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.
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The following is a list of published doctoral dissertations which have been archived, in order of year published, including the names of the alum and their special committee chair. For the most recent data visit the Dissertation Record page.
2018
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
| Jessica Rose Abel | Teaching Joyce's Ulysses | Daniel Schwarz |
| Christina Susanna Black | Wits, Shits, and Crits: The Problem of Digestive Interpretation in Pope, Swift, and Fielding | Fredic Bogel |
| Nicolette Shannon Bragg | Creature of Theory: Maternity amongst the Ghosts and Strangers | Jane Juffer |
| Jesse Aaron Goldberg | The Excessive Present of Abolition: The Afterlife of Slavery in Law, Literature, and Performance | Margo Crawford |
| Matthew R. Kibbee | The Mind Transfigur'd: Brain, Body, and Self in the Drama of Shakespeare and Marlowe | Rayna Kalas |
| Lena Krian | "Nothing Can Contain this Story Now:" Incarceration and Contemporary Native American Literature | Eric Cheyfitz |
| Shilo Rae McGiff | "Out of the Heart of Spring": Virginia Woolf and the Changing Shapes of Pastoral 1928-1938 | Neil Saccamano |
| Mee-Ju Ro | Entangled Testimonies: Technologies of Subjecticity in Asian American Women's Writing | Shelley Wong |
| Sara Joan Schlemm | 'Pygmalion's Frenzy': The Organic Opulence of Romance in Early Modern England | Jenny Mann |
| Yee Hang Tam | Modernism in Love | Ellis Hanson |
| Katherine Lonsdale Waller | Occupying Televisual Narratives: Metaphors and Models for Imagining Beyond the Cultural Machine | Amy Villarejo |
| Mariam Louka Wassif | "Poisoned Vestments": Romanticism, Rhetoric, and Material Culture | Cathy Caruth |
2017
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
| Ezra Dan Feldman | Flat Narratology: Surface, Depth, and Speculation in Contemporary Metafiction | Elizabeth Anker |
| Lauren Alexandra Harmon | The Spirit of the Law: The Haunting of U.S. Federal Indian Law in the Contemporary Western | Eric Cheyfitz |
| Molly Rachel Katz | Figuring the Female Spectator | Rayna Kalas |
| Matthew Clinton McConnell | Women's Gathering: the Auchinleck Manuscript and Women's Reading in the 14th Century London | Andrew Scott Galloway |
| Kaylin Anne O'Dell | The Mind On-Stage: Crafting the Self in Anglo-Saxon England | Samantha Zacher |
| Nancy Quintanilla | Archives of Failure: Missing Bodies and the Practice of Recovery | Mary Pat Brady |
| Daniel Matthew Radus | Writing Native Pasts in the Nineteenth Century | Eric Cheyfitz |
| Emily Katherine Rials | Brackets and Bodies: Punctuated Physicality in Modernist and Contemporary Fiction | Kevin Attell |
| Aaron David Rosenberg | The Scale of the Modern Novel: From Realism to the Genres of Deep Time | Jeremy Braddock |
| Kristie Ann Schlauraff | Sounding Bodies and Voices in Nineteenth-Century British and American Gothic Fiction | Shirley Samuels |
| Matthew Esteban Spears | Hunting for the Subject: Human Animals and Animal Humans in Anglo-Saxon England | Thomas Dana Hill |
2016
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
| Elizabeth Blake | Eating and Feeling: Pleasure and the Modernist Body | Nicholas Salvato |
| Anna Rose Casey | Aesthetic Impropriety: Properties of Law and Politics in Postcolonial Literature | Elizabeth Anker |
| Ingrid Giorgia Diran | Mutinous Muteness: Radicalizing Illegibility in Twentieth-Century African American Literature | Amy Villarejo |
| Shyla Cherrelle Foster | Telling Girlhood: Girls’ Studies, Reparative Trauma and 20th Century U.S. Popular Culture | Shirley Samuels |
| Bernadette Sharyn Guthrie | Untimely Interference: Anachronistic Temporalities in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry | Jonathan Culler |
| Danielle Morgan | What's So Funny?: Satire and African American Literature and Culture in the Twenty-First Century | Margo Crawford |
| Stephen Thompson | Modernism From Text to Work: Personality, Poetic Development, and the Study of Literature | Jeremy Braddock |
| Christine Yao | Feeling Subjects: Science and Law in Nineteenth-Century America | Shirley Samuels |
2015
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
| Jacob Benjamin Brogan | Some of the Parts: Fragmentary Literature and Queer Politics | Ellis Hanson |
| Jillian Spivey Caddell | An Exchange of Territory: Geography, Literature, and the American Civil War | Shirley Samuels |
| Noor Adhaar Desai | Unruly Lines: Poetic Measure and Dramatic Convention in Early Modern England | Rayna Kalas |
| Noor Hashem | Creative Ritual: Embodied Faith and Secular Reason in Contemporary Muslim Fiction | Elizabeth Anker |
| Kamila Janiszewska | The Unlikely Literature of the Civil War: Miniature, Literary Experimentation, and American Women Writers, 1860-1875 |
Shirley Samuels |
| Jane Elizabeth Kim | Poetic Theology: Dante and the British Romantic Poets | Reeve Parker |
| Adin Esther Lears | Noise and Knowing in Late-Medieval England | Andrew Galloway |
| Daniel Nathan Sinykin | After the Boom: Apocalypse and Economics in American Literature f the Neoliberal Period | Kevin Attell and Jeremy Braddock |
| Lynne Stahl | Unhappy Medium: Filmic Tomboy Narrative and Queer Feminist Spectatorship | Amy Villarejo |
| Susan Melissa Winders | Reading Medieval Courtesy | Andrew Galloway |
2014
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
| Kaelin Alexander | Turning in the Grave: Ambivalence, Queer Loss, and the Victorian Novel | Ellis Hanson |
| William Cordeiro | A Double Capacity: Self-Parody In Britain's Long Eighteenth Century | Laura Brown |
| Sarah Lynn Coté | Great Affectations: Camp Parody in the British Long Eighteenth Century | Laura Brown |
| Daining Lily Cui | Desolate Theatricality: Staging Feeling and Consciousness in the Late Novels of Henry James | Ellis Hanson |
| Danielle Aberle Haque | Secularism Narratives and Arab American Fiction | Mary K. McCullough |
| Nicholas Tobin Roth | Potential Cinema: Closet Film in Twentieth-Century Fiction | Kevin Attell |
| Avery Slater | Apparatus Poetica: The Question of Technology in Mid Twentieth-century American Poetry | Jonathan Culler |
| Brant Michael Torres | Occult Feelings: Esotericism and Queer Relationality in Nineteenth-Century US Literature | Shirley Samuels |
| William Auther Youngman | Rewriting Old Age from Chaucer to Shakespeare: The Invention of English Senex Style | Andrew Galloway |
| Brad Bozidar Zukovic | Reflexive Figurality in the Poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Ashbery, and A. R. Ammons | Cynthia Chase |