MASTER'S STUDENT THESES

Recent thesis titles:

Sister of the "Weary Fraternity": Louisa May Alcott’s Reconciliation to Transcendentalism via Her Writings about the American Civil War

In-between and Overflowing: Meta-archipelagic Visions of Identity, Community, and Tradition in the Literary Production of Pedro Pietri

A Prison of the Body: Illness, Incarceration, and the Embodiment of Form in Memoir

Composing Home: Things, World, and Futurity in the Poetry of George Oppen

Medicine, Disease, and Pathology in Nineteenth-Century British Gothic Fiction

The Anglophone Novel of Living and Dying: Non-Self, Impersonal Energy and the Dissolution of Subjectivity in Contemporary Fiction

Modernism and the Repurposing of Institutionally Built Space

Does it Matter of Joyce (Alone) was a Feminist?: Using Contemporary Adaptations of Ulysses to Understand Molly Bloom

"So My Dead Are Not Strangers": John Edgar Wideman, Black Lives Matter, and the Terror of Forgetfulness

Reconstructing Black Subjectivities: Formulations of Narrative Identities in 19th Century African-American Literature

Iustitiae Legibus?: The Political Implications of Arthur's Problematic Acts of War in the Galfridian Tradition

Contemplating the "Spiritual but not Religious" in Wallace Stevens and David Foster Wallace

"Strange Sensations" and Democratic Relations: Affect, Reading, and Sympathy in Herman Melville's Pierre

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 D'Arthur

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:

Student Identity in Twenty-First-Century Campus Novel

A Pedagogical Investigation of African American Historiographic Drama

"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