, The Present Moment, and Identity in Lyn Hejinian  
  • Caroline Kubzansky, “This is What I Have of You”: Ethical Knowledge of Others in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince  
  • Caitlyn Klum, “A Whistle, a High Murmur, and, at Last, a Song”: Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Poetics of Listening  
  • Rita Khouri, The Emergence of Self-Consciousness: A Dialectic between Natural and Biblical Revelation Bridged by the Poetic Imagination in The Prelude  
  • Brian Johnson, A Little Too Much: The Aesthetic Troubles of Neoliberalism and “Trauma Porn” in A Little Life (2015) 
  • Zeinab Hussen, From Human Being to Zombie: Racialization, Recognition, and the Right to Opacity  
  • Myles Hudson, “Your Country’s Secrets”: Cultural Capital and the Literary Construction of White America  
  • Samual Hebert, “Good night sweet Prince,” the Rood whispered in its Dream: Christ and the Rood’s suffering without terror, riddle-objects’ dual natures in the Exeter Book, and the case against ananthropocentric reading of Old English Treatments of the Anthropomorphic and Natural domains  
  • Yassmin Elbanna, Submission and Solitude: Deciphering Clarissa Harlowe’s Voice through the Significance of Letter Writing  
  • Selin Deldag, Multiple Pillars of Maria Edgeworth’s Complex Social, Political and Economic Vision for Ireland  
  • Hannah Chen, “Beloved, Household Spirit”: Coming of Age with Ghosts in Beloved and Little Women  
  • Andrew Chang, The Death of the Designer: A Case for The Decentralized Narrative Model of Contemporary Fashion Shows  
  • Trent Anderson, Detectives Have Hitherto Only Interpreted the World in Various Ways; the Point Is to Change It: How Truth and Justice Converge in Knight’s Gambit 

2019-2020

  • Nicho Alvarado, Narratology and the Apocalypse in Dark Souls
  • Max Alvarez, Joyce’s “Poetical Evacuations”: Bathos and the Depersonalization of Comedy in Ulysses
  • Marjorie Antohi, The Materiality of the Fall in Paradise Lost
  • Elizabeth Crowdus, The Anti-Mechanical Justice League: Nationalism, Race, and Opaque Technology in ​Wonder Woman
  • Paola Del Toro, “The President Told Us All to Go Shopping:” Late Capitalist Rupture and Immigrant Recovery in Ling Ma’s Severance
  • Belen Edwards, Biotransformations and Community Building in Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series
  • Lily Anna Grossbard, “Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That!”:Queer Utopic Moments in Seinfeld
  • Hope Campbell Gundlah, “This is my letter to the World”: Emily Dickinson in Dramatic Performance
  • Tess Gundlah, The Demon Who Saved The World: Adaptation, Identity, and Free Will in Good Omens
  • Claire Holland, Looking Back: World, Woman, and Writing in Elizabeth Bowen’s “Look at All Those Roses”
  • John Ingold, Crossing the Threshold: Supernatural Representations of Trauma in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
  • Carissa Knickerbocker, A Wolf in Knight’s Clothing: Crafting Magic in Marie de France’s “Bisclavret”
  • Alex Kong, Aspiring to Nature: The Politics of Acknowledgement in Michael Fried’s Modernism
  • Felix Lecocq: Men on Fire: Reading Trauma and Immortality through Time in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
  • Emily Lynch, One-Woman Shows in an Era of“Stale” Feminism
  • Brooke Nagler, Iconicity, Photographic Aesthetics, and Implicit Partnership:Stein and Toklas, Sontag and Leibovitz
  • G. Cyrus Pacht, Alienating the Teutonosphere, or Avoiding History: Subversive Approaches to Postwar Progress in How German Is It and Heldenplatz
  • Ramona Pfaender, Magic and Mayhem: Gender and the Spatialization of Power in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire
  • Bryant Raisch, Odysseus as Ethnographer: Ulysses and the Odyssey
  • Nicole Romeu, Where’s Wald(a)? Locating the Origins of Feminine Subjectivity via the Deconstruction of the American Nuclear Family in Sula
  • Claire Schultz, “You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?”: Jane Eyre and the Fairy Tale
  • Jake Scott, Mobility in the Age of Political Economy: Beachy Head’s Prospect of Community
  • Emily Stevens, How To Do Kings With Words: Paradigms of Performance in Shakespeare’s Richard II
  • Sarah Tinaphong, Creating from the Space Between: On the Use of Poetics to Convey the Asian-American Experience
  • Christina Tuccillo, Call Me by Y/N:Celebrity and the Status of the Reader in Reader-Insert Fanfiction
  • Calvin Wang, Watch What You See, Watch What You Think, and Watch Out for the Flies: Video, Relationality, and Ecology in Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt
  • Melanie WangGone Girl: An Analysis of the Trickle-Down Effect of Neoliberalism on Ordinary Behavior