2026

Brett Driben
Reading History, Reading Race: Historical Narrative, Racial Epistemology, and the Multiplicity of Interpretation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Texts
Advisor: Prof. López

Vanessa Febo
The Ballad’s Racial Borders: Race, Nationalism, and Imperialism in the Nineteenth-Century Ballad
Advisor: Prof. Cohen

Marguerite Happe
The Vermicular Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1660-1760)
Prof. Deutsch

Emma Spies
“The Novel and the Transient”: Queer Turns in Surrealism
Prof. Hornby

2025

Kristen Cardon
Narrative Suicidology: Literary Approaches to Individual and Species Suicide Prevention
Prof. DeLoughrey

Abraham Encinas
Genres of Dictatorship: Dictator Novels, Counterfactuals, Dystopian Sci-Fi, and Refugee Texts of 20th Century and Contemporary U.S. Literature
Prof. López

Jené Pledger
Earwitnesses in America: Listening Literatures in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.
Prof. Hyde

Lesley Thulin
Disability and Political Economy in Romantic Literature, 1762-1834
Prof. Deutsch

Joseph Torres
World-Remaking Experiments in seventeenth-Century English Literature
Prof. Gallagher

Tony Wei Ling
More or Less Alive: Labor and Race in Comics’ Vital Aesthetics
Prof. R. Lee

2024

Oriah Amit
Precautionary Tales: Political Consequence in British Fiction, 1867-1903
Advisors: Prof. Bristow, Prof. Grossman

Salvador Herrera
Desert Dreams: Transborder Art at the Limits of Identity
Advisors:  Prof. R. Lee, Prof. Pérez-Torres

Jessica Lee
Across Africa’s American Atlantic: Middle Passages, Imagined Home Spaces and Black Futurities
Advisor: Prof. Goyal

Dandi Meng
Skin Pulled Back: Race and Literary Abstractions in the 21st Century
Advisors: Prof. McMillan, Prof. Nersessian

Spencer Robins
Our Planet: Collective Narrative in the Climate Change Era
Advisor: Prof. Heise, Prof. Allison Carruth

Jessica Cook Sherrill
Memory Machines: Mnemonics, Poetry, and Computing in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Advisor: Prof. Grossman

Sammy Solis
Contested Bodies: Fictions of Brownness and Latinidad
Advisor: Prof. López

Arielle Stambler
The Social Rights Imaginary of the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel
Advisors: Prof. Goyal, Prof. Rothberg

Jesslyn Whittell
The Riot and the Didactic: Instruction in British Romantic Poetry
Prof. Makdisi, Prof. Nersessian

2023

Andrea Acosta
Virtual Bodies: Minoritarian Performance in Digital Subcultures
Advisors: Prof. McMillan, Prof. Snelson

Kersti Francis
Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural, 1150-1650
Advisors: Prof. Chism, Prof. Gallagher

Misho Ishikawa
Sensing Empire: Sensing Mongol Imperialism in Medieval Contact Literatures (1206-1368)
Advisor: Prof. Chism

Robin Kello
Performing Displacement: Precarious Encounters, Hospitality Events, and The Theater of Migration
Advisor: Prof. Fuchs

Yangjung Lee
A Guilty Emancipation: Victorian Fiction and the Legacies of Compensation
Advisor: Prof. Grossman

Shouhei Tanaka
Fossil Power: Energy Empire and Insurgent Life
Advisors: Prof. Heise, Prof. Carruth

2022

Vivian Delchamps
The Names of Sickness: Writing Disability and Revising Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century America
Advisors: Prof. Deutsch, Prof. Looby

Lauren Dembowitz
Retracing the Black Venus: Figures of Intimate Commerce in the Atlantic World
Advisor: Prof. Goyal

Lillian Lu
Naiveté and the British Novel (1770-1830)
Advisor: Prof. Deutsch

Taly Ravid
“A Symptom of History:” The Traumatic Form of the Alternate History
Advisors: Prof. Deutsch, Prof. North

Claire Stanford
Future Asians: Orientalism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century U.S. Science Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Heise

Gabriela Valenzuela
Reading Centroamericanismo: U.S. Central American Literatures in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1870-1921
Advisor: Prof. López

2021

Comfort Azubuko-Udah
Unwritten Spaces: African Literature and Charismatic Spatiality
Advisor: Prof. Goyal

Ellen Bistline
The Realism of Seeing the Text in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Grossman

Jacqueline Barrios
London’s Pacific Rim: East Asian Emplacements of the British Capita
Advisors: Prof. Grossman, Prof. Makdisi

Timothy Fosbury
Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past: Genres of Geography and Race in Early America
Advisor: Prof. López

Mark Gallagher
Affective Transcendentalisms: Sense and Spirit in Emerson, Peabody, Thoreau, and Melville
Advisors: Karen E. Rowe, Daniel Walker Howe

Chelsea Kern
Reading the Machine: Digital Reading Practices and the Contemporary U.S. Novel
Advisors: Prof. Snelson, Allison Carruth

Lauren (Becky) King
Reaching Readers: Textual Engagement and Personalized Learning in the Works of Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey Chaucer
Advisor: Prof. Chism

Effren Lopez
Arrested Solidarities: Resistance and Racial Contact Zones in the 19th Century U.S.
Advisor: Prof. López

Craig Messner
Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930
Advisor: Prof. Looby

Hannah Nahm
Alien Love: Passing, Race, and the Ethics of the Neighbor in Postwar African American Novels, 1945 – 1956
Advisor: Prof. Yarborough

Gregory Toy
Asian American Narratives of Building and Unbuilding: An Exploration of Infra-Structural Method
Advisor: Prof. Lee

Michael Vignola
The Reform Aesthetic: Political Futurity and the Novel
Advisor: Prof. Grossman

Andrew Wagner
Racial Prosthesis: Shakespearean Properties of Whiteness
Advisor: Prof. Little

2020

Kate Bolton Bonnici
Becoming Dead in Early Modern English Literature: a Lucretian Poetics
Advisor: Prof. Gallagher

Kimberly Calder
World Ecology, Indigeneity, and Epistemology in Countercultural American Literature
Advisor: Prof. Heise

Jessica Horvath Williams
A Monster of Virtues: Female Ideality, (Dis)Ability, And Nineteenth-Century Womanhood
Advisor: Prof. Deutsch, Prof. Yarborough

Jay Jin
Rhetorics of Scale In Literary & Scientific Discourse
Advisor: Prof. North

Ji Eun Lee
Walking London: Urban Gaits of the British Novel, Jostling, Prowling, Wooshing 1855-1909
Advisor: Prof. Grossman

Kirsten Lew
Deviant Representations: Discourses of Sexuality and Facilitations of Intersectionality in American Film and Literature, 1918-1945
Advisor: Prof. McHugh, Prof. Yarborough

Samantha Morse
Dread: The Literary History of a Political Affect, 1750-1900
Advisor: Prof. Kareem

Grant Rosson
Writing Country: Geography and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century
Advisor: Prof. Looby

Jeremy Schmidt
Three Very Short Poems: The Verbal Economics of Twentieth-Century American Poet
Advisor: Prof. North

Robert K. Smith
Representing Radical Politics in Anglophone Caribbean Literature After Independence
Advisor: Prof. Sharpe

Sujin Youn
Novels That Enact: Capitalist Storification and Emerging Forms in Contemporary Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Seltzer

2019

Benjamin Beck
Matters of Life: Writing Lives in the Age of United States Slavery
Advisor: Prof. Christopher Looby

Kathryn Cai
Nascent Articulations of Feeling: Affective Care Labor in Emerging Postcolonialist and Late Capitalist China-U.S. Circuits
Advisor: Prof. Rachel Lee

Angelina Del Balzo
“Furbish’d Remnants”: Theatrical Adaptation and the Orient, 1660-1815
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum

Shawn Cailey Hall
Visceral Romanticism: The Literature and Culture of Digestion, 1780-1830
Advisor: Prof. Saree Makdisi

Jonathan Kincade
Adaptation, Remediation, and Reciprocity in Narrative Video Games
Advisor: Prof. Ursula Heise

Crescent Rainwater
Fashioning Feminist Aestheticism in the Early Twentieth-Century Novel: Lucas Malet, Netta Syrett, Dorothy Richardson, and Fin-De-Siècle Culture
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow

Kiel Shaub
Rethinking The Arts And Sciences: Institutional Movement and the Formation of Romantic Discourse
Advisor: Prof. Makdisi

Jordan Wingate
The Periodical Origins of the American Self
Advisor: Prof. Looby, Prof. Yarborough

Martin Zirulnik
The Time of the Thriller: Suspense and Continuity After World War II
Prof. Heise

2018

Sharon Chon
Narrating the Visual: Seeing Race in Asian American Literature
Advisor: Prof. Jinqi Ling

William Clark
Time’s Citizens: American Fiction and the Sexual Politics of U.S. Civic Membership, 1886-1929
Advisors: Prof. Christopher Looby, Richard Prof. Yarborough

Kimberly Hedlin
The Book of Job in Early Modern England
Advisor: Prof. Debora Shuger

Allison Hegel
Social Reading in the Digital Age
Advisor: Prof. Allison Carruth

Boram Claire Kim
“A Little Out of Its Due Course”: The Appeal of the Digressive Chronotope in the Early English Novel
Advisor: Prof. Helen Deutsch

Gabriel Mehlman
“And Now Here is the Unreal Real”: The Transformation of American Realisms, 1892-1925
Advisors: Prof. North, Prof. Seltzer

Sydney Miller
“Weather ex Machina: Climatic Determinism and the Fiction of Causality in the Twentieth-Century Novel
Advisor: Prof. Michael North

Eric Newman
Queer Orientations: Desire, Race and Belonging in Queer American Literature 1900-1940
Advisor: Prof. Yogita Goyal

Erica Onugha
Abberant Time: The Peculiar Temporalities of Black Women’s Labors in Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiographies
Advisor: Prof. Richard Yarborough

Megan Smith
In the Likeness of: Christology, Gender, and the Self-Emptying Subject in Early Modern Literature
Advisor: Prof. Lowell Gallagher

Alexandra Verini
“A New Kingdom of Femininity”: Women’s Utopias in Early English Culture and Imagination
Advisor: Prof. Chris Chism, Prof. Lowell Gallagher

2017

Julia Callander
Plagiarists, Sodomites, and Cannibals: Authorship and the History of Sexuality, 1740-1820
Advisor: Professor Helen Deutsch

Deborah Donig
Leave Nothing to the Imagination: Glimpses of the Ineffable After 1945
Advisor: Professor Jenny Sharpe

Jason Morphew
Hamlet‘s Petrarchism
Advisors: Prof. Helen Deutsch, Prof. Lowell Gallagher

Sarah Nance
The Pathologies of Flesh: Temporalities of Feminine Embodiment in Contemporary Poetry
Advisor: Prof. Helen Deutsch

Alethia Shih
Or Not Growing Up: Resizing Children’s Fantasy, 1865-1952
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow

Sharon Tran
Between Asian Girls: On Female Homosociality/Homoeroticism
Advisor: Prof. Rachel Lee

Brandy Underwood
Witnessing Violence:  Affect Theory, Crowds, and African American Fiction
Advisor: Prof. Richard Yarborough

Joyce Warren
Theorizing the Pō: Genealogy, Time, and Space in Polynesian Literature
Advisor: Prof. Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Lindsay Wilhelm
Evolutionary Aestheticism: Scientific Optimism and Cultural Progress, 1850-1913
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Bristow

2016

Gillian Adler
Seeing Time: Boethius and the Ethics of Perspective in Chaucer’s Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde
Advisors: Professor Chris Chism, Professor Matthew Fisher

Sara Burdorff
The Belly and the Beast
Advisor: Professor Joseph Nagy

John Caughey
How to Become an Author: The Art and Business of Literary Advice Handbooks from 1884-1940
Advisors: Professor Jonathan Grossman, Professor Mark McGurl

Katherine Charles
The Interpolated Tale in the Early Novel
Advisor: Professor Felicity Nussbaum

Daniel Couch
The Imperfect Form: Literary Fragments and Politics in the Early American Republic
Advisor: Professor Christopher Looby

Leigh-Michil George
Comical Consciousness: Caricature and the Novel, 1726-1837
Advisors: Professor Jonathan Grossman, Professor Felicity Nussbaum

Christine Gottlieb
The Death of Gender: Queer Cadavers on the Early Modern Stage
Advisors: Prof. A.R. Braunmuller, Prof. Lowell Gallagher

Renee Hudson
Revolutionary Futures: Romance and the Limits of Transnational Forms 1910-1986
Advisor: Prof. Yogita Goyal

Laura Pierson Lorhan
Puzzling Modernity
Advisor: Prof. Michael North

Alexandra Milsom
According to the Book: Tour Groups & English Writing, 1789-1901
Advisors: Prof. Ali Behdad, Prof. Joseph Bristow

Holly Moyer
The Captive’s Audience: Captive Selfhood and Narrative Authority from Chaucer to Shakespeare
Advisors: Prof. Chris Chism, Prof. Lowell Gallagher

Michael Nicholson
After Time: English Poetry and Anachronism, 1700-1850
Advisors: Prof. Helen Deutsch, Prof. Anne Mellor

Brendan O’Kelly
The Unseen in the Modern Image World
Advisor: Prof. Michael North

James Reeves
Unbelief: Atheism in the Literary Imagination, 1790-1800
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum

Samir Soni
Un/Settling Travelers: The British Novel Set in India, 1760-1820
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum

Taylor Walle
Viva Voce: The Living Voice in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century
Advisor: Prof. Felicity Nussbaum