Dissertation Titles

Dissertations published by doctoral awardees in English Language and Literature have addressed an immense variety of topics, ranging widely in history, geography, genre, and method.

happy graduates Doctoral students in English at Cornell typically begin work on their dissertations after their third year in the program, following completion of their Advance-to-candidacy exam. Students draw on a corresponding range of faculty expertise both within and outside of English and their special committees frequently include faculty from multiple departments.

The following is a list of published doctoral dissertations from the last 5 years, in order of year published, including the alumnus’ and their special committee chair’s name.

Published Doctoral Dissertations 2004-2008
Alumnus	Title of Dissertation	Chair
2008
Jonathan Pickett	Finnegans Wake: The Agency of the Letter in the Conscious	Jonathan Culler
Rose Ellen Lessy	“This Mysterious Miasma”: Enviornmental Risk, Edith Wharton, and the Literature of Bad Air	Jonathan Culler
Ryan Canlas	The Constellational Diaspora: Filipino Literature and Late Twentieth Century Imperialism	Shelley Wong
Joshua Corey	The American Avant-Pastoral: Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Ronald Johnson	Roger Gilbert
Susan Hall	Seduction and Servitude: The Erotics of Women’s Captivity Narratives	Shirley Samuels
Karen Anderson	Classifying Life: Metaphor, Popular Biology, and Social Categorization in Emily Dickinson, Anne Spencer, Marianne Moore, and Lorine Niedecker	Roger Gilbert
Jonah Corne	Endangered Zones: Books, Buildings, anda Modernity	Doug Mao
Ariana Vigil	Art in a Time of War: U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production and the Central American Revolutions	Mary Pat Brady
Caetlin Benson-Allott	Imperio-Video: Motion Pictures, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Technology	Ellis Hanson
Janice Ho	Liberal Englishness, Alterity, and the Twentieth-Century British Novel	Walter Cohen
Ramesh Mallipeddi	The Imaginary African: The Politics of Slavery in Eighteenth-Century England	Laura Brown
Misty Urban	Monstrous Women in Middle English Romance	Andy Galloway

2007
Victoria Chevalier	Decolonizing mimesis in the works of Jessie Fauset, David Bradley and Nelly Rosario	Hortense Spillers
Sarah Ferguson-Wagstaffe	“So I Sung the Same Again”: Reading Revision in the Nineteenth-Century Long Poem	A. Reeve Parker
Hyowon Kim	Adopted colors: Domesticity and foreign nationalism in Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot	James E. Adams
Michael Garcia	Narratives of the Ethnic Self in American Literature: Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown.	Shirley Samuels
Kevin Lamb	Impersonality and the Modernist Art of Critique	Molly Hite
Andrea Rehn	White Rajas: Chairsma and Colonial Sovereignty in Victorian Literature	James E. Adams
Hilary Emmett	“Passion More Than Fraternal”: Towards a Poetics and Politics of Sisterhood in the American Novel 1798-1987	Hortense Spillers
Michael Klotz	Anxious Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Interiority and the Home	Harry Shaw

2006
Nadine Attewell	Strange Inheritors: Reproduction, History, and the Nation Between the Two World Wars	Molly Hite
Wyatt Bonikowski	Traces of War: Shell shock, death drive, and narrative after the first world war	Molly Hite
Richard Juang	Deep Waters, Unknown Shores: Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Transatlantic Domain	Laura Brown
Kimberly Snyder Manganelli	The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse: Erotic Spectables of Race	James E. Adams
David Rando	Make it News!: Representing Experience in Twentieth-century News and Literature	Molly Hite
Alice TePunga Somerville	Nau te rourou, Nau te rakau: the Oceanic, Indigenous, Postcolonial and New Zealand comparitive contexts of Maori writing in English	Biodun Jeyifo
Robin Sowards	The Metaphysics of Syntax in Nineteenth Century Lyric	Jonathan D. Culler
Danielle St. Hilaire	Satan’s Poetry: Fallen Art from Homer to Spenser in Paradise Lost	Winthrop Wetherbee
Pauls Toutonghi	A World Without Maps: Post-National, English-Language Literature in the Late Twentieth Century	Daniel R. Schwarz

2005
Akinwumi Adesokani	Worlds That Flourish: Postnational Asethetics in west African Videofilms, African Cinema, and Black Diasporic Writings	Biodun Jeyifo
Zubair Amir	“Usurpations and other Scandals”: Gossip and Social Climbing in the Victorian Novel	James E. Adams
Dwight Codr	A Store Yet Untouched: Speculative Ideologies in Eighteenth-century English Literature	Neil Saccamano
Nicholas Davis	The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze, Film Theory, and Contemporary Queer Cinema	Ellis Hanson
Esther Hu	Christina Rossetti’s Devotional Poetics: The Tractarian Mode	Dorothy Mermin
Stephanie Li	Resistance through the body: power, representation, and the enslaved woman	Shirley Samuels
Ernesto Martinez	Queers of Color and the Ethics of Social Literacy	Satya Mohanty
Annette Portillo	Outlaw Genres: Reconceptualizing Life Stories by Chicanas and Native American Women	Mary Pat Brady
Jacqueline Stuhmiller	The Hunt in Romance and the Hunt as Romance	Winthrop Wetherbee
Katherine Terrell	Translating the Past, Scripting the Nation: Poetry, History, and Authority in Late Medieval Scotland	Winthrop Wetherbee
Mimi Yiu	Building Platforms: Staging the Architecture of Early Modern Subjectivity	Timothy Murray

2004
Lisa Brooks	The Common Pot: Indigenous Writing and the Reconstruction of Native Space in the Northeast	Shelley Wong
Joe Campana	Suffering Romance: Edmund Spenser and the Matter of Poetry	Gordon Teskey
Zahid Chaudhary	Frames of Violence: British Photography in Colonial India	Biodun Jeyifo
Kellie Dawson	Portions of Heaven and Hell: Sympathy and Suffering in Lolita	Paul Sawyer
Andrea Gazzaniga	This Close Room: Intimacy and Enclosure in Victorian Lyric Sequences	Debra Fried
Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez	Made by Violence: Chicana Narrative and the Remaking of the World, 1851-1996	Laura Donaldson
Paul Hecht	Studies in The Shepheardes Calender	Gordon Teskey
Daniel Kim	“Ann Aggressive Concept of the Popular”: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Multicultural U.S. Left	Biodun Jeyifo
T. Roscoe Leasure	Belial, Belialism, and the Diabolic Power of Rhetoric from Cynewulf to Milton	Andrew Galloway
Sunjay Sharma	Abyssal Grounds: In Search of the Subject of the Sublime in Wordsworth and Kant	Jonathan D. Culler
Sara Wasson	Using a Shattered City: Fantasies of Wartime London, 1939-1951	Molly Hite
Meg Wesling	States of Culture: Pedagogy and the Making of American Citizens	Shelley Wong
Kay Yandell	Divine Telegraphy: How Telecommunication Shaped Gender, Ethnicity, and Nation in Nineteenth-Century American Literature	Laura Donaldson