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

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	Jeremy Braddock
Ben Fried	The Empire of English Literature: Editing the Global Anglophone, 1947-1993	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	Elizabeth Anker
Austin Lillywhite	Raw Feelings: Ecologies of Race and Sexuality in Contemporary American Literature	Jeremy Braddock
Molly MacVeagh	Maintenance Work: Climate Fiction and Process Biology	Elisha Cohn
Gary Slack	Editing Black Aesthetics: Hoyt Fuller, Toni Morrison and 'The Black Book'	Andrew Galloway
Seth Strickland	Rewrite this Book: Compilation and Experimental Literary Practices in Piers Plowman and Late Medieval English Book Culture	Caroline Levine
Krithika Vachali	Novel Relations: Collection Epistemologies in Nineteenth Centure British Literature	George Hutchinson

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

AlumnusTitle of DissertationChairMariana AlarconLiving in Excess: Narrating Violence and Presence in Native American and Chicana LiteratureMary Pat BradyElizabeth AlexanderDirty Computers: Erotic Data PoeticsKate McCulloughMalcolm BareImplied SheltersCaroline LevineChristopher BerardinoMultitude Modernism: Democratic Epiphany in American Interwar LiteratureGeorge HutchinsonPichaya DamrongpiwatFictions of Materiality in the Eighteenth-Century NovelLaura BrownOlivia Milroy EvansArchiving Otherwise: The Rhetoric, Ethics, and Poetics of Contemporary Documentary PoetryRoger GilbertGabriella FriedmanSpeculative Pasts, Radical Politics: Historicizing in Black and Indigenous FictionElizabeth Anker Grace Catherine GreinerThe Poet's Matere: Materiality, Temporality, and the Making of Literary History in Chaucer and Lydgate's Inset-Lyric PoemsAndrew GallowayNoah LloydCaught Up in the Arrangement: Forms of Literary Life in the Eighteenth CenturyLaura BrownMadeline ReynoldsAnthropomorphic Representations: Blurring Animal-Human Boundaries in the Nineteenth-Century NovelElisha CohnBojan SrbinovskiFigures of Catastrophe: Tragedy, Law, and Lateness in Victorian RealismEllis HansonElisabeth StrayerVictorian Microcosms: Environmental Formalism in the NovelElisha CohnHema SurendranathanSpecies and Psyche: Anthropomorphism and Environmentalism in Human-Animal MetafictionLaura BrownBrianna Thompson“The Kinship of Her Pain”: Intimate Healing in American Women's FictionShirley Samuels2020
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

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