Dissertation Titles

Dissertations published by doctoral awardees in English Language and Literature have addressed an immense variety of topics, ranging widely in history, geography, genre, and method.

happy graduates Doctoral students in English at Cornell typically begin work on their dissertations after their third year in the program, following completion of their Advance-to-candidacy exam. Students draw on a corresponding range of faculty expertise both within and outside of English and their special committees frequently include faculty from multiple departments.

The following is a list of published doctoral dissertations from the last 5 years, in order of year published, including the alumnus’ and their special committee chair’s name.

Published Doctoral Dissertations 2008-2012
Alumnus	Title of Dissertation	Chair
2012
Bryan Alkemeyer	Circe Stories: Transformation, Animals, and Natural History, 1550-1750	Laura Brown
Sarah Elizabeth Ensor	Spinster Ecology: Rethinking Relation in the American Literary Environment	Shirley Samuels
Matthew David Fellion	Wise Folly in the British Realist Novel	Harry Shaw
Brigitte Nicole Fielder	Diverse Bloods: White Womanhood and Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century American Literatures	Shirley Samuels
Benjamin Glaser	Modernism’s Metronome: Metrical Vestiges, Historical Prosody, and American Poetry 1910-1930	Jonathan Culler
John Hicks	A Fairer House Than Prose: Verse and Its Others in American Poetry, 1850-1950	Roger Gilbert
Julie Anne Joosten	The Feel of Not to Feel It: Reading Romanticism and Senselessness	Cynthia Chase
Mukti Lakhi	Contextual Universalisms	Satya Mohanty
Nandini Ramesh Sankar	Poetics of Difficulty in Postmodern Poetry	Roger Gilbert
Jonathan William Senchyne	Our Paper Allegories: Intimacy, Publicity, and Material Textuality in Colonial and Antebellum American Literature	Shirley Samuels
Sonam Singh	The Aesthetics Of Contingency: Contesting Literary Modernity in the 1930s and Beyond	Jonathan Culler
William Van Esveld	Primitivism in Modernist Literature: A Study Of Eliot, Woolf and Lawrence	Molly Hite

2011
Ashly Bennett	For Shame: Emotion, Gender, and Innovation in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel	Ellis Hanson
Chad Bennett	Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry	Roger Gilbert
Julie Brown	Tactual Poesis: Material Translation in Contemporary Women’s Poetry	Roger Gilbert
David Coombs	Uncommon Sense: Aesthetics, Liberalism, and late Victorian Cognitive Science	James E. Adams
Colin Dewey	In Deep Water: The Oceanic in the British Imaginary, 1666-1805	Reeve Parker
Sarah Eron	The Modern Muse: Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment	Laura Brown
Melissa Gniadek	Unsettled Spaces, Unsettled Stories: Travel and Historical Narrative in the United States, 1799-1859	Shirley Samuels
Adam Grener	Improbable Realism: Coincidence as Realist Technique from Fielding to Hardy	James E. Adams
Danielle Heard	Buggy Jiving: Comic Strategies of the Black Avant-Garde	Hortense Spillers
Theo Hummer	Spell from the Colored Section: Performance and Segregation in Contemporary US Poetry	Shirley Samuels
Corinna Lee	Recovered From The Thirties: The Politics of Periodization	Shelley Wong
Jessica Metzler	That Teenage Feeling: Affect and Queer Adolescence in the Mid-Twentieth Century American Novel	Ellis Hanson
Sarah Weiger	The Bird is the Feeling: Romantic Natural History and its Subjects	A. Reeve Parker
Corey Wronski-Mayersak	Speaking from the Threshold: Liminality and Literary Subjectivity in Late Medieval Mystical Narrative	Andy Galloway
Alan Young-Bryant	Perverse Form and Victorian Lyric	Jonathan Culler

2010
Edmund Goode	East Of New England: Reorienting The Early Writings Of Ralph Waldo Emerson And Henry David Thoreau	Debra Fried
Joshua Nelson	Progressive Traditions: Cherokee Cultural Studies	Laura Donaldson
Meghan Freeman	“Precious States of Mind”: The Aesthetic Encounter in Victorian Literature	James E. Adams
Danielle Heard	Buggy Jiving: Comic Strategies of the Black Avant-Garde	Hortense Spillers
Ogaga Ifowodo	Re-constructing Identities: History, Trauma and Healing in the Post-Colonial Narrative	Biodun Jeyifo
Judy Park	Staging Republic and Empire: Politics of English Drama, 1603-1660	Walter Cohen
Anthony Reed	After the End of the World: Poetics, Time and Black Experimental Writing	Grant Farred

2009
Ricardo Hasse	Figuring It Out: Metaphor and Agency in Henry James’ New York Edition	Harry Shaw
Kimberly Zarins	Writing the Literary Zodiac: Division, Unity, and Power in John Gower’s Poetics	Andrew Galloway
Angela Naimou	Statelessness and the Making of a Decolonial Aesthetics in U.S. Literature	Mary Pat Brady
Jade Ferguson	From Dixie to the Dominion: Violence, Race, and the Time of Capital	Kate McCullough
Toni Jaudon	The Geography of Feeling: Christianity, the Nation-State, and the Labor of Love in Nineteenth-Century United States Literatures	Shirley Samuels
Joseph Murtagh	Career Fictions: The Representation of the Career in the Victorian Novel	James E. Adams
Robert Lehman	The Impossibility of Being Modern: Time, Tradition and Event in Modernist Literature and Philosophy	Jonathan Culler
Peter Bailey	Aestheticism and the Erotics of Pedagogy	Ellis Hanson
Rebecca Colesworthy	Modernism’s Gifts	Ellis Hanson, Doug Mao (co-chairs)
Belinda Rincon	War, Gender, and State Formation in Latina War Stories from the Mexican Revolution to the War on Terror	Mary Pat Brady
Krupa Shandilya	Sacred Subjects: Gender and Nation in South Asian Fiction	Durba Ghosh
Karen Bourrier	Physical Disability and Masculinity in Mid-Victorian Narrative	James E. Adams

2008
Jonathan Pickett	Finnegans Wake: The Agency of the Letter in the Conscious	Jonathan Culler
Rose Ellen Lessy	“This Mysterious Miasma”: Enviornmental Risk, Edith Wharton, and the Literature of Bad Air	Jonathan Culler
Ryan Canlas	The Constellational Diaspora: Filipino Literature and Late Twentieth Century Imperialism	Shelley Wong
Joshua Corey	The American Avant-Pastoral: Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Ronald Johnson	Roger Gilbert
Susan Hall	Seduction and Servitude: The Erotics of Women’s Captivity Narratives	Shirley Samuels
Karen Anderson	Classifying Life: Metaphor, Popular Biology, and Social Categorization in Emily Dickinson, Anne Spencer, Marianne Moore, and Lorine Niedecker	Roger Gilbert
Jonah Corne	Endangered Zones: Books, Buildings, anda Modernity	Doug Mao
Ariana Vigil	Art in a Time of War: U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production and the Central American Revolutions	Mary Pat Brady
Caetlin Benson-Allott	Imperio-Video: Motion Pictures, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Technology	Ellis Hanson
Janice Ho	Liberal Englishness, Alterity, and the Twentieth-Century British Novel	Walter Cohen
Ramesh Mallipeddi	The Imaginary African: The Politics of Slavery in Eighteenth-Century England	Laura Brown
Misty Urban	Monstrous Women in Middle English Romance	Andy Galloway