PhD Program

Recent PhD Recipients

2024

LANG, AMANDA
“The Public Theater as Grammar School Education in Early Modern England: An Exploration of Women's Spectatorship and the New Comic Pattern in Renaissance Comedy”
Director: Rosemary Kegl

WESSELS, CHRISTIAN
“Forms of Instruction: Didactic Poetry in the New Century”
Director: Jennifer Grotz

2023

CONKLIN, ASHLEY
“Thomas Becket's Muslim Mother: Imagining Englishness in the South English Legendary”
Director: Hahn, Thomas

RICH, ROBERT
“Reasonable Inferences and Simple Deductions: Historical Economics and Victorian Realism”
Director: Supritha Rajan

ZALOOM, ROSE
“'Say I Am Revenge': Violence, Performance, and the Figure of the Female Revenger in English Renaissance Drama”
Director: Rosemary Kegl

2022

CHO, SEUNG
“Generosity as Generality: The Poetics of Largeness in the Renaissance Literature”
Director: Kenneth Gross

SENGUPTA, OISHANI
“From Picture to Feeling: Racial Affects and Illustrated Narratives in Britain 1840-1900”
Director: Morris Eaves

SKWIAT, MATTHEW
“The Realist Stage: Theatrical Verisimilitude in the Nineteenth Century Novel”
Director: Supritha Rajan

YEE, PAMELA
“Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions”
Director: Russell Peck

2021

INGLES, JARROD
“Conservation and Correction: A Study of Ecology and Romantic Conservative Thought”
Director: Morris Eaves

LLOYD, HILARIE
“Seeing American Blindness: Critical Race Theory in 20th Century American Literature”
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

LOY, ERIC
“Printed Past, Bookish Present, Digital Future: Media, Materiality, and Design in Contemporary Literature”
Director: Morris Eaves

McDONALD, MATTHEW
“Lyric Body, Lyric Soul: Formal Rhythm in American Sonnets and in the Free Verse of Walt Whitman”
Director: Kenneth Gross

POWELL, ZACHARY
“The Finite Wartime Imaginary: How WWI and WWII Representations Mediate our Endless War and Crises”
Director: Jason Middleton

SHUKLA, ABHISHEK
“The System of Being: Four Essays on the Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards”
Director: John Michael

THOMPSON-STONE, JENNIFER
“Tracing Landmarks: Intimate Contextualization in Transnational Academic Autobiography”
Director: Bette London

2020

DAVIES, HELEN
“Translating Space: The Vercelli Mappa Mundi and Visual Pedagogy”
Director: Gregory Heyworth

KRAINES, DANIEL
“Queer Longing: Figuration in Rich, Lorde, Gunn, and Bidart”
Director: James Longenbach

NELSON, DANIEL
“Non-Purposive Poetics: Thoreau's Journal, Dickinson's Poems, and the Meaning of Not Meaning”
Director: John Michael

NIKOLIS, ANASTASIA
“Lyric Confession and the Specter of Autobiography in Postmodern American Poetry”
Director: James Longenbach

2019

BYNG, GYASI
“Dismantling the Tragic Mulatto/a: Interrogating Racial Authenticity, Genre, and Black Motherhood in African American Women's Fiction”
Director: Jeff Tucker

GRENERT, ALISON
“The Story of A: Anger and Ambivalence in Women's Autobiographical Writing”
Director: David Bleich

LAMPEREZ, JOSEPH
“The Idol and the Machine: Hinduism and Technology in the Romantic Imagination”
Director: Morris Eaves

O'NEIL, SCOTT
“A Temple Made Without Hands: Professional Authority and Institutional Space in Renaissance Drama”
Director: Rosemary Kegl

SINGLETON, DANIEL
“Projecting Fandom: Authorship, Fandom, and Media Convergence in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema”
Director: Jason Middleton

VANDENBOSSCHE, LISA
“Sympathetic Seas: Sailors, Writing and Reform in the Anglo-Maritime World, 1750-1865”
Director: Ezra Tawil

WHITEBELL, LAURA
"Unsettled Arrival: Migrants and the Transatlantic Journey in Nineteenth-century Fiction"
Director: John Michael

2018

KNOPF, NICHOLAS
“Disability, Disease, and Dissent: Embodiment as Critique of British and American Empire from the Stamp Act Crisis to Manifest Destiny”
Director: Katherine Mannheimer

2017

DRESSEL, SAMANTHA
“Wrongs Unspeakable: Communicating Revenge in English Renaissance Tragedy”
Directors: Rosemary Kegl/Kenneth Gross

HECK, JULIANNE
“Ugly and Unspeakable: Girls, Anger, and Counterpornography”
Director: David Bleich

2016

BAYNE, MATTHEW
"Tarrying with Useless Things: Reparative Readings of Victorian Social Inequality"
Director: Bette London

BOYAR, JENNY
"Lyric Form and the Charge of Forgetfulness in Medieval and Early Modern Poetry"
Director: Kenneth Gross

BUNKER, SARAH
"A World, the World Without: The Open Microcosm in Early Modern British Literature"
Director: Rosemary Kegl

CHASIN, CARLY
"A Loneliness That Can Be Rocked: Maternal Loss, Language, and Unconventional Mothering in Contemporary African American Literature"
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

EVERETT, ANDREA
“Villeneuve’s ‘La Belle et la Bête’ (1740): An Annotated Edition in English”
Director: Russell Peck

MORRIS, MEGAN
"Re-membering the Author: Bodies and Specters in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture"
Director: Bette London

RHODES, SHARON
“Turning the Tide: Fathoming the Great Flood in Old English Literature"
Director: Tom Hahn

SIDHU, HARDEEP
"Pulp Historiography: American Historical Fiction in the Twenty-First Century"
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

SYDELNIK, STEFANIE
“Antislavery Gifts: The Adaptation of the American Gift Book for Abolitionist Purposes, 1834-1858”
Director: John Michael

WASMOEN, NIKOLAUS
“Editorial Modernism: Eliot, Moore, Pound"
Director: Morris Eaves

2015

COYNE, JUSTIN
"Worldly Experiments: Cosmopolitanism as Style in Twentieth-Century African American Literature"
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

McGHEE, JUSTINE ALI
“Embodying the Torrid Zone: Creolization, Contamination, and the Disintegration of Identity in the British and Colonial Cultural Imagination”
Director: Morris Eaves

2014

JOHNSON-OLIN, MARTHA
"Finding Lost Heroines: Performing Agency in Middle English Kinship Romances"
Director: Russell Peck

McSHANE, KARA
"In the Words of Others: Exotic Documents and Vernacular Anxieties in Medieval England"
Director: Thomas Hahn

RICHLER, AMIRA
"Beyond Black British? The Novels of David Daybeen, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and Hanif Kureishi"
Director: Bette London

STOKES, DANIEL
"The Post-Cultural Imagination in Fourteenth-Century English Literature"
Director: Thomas Hahn

VOGEL, JOSEPH
"The Rising Tide of Color: Race, Masculinity and Contested Histories in the American Imaginary"
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

ZOGAS, PETER
"Writing Contingent Histories: Temporality and the Construction of Progress in Nineteenth-Century American Literature"
Director: John Michael 

2013

ARNOLD, ESTHER
"Entertaining Reformers: Social Reform and Recreation in American Literature and Silent Film, 1840-1915" 
Director: John Michael

HUTCHINS, DANIEL
"Hallucinatory Empires: Troping Knowledge in the Early Atlantic World"
Director: John Michael

LEE, RACHEL
"This Bright Luminary, the Press: Metaphor as Media Theory during the Romantic Printing Revolution" 
Director: Morris Eaves

2012

BENDER, GEOFFREY
"Casting the Eternal Original: Classicism, Class, and the Antebellum Dread of Modernity" 
Director: John Michael

CHANDLER, JOHN
"'The King of Tars': A New Edition" 
Director: Thomas Hahn

HARPER, RYAN
"The Representation of Woodland Space in Middle English Popular Narrative" 
Director: Thomas Hahn

HAVARD, JOHN
"Hispanicism: Spanish-ness, Liberalism, and National Identity in U.S. Literature, 1787-1861" 
Director: John Michael

JOHNSON, VALERIE
"Politicizing the Landscape: Ricardian Literary Languages of Power" 
Director: Thomas Hahn

MARGALA, MIRIAM
"Translation, Recognition and the Materiality of Language" 
Directors: David Bleich and Greg Carlson

MEHRA, SHAILA
"Recasting the Past: Historical Knowledge and the African American Postmodern" 
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

NORAKO, LEILA K
"The Crusading Imaginary of Late Medieval England" 
Director: Thomas Hahn

SBRIGLIA, RUSSELL
"Dissensus Communis: Conservatism, Skepticism, and Sympathy in the American Renaissance" 
Director: John Michael

VAN WERT, KATHRYN
"Wars of Inflection: Imperial Violence and the Modern Voice" 
Director: James Longenbach

2011

DURKIN, ANNA
"Negotiating Meaning: The Aestheticization of the Novel in James, Hawthorne, and Wharton" 
Director: John Michael

HANNUM, DUSTIN
"Forms of Freedom: Aesthetics, Law, and Politics in the American Renaissance" 
Director: John Michael

HAUGHT, LEAH
"Toward an Aesthetics of Failure: Generic Expectation and Identity Formation in Middle English Arthuriana" 
Director: Thomas Hahn

2010

BHARADWAJ, VASUDHA
"Languages of Nationhood: Political Ideologies and the Place of English in Twentieth-Century India" 
Directors: Bette London and Stewart Weaver

BOLLINGER, HEIDI
“A Chorus of Witnesses: the Hybrid Genre of Testimonial Literature”
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

LEHMAN, AARON
“Accidental Modernism: Spontaneity and Design in Modern American Poetry”
Director: John Michael

2009

CRYDERMAN, KEVIN
“Ghostly Spectators of History: Collective Identity, Regulative Frameworks and the Idiosyncratic Subject”
Director: John Michael

GIOVANIELLI, TINA
“Creative Constriction: The Use of the American Short Story at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”
Director: John Michael

LIGHTWEIS-GOFF, JENNIFER
“’Blood at the Root’: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus”
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

2008

FENSTERMAKER, AMY
“Bridging the Gap Between (White) Metafiction and (Black) Self-Reflexivity”
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

HUBER, EMILY
“’For Y am sorwe, and sorwe ys Y’: Melancholy, Despair and Pathology in Middle English Literature”
Director: Thomas Hahn

WADOSKI, ANDREW
“Spenser’s Gardens: Poetry, Fantasy and Allegory”
Director: Kenneth Gross

2007

AILLES, JENNIFER
“The Fairy/Queen/Mab: Mediating Elizabeth in Early Modern England”
Director: Rosemary Kegl

BIRIEN, ANNE
“Modern Poets and Foreign Tongues: Philology, Translation and the Genius of Language”
Director: James Longenbach

DOUGLAS, JENNIFER
“Like a Natural Woman: Constructing Gender from Performance to Performativity”
Director: Bette London

GIBSON, ANGELA
“Fictions of Abduction in the Auchinleck Manuscript, the ‘Pearl’ Poet, Chaucer, and Malory”
Director: Thomas Hahn

GRANT, JOANNA
“Journeys to Barbary: Modernism’s Middle East”
Director: Frank Shuffelton

MILLER, APRIL-DAWN
“Offending Women: Modernism, Crime, and Creative Production”
Director: Bette London

2006

BABBAR, ANJILI
“Forging Identity in ‘Age of Authors’”
Director: Hal Gladfelder

DONAGHY, DANIEL
“Writing Through Resistance: African-American Writes and Their Audiences, 1912-1932”
Director: Jeffrey Tucker

KRAUS, KARI
“Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts”
Director: Morris Eaves

LIVINGSTON, MICHAEL
“The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament and Its Cultural Contexts”
Director: Russell Peck

RIPLEY, WAYNE
“’The Secrets of Dark Contemplation’: Edward Young, William Blake, and the History of Radical Devotional Poetics”
Director: Morris Eaves

SULLIVAN, JULIET
“Manners Make the Man: Gender and social Identity in the Medieval Discourse of Conduct”
Director: Thomas Hahn

SUTTON, JOHN
“Performing Death and Masculinity in Old and Middle English Literature”
Director: Sarah Higley