Dissertation Record
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 from the last 5 years, in order of year published, including the names of the alum and their special committee chair. For older data visit the Dissertation Record Archive.
2024
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
|---|---|---|
| Kyhl Stephen | American Fiction and the Textual Basis of Corporate Personhood, 1871-1921 | Shirley Samuels |
| Victoria Baugh | Race and Authority: Building Racial Epistemologies in Nineteenth-Century British and Caribbean Women's Writing | Caroline Levine |
| Kathryn Harlan-Gran | Pop Potentiality: Renegotiating Networks of Power and Relation Through Contemporary Speculative Fiction | Kate McCullough |
| Sara Stamatiades | The Theater of Discover: (Un)making the World on the Early Modern Stage | Philip Lorenz |
| Sophia Veltfort | Fictions of seeing and speaking: Free Indirect Discourse in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen | Dan Schwarz |
| Maggie O’Leary | Metabolic Personhood: Disorder, Decapacitation, Debility | Shirley Samuels & Naminata Diabate |
2023
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
|---|---|---|
| Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire | Afro-Nationalism: The Transcontinental Poetics of Newly Black Fiction | Caroline Levine |
| Philippa Chun | Memento Mori: Attending to the Dead in Nineteenth-Century American Literature | Shirley Samuels |
| Verdie Culbreath | Towards a Literary History of the Rest Cure (1869-1931) | Elisha Cohn & Dan Schwarz |
| Christina Fogarasi | Therapeutic Culture and the Anti-Confessional Narrator | Elizabeth Anker & Elisha Cohn |
| Laura Francis | Irregular Pearl: Spanish-English Translations and for Formation of an English Baroque | Philip Lorenz |
| Kelly Hoffer | Against the Transparency of the Word: Metaphor and Visuality in Contemporary American Poetry | Elizabeth Anker |
| Joseph Miranda | Browning out: Suspended Relations of Lantinx Literature | Mary Pat Brady |
2022
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
|---|---|---|
| Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu | Network Poetics: The Making of Anglophone Poetry | Jonathan Monroe |
| Marty Cain | Rural Avant-Garde: Mapping Contemporary U.S. Poetry Collectives Outside the Metropolis | Jeremy Braddock |
| Abram Coetsee | New York Subway Style Writing: Aesthetics, Infrastructure and Technology | George Hutchinson |
| Ben Fried | The Empire of English Literature: Editing the Global Anglophone, 1947-1993 | Jeremy Braddock |
| Zachary Grobe | Feeling Place: Documenting Affective Attachments in the Rust Belt and Fracking Fields | Amy Villarejo |
| Seth Koproski | Did We Believe in Dragons?: The Physiologic Tradition, Wonder and Ethnicity in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland | Samantha Zacher |
| Nathaniel Likert | Botany of the Mind: Character and Experience in Early Modern England | Rayna Kalas |
| Austin Lillywhite | Raw Feelings: Ecologies of Race and Sexuality in Contemporary American Literature | Elizabeth Anker |
| Molly MacVeagh | Maintenance Work: Climate Fiction and Process Biology | Elisha Cohn |
| Gary Slack | Editing Black Aesthetics: Hoyt Fuller, Toni Morrison and 'The Black Book' | Jeremy Braddock |
| Seth Strickland | Rewrite this Book: Compilation and Experimental Literary Practices in Piers Plowman and Late Medieval English Book Culture | Andrew Galloway |
| Krithika Vachali | Novel Relations: Collection Epistemologies in Nineteenth Centure British Literature | Caroline Levine |
2021
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
|---|---|---|
| Mariana Alarcon | Living in Excess: Narrating Violence and Presence in Native American and Chicana Literature | Mary Pat Brady |
| Elizabeth Alexander | Dirty Computers: Erotic Data Poetics | Kate McCullough |
| Malcolm Bare | Implied Shelters | Caroline Levine |
| Christopher Berardino | Multitude Modernism: Democratic Epiphany in American Interwar Literature | George Hutchinson |
| Pichaya (Mint) Damrongpiwat | Fictions of Materiality in the Eighteenth-Century Novel | Laura Brown |
| Olivia Milroy Evans | Archiving Otherwise: The Rhetoric, Ethics, and Poetics of Contemporary Documentary Poetry | Roger Gilbert |
| Gabriella Friedman | Speculative Pasts, Radical Politics: Historicizing in Black and Indigenous Fiction | Elizabeth Anker |
| Grace Catherine Greiner | The Poet's Matere: Materiality, Temporality, and the Making of Literary History in Chaucer and Lydgate's Inset-Lyric Poems | Andrew Galloway |
| Noah Lloyd | Caught Up in the Arrangement: Forms of Literary Life in the Eighteenth Century | Laura Brown |
| Madeline Reynolds | Anthropomorphic Representations: Blurring Animal-Human Boundaries in the Nineteenth-Century Novel | Elisha Cohn |
| Bojan Srbinovski | Figures of Catastrophe: Tragedy, Law, and Lateness in Victorian Realism | Ellis Hanson |
| Elisabeth Strayer | Victorian Microcosms: Environmental Formalism in the Novel | Elisha Cohn |
| Hema Surendranathan | Species and Psyche: Anthropomorphism and Environmentalism in Human-Animal Metafiction | Laura Brown |
| Brianna Thompson | "The Kinship of Her Pain": Intimate Healing in American Women's Fiction | Shirley Samuels |
2020
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
|---|---|---|
| Kristen Angierski | Fictions of Empathy: Embodied Ethics in Contemporary Anthropocene Literature | Elizabeth Anker |
| Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera | The Trope of the Papers: The Coloniality of Citizenship and the Turn to the Undocumented in Black and Chicana Feminist Thought | Mary Pat Brady |
| Gregory Brazeal | The Hero & the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction | Daniel Schwarz |
| Amelia Hall | Epigraphic Encounters and the Origins of the English Novel | Ellis Hanson |
| Matthew Kilbane | The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media | Jeremy Braddock |
| Stephen Kim | Racial Fictions in Early Modern England | Jenny Mann |
| Jonathan Reinhardt | Political Secrecy and Theatricality in Marlowe and Shakespeare | Phillip Lorenz |
2019
| Alumnus | Title of Dissertation | Chair |
|---|---|---|
| Marquis Bey | The Blacknesses of Blackness: Fugitivity, Feminism, and Transness | Dagmawi Woubshet |
| David Cosca | Demonizing Unions: Religious Rhetoric in the Early 20th Century Strike Novel | Eric Cheyfitz |
| Jane Glaubman | Deplorable Cultus: Populism, Globalization, and The Lord of the Rings | Amy Villarejo & Jeremy Braddock |
| Amber Harding | The Not So Great House: Domestic Space, Subjectivity, and Homecomings in the English Modernist Novel | Ellis Hanson |
| Nasrin Olla | Reaching for Opacity: Contemporary Afrodiasporic Literature | Jonathan Culler & Margo Crawford |
| Zachary Price | Molecular Terror: Medical Vision, Biopolitics, and Visceral Effects in Contemporary Cinema | Ellis Hanson |
| Ruoji Tang | Nature's Persistence: Romanticism and the Rhetoric of Implication | Cathy Caruth |
| Katherine Thorsteinson | Narratives of Disposability: Race and Ecology in Contemporary Media | Elizabeth Anker |
| Claire Whitenack | Poison and Disease in Anglo-Saxon Medicine and Metaphor | Samantha Zacher |