Selected Dissertation Defenses
2023
March 21, 2023
Performing a servant’s faithful parts: Master-Servant Relations in Early Modern Drama
Committee: Ramie Targoff, Billy Flesch, William Carroll (Boston University)
December 8, 2023
Novels of Ocean-Crossing: A Homage to Vibrant Lives Across the Oceans
Committee: Caren Irr, Ulka Anjaria, Eric Newman (Los Angeles Review of Books)
2022
July 22, 2022
Teepees in Hexadecimal: Queering and Indigenizing Games
Committee: Dorothy Kim, Brandon Callender, Siobhan Senier (University of New Hampshire)
May 10, 2022
Caribbean Archipelagraphy: Geographies of the Black Diaspora and Imperial Intimacies
Committee: Faith Smith, Ulka Anjaria, Michelle Stephens (Rutgers University)
November 7, 2022
Empire's Foot: Cold War US Poetry & Imperialism in Latin America
Committee: Caren Irr, David Sherman, Patricia Stuelke (Dartmouth College)
April 26, 2022
The Novelistic Middle and Nineteenth Century Narratives of Midlife
Committee: John Plotz, Ulka Anjaria, Kay Heath (Georgia Gwinnett College)
March 23, 2022
Haiti and Being: Vodoun, Zombies and the Plantation Continuum
Committee: Faith Smith, Emilie Diouf, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brown University), Tony Bogues (Brown University)
September 21, 2022
The Poetics of the Sharing Economy: Shakespeare and Milton in the Age of the Leviathan
Committee: William Flesch, Laura Quinney, Julia Lupton (University of California, Irvine)
2021
July 12, 2021
Between Art and Science: Growing Old in Shakespeare's Worlds
Committee: Ramie Targoff, Tom King, Gordon Teskey (Harvard University)
May 17, 2021
Divided Labors: Narrative Innovation and Political Economy in Industrial Britain
Committee: John Plotz, Ulka Anjaria, Sarah Winter (University of Connecticut)
June 28, 2021
“We Need New Names”: Conditions of Belonging in the Contemporary US Immigrant Novel
Committee: Caren Irr, Ulka Anjaria, Yogita Goyal (University of California, Los Angeles)
February 16, 2021
Glimpses of the World: The Vignette in 21st-Century American Fiction
Committee: Caren Irr, Ulka Anjaria, Jessica Pressman (San Diego State University)
May 26, 2021
The Ontology of Modernist Character: Deconstructing the Human in the British Novel, 1899-1934
Committee: David Sherman, Paul Morrison, Marta Figlerowicz (Yale University)
June 7, 2021
Performing Class: Domestic Labor in Working-Class Modernism
Committee: David Sherman, Caren Irr, Mary Wilson (UMASS Dartmouth)
2020
March 26, 2020
Narrative Intimacy: The confidante in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Committee: John Plotz, Ulka Anjaria, Aeron Hunt (Boston College)
February 4, 2020
Houses of Genre Fiction: The Shared Estrangement of Postwar American Culture
Committee: Caren Irr, David Sherman, Theodore Martin (UC Irvine)
August 11, 2020
Black Women Writing Madness (1970- Present)
Committee: Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brown University), Faith Smith, Shoniqua Roach (AAAS, WGS)
July 14, 2020
Queer Temperance: Addiction and Sites of Voluntarity in Lesbian and Gay Literature (1948-1979)
Committee: David Sherman, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Matthew Bell (Bridgewater State University)
April 7, 2020
Infernal Modernism: the Afterlife of Faith in Modern Irish Fiction
Committee: David Sherman, William Flesch, Daniela Caselli (University of Manchester)
2019
April 11, 2019
(Auto)Mobility and Narrative Innovation in Wharton, Fitzgerald, and O'Hara
committee: John Burt, David Sherman, Christopher Wilson (Boston College)
June 21, 2019
The Politics of Subjectivity: Biopolitics and British Romanticism
Committee: Laura Quinney, Susan Lanser, Yoon Sun Lee (Wellesly University)
July 23, 2019
Shapeshifting Shakespearean Madnesses
Committee: Thomas King, Mary Baine Campbell, Lucy Munro (King's College, London)
May 29, 2019
Privilege Disembodied: Prisms of White Masculinity in Civil-Rights-Era American Fiction
Committee: Caren Irr, John Burt, Stephen Dowden
2018
January 15, 2018
Event Narrative in American Fiction and Film, 1970-2010
Committee: Caren Irr, John Burt, Robert Chodat (Boston University)
March 20, 2018
After the End: Antoine Volodine and Samuel Beckett
Committee: William Flesch, David Sherman, Brian Evenson (California Institute of the Arts)
November 9, 2018
The Sympathetic Servant in the Eighteenth-Century British NovelCommittee: Susan Lanser, Thomas King, Shawn Maurer (College of the Holy Cross)
March 14, 2018
Intimate Scripts and the Early 20th-Century Black Transnational Romance
Committee: Faith Smith, Ulka Anjaria, Christina Sharpe (Tufts University)
November 30, 2018
The American Novel at Work, 1964-2016
Committee: Caren Irr, John Burt, David Alworth (Harvard University)December 6, 2018
The Clerical Domestic: Manhood, Moral Authority, and the Family in the English Novel, 1740-1817
Committee: Susan Lanser, Thomas King, Ruth Perry (MIT)
2017
January 9, 2017
Turning Toward the World: Aestheticism, Christianity, and the Ends of Art in Modernist Literature
Committee: Paul Morrison, David Sherman, John Lurz (Tufts University)
2016
June 22, 2016
Dying to Write: Mothers' Memento Mori Legacy Texts in England, 1600-1650
Committee: Mary Baine Campbell, Thomas King, Paula McQuade (DePaul University)
December 8, 2016
Narrative's Nuclear Spring: The South Asian Novel after the Nuclear Bomb
Committee: Ulka Anjaria, Faith Smith, Mrinalini Chakravorty (University of Virginia)
July 19, 2016
"Unbearable Stench": Excremental Violence in Holocaust Literature
Committee: Dawn Skorczewski, David Sherman, Alicia Nitecki (Bentley University)
November 16, 2016
Queering Happily Ever After: Narrative Progression in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Novels
Committee: Susan S. Lanser, Dawn Skorczewski, Sue J. Kim (UMASS Lowell)