Commencement 2020-21 Graduates

See the full list of 2020-21 Department of Literatures in English student award winners here.

PhD in English Language & Literature Graduates 2021

Mariana Alarcón
My dissertation outlines the ways in which a comparative study of Native American, First Nations, and Chicanx narratives of erasure and presence reveals remarkable and significant shared characteristics. This extensive comparison demonstrates these narratives’ similar modes of theorizing representations of the body and its violent absenting, their similar if distinct concerns about the nature of colonial violence and its legacies, and their similar understandings of and strategies for cultural continuity that bypass settler colonial definition. I examine their approaches to representing and navigating the violence of enforced absence and the technologies that create absence, and to exploring how it conditions the strategies for survival that exceed it, arguing that they thus articulate subjectivities that insist on an enduring presence outside the conceptual and linguistic jurisdiction of the state and its technologies. For example, they query nationalist melancholic politics and discourses on ghostliness even as they rethink ghostliness in their own discursive traditions in order to mark both absence and presence. But these similarities, as well as the entangled histories that complicate those similarities, have gone unnoticed by Chicanx and Native scholarship, and so I aim to address that paucity. The purpose of this dissertation is thus to investigate and compare narrative and artistic strategies for processing and representing ghostliness and presence in Chicanx and Native American literature and cultural production. - Mariana Alarcón

Mariana Alarcón has written an elegant, eloquent analysis of Chicana and Native American literatures showing how careful consideration of the two bodies of literature reveal significant connections and new formal insights. Hers will be a crucial, inspirational study for scholars seeking to decolonize knowledge. - Mary Pat Brady, Committee Chair

Elizabeth Alexander
Dirty Computers: Black Women’s Data Uses, uses queer womanist thought to rethink and hack out of our data surveillant capitalist state. The project reads Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name against Lorde's FBI dossier to theorize Zami (the concept) as a framework for erotic data sousveillance in response to state surveillance. It then reads Janelle Monae's 2018 emotion picture Dirty Computers to theorize Pynk as a framework for erotic algorithmic identity creation, using Zami as a tool to hack at our existing social media surveillance structures. Finally, it turns to virtual reality and choreography as the future of what erotic data could be, using Zami and Pynk to create against state/social media surveillance. - Elizabeth Alexander

Alexander’s work puts literary and cultural texts into conversation with data surveillant capitalism, and in so doing demonstrates the extent to which surveillance technologies are imbricated with race and, at the same time, the range of creative strategies that Black women employ in resisting surveillance and in taking control of their own data narratives. Through her analytic focus on the work of twenty- and twenty-first-century Black women, Alexander makes it clear that if data surveillance operates as a contemporary instance of biopolitical power emerging out of earlier systems of control of black bodies, contemporary cultural productions by Black women continue a long tradition of successful resistance to such control. - Kate McCullough, Committee Chair

Malcolm Bare
Implied Shelters argues that close-reading practices ignore the majority of spatial description in realist novels, limiting our conceptions of shelter to a handful of overly described set pieces. Often these set pieces are family homes, skewing our understanding of the realist novel’s social values. This project proposes a technique called statistically informed reading to better account for fiction’s plurality of odd-but-good-enough living arrangements. Implied Shelters uses an over 25,000 line hand-annotated dataset that accounts for all spatial description in Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë’s oeuvres across eight categories: position in volume, position in chapter, position in paragraph, category of description, type of space (largest), type of space (smallest), title of space, and perspective of description. Using a combination of summary statistics and Natural Language Processing algorithms, the project encourages a shift from reading space for descriptive richness to recognizing patterns in locatives and wayfinding; thinking of the realist novel as a collection of orientations rather than set pieces reveals strains of equity and understanding lost in more superficial understandings of a novel’s world. More broadly, Implied Shelters provides a framework for incorporating annotation practices across the discipline, with the hope that doing so would encourage a more generous and generative critical practice. - Malcolm Bare

Malcolm’s inventive and ambitious dissertation brings digital methods to the question of home in nineteenth-century British novels. While we have long thought of the novel in this period as obsessed with happy domestic endings, Malcolm exposes the surprising pervasiveness of what he calls the paradomestic: from temporary and makeshift homes to dwellings that are also businesses. All of these appear throughout the most canonical fictions. Then he has been using digital methods to track the specific patterns four novelists (Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot) use to describe these paradomestic spaces, coming to startling conclusions about where each lavishes attention. Bronte, for example, focuses on processes of adjustment, while Shelley shows how truly violent and inhospitable traditional homes are. - Caroline Levine, Committee Chair

Christopher Berardino
My dissertation develops a theory of “Multitude Modernism” by examining signal instances of what I call “democratic epiphany” in literary works by writers of color and leftist artists in the 1930s and 1940s, notably Richard Wright, H.T. Tsiang, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Steinbeck. My study analyzes narrative moments, often in the plot’s climax, where a compassionate protagonist momentarily unites, sometimes even merges with, their broader social communities. During these surrealistic moments of “democratic epiphany,” surrounding populations are transformed into a single entity, a transcendent social collective no longer bound by repressive structures of race and class. I contend “democratic epiphany” can be understood not only as radical writers’ imagined alternative to oppression, but also as the aesthetic of an era. Drawing on the scholarly contributions of Michael Denning, Alan Wald, Floyd Chueng, and Michael Tratner, my dissertation examines American writers’ subversion of High Modernist practice to forge a modernism of their own making. Though significant work has been done in recovering the existence of a distinctly leftist modernist movement, few studies formally account for these strange moments of social synthesis. Attending to writers from an array of ethnic affiliations, my chapters seek to account for the ways in which democratic epiphany articulates the convictions of a multiethnic pluralism that blossomed throughout the interwar period. - Christopher Berardino

In a truly original dissertation, Berardino demonstrates how texts by mid-20th-century left wing writers from different social positions intersect through the motif what he calls the “democratic epiphany,” in which a protagonist experiences a sudden sense of solidarity across lines of social difference, and in which the problem of “the one and the many” is resolved not through rational processes but through a kind of socially-oriented and politically radical ecstasy. - George Hutchinson, Committee Chair

Pichaya Damrongpiwat
“Fictions of Materiality in the Eighteenth-Century Novel” examines the literary representation of rape and gendered violence and its engagement with the vibrant materiality of female literacy in three major texts spanning the latter half of the Transatlantic eighteenth century: Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines feminist criticism, archival research, theories of materialism, and literary analysis, the project seeks historical footing in the period’s incipient modernity, which saw the explosive rise of print culture, increased rates of female literacy, newly-formed practices of leisure reading, and the first widespread possibility of female professional authorship. The dissertation argues that the material traces of gendered violence in epistolary fiction—the novel’s “fictions of materiality”—disrupt male efforts to control the physical embodiment and discursive significance of women’s bodies, in part due to their non-discursive nature, but also due to their intimate connection with female-gendered writing practices, literacy, and affectivity. It shows that the novel captured the materiality of writing in ways that the new medium of print could not. Precisely because fictions of materiality emerged during the media revolution from manuscript to print, this project thus offers a historical vantage point from which we can examine contemporary rape culture, our own tectonic shifts toward a digital media ecosystem, and their intimate entanglements. - Pichaya Damrongpiwat

Ms. Damrongpiwat’s thesis fundamentally redefines our understanding of the relation between literature and materiality by showing how the representation of rape—a core theme of early realist fiction—joins the materiality of violence against women with the notion of writing itself as a material practice which then, paradoxically, asserts female agency even through the representation of rape. - Laura Brown, Committee Chair

Gabriella Friedman
My dissertation considers the ethical and political stakes of delving into the past. Literary critics have long contended that fiction about the past encourages an ethical relationship to violent legacies through a variety of narrative and affective techniques. According to such scholars, historical fiction works by evoking specific feelings in readers (sentimentality), bringing marginalized stories to the forefront (visibility), and filling gaps in archives (recovery). Departing from these approaches, my dissertation charts how non-realist elements transform historical fiction into a toolbox of political tactics such as direct action, covert movement, tangible care, community building, and the calculated use of the law. In other words, speculative tropes make history concrete in order to kindle decolonial and abolitionist politics. Each chapter highlights the world-making quality of Black and Indigenous political imaginaries. My first chapter, on Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, explores how the sentimental conventions deployed in many neo-slave narratives can unintentionally undermine the genre’s revolutionary goals by facilitating domestication that bolsters the antiblack nation-state. Whitehead’s unsentimental novel of slavery instead turns towards affiliation mediated by palpable care. Chapter two argues that Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears demonstrates how making Indigenous history visible can collude with the assimilative function of settler colonial capitalism. In chapter three, I explore the limits of recovery through Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling as well as Butler’s unpublished papers. I assert that Fledgling’s Black amnesiac protagonist models how to grapple strategically with an unrecoverable history. Reconceiving both speculative fiction and historical fiction, my project intervenes in broader conversations across the humanities about what constitutes an ethical relationship to the past. - Gabriella Friedman

Gabriella’s fantastic dissertation investigates the authority of historical fiction that seeks to complicate its own evidentiary status by enlisting elements of the “speculative.” Placing African American and indigenous writers into conversation, Gabriella’s cutting-edge work challenges regnant assumptions about the radicalism of the novel to locate its politics within representational practices that are concrete, tangible, and direct. For instance a chapter on Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad examines how that novel literalizes a common figure or metaphor for freedom in ways that lend physical, tangible reality to an otherwise purely imaginative structure. Gabriella offers a thrilling discussion of historical fiction that I’m sure will receive much attention from other critics!  - Elizabeth Anker, Committee Chair

Grace Catherine Greiner
Grace Catherine's dissertation uncovers a novel material poetics in the inset-lyric poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate, and further examines Renaissance antiquarian responses to and repackaging of that poetics for early modern audiences. - Grace Catherine Greiner

Using such focuses as the inset lyric, the dismantling and recombining of linear temporality, and the anachronistic imitations yet updatings of later antiquarians, Grace Catherine’s dissertation investigates the palpable presences and some of the less easily bounded ideas of “materiality” in late-medieval English poetry, from Chaucer through some of his poetry’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century followers and collectors, in sum demonstrating in deft and new ways how English poetry was reprocessed during and itself actively exploited the transition between “medieval” manuscript culture and “Renaissance” early print culture. - Andrew Galloway, Committee Chair

Noah Lloyd
Mr. Lloyd’s dissertation powerfully advocates for the agency of literary arrangements—characters, objects, animals from literary texts that propagate themselves within and beyond the text in ways that bridge fictionality and reality, and that fundamentally reorient our understanding of the means by which literature takes action. - Laura Brown, Committee Chair

Madeline Reynolds
My research puts several fields in conversation with one another, including literary animal studies, postcolonial studies, and history of science. My dissertation focuses on the concept of anthropomorphism in a series of nineteenth-century novels, arguing that these works index imperial values by blurring species boundaries between humans and non-human animals. Through readings of canonical fiction—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and Wilkie Collins’ Heart and Science—I argue that Victorian culture’s pervasive anthropomorphism does not operate merely in a unidirectional motion from animal to human, moving animals to a higher position within what Mel Chen terms “animacy hierarchies.” Instead, it draws attention to indeterminacy between humans and animals through forms such as hybridity, chiasmus, inversion, and metonymy. These forms demonstrate that zoomorphism, language used to describe human bodies in often racist and xenophobic ways, is intricately intertwined with anthropomorphic representations. Taken together, zoomorphism and anthropomorphism in these texts reveal how the British empire’s oppression of colonized subjects, people of color, and animals are entangled in the nineteenth-century fields of biology and race science. - Madeline Reynolds

Reading a range of canonical texts, from Frankenstein to Wuthering Heights to Alice in Wonderland, Maddie's dissertation demonstrates that anthropomorphism simultaneously disturbs the category of the human to seemingly subversive effect as well as serves the racial hierarchies of the British empire. Against animal studies and environmental studies perspectives that advocate blurring categories boundaries as a means of interspecies liberation, Maddie precisely demonstrates where boundary-mixing can be as pernicious as it is liberating—an important corrective to the frequently utopian politics of animal and environmental studies. - Elisha Cohn, Committee Chair

Bojan Srbinovski
My dissertation titled “Figures of Catastrophe: Tragedy, Law, and Lateness in Victorian Realism” examines the historical and cultural significance that the Victorians drew between catastrophe and figuration. Arising from the classical discourse of drama, catastrophe used to mean the end of a story. In the Victorian era, it acquired the meaning that we ascribe to it today. Figuration became the privileged site for several different meditations on the temporal experience of catastrophe because it possesses the ability to structure the time of reading and because it is marked by a catastrophic dimension that became available to the Victorian world precisely at the moment when the meaning of catastrophe began to change. The figures that this dissertation studies–tragedy, law, and lateness–submit themselves to figural interpretation, that venerable method for comprehending reality, where they suggest multiple contrasting ways of inhabiting the time of catastrophe. The procedure of figural interpretation which, by rights, should lead to comprehension, transforms into the scene of a missed encounter between figural language and the catastrophe of which it speaks. In staging this missed encounter, the texts that this dissertation studies vitiate any straightforward understanding of catastrophe and the philosophical problems that it poses. In place of such understanding, they offer renewed competence in the attempt to speak of a phenomenon that exceeds the boundaries of language. Catastrophe’s entry into the arena of realist literature, therefore, brings into question the status of the reality of which any such literature may attempt to speak. In fact, the works of realism that this dissertation studies evince a profound uncertainty about their ability to represent reality. Even the most staunchly realist text among them do not claim to tell catastrophic stories with verisimilitude. In displacing “representation” as the main coordinate of Victorian realism, these texts offer a more capacious view of it. - Bojan Srbinovski

Bojan Srbinovski examines some choice tragic narratives in Victorian literature, and he focuses on the specifically figural dimension of catastrophe in fresh and incisive readings of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the late style of Oscar Wilde. - Ellis Hanson, Committee Chair

Elisabeth Strayer
Victorian Microcosms: Environmental Formalism in the Novel considers how formal structures within the Victorian novel serve as techniques of enclosing – and thus rendering representable – large-scale climatic systems. These structures make legible an increasingly capacious vision of the environment in Victorian culture, a crucial context for tracing the history of anthropogenic climate change. By examining forms of scaling down, this project aims to address the conceptual problem of representing vast, seemingly intangible, entities: the terms “climate,” “atmosphere,” and “weather,” which often prove murky, and even interchangeable, in contemporary discourse. The dissertation evaluates these meteorological terms through readings of Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Ultimately, Victorian Microcosms argues that the enclosing structures within nineteenth-century British novels (as well as their modernist successors) entangle the human and more-than-human worlds, circumscribing literary ecologies that challenge assumptions of human dominance. - Elisabeth Strayer

Elisabeth's dissertation defends the small scale of the British novel, and the practices of close reading that constitute a traditional strength of literary studies, as an effective way of comprehending the anthropogenic climate crisis. Examining how weather and atmosphere enclose literary worlds from Wuthering Heights to Between the Acts, Elisabeth demonstrates that the Victorian vision of "naturecultures" registered the profound, local enmeshment of human actors in their environments. - Elisha Cohn, Committee Chair

Hema Surendranathan
Hema’s dissertation Species and Psyche: Anthropomorphism and Environmentalism in Human-Animal Metafiction challenges the prevalent poststructuralist stance that imbrication generates ethical cross-species relations. By drawing on psychoanalytic psychology, both D.W. Winnicott’s ontological theory of ‘play’ and Sigmund Freud’s early work on somatic compliance, she illustrates how, in contrast, an appreciation for differences in the subject’s ability to attach results in the formation and preservation of agency, the foundation for human advocacy for nonhuman life. Specifically, she shows that the formal scenario of literary metafiction in J. M Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), A.S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia” (1992) and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014) represents the play of psyche and soma as the nonhuman text relates to itself and an imagined reader. This textual play is a mirror for the turbulent human-animal relationships that are the focus of the works discussed and helps generate models for ethical relationships between humans and nonhuman animals. - Hema Surendranathan

Ms. Surendranathan’s thesis re-envisions the approach to the role of animals in literature by introducing a new concept – “critical anthropomorphism” – which redefines anthropomorphism through modern theories of psychic integration; understood as an integrative formation, the psyche accommodates species difference in ways that transcend the human. - Laura Brown, Committee Chair

Brianna Thompson
My dissertation, “‘the kinship of her pain:’ Intimate Healing in American Women’s Fiction,” argues that in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, women who teach each other about religion harness erotic power to upend patriarchal family structures. By attending to the undertheorized nexus of eros, speculation, and homosocial religious devotion in sentimental and Afrofuturist fiction, I illuminate religiosity as a crucial site of intimacy and the formation of non-heteronormative families. I organize my dissertation chapters thematically rather than chronologically, such that my first chapter on Phelps’ 1868 The Gates Ajar is followed by Octavia Butler’s 1998 Parable of the Talents. My third and final chapter returns to the nineteenth century with Warner’s 1850 The Wide, Wide World, and my conclusion briefly addresses Toni Morrison’s Paradise. This formal gesture reflects my desire for stories that organize themselves relationally or imaginatively, rather than predicating affinity on a chronology that often translates to teleology. We can better understand nineteenth century sentimental fiction like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ 1868 The Gates Ajar by reading it alongside a twentieth century Afrofuturist text like Octavia Butler’s 1998 Parable of the Talents. Both of these works, I assert, illuminate how erotic religious instruction acts as a mode of alchemy to transform pain and limiting worlds, be they domestic or post-apocalyptic. I study how these novels present alternatives to Christian kinship and hierarchy, uncovering the way that American women’s fiction has worked and continues to work within traditional structures to build radical modes of living, mothering, and relating. - Brianna Thompson

The dissertation that Brianna Thompson has just filed for a May Ph.D., “’The Kinship of Her Pain’: Intimate Healing in American Women’s Fiction,” develops an original approach to considering relations among women in key novels by women authors in the 19th and 20th century U. S. These novels show women characters who recover from trauma through the intimate teachings of a woman who guides them to understanding new possible futures. - Shirley Samuels, Committee Chair

PhD in English Language & Literature Graduates 2020

Kristen Angierski
Kristen’s brilliantly conceived dissertation, “Fictions of Empathy: Embodied Ethics in Contemporary Anthropocene Literature,” examines what Kristen describes as the “transcorporeal turn” within ecocriticism. As Kristen argues, a valorization of transcorporeal, cross-species intermingling and immersion has informed most theoretical accounts of an environmentally engaged ethics and politics. However, Kristen complicates this focus, showing through a number of brilliant literary analyses how such a mystique of the transcorporeal can inadvertently sanction various imperialist and gendered fantasies and, in most extreme form, patterns of domination. In order to develop an alternate account of agency, Kristen connects a number of gorgeous close readings of novels with characters who operate as “eco-martyrs.” This is such a brilliant project! - Elizabeth Anker, Committee Chair

Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera
The Trope of the Papers: The Coloniality of Citizenship and the Turn to the Undocumented in Black and Chicana Feminist Thought examines the work the undocumented immigrant, its presence and absence, has enabled in feminist history, theory, and literature, from the mid-nineteenth century to the late-twentieth century, and argues that the undocumented immigrant is central to the development of U.S. feminist thought. Specifically, this project traces a theoretical shift in Black and Chicana feminist thought where citizenship is replaced by undocumentedness as the organizing rubric in Black and Chicana feminist thinking and organizing. This process, as this project demonstrates, begins with Black and Chicana feminist thinkers' recognition of the coloniality of citizenship, by which I mean, legal citizenship's function as a mechanism for the perpetuation of colonial forms of domination, and is followed by a rejection of the institution of legal citizenship, what I call the turn to the undocumented, that is enacted through the trope of the papers, what I define in this project as the use of legal and extralegal documents to interrogate both the limitations of legal citizenship and the liberatory potential in the abolition of this institution. - Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera

Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera has written a fiercely imaginative, analytically incisive, and pathbreaking analysis of the way the figure of the alien functions as an inflection point for feminist movements. Although many scholars have recently linked various movement histories, Esme is the first to put into conversation abolitionist, suffrage, and contemporary civil rights movements – including LGBTQ and Latinx immigrant rights efforts. This project offers a new model for scholarship and a new history of the coloniality of citizenship. - Mary Pat Brady, Committee Chair

Gregory Brazeal
The Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction analyzes several works of literary fiction, and one popular memoir, by American authors about the U.S. military experience in the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011. In contrast to the emphasis of most ancient war literature on the figure of the warrior-as-hero, and the growing modern emphasis on the figure of the soldier-as-victim, Iraq War fiction reflects the troubled emergence of a new narrative template for war literature: the story of the ordinary soldier as a wrongdoer or even criminal. Iraq War fiction is haunted by depictions of moral injury and expressions of unresolved guilt. The dissertation argues that the emphasis on criminality in Iraq War fiction can be partly explained by the rise of moral cosmopolitanism and its blurring of the traditional conceptual lines between war and crime. - Gregory Brazeal

Drawing upon narratology, recent history, legal issues, and a strong knowledge of American war fiction, Greg Brazeal wrote a brilliant and sophisticated dissertation on fiction addressing the Iraq-US war.  - Daniel Schwarz, Committee Chair

Amelia Hall
Amelia's dissertation, “Epigraphic Encounters and the Origins of the British Novel,” uncovers the crucial role that chapter epigraphs played in the evolution of the English novel’s form and develops a new theory for reading this structurally significant paratext. Drawing our attention to epigraphs’ profoundly expressive non-semantic qualities, including size, attribution, aggregation, optionality, diversion, and hierarchical organization, “Epigraphic Encounters” argues that writers of the long nineteenth century harnessed these elements in order to create meaning and negotiate generic transformations—first from poetry to the novel, and then from one novel genre to another. Case studies of Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot demonstrate how chapter epigraphs facilitated the emergence of gothic, historical, and realist novels by making literary-historical negotiations an indelible part of their structural framework. My conclusion examines the influence of these texts on the twentieth-century writer John Fowles, and the role his novels played in characterizing chapter epigraphs as a quintessentially Victorian phenomenon. - Amelia Hall

We’ve all had to puzzle over those oddly distracting chapter epigraphs in Middlemarch, and so we’re fortunate that Amelia Hall has given us now the most original and rigorous meditation on this paratextual device -- how it came to prominence in British novels and then mostly vanished, and how it affects the way we read fiction. - Ellis Hanson, Committee Chair

Matthew Kilbane
Matt’s dissertation, “The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media,” unfolds a disciplinary meeting place for literary and media studies around modern lyric poetry. The dissertation analyzes how emergent sound technologies of the twentieth century like phonography and broadcast radio substantially transformed the material means by which lyric reproduces sound, in the process leaving an indelible mark on lyric forms. By reading for the impress of these sonic media across a diverse array of literary and musical works, “The Lyre Book” establishes electric sound as the very condition of possibility for key innovations in late modernist poetics, while also discovering in lyric an unrecognized capacity for media critique. Opening our lyric archives to such things as pop songs, radio poems, object-forms, and speech-music, the dissertation also supplies a framework for apprehending poetry’s dynamic transactions with ever-newer digital media today. - Matthew Kilbane

Matt Kilbane’s dissertation is a brilliantly synthetic study that recasts lyric writing as fundamentally concerned with questions of medium and media.  It gives poetry scholars the media theory they didn’t know they needed, and vice versa; I’ll be excited to see it published soon. - Jeremy Braddock, Committee Chair

Stephen Kim
My dissertation, Racial Fictions in Early Modern England, asks how race, co-constituted with gender and sexuality, animates early modern English texts. I theorize race in early modern England as the developing process of categorizing, including, excluding, and hierarchizing people based upon historically contingent features that become essentialized through these acts of categorizing and hierarchizing. Examining race more as a process rather than a stable category or relationship opens three important avenues of inquiry. First, it brings to light the ways in which race undergirds concepts that are central to early modern texts, such as chastity or borders. The hyper-visibility of these concepts often occludes if not erases the processes of their own formations, race being one of them. Making them visible requires finding where they hide: within the language and rhetorical figures in literary texts. Second, it allows more flexibility to explore the ways in which race forms and is formed by other facets of identity, such as gender and sexuality. Third, it allows scholars to track race in contexts in which it is not as easily apparent, such as the early modern period when systems of white supremacy are not as coalesced into a set of identifiable strategies and institutions. I make these arguments by reading four canonical early modern texts, three of which are not as strongly associated with race in current scholarship. Ultimately, Racial Fictions asserts that race is a crucial analytic lens for reading all early modern English literary texts. - Stephen Kim

By recovering the “racial fictions” hiding within the literary figures of early modern texts, Stephen Kim’s path-breaking dissertation remakes the still-dominant assumptions of the field of early modern studies, modeling how to read for race as it is articulated and enforced through language in the pre-modern world. - Jenny Mann, Committee Chair

MFA in Creative Writing Graduates 2021

Lily Codera, Poet

Briel Felton, Poet

Elisavet Makridis, Poet

Elie Piha, Fiction Writer

Zahid Rafiq, Fiction Writer

Alice Rhee, Fiction Writer

Bobby Romero, Fiction Writer

MFA in Creative Writing Graduates 2020

Anum Asi, Fiction Writer

Kathryn Rebecca Diaz, Fiction Writer

Carlos Rafael Gomez, Fiction Writer

Ashley Elizabeth Hand, Fiction Writer

Chi Thuy Le, Poet

Yessica Martinez, Poet

Anastasia McCray, Poet

Jasmine Rajah Reid, Poet

Sophia Elena Pies Veltfort, Fiction Writer
In Queen of the Dryads, women navigate the competing narratives that structure their lives. They read and misread; they negotiate and misconstrue. They confront moments when such fictions come into conflict. - Sophia Elena Pies Veltfort

Bachelor of Arts in English Graduates May 2021

Lan An, magna cum laude

Carolina Arango

Emma Bernstein

Spencer Blumenberg

Ivy Braxton Harrington

Max Buettner

Matthew Bull

Peter Buonanno, magna cum laude

Caroline Chun, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Honorable Mention

Jocelyn Cubstead, cum laude

Audrey DeCastro

Laura DeMassa, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Winner

Parastou Ghazi, cum laude

Jane Glaser, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Honorable Mention

Mary Gordon

Bryeson Henry

Daisy Holthus

Skyler Holtzman

Talia Isaacson

Halle Jaffe

Priscilla Kim, magna cum laude

Bennett Kukla

Regina Lassiter

Theresa Leith

Alison Lilla

Sarah Lorgan-Khanyile

Grace Lu

Jessica Lussier, summa cum laude

Maxine Malvar

Elica Marcellin

Rebecca Marratta, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Honorable Mention

Paola Méndez García, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Honorable Mention

Samantha Minion

Victoria Moore

Elia Morelos

Krysta Mostert

Shivank Nayak

Andrew Needham

Thomas O'Shea

Euna Park

Shriya Perati, magna cum laude

Sabrina Perez

Bailey Regan

Tomás Reuning

Megan Rochlin

Olivia Romano

Gulnara Sadowski

Ivy San

Alyssa Sandefer

John Sawyers, cum laude

Aliza Schub

Mariana Seibold, magna cum laude

Olivia Simoni, summa cum laude

Sarah Skinner

Julia Smith

Jacob Stein

Aaron Stella

Julianna Teoh, cum laude

Maricel Troitino Marco, magna cum laude

Ashley Whitley, summa cum laude

Rebecca Wiltshire

Ramyashree Yandava, summa cum laude

Annabel Young

Bachelor of Arts in English Graduates 2020

Chloe Amsterdam

Reid Anrod

Chloe Bausano

Archer Biggs, cum laude

Katherine Borg

Harrison Chiu

Matthew Conte

Elise Cording, magna cum laude

Jared DeCesare

Olivia Domingue

Madeleine Gray

Caroline Groves

Miles Henshaw

Victoria Horrocks, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Winner

Edy Kennedy

Jung-Bon Kim

Seonah Kim

Jacob Kruger

Chi Kyu Lee

Jinwook Lee

Zachary Lee, cum laude

Aaran Leviton

Zain Mehdi

Abigail Mengesha, summa cum laude

Ellie O'Reilly

Caleb Oh

Jenna Oliver

Anne-Sophie Olsen

Tatiana Pankratova

Alexander Perel, magna cum laude

Colton Poore

Allen Porterie

Rachel Rosenberg, magna cum laude

Juliette Rolnick, magna cum laude

Eliana Rozinov

Megan She

Mengtong Song

Miguel Soto Tapia

Elizabeth Stell

Alana Sullivan, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Winner

Peter Szilagyi, summa cum laude

Nicholas Tausig-Edwards

Noah Thomas

Teagan Todd

April Townson, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Honorable Mention

Yijun (Andrea) Yang, magna cum laude

Jenny (Jia Ning) Xie, summa cum laude, M.H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize Winner