Dissertation Titles

2019

  • Corinne Blalock, The Privatization of Protection: The Neoliberal Fourteenth Amendment
  • Bennett Dempsey Carpenter, Lumpen: Vagrancies of a Concept from Marx to Fannon (and on)
  • Chase Paulina Gregory, Reading and Writing As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity
  • Nicholas Alan Huber, Feedback Exhaust: Money and the Novel at the End of the Contemporary
  • Jessica Estlund Issacharoff, Big House: Women, Prison and the Domestic
  • Laura Jaramillo, Devorational Cinema: Spectacle, Ritual, and the Senses in Cold War Latin American and Spanish Experimental Film

2018

  • Michael Gabryel Swacha, Modernist Form: On the Problem of Fragmentation
  • Jui-An Chou, Between Boys: Writing Across Gender and Sexuality in Mid-Twentieth Century Women's Writings
  • Rachel E. Greenspan, Dreaming Woman: Argentine Modernity and the Psychoanalytic Diaspora
  • Carolyn C. Laubender, Child's Play: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Clinic
  • David Nathan Rambo, Technics Before Time: Experiencing Rationalism and the Techno-Aesthetics of Speculation
  • John Paul Stadler, Pornographesis: Sex, Media, and Gay Culture
  • Serhat Uyurkulak, The Modernist Will to Totality: Dream Aesthetics and National Allegory
  • Ryan T. Vu, Toward a Prehistory of the Fantastic: The Imagination of Alterity in the Long Eighteenth Century
  • Karim Wissa, Sketches Toward an Ideology of Musical Forms:  A Study in Jazz

2017

  • Abhishek Bose-Kolanu, Hypervisor Theory: An Anti-Theory of the Media
  • Amalle Dublon, Partial Figures: Sound in Queer and Feminist Thought
  • Amanda Gould, Digital Environmental Metabolisms: An Eco-Critical Project of the Digital Environmental Humanities
  • Lisa Klarr, Useless: The Aesthetics of Obsolescence in Twentieth Century U.S. Culture
  • Virginia Tuma, The Cuban Diaspora and the Question of Nostalgia

2016

  • Kristina Burnside-Oxendine, Police is Dead: The Birth of Econonism
  • Katherine Costello, Inventing “French Feminism:” A Critical History
  • Sophie Smith, The Hole in the Fence: Policing, Peril, and Possibility in the US-Mexico Border Zone, 1994-Present

2015

  • Jessica Jones, Feeling America Otherwise: Ground as an Earth that Quakes
  • Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater

2014

  • Leah Allen, Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012
  • Zachary Blas, Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement
  • Abigail Langston, Beyond Measure: Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century
  • Clarissa Ai Ling Lee, Speculative Physics: The Ontology of Theory and Experiment in High Energy Particle Physics and Science Fiction
  • China Medel, Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Medias of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexico Border

2013

  • Elisabeth Bell, What You Don’t Know, Learn!: Movements for Autonomous Education in the US, Past, Present and Future
  • Rizvana Braxton, Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial
  • Selin Ever, The Modernist Bildungsroman: End of Forms Most Beautiful
  • Abraham Geil, Plastic Recognition: The Politics and Aesthetics of Facial Representation from Silent Cinema to Cognitive Neuroscience
  • KaMan Calvin Hui, The People’s Republic of Capitalism: The Making of the New Middle Class in Post-Socialist China, 1978- Present                        
  • Allen Riddell, Demography of Literary Form: Probabilistic Models for Literary History

2012

  • Sara Appel, Football Wishes and Fashion Fair Dreams: Class and the Problem of Upward Mobility in Contemporary U.S. Literature and Culture
  • Gerry Canavan, Theories of Everything: Science Fiction, Totality, and Empire in the Twentieth Century
  • Beatriz Llenin-Figueroa, Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics

2011

  • Justin Izzo, Citizens of a Genre: Forms, Fields, and Practices of French and Francophone Ethnographic Fiction

2010

  • Luka Arsenjuk, Political Cinema: The Historicity of an Encounter
  • Bulent Eken, Stevens after Deleuze: The Effects of a New Ontology on the Problems of Poetics
  • Hongsheng Jiang, The Paris Commune in Shanghai: The Masses, the State, and Dynamics of “Continuous Revolution”
  • Michelle Koerner, The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze’s American Rhizome
  • Kinohi Nishikawa, Reading the Street: Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, and the Rise of Black Pulp Fiction
  • Jennifer Rhee, Anthropomorphic Attachments in U.S. Literature, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence
  • Warren Shilyh, Real Politics and Feminist Documentaries: Re-Visioning Seventies Film Feminisms
  • Corina Stan, The Art of Distances, or, A Morality for the Everyday

2009

  • Nicholas Baumbach, Impure Cinema: Political Pedagogies in Film and Theory
  • Alexander Ruch, Fictions of the Afterlife: Temporality and Belief in Late Modernism
  • Russell Leo, Affect before Spinoza: Reformed Faith, Affectus, and Experience in Jean Calvin, John Donne, John Milton and Baruch Spinoza
  • Alvaro Reyes, Can't Go Home Again: Sovereign Entanglements and the Black Radical Tradition in the Twentieth Century

2008

  • Courtney Baker, Misrecognized: Looking at Images of Black Suffering and Death
  • Heather Pilatic, Genealogies of Attention: The Emergence of U.S. Hegemony, 1870−1929
  • Erin Post, Carceral Theaters: Genet, Beckett, & Weiss between Dramatic and Postdramatic Theater
  • Teresa Shewry, Possible Ecologies: Re-Imagining Literature, Nature, and Hope in the Pacific

2007

  • Kristin Bergen, Gertrude Stein War Time Art
  • Magdalena Ostas, Romanticism and the Forms of Interiority
  • Rachel Price, Future Measures in Atlantic Literatures (1868−1968)
  • Juan Carlos Rodriguez, The Post-Dictatorial Documentaries of Patricio Guzmán: Chile, Obstinate Memory; The Pinochet Case & Island of Robinson Crusoe
  • Abigail Salerno, The Blind Heroine in Cinema History: Film and the Not-Visual

2006

  • Arnal Dayaratna, Reading India’s Partition through Literature
  • Mike Ennis, Historicizing Nahua Utopias
  • Erica Edwards, Contesting Charisma: Political Leadership in Contemporary African American Culture
  • Nayeli Garci-Crespo, Becoming Digital: Ghosts of "Old Media"
  • Jini Watson, The New Asian City: Literature and Urban Form in Postcolonial Asia-Pacific
  • Matthew Wilkins, Points and Lines: Allegory, Event, and the End of American Modernism

2005

  • Jack Draper, Redemptive Regionalism in the Brazilian Northeast: Forro and the Flows of Popular Culture in a Global Economy
  • Li-Li Hsieh, The Politics of Affect: Anger, Melancholy, and Transnational Feminism in Virginia Woolf and Eileen Chang
  • Julie Kim, Consumer Anthropology: New World Foods and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Empire
  • Mendi Obadike, Low Fidelity: Stereotyped Blackness in the Field of Sound
  • Pavla Vesela, Utopias from the First and Second Worlds

2004

  • Amy Carroll, The Allegorical Performative: Mexican and United States Transnational Tactics for Representing and Reinventing the “New World Border”
  • Aisha Karim, Text without a People: Globalization and the Third World Novel
  • Desiree Martin, Bordered Saints: Unorthodox Sanctity along the Border in Mexican and Chicano/a Literature
  • David Woodard, Queer Forms of Belonging: The Displacement of Kinship in Twentieth Century African American Literature and Film

2003

  • Kristen Barnes, Contemporary Cinematic Constructions of French and Francophone African Immigrant Identities, 1950−Present
  • Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Cultural Theory and Latin America October 10th, 1942−April 13th, 2002
  • Jessica Blaustein, Alternative Technologies of Domestic Enclosure in the Early Twentieth Century United States
  • Fabio Durao, Modernism and Coherence: Four Chapters of a Negative Aesthetics
  • Elizabeth LaMacchia, Women, Abortion, Democracy: Defending Abortion Rights as Constitutionally Protected Political Rights
  • Yiman Wang, Moving the Image between Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood from the 1920s to 1990s: Reformulating Film Remaking and National Cinema
  • Min Wu, The Kingdom of Darkness: China in the Rise of the American Empire, 1784−1844

2002

  • Jason Middleton, Documentary/Genre
  • Danapalan Pillay, Re-Reading Apartheid: Governmentality, Identity, Ethics
  • Ilka Saal, Epic Pleasures: Political Theater Reconsidered
  • Megan Sweeney, Doing Time, Reading Crime: Rethinking “The Female Criminal”

2001

  • Teresa Chung, A Suspicion of Performance: Discourses of Theatricality and Authenticity in Constructions of the Bourgeois Subject
  • David Freeman, The Gospel According to Bigger Thomas
  • Amy Frykholm, Reading the Rapture: Christian Fiction and the Social Structures of Belief
  • Alexander Galloway, Protocol, or, How Control Exists After Decentralization
  • Alejandro Manara, From Close(t) Spaces to the Performance of Hybridity
  • Norbert Schurer, Lennox and Smollett in the Literary Marketplace: Authorship and Readership after Fielding and Richardson
  • Christian Thorne, The Closet of Epistemology: Towards a History of Scepticism

2000

  • Roger Beebe, Still Too Human: The Limits and Limitations of the Posthuman in Contemporary Visual Culture
  • Susan Brook, Writing Culture: British Literature and Cultural Theory in the Fifties
  • Ulrik Ekman, Dots: Between Philosophy and Literature in Derrida
  • Natania Meeker, The Order of Enlightenment: Epicureanism, Desire, and the Critical Imperative in Eighteenth-Century France
  • James Penney, The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire
  • Vivasvan Soni, Affecting Happiness: The Emergence of the Modern Political Subject in the Eighteenth Century
  • Christina Tourino, Sex and Reproduction in Contemporary Ethnic Literature

1999

  • Nicholas Brown, Narratives of Utopia Inchoate: African Fiction and British Modernism
  • Jennifer Doyle, Sex, Money, and the Aesthetic Ideology of Realism
  • Ted Friedman, Electric Dreams: Computer Culture and the Utopian Sphere
  • Gregory Hampton, Changing Bodies: Some Matters of the Body in the Fiction of Octavia E. Butler
  • Svetlana Mintcheva, Visceral Art: Traumatic Enactments in Karen Finley, Kathy Acker and David Wojnarowicz
  • John Murnighan, Beatrice’s Smile: Allegory and Mimesis
  • Lily Phillips, Patrolling the Borders: Citizenship, Nation and Social Protest Literature in the 1950s United States
  • Gillian Silverman, Public Sentiments: Fantasies of Community in Antebellum America
  • Lucia Suarez, Caribbean Women Claiming their Islands

1998

  • Alden Bumstead, Place Matters: Place and Globalization in Recent United States Fiction
  • Christopher Harlos, The Jazz Life-Text: Autobiography and Biography in Jazz Art
  • Maude Hines, Making Americans: National Fairytales and Fantasies of the Transformation, 1865–1900
  • Zilkia Janer, Colonial Nationalism: The Nation-Building Literary Field and Subaltern Intellectuals in Puerto Rico, 1849–1952
  • Matthew Lazen, The Desert and the Promised Land: Postmodern French Regionalism, 1960–1992
  • Jennifer Parchesky, Melodramas of Everyday Life: 1920s Popular Fictions and the Making of Middle America
  • Imre Szeman, On National Cultures: Literary Politics in Canada, the Caribbean and Nigeria, 1952–1970
  • Johannes von Moltke, Beyond Authenticity: Experience, Identity, and Performance in the New German Cinema

1997

  • Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Modernist Aesthetics
  • Marcus Embry, The Shadow of Latinidad
  • Christopher Harlos, American Literary Nationalism and the Modernist Turn
  • Daniel Itzkovitz, American Modernism, Race and the Rhetoric of “Jewish Difference,” 1880–1940
  • Stefan Jonsson, Subject without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity
  • Joseph Karaganis, American Literary Nationalism and the Modernist Turn
  • Eleanor Kaufman, The Delirium of Exegesis: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski
  • Erin Smith, Hard-Boiled Readers: Workers, Consumer Culture and Pulp Magazines, 1923–1951

1996

  • John Cunningham, The American Encyclopedia: The Book of the World in the New World
  • Jonathan Flatley, Modernism and Melancholia: Affect and Aesthetics in the Imagining of Alternative Modernities
  • Rosanne Kennedy, Scenes of Witnessing: Form, Memory and Gender in Testimonial Film and Literature
  • David Moore, Geo/graphy Without Borders: Metaphors of Structure for a Twentieth-Century World Literature
  • Neferti Tadiar, Developing Subjects: Makings of Historical Experience and Contemporary Philippine Literatures

1995

  • Elise-Noel McMahon, Classics Incorporated: Cultural Materialism and Seventeenth-Century French Literature
  • Jose Munoz, Disidentifications
  • Faith Smith, John Jacob Thomas and Caribbean Intellectual Life in the Nineteenth Century
  • Robert Talbot, The Wakefield Master, Robin Hood, and the Agrarian Struggle of the Latter Middle Ages
  • Silvia Tandeciarz, Engaging Peronism: Gender Conflict and Culture Wars in Recent Argentina Literature
  • Xu-Dong Zhang, The Politics of Aestheticization: Zhou Zuoren and the Crisis of the Chinese New Culture, 1927–1937

1994

  • Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production
  • Cesare Casarino, The Voyages of Heterotopia: Meditations on Modernity, Crisis and the Sea
  • Samira Kawash, Racial Properties, Racial Improprieties: Structures of Race in African American Narrative
  • Christopher Pavsek, The Utopia of Film: The Critical Theory and Films of Alexander Kluge
  • Sara Poor, Medieval Incarnations of Self: Subjectivity and Authority in the Writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg
  • Robert Seguin, Around Quitting Time: Work, Technology, and the Forms of Middle-Class Ideology in Modern American Fiction

1993

  • Lloyd Davies, On Reading Nature: Romanticism, Textuality, and the Alps
  • Saree Makdisi, Songs of the Tyger: Nature and Empire in British Romanticism
  • Yael Schlick, Travel, Education, and the Pathways of Feminism in Post-Revolutionary France
  • Michael Speaks, Architectural Ideologies: Modern, Postmodern, and Deconstructive
  • Phillip Wegner, Horizons of Future Worlds, Borders of Present States: Utopian Narratives, History, and the Nation
  • Jane Winston, Buried in Applause: Politics, Cultures, and the Arts of Marguerite Duras

1992

  • Deborah Chay, Black Feminist Criticism and the Politics of Reading Jessie Fauset
  • Susan Hegeman, The Democracy of Cultures: Transformations of the Culture Concept in Modernist America
  • Thomas Scanlan, Conversion, Suppression, or Limited Partnership: Problems in the Protestant Colonial Ethic
  • Barbara Will, Genius and Gender in Gertrude Stein

1991

  • Santiago Colas, Latin American Postmodernism: Writing History and Resistance
  • Richard Dienst, The Worlds of Television: Theories of Culture and Technology
  • Jamie Hysjulien, The Poets’ Politics: Modern American Poetry and the Aesthetics of Social Change
  • Henry Schwarz, Forced Bloom: Narrative and Empire in Colonial Bengal
  • Naomi Wood, Better Than Life: Death as a Developmental Trope in Nineteenth-Century British Children’s Fiction
  • Tang Xiaobing, Writing a History of Modernity: A Study of the Historical Consciousness of Liang Ch’i-Ch’ao

1990

  • Barbara Ching, The Cultural Work of Burlesque Narrative: Relearning to Read
  • Matthew Hearn, Studies in Middle English Romance: “King Horn” and the Recuperation of a Category