2026
Brett Driben
Reading History, Reading Race: Historical Narrative, Racial Epistemology, and the Multiplicity of Interpretation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Texts
Advisor: Prof. López
Vanessa Febo
The Ballad’s Racial Borders: Race, Nationalism, and Imperialism in the Nineteenth-Century Ballad
Advisor: Prof. Cohen
Marguerite Happe
The Vermicular Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1660-1760)
Prof. Deutsch
Emma Spies
“The Novel and the Transient”: Queer Turns in Surrealism
Prof. Hornby
2025
Kristen Cardon
Narrative Suicidology: Literary Approaches to Individual and Species Suicide Prevention
Prof. DeLoughrey
Abraham Encinas
Genres of Dictatorship: Dictator Novels, Counterfactuals, Dystopian Sci-Fi, and Refugee Texts of 20th Century and Contemporary U.S. Literature
Prof. López
Jené Pledger
Earwitnesses in America: Listening Literatures in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.
Prof. Hyde
Lesley Thulin
Disability and Political Economy in Romantic Literature, 1762-1834
Prof. Deutsch
Joseph Torres
World-Remaking Experiments in seventeenth-Century English Literature
Prof. Gallagher
Tony Wei Ling
More or Less Alive: Labor and Race in Comics’ Vital Aesthetics
Prof. R. Lee
2024
Oriah Amit
Precautionary Tales: Political Consequence in British Fiction, 1867-1903
Advisors: Prof. Bristow, Prof. Grossman
Salvador Herrera
Desert Dreams: Transborder Art at the Limits of Identity
Advisors: Prof. R. Lee, Prof. Pérez-Torres
Jessica Lee
Across Africa’s American Atlantic: Middle Passages, Imagined Home Spaces and Black Futurities
Advisor: Prof. Goyal
Dandi Meng
Skin Pulled Back: Race and Literary Abstractions in the 21st Century
Advisors: Prof. McMillan, Prof. Nersessian
Spencer Robins
Our Planet: Collective Narrative in the Climate Change Era
Advisor: Prof. Heise, Prof. Allison Carruth
Jessica Cook Sherrill
Memory Machines: Mnemonics, Poetry, and Computing in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Advisor: Prof. Grossman
Sammy Solis
Contested Bodies: Fictions of Brownness and Latinidad
Advisor: Prof. López
Arielle Stambler
The Social Rights Imaginary of the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel
Advisors: Prof. Goyal, Prof. Rothberg
Jesslyn Whittell
The Riot and the Didactic: Instruction in British Romantic Poetry
Prof. Makdisi, Prof. Nersessian
2023
Andrea Acosta
Virtual Bodies: Minoritarian Performance in Digital Subcultures
Advisors: Prof. McMillan, Prof. Snelson
Kersti Francis
Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural, 1150-1650
Advisors: Prof. Chism, Prof. Gallagher
Misho Ishikawa
Sensing Empire: Sensing Mongol Imperialism in Medieval Contact Literatures (1206-1368)
Advisor: Prof. Chism
Robin Kello
Performing Displacement: Precarious Encounters, Hospitality Events, and The Theater of Migration
Advisor: Prof. Fuchs
Yangjung Lee
A Guilty Emancipation: Victorian Fiction and the Legacies of Compensation
Advisor: Prof. Grossman
Shouhei Tanaka
Fossil Power: Energy Empire and Insurgent Life
Advisors: Prof. Heise, Prof. Carruth
2022
Vivian Delchamps
The Names of Sickness: Writing Disability and Revising Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century America
Advisors: Prof. Deutsch, Prof. Looby
Lauren Dembowitz
Retracing the Black Venus: Figures of Intimate Commerce in the Atlantic World
Advisor: Prof. Goyal
Lillian Lu
Naiveté and the British Novel (1770-1830)
Advisor: Prof. Deutsch
Taly Ravid
“A Symptom of History:” The Traumatic Form of the Alternate History
Advisors: Prof. Deutsch, Prof. North
Claire Stanford
Future Asians: Orientalism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century U.S. Science Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Heise
Gabriela Valenzuela
Reading Centroamericanismo: U.S. Central American Literatures in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1870-1921
Advisor: Prof. López
2021
Comfort Azubuko-Udah
Unwritten Spaces: African Literature and Charismatic Spatiality
Advisor: Prof. Goyal
Ellen Bistline
The Realism of Seeing the Text in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Grossman
Jacqueline Barrios
London’s Pacific Rim: East Asian Emplacements of the British Capita
Advisors: Prof. Grossman, Prof. Makdisi
Timothy Fosbury
Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past: Genres of Geography and Race in Early America
Advisor: Prof. López
Mark Gallagher
Affective Transcendentalisms: Sense and Spirit in Emerson, Peabody, Thoreau, and Melville
Advisors: Karen E. Rowe, Daniel Walker Howe
Chelsea Kern
Reading the Machine: Digital Reading Practices and the Contemporary U.S. Novel
Advisors: Prof. Snelson, Allison Carruth
Lauren (Becky) King
Reaching Readers: Textual Engagement and Personalized Learning in the Works of Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey Chaucer
Advisor: Prof. Chism
Effren Lopez
Arrested Solidarities: Resistance and Racial Contact Zones in the 19th Century U.S.
Advisor: Prof. López
Craig Messner
Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930
Advisor: Prof. Looby
Hannah Nahm
Alien Love: Passing, Race, and the Ethics of the Neighbor in Postwar African American Novels, 1945 – 1956
Advisor: Prof. Yarborough
Gregory Toy
Asian American Narratives of Building and Unbuilding: An Exploration of Infra-Structural Method
Advisor: Prof. Lee
Michael Vignola
The Reform Aesthetic: Political Futurity and the Novel
Advisor: Prof. Grossman
Andrew Wagner
Racial Prosthesis: Shakespearean Properties of Whiteness
Advisor: Prof. Little
2020
Kate Bolton Bonnici
Becoming Dead in Early Modern English Literature: a Lucretian Poetics
Advisor: Prof. Gallagher
Kimberly Calder
World Ecology, Indigeneity, and Epistemology in Countercultural American Literature
Advisor: Prof. Heise
Jessica Horvath Williams
A Monster of Virtues: Female Ideality, (Dis)Ability, And Nineteenth-Century Womanhood
Advisor: Prof. Deutsch, Prof. Yarborough
Jay Jin
Rhetorics of Scale In Literary & Scientific Discourse
Advisor: Prof. North
Ji Eun Lee
Walking London: Urban Gaits of the British Novel, Jostling, Prowling, Wooshing 1855-1909
Advisor: Prof. Grossman
Kirsten Lew
Deviant Representations: Discourses of Sexuality and Facilitations of Intersectionality in American Film and Literature, 1918-1945
Advisor: Prof. McHugh, Prof. Yarborough
Samantha Morse
Dread: The Literary History of a Political Affect, 1750-1900
Advisor: Prof. Kareem
Grant Rosson
Writing Country: Geography and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century
Advisor: Prof. Looby
Jeremy Schmidt
Three Very Short Poems: The Verbal Economics of Twentieth-Century American Poet
Advisor: Prof. North
Robert K. Smith
Representing Radical Politics in Anglophone Caribbean Literature After Independence
Advisor: Prof. Sharpe
Sujin Youn
Novels That Enact: Capitalist Storification and Emerging Forms in Contemporary Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Seltzer
2019
Benjamin Beck
Matters of Life: Writing Lives in the Age of United States Slavery
Advisor: Prof. Christopher Looby
Kathryn Cai
Nascent Articulations of Feeling: Affective Care Labor in Emerging Postcolonialist and Late Capitalist China-U.S. Circuits
Advisor: Prof. Rachel Lee
Angelina Del Balzo
“Furbish’d Remnants”: Theatrical Adaptation and the Orient, 1660-1815
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum
Shawn Cailey Hall
Visceral Romanticism: The Literature and Culture of Digestion, 1780-1830
Advisor: Prof. Saree Makdisi
Jonathan Kincade
Adaptation, Remediation, and Reciprocity in Narrative Video Games
Advisor: Prof. Ursula Heise
Crescent Rainwater
Fashioning Feminist Aestheticism in the Early Twentieth-Century Novel: Lucas Malet, Netta Syrett, Dorothy Richardson, and Fin-De-Siècle Culture
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow
Kiel Shaub
Rethinking The Arts And Sciences: Institutional Movement and the Formation of Romantic Discourse
Advisor: Prof. Makdisi
Jordan Wingate
The Periodical Origins of the American Self
Advisor: Prof. Looby, Prof. Yarborough
Martin Zirulnik
The Time of the Thriller: Suspense and Continuity After World War II
Prof. Heise
2018
Sharon Chon
Narrating the Visual: Seeing Race in Asian American Literature
Advisor: Prof. Jinqi Ling
William Clark
Time’s Citizens: American Fiction and the Sexual Politics of U.S. Civic Membership, 1886-1929
Advisors: Prof. Christopher Looby, Richard Prof. Yarborough
Kimberly Hedlin
The Book of Job in Early Modern England
Advisor: Prof. Debora Shuger
Allison Hegel
Social Reading in the Digital Age
Advisor: Prof. Allison Carruth
Boram Claire Kim
“A Little Out of Its Due Course”: The Appeal of the Digressive Chronotope in the Early English Novel
Advisor: Prof. Helen Deutsch
Gabriel Mehlman
“And Now Here is the Unreal Real”: The Transformation of American Realisms, 1892-1925
Advisors: Prof. North, Prof. Seltzer
Sydney Miller
“Weather ex Machina: Climatic Determinism and the Fiction of Causality in the Twentieth-Century Novel
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
Eric Newman
Queer Orientations: Desire, Race and Belonging in Queer American Literature 1900-1940
Advisor: Prof. Yogita Goyal
Erica Onugha
Abberant Time: The Peculiar Temporalities of Black Women’s Labors in Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiographies
Advisor: Prof. Richard Yarborough
Megan Smith
In the Likeness of: Christology, Gender, and the Self-Emptying Subject in Early Modern Literature
Advisor: Prof. Lowell Gallagher
Alexandra Verini
“A New Kingdom of Femininity”: Women’s Utopias in Early English Culture and Imagination
Advisor: Prof. Chris Chism, Prof. Lowell Gallagher
2017
Julia Callander
Plagiarists, Sodomites, and Cannibals: Authorship and the History of Sexuality, 1740-1820
Advisor: Professor Helen Deutsch
Deborah Donig
Leave Nothing to the Imagination: Glimpses of the Ineffable After 1945
Advisor: Professor Jenny Sharpe
Jason Morphew
Hamlet‘s Petrarchism
Advisors: Prof. Helen Deutsch, Prof. Lowell Gallagher
Sarah Nance
The Pathologies of Flesh: Temporalities of Feminine Embodiment in Contemporary Poetry
Advisor: Prof. Helen Deutsch
Alethia Shih
Or Not Growing Up: Resizing Children’s Fantasy, 1865-1952
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow
Sharon Tran
Between Asian Girls: On Female Homosociality/Homoeroticism
Advisor: Prof. Rachel Lee
Brandy Underwood
Witnessing Violence: Affect Theory, Crowds, and African American Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Richard Yarborough
Joyce Warren
Theorizing the Pō: Genealogy, Time, and Space in Polynesian Literature
Advisor: Prof. Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Lindsay Wilhelm
Evolutionary Aestheticism: Scientific Optimism and Cultural Progress, 1850-1913
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow
2016
Gillian Adler
Seeing Time: Boethius and the Ethics of Perspective in Chaucer’s Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde
Advisors: Professor Chris Chism, Professor Matthew Fisher
Sara Burdorff
The Belly and the Beast
Advisor: Professor Joseph Nagy
John Caughey
How to Become an Author: The Art and Business of Literary Advice Handbooks from 1884-1940
Advisors: Professor Jonathan Grossman, Professor Mark McGurl
Katherine Charles
The Interpolated Tale in the Early Novel
Advisor: Professor Felicity Nussbaum
Daniel Couch
The Imperfect Form: Literary Fragments and Politics in the Early American Republic
Advisor: Professor Christopher Looby
Leigh-Michil George
Comical Consciousness: Caricature and the Novel, 1726-1837
Advisors: Professor Jonathan Grossman, Professor Felicity Nussbaum
Christine Gottlieb
The Death of Gender: Queer Cadavers on the Early Modern Stage
Advisors: Prof. A.R. Braunmuller, Prof. Lowell Gallagher
Renee Hudson
Revolutionary Futures: Romance and the Limits of Transnational Forms 1910-1986
Advisor: Prof. Yogita Goyal
Laura Pierson Lorhan
Puzzling Modernity
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
Alexandra Milsom
According to the Book: Tour Groups & English Writing, 1789-1901
Advisors: Prof. Ali Behdad, Prof. Joseph Bristow
Holly Moyer
The Captive’s Audience: Captive Selfhood and Narrative Authority from Chaucer to Shakespeare
Advisors: Prof. Chris Chism, Prof. Lowell Gallagher
Michael Nicholson
After Time: English Poetry and Anachronism, 1700-1850
Advisors: Prof. Helen Deutsch, Prof. Anne Mellor
Brendan O’Kelly
The Unseen in the Modern Image World
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
James Reeves
Unbelief: Atheism in the Literary Imagination, 1790-1800
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum
Samir Soni
Un/Settling Travelers: The British Novel Set in India, 1760-1820
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum
Taylor Walle
Viva Voce: The Living Voice in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum
2015
Jacqueline Ardam
Reading from A to Z: The Alphabetic Sequence in Experimental Literature and Visual Art
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
Ronjaunee Chatterjee
“Women, and Nothing But Women”: Literature and Feminine Singularity
Advisor: Professor Joseph Bristow
Matthew Dubord
The Organization of Organizations: Bureaucratic Administration and Domestic Comfort in the Victorian Sequence Novel
Advisor: Prof. Jonathan Grossman
Christina Richieri Griffin
Omniscience Incarnate: Being In and Of the World in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Jonathan Grossman
Amanda Hollander
The FabianChild: English and American Literature and Socialist Reform, 1884-1915
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow
Kimberly Mack
The Fictional Black Blues Figure: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention
Advisor: Prof. Richard Yarborough
Francesca Marx
Transformation and Medieval Aristocracy: Werewolves, Lepers and the King’s Body
Advisors: Prof. Baswell, Prof. Chris Chism
Lisa Mendelman
Modern Sentimentalism: Feeling, Femininity, and Female Authorship in Interwar America
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
Christian Reed
Genre and Belonging in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Advisor: Prof. Christopher Looby
Shirley Tung
A Self-Reflexive Journey: Imagining Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Travel Narrative
Shirley Tung
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum
Amanda Waldo
The Ethical Consumer: Narratives of Social and Environmental Change in Contempoarary American Literature
Advisor: Prof. Allison Carruth
Daniel Williford
The Aesthetic Book of Decadent Literature, 1870-1914
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow
Amy Wong
Victorian Talk: Human Media and Literary Writing in the Age of Mass Print
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow
2014
Stacie Cassarino
American Food Culture, the Language of Taste, and the Edible Image in Twentieth-Century Literature
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
David Chase
Homing Desires/Desiring Homes: The Construction of Queer Domestic Space in Contemporary American Literature
Advisor: Prof. Arthur Little
Guadalupe Escobar
Arms of Amnerica: Latina Literary Re-Interventions & Reinventions
Advisor: Prof. Rafael Pérez-Torres
Tara Fickle
Serious Play : Race, Game, Asian American Literature
Advisors: Prof. Rachel Lee, Prof. Mark McGurl
Daniel Gardner
Urban Frontiers, Ethnic Fictions: Revising the Frontier Myth in the Writings of Mike Gold, James T. Farrell, and John Fante
Advisors: Prof. Blake Allmendinger, Prof. Cooper (CSU Long Beach)
Aaron Gorelik
The AIDS Poets, 1985-1995: From Anti-Elegy to Lyric Queerness
Advisor: Prof. Arthur Little
Alice Henton
Spectral Evidence of an Invisible World: Gender and the Puritan Supernatural in American Fiction, 1798-1856
Advisor: Prof. Michael Colacurcio
Alex Hernandez
Modernity and Affliction: The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum
Katherine Isokawa
The Surprising Times of the Modernist Novel
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
Susan Lewak
Sustainable Gardens of the Mind: Beat Ecopoetry and Prose in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Publications
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
Justine Pizzo
Solid Air: Victorian Atmosphere and Female Character in British Fiction 1847-1891
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow, Prof. Jonathan Grossman
Emily Runde
Ways of Reading and Framing Collection In Late Medieval England
Advisors: Prof. Matthew Fisher, Prof. Donka Minkova
Sara Torres
Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Geneologies and Translation Late Medieval England and Iberia”
Advisors: Prof. Matthew Fisher, Prof. Donka Minkova
Fuson Wang
The Immune Response: Romanticism and the Radical Literary History of Smallpox Inoculation”, Fuson Wang,
Advisors: Prof. Anne Mellor, Prof. Saree Makdisi
Katherine Webster
Novels of the Nation: Literary Theory, Post-Revolutionary Republicanism, and the Rise of the Novel in America, 1789-1812
Advisors: Prof. Michael Colacurcio, Prof. Karen Rowe
2013
Katherine Bergren
After Wordsworth: Global Revisions of the English Poet
Advisor: Prof. Saree Makdisi
Anthony Camara
Dark Matter: British Weird Fiction and the Substance of Horror, 1880-1927
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow
Donal Harris
On Company Time: American Modernism and the Big Magazines
Advisors: Prof. Mark McGurl, Prof. Michael North
Allison Johnson
The Scars We Carve: Disruptive Bodies in Civil War Literature
Advisor: Prof. Michael Colacurcio
Kevin Moore
The Myth of Writer’s Block: Imagining American Moral Realism
Advisor: Prof. Eric Sundquist
Ian Newman
Tavern Talk: Literature, Politics & Conviviality
Advisor: Prof. Saree Makdisi
Elizabeth Raisanen
Literary Gestations: Giving Birth to Writing, 1720-1831
Advisor: Prof. Anne Mellor
2012
Vivian Davis
Mongrel Forms: Tragedy, Comedy, and Mixed Genres in Britian, 1680-1760
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum
Lana Finley
Occult Americans: Invisible Culture and the Literary Imagination
Advisor: Prof. Christopher Looby
Dustin Friedman
Erotic Negativity and Victorian Aestheticism, 1864-1896
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow
Valerie Popp
The Art of the Modernist Body
Advisor: Prof. Michael North
James Pulizzi
Literature, Technical Media, and Cognition in the Twentieth Century
Advisors: Prof. Katherine Hayles, Prof. Kenneth Reinhard