Dissertation Record

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

AlumnusTitle of DissertationChair
Kyhl StephenAmerican Fiction and the Textual Basis of Corporate Personhood, 1871-1921Shirley 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 StamatiadesThe Theater of Discover: (Un)making the World on the Early Modern StagePhilip Lorenz
Sophia VeltfortFictions of seeing and speaking: Free Indirect Discourse in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Nella LarsenDan Schwarz
Maggie O’LearyMetabolic Personhood: Disorder, Decapacitation, DebilityShirley Samuels & 
Naminata Diabate

2023

AlumnusTitle of DissertationChair
Bwesigye Bwa MwesigireAfro-Nationalism: The Transcontinental Poetics of Newly Black FictionCaroline Levine
Philippa ChunMemento Mori: Attending to the Dead in Nineteenth-Century American LiteratureShirley Samuels
Verdie CulbreathTowards a Literary History of the Rest Cure (1869-1931)Elisha Cohn & 
Dan Schwarz
Christina FogarasiTherapeutic Culture and the Anti-Confessional NarratorElizabeth Anker 
& Elisha Cohn
Laura FrancisIrregular Pearl: Spanish-English Translations and for Formation of an English BaroquePhilip Lorenz
Kelly HofferAgainst the Transparency of the Word: Metaphor and Visuality in Contemporary American PoetryElizabeth Anker
Joseph MirandaBrowning out: Suspended Relations of Lantinx LiteratureMary Pat Brady

2022

AlumnusTitle of DissertationChair
Ama Bemma Adwetewa-BaduNetwork Poetics: The Making of Anglophone PoetryJonathan Monroe
Marty CainRural Avant-Garde: Mapping Contemporary U.S. Poetry Collectives Outside
the Metropolis
Jeremy Braddock
Abram CoetseeNew York Subway Style Writing: Aesthetics, Infrastructure and TechnologyGeorge Hutchinson
Ben FriedThe Empire of English Literature: Editing the Global Anglophone, 1947-1993Jeremy Braddock
Zachary GrobeFeeling Place: Documenting Affective Attachments in the Rust Belt and Fracking FieldsAmy Villarejo
Seth KoproskiDid We Believe in Dragons?: The Physiologic Tradition, Wonder and Ethnicity in
Early Medieval Britain and Ireland
Samantha Zacher
Nathaniel LikertBotany of the Mind: Character and Experience in Early Modern EnglandRayna Kalas
Austin LillywhiteRaw Feelings: Ecologies of Race and Sexuality in Contemporary
American Literature
Elizabeth Anker
Molly MacVeaghMaintenance Work: Climate Fiction and Process BiologyElisha Cohn
Gary SlackEditing Black Aesthetics: Hoyt Fuller, Toni Morrison and 'The Black Book'Jeremy Braddock
Seth StricklandRewrite this Book: Compilation and Experimental Literary Practices in
Piers Plowman and Late Medieval English Book Culture
Andrew Galloway
Krithika VachaliNovel Relations: Collection Epistemologies in Nineteenth Centure
British Literature
Caroline Levine

2021

AlumnusTitle of DissertationChair
Mariana AlarconLiving in Excess: Narrating Violence and Presence in Native American
and Chicana Literature
Mary Pat Brady
Elizabeth AlexanderDirty Computers: Erotic Data PoeticsKate McCullough
Malcolm BareImplied SheltersCaroline Levine
Christopher BerardinoMultitude Modernism: Democratic Epiphany in
American Interwar Literature
George Hutchinson
Pichaya (Mint) DamrongpiwatFictions of Materiality in the Eighteenth-Century NovelLaura Brown
Olivia Milroy EvansArchiving Otherwise: The Rhetoric, Ethics, and Poetics of Contemporary
Documentary Poetry
Roger Gilbert
Gabriella FriedmanSpeculative Pasts, Radical Politics: Historicizing in Black and
Indigenous Fiction
Elizabeth Anker
Grace Catherine GreinerThe Poet's Matere: Materiality, Temporality, and the Making of Literary
History in Chaucer and Lydgate's Inset-Lyric Poems
Andrew Galloway
Noah LloydCaught Up in the Arrangement: Forms of Literary Life in the
Eighteenth Century
Laura Brown
Madeline ReynoldsAnthropomorphic Representations: Blurring Animal-Human Boundaries
in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Elisha Cohn
Bojan SrbinovskiFigures of Catastrophe: Tragedy, Law, and Lateness in Victorian RealismEllis Hanson
Elisabeth StrayerVictorian Microcosms: Environmental Formalism in the NovelElisha Cohn
Hema SurendranathanSpecies and Psyche: Anthropomorphism and Environmentalism in 
Human-Animal Metafiction
Laura Brown
Brianna Thompson"The Kinship of Her Pain": Intimate Healing in American Women's FictionShirley Samuels

2020

AlumnusTitle of DissertationChair
Kristen AngierskiFictions of Empathy: Embodied Ethics in Contemporary Anthropocene LiteratureElizabeth Anker
Esmeralda Arrizón-PalomeraThe Trope of the Papers: 
The Coloniality of Citizenship and the Turn to the Undocumented in Black and Chicana Feminist Thought
Mary Pat Brady
Gregory BrazealThe Hero & the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War FictionDaniel Schwarz
Amelia Hall  Epigraphic Encounters and the Origins of the English NovelEllis Hanson   
Matthew KilbaneThe Lyre Book: Modern Poetic MediaJeremy Braddock
Stephen KimRacial Fictions in Early Modern EnglandJenny Mann
Jonathan ReinhardtPolitical Secrecy and Theatricality in Marlowe and ShakespearePhillip Lorenz

 2019

AlumnusTitle of DissertationChair
Marquis BeyThe Blacknesses of Blackness: Fugitivity, Feminism, and TransnessDagmawi Woubshet
David CoscaDemonizing Unions: Religious Rhetoric in the Early 20th Century Strike NovelEric Cheyfitz
Jane GlaubmanDeplorable Cultus: Populism, Globalization, and The Lord of the RingsAmy Villarejo & Jeremy Braddock
Amber Harding       The Not So Great House: 
Domestic Space, Subjectivity, and Homecomings in the English Modernist Novel
Ellis Hanson                                      
Nasrin OllaReaching for Opacity: Contemporary Afrodiasporic LiteratureJonathan Culler & Margo Crawford
Zachary PriceMolecular Terror: Medical Vision, Biopolitics, and Visceral Effects in Contemporary CinemaEllis Hanson
Ruoji TangNature's Persistence: Romanticism and the Rhetoric of ImplicationCathy Caruth
Katherine ThorsteinsonNarratives of Disposability: Race and Ecology in Contemporary MediaElizabeth Anker
Claire WhitenackPoison and Disease in Anglo-Saxon Medicine and MetaphorSamantha Zacher
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