Please use the links below to access departmentally approved PhD dissertation abstracts.

2011

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Michael Hamburger The Poetics of Charity and Relief: The Problem of Poverty And Aid to the Poor in the Development of the Early Romantic Lyric
Leslie Simon Novel Patterns: Dickens, Narrative Realism, and Nineteenth-Century Mathematics

2008

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Elisa Oh Defining Absence: Reading Female Silence in English Literature 1580–1640
Jennifer Airey “I Would Have Kill’d Myself With A Knife”: Sexual Violence, Courtroom Broadside, and the Restoration Stage

2007

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Alexander Bove Dickens’ Dream-Representations: Image and Character beyond Mimesis
Keith Johnson The Ethics of Form and the Form of Ethics: Experiments in Literature and Philosophy
Joseph Navitsky “Words With Words Revenged”: Religious Conflict and the Rearticulation of Late Elizabethan Satire
Shawn Normandin The Opacity of Renunciation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Emily Rohrbach Historiography of the Subject in Austen, Keats, and Byron
Sara Sullivan Coming Home to History: The Domestic Interior and the Nation in Twentieth-Century Irish Literature

2005

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Soharn Randy Boyagoda Imagining Nation and Imaginary Americans: Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner
Amy Weintraub Kratka Cynthia Ozick’s Sacral Aesthetic

2004

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Laurel Correlle Elizabeth Bishop and Christian Literary Tradition
Sharifah Osman Bandit Queens and Eastern Sisters: Byronic Heroines and British Nationalism, 1770–1840
Reena Sastri James Merrill: Knowing Innocence
Daniel Silverstone Urban Topographies: Controlling the Movement of People in Fictions of Dublin, London, and Los Angeles

2003

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Jennifer Ho Consumption and Identity in Asian Coming-of-Age Novels

2002

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Kirk Melnikoff Professional Drama in the Twilight of the Elizabethan Clown: Playing and Professional Playwrighting in the Late 1580s and the Early 1590s

2000

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Jeanne Follansbee Quinn Democratic Aesthetics: The Discourse of Social Justice in American Literature, Criticism, and Philosophy of the 1930’s

1999

Candidate’s Name Dissertation Abstract
Edward Gieskes Writing the Professions: Letters, Law and Administration
in Early Modern England
Maydee G. Lande “Accursed Tongue” and “Frightful Hearing”: The Incest Narrative and Strategies of Discourse
John R. Smith Prominent Backgrounds: Visions of Class and Desire in Dickens’s Illustrated Novels