MASTER'S STUDENT THESES

You can read about our students' theses and field exams on our graduate program blog, the YAWP.

Recent thesis titles:

A Work in Progress: Recovering the Filipino Literary Voice of Survival

Normative Violence and Trans Masculinity in Macbeth and Twelfth Night

Literature for the Common Woman: Reading Early Novels, Penny Journals, and Fanfiction

Reimagining "Human": Anthropocene Small-Scale Readings of Inter- and Intra-Species Relationships in the Work of T.C. Boyle

Prism, Mirror, Lens: A Critical Companion to Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren

Let's Disco: The Dance of Dark Ecology & Ecotheology in The Year of the Flood & Parable of the Sower

The Mediated, Medicalized, and Mortal: Tracing the Body through Don DeLillo's White Noise and The Day Room and Noah Baumbach's White Noise

"Customs Handed Down to Us": Colonialism and Healthcare in Nurse Bridget Hedderman's Glimpses of my Life in Aran

Parched: Thirst in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Being Nothing: Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls and the Poethics of Annihilation

Tragedy of the Teenage Girl: Female Characters in Contemporary Shakespearean Commercial Film Adaptations

Predestination, Textuality, and Cosmic Horror in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft and Their Comics Adaptations

Chawlistan: Infrastructure, Form, and Development in Postcolonial Indian Literature

Folklore’s Potency in Addressing Irish Women’s Trauma

Architectural Poetry and the Museum Space

Haunting: Trauma and the Supernatural on the Contemporary Irish Stage

The Post-Agreement Northern Irish Bildungsroman

Stagecraft and Warcraft: Toward Theatrical Game Design

Robert Duncan and the Ethics of Poetry

Zero Hour, Neomedievalism in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias

“A Place Already Made for Me”: Reading the “Body at Home” in the Novels of Toni Morrison

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

Adichie’s “United League of the Oppressed”: Du Bois and Double-Consciousness in Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hiding in Plain Sight: Disability, Gender, and Race in 20th Century Literature

Exploring the Minds of Lost Souls in Contemporary Society: Jennifer Egan’s Portrayal of Globalization and its Effects on Selfhood

Recent field exam titles include:

"So Speaking as I Think, Alas, I Die": A Survey of Gendered Portrayals of Death and Dying Among Shakespeare's Tragic Women

Gothic Modernism: Exploring Race, Gender, and Sexuality through Haunted Women

Existential Literature: A History and Model

Screening Modernists: Reading Literary Modernism Through Cinema and Race

The Missing Mother: An Exploration and Analysis of Maternity in 18th and 19th Century Children’s Literature

The Thornton Manuscript: Popular Gentry Literary Consumption and Shifting Social Power in Mid-fifteenth-Century England

20th and 21st Century Queer and Feminist American Science Fiction

New Bodies and Enhanced Software: Constructing the Posthuman in Science Fiction

Space and the Nation-state in 21^st Century American Immigrant Narratives

Seneca, Shakespeare, and the Silver Screen: The Ritual of Revenge

Lord Byron: Relationships, Character, and Lost Memoirs

Prison Witness Literature: Challenging the US Prison System and Conventions of Readership