Theses from 2025
Beyond Just the Negros’ Art: Langston Hughes and the Poetic Renewal of Black Musical Tradition, Samuel Adewumi
Migration and Diaspora: An Intersectional Feminist Reading of Lucy by Jamacia Kincaid., Benjamin Oluwakayode Akinlabi
"All the Songs I Stole": Ballad Collection and the Conditions of Collective-Making in Johnny Cash's Prison Concert-Albums, Camryn J. Bruce
Understanding Writing Center’s Motivations for Creating and Providing Online Writing Resources: A Qualitative Study, MacKenzie K. Croley
Rhetorics of Motherhood in Fiction:Motherhood as Identity and Status-Quo, Brea A. Hudson
The Shame of (Be)Longing in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, Grace S. Miholic
Capitola, the Newsboy, as a Story-Paper: Movement, Serialization, and the Rewriting of Domestic Space in E.D.E.N Southworth’s the Hidden Hand, Emma B. Pinson
Grief is Isolating. The Elegy is Not: An Exploration of Loss and Grief in Poems, Jennifer Terry
Unsettling Femininity in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Audrianna Witcher
Untethered and Unraveled: Isolated Motherhood in the Liminal Stage, Ashton K. Wronikowski
Theses from 2024
Fragile: Handle With Care A Conversation on Trauma, Flashbacks, and Seeing A Therapist When You Need One, Gloria Aragon
“No One Likes a Mad Woman:” a Modern Reclamation of Solitude In The Domestic Space Through Women With Invisible Disabilities in a Post-lockdown World, Marley Ashton Bickley
The Grove, Sabrina Blanchard
Playing Myself: The Gothic's Challenge to Audience Identity, Elena Durant
Cloaked Trannies on the SIlver Screen: "Evolutionary Derangement" and Cronenberg's Approach to Shaping a Critical Mindset towards Trans Bodies, John David Hunter
Shared Shame and Affect in Nella Larsen's Passing, Claudia Ludwick
Depths of Perception, Connor Matthews
The Calling of Governess, Karissa Maust
“Caroline”: Deviance in Southern Women’s Poetry, Sage Aspyn Short
Beyond “Muscular Blueprints”: Sarah Ruhl and Access Intimacy in Dramatic Writing, Taylor Steck
The Female Werewolf: The Wolf, the Woman, and the Dunce Outcast, Melina Wallace
By the Devil’s Grace: Zofloya’s Victoria and the Recontextualizing of a Protagonist, Katherine Woods
Theses from 2023
Cú Chulainn's "Vigil on the Hound Fords": The Centrality of Borders in the Táin Bó Cuailnge, David Atkinson
Pedagogy, Sexual Violence, and Contemporary Extremist Films: Baise-moi (2000), Irréversible (2002), and Promising Young Woman (2020), Olivia Harris
Finding Freedom in Stagnation: The Physical Spaces and Movement of Victorian Women in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Madison Norder
“I Found It Again. My Home.”: The Role of Art in the Mediation of Trauma and Loss in Station Eleven, Emily Zhong
Theses from 2022
Enclosure in Flesh and Stone: Intermediaries and Access to God in Revelations of Divine Love, Emily Danuser
“People Like They Historical Shit in a Certain Way”: The Civil War Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, or Commercialized Memory and Black Lives, Brandon Eric Fisher
The Screen and Development: Creative Writing and Liminality in Children’s Literature, Rebecca E. Glenn
Triumph in the Suburbs: Richard Ford and the Spaces of New Capitalism, John Gorton
The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half” and Her Intent on Revealing the Unseen in the Tradition of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue
"Custome is an Idiot": How Genre Bending Opens New Meanings for Hæc Vir, or the Womanish Man, Stephen Montgomery-Anderson
Inclusive Pedagogy: Connecting Disability and Race In Higher Education, Meredith Persin
Unseen Bruises: Surviving and Conquering a Narcissist, Frances C. Smith
A Cross-Cultural Trek of Nomadism Through Metaphoric Criticism, Gabrielle Wilkosz
Theses from 2021
COVID-19 and the Emergence of a New Illness Narrative, Thomas M. Allison
How “Interested” Criticism Fueled the Formulation of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Cultural Afterlife, John Cameron Bosch
Interrupting the Narrative: Reader Emapthy and Authorial Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Allison Daniel
The Art of The Author: A Discussion of Servants in The Castle of Otranto, Laura Caroline Dunn
"They don't need men and they don't need God": The Liberatory Possibilities of Waywardness in Toni Morrison's Paradise, Mary Frankovich
Weaponizing Faith: ‘Spectral Evidence’ in Longfellow, Miller and Trump, Paul Hyde
Contemporary Women's Poetry and Leaning Into the Senses, Samantha Keebler
On Moving Beyond and Looking Behind: An Analysis of Contemporary Queer of Color Digital Art and Performance, Caroline Kinderthain
"I / believe in ruin": Trance, Affect, and Disorientation, Zachary Melton Kinsella
Autonomous Power and Profound Agency: Women and Magic in the Icelandic Legendary Sagas, Amanda Platz
They Say, We Say: A Standpoint Analysis of Stay-at-Home Mothers’ Engagement with Public Discourse, Ayesha Tanzila
The Bachelor as a Platform for Format Subversion: Authorial Intent and Audience Reaction, Michael A. Vaughan
Historical Nets, Jenny E. Washburne
Theses from 2020
Finding the Ephemeral: Aura, Apperception, and Digitally-Mediated Music, Rodger Eugene Bishop
Guard Your Heart, “by Force, if Necessary”: Faith, Virginity, and Shame in the Evangelical Purity Movement, Kelley M. Gillis
The Story of Hur, Hwi Eun Hur
Marie's Knowing Winks: Ironic Play, Courtly Love, and the Disruption of Generic Conventions in Chaitivel, Lanva, and Yonec, Anna Lia Johnson
Defending the Dead: A Critical and Creative Exploration of the Eulogy, Dan Leach
A Slow and Spectacular Violence: Anti-Black, Environmental, and Labor Violence in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, Kaitlyn Michelle Samons
Computational Configurations: Behind the Bricolage of The Truelist, Emma Jayne Stanley
Between Worlds & A Conversation on Fantasy, Portals, and Escape, Sarah Savannah Watkins
Something I Don't Know: Stories About Being Human, Robert Welborn
Theses from 2019
"I Was Quiet, But I Was Not Blind": The Surprising Consistency of Fanny Price, Blake Elizabeth Bowens
Rereading the Journal: Maintaining the Potential for Refinement, Julie Anne Edewaard
Is There a Self in this Text? Satire, Passing, and Life in Caucasia, Myers Enlow
An Audience with the King, Charissa Eileen Fryberger
A Change in Southern Character through Southern Characters, Emma McCracken
Reading Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Early Writings as Colonialist Fantasy, Kristian Nicole Wilson
Theses from 2018
Dendarian: A Young Man's Quest & The Functions of Fairy Tales, Daniel Atkinson
"It's All a Blind": Scopic Economies in Henry James' Washington Square, Carrie L. Hill
The Culture of the Body: The Beautiful, Sublime, and Ugly in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Courtney Huff-Oelberg
Better than Adequate: An Investigation in Contemporary Short Fiction, Stephen Michael Hundley
Making Interpretations: Digitally Adapting Yeats's 'Ego Dominus Tuus' as a Digital Comic, Jared Jameson
The Desubjectified Subject in the Poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Amanda Rebecca Johnson
Edward II: Negotiations of Credit in the Early Modern Public Sphere, Jane E. Kuebler
The Work of Water in Edwidge Danticat's Environmental Imagination, Gabrielle Nugent
Transgressive Theatricalities: Questioning the Existence of a Sincere Self in Sensation Fiction, Carley Amanda Robertson
Theses from 2017
Marked: Masculine Performativity in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, Robert Brian Brissey Jr.
Abducted by Reading Machines: Pragmatism and the Discourse of Distant Reading, Matthew Scott Duncan
A Shared Resilience in Contemporary Southern Literature: Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Robin Boylorn's Sweetwater: Black Women and Tales of Resilience, Laurie Pfister Epps
Madness in the Media: Demystifying the Emergence of an OCD Trope in Television, Sam Martin
Theses from 2016
Treacherous Selves: Subjection and Subjectivity in The Tragedy of Mariam, Emily Anne Boyter
The Sunglasses of Ideology: Augmented Reality as Posthuman Cognitive Prosthesis, Jason Crider
From Overt Contentment to Hidden Space: Examining the Portrayal of Gender Fluidity in Naylor's Bailey's Café and Walker's The Color Purple, Teneshia Shante Head
"The Wildest Stock": Service, Monarchical Grafting, and Environmental Engagement in The Winter's Tale, Kristen Joy Hixon
Between Flesh and Being: Theorizing the Racial Body and the Position of Personhood in Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Lanja Najmalddin Karim
Will The Real Captain America Please Stand-Up: Redefining the Patriotic Hero Post-9/11, Michelle Anne Lloyd
Gender Hybridity in H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, Charlotte Rene Powell
Like a Character in a Truffaut Film, Trevor Lance Seigler
Finding Freedom for Jane: A Reading of Subjugation, Shame, and Sympathy in Charlotte's Brontë Jane Eyre, Rebecca Shaver
Formulas of Fiction: The First World War and the Popular Fiction of 1914, Caroline Swanson
The Zombi of the British Empire: Rochester's Imperialist Drive in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Chloe Whitaker
Theses from 2015
The Metonym of Edenic Masculinity: Depictions of Male-Male Rape in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Property, Chelsea Clarey
CARRIE’S CHOICE: CONTEMPORARY FEMINISM AND SOCIOPOLITICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF WOMANHOOD IN FILM ADAPTATIONS OF STEPHEN KING’S CARRIE, Molly Brianna Collins
Raising Specters: Queer Reclamation in Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Justin Allen Holliday
Reader Interrupted: Poetry as Thing in the Lyrical Works of Emily Dickinson, Sarah Katherine Melchers
A Discourse of Hoodwinking: Falcons and Performativity in The Taming of the Shrew, Dustin Cleag Mosley
PAINTING VERSUS PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ROMANCE OF A SHOP AND CAPTURING THE NEW WOMAN THROUGH A MECHANICAL LENS, Sarah Michelle Naciuk
Gawain the Exile: Reading 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' in a Postcolonial Context, Hannah Vaughan
Value and Truth in Literature: The Critic versus the Reader from Henry James' Perspective as Applied to Reader Response Theory, Marilyn M. Vickery
Conspicuous Consumers: the Victorian Department Store and the Women's Movement, Joslyn McCraw VonKaenel
Theses from 2014
The Deception of Perception: Browning, Childe Roland, and Supersensory Belief, Catherine Blass
A Modernism Against Maestros: Horacio Quiroga and the Transnational Automaton, Jacqueline Fetzer
Bombing 12294, Lucosi Ikeem Fuller