Student Theses

Recent thesis titles include the following:

• John Donne's Isaiah: A structural and exegetical examination of early-modern homiletics
• Playing Doctor: Patriarchal Doctor/Patient Binaries in the Lives and Works of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Gothic Ape: Evolutionary Influence and the Post-Apocalypse
• “On the Outside of the World Peeping In”: 20th Century African American Literature and the Advent of Kendrick Lamar
• "We are gathered here today because we are not gathered somewhere else today": Slam poetry and political solidarity
• K-Mart Conatus: Raymond Carver and Physical Anticipation of Revelation
• God’s Ragged Edges: Religion and Public Life in the Work of Herman Melville
• Belief in Lyric: The Intersection of Religion and Language in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot
• The Loathly le Fay: Morgan le Fay as Irish Sovereignty Myth in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and Morte Darthur
• Radical Openness and The Possibility of Reading
• A Fearsome Inheritance: Queer Gothic Families in Post-World War II Literature and Film
• “Our Brains Upon the Same Lines”—Collaboration as a Mode of Resistance Against Aesthetic Dogmatism in Virginia Woolf’s Life and Work
• “And Never Shall My Harp Thy Praise Forget”: Memory, Subjectivity, and Poetic Devotion in Paradise Lost
• Willfulness, Shame, and Trauma in Eimear McBride's Novels
• “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink”: A Posthumanist Evaluation of Formal and Rhetorical Environmental Literary Strategies
• “‘Lost’ Along the Color Line: The Conflict over Race and National Identity in the Selected Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Claude McKay”
• “Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or the Wrongs of Women and Shelley’s Frankenstein: Echoes and Revisions”
• “Writing ‘the Jew’: Semitic Discourse in Oliver Twist, Daniel Deronda, and Reuben Sachs”
• “Christianity and Decolonization: Louise Erdrich’s Reinscription in Love Medicine, Tracks, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace”
• “‘A Shape Within the Watry Gleam’: Writing, Subjectivity, and Visuality in Early Modern Literature”
• “Striking it Rich Behind the Linear Black: The Sonnet Sequences of Seamus Heaney”
• “‘So Young and Tender of Age’: Children and Other Suffering Innocents as Marian and Christological Images in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales”
• “Williams, Joyce, and Visual Clamor”
• “Constructing Cleopatra: Making Sense of a Female Sovereign in William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra”
• “Nation, Faith, and Body: Corporeal Subjectivity in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”
• “‘The Labour Which That Longeth Unto Me’: Male Gaze versus Female Body in ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and ‘The Clerk’s Tale’”

Recent field exam titles include the following:

• "Playing the Woman Card:" The 2016 Presidential Election, Campaign News, and the Gendered Appeal
• 1840–1940: The Development of a Modern Ireland and a Modern Literature
• The Literary Memoir
• “Women of Color Feminism in the Multicultural Classroom: Self-Narrative as a Pedagogical Tool.”
• (Un)Safe as Houses: Gender, Memory and National Trauma in American Haunted House Novels of the Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
• “Goddesses of Night”: Deviant Women in the Gothic