Selected Dissertation Defenses
2025
March 20, 2025
Visions of Social Impact: The Literary Nexus of Abolitionist Imaginaries and Victorian Studies
Committee: John Plotz, Ulka Anjaria, Eric Gordon (Boston University)
March 19, 2025
Conversion, Apostasy, and Modern Literature
Committee: David Sherman, William Flesch, Gabrielle McIntire (Queen’s University)
March 18, 2025
In the Mental Flesh: Unhappy Interiority from Dostoevsky to Faulkner with Continual Reference to Wittgenstein
Committee: William Flesch, John Burt, Robin Miller, Kevin Ohi (Boston College)
March 14, 2025
Full of Days: A Doctoral Portfolio Project
Committee: David Sherman, Jerome Tharaud, Aaron Kopp (Boston University)
2024
December 11, 2024
Milton’s Great Illusions
Committee: William Flesch, Laura Quinney, Kevin Ohi (Boston College)
November 18, 2024
Heavenly Communications: Media and Angels Amongst the New England Puritans
Committee: Caren Irr, Jerome Tharaud, Meredith Neuman (Clark University)
July 17, 2024
Beside Sense: Phenomenograpphy and Contemporary Poetry
Committee: David Sherman, Paul Morrison, Vincent Joshua Adams (University of Louisville)
July 16, 2024
Writing Ante/Bellum True Womanhood
Committee: John Burt, Jerome Tharaud, Ernest Suarez (Catholic University)
June 27, 2024
Manuscripts, Meat, and Medievalism
Committee: Dorothy Kim, Faith Smith, Lynn Ramey (Vanderbilt University)
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