Department of English

July 17, 2024

Beside Sense: Phenomenograpphy and Contemporary Poetry

Committee: David Sherman, Paul Morrison, Vincent Joshua Adams (University of Louisville)

June 27, 2024

Manuscripts, Meat, and Medievalism

Committee: Dorothy Kim, Faith Smith, Lynn Ramey (Vanderbilt University)

July 16, 2024

Writing Ante/Bellum True Womanhood

Committee: John Burt, Jerome Tharaud, Ernest Suarez (Catholic University)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

Committee: 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

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)

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)

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)