Final Public Orals
Past Events
2021 - 2022
Fallen Father: John Milton, Antinomianism, and the Case Against Adam
Dissertation advisers: Jeff Dolven, Russ Leo, and Nigel Smith
2020-2021
Securing the Crisis: Race and the Poetics of Risk
Dissertation Advisers: Simon Gikandi, Kinohi Nishikawa, Imani Perry, Herman Beavers (University of Pennsylvania)
Protean Figures: Personified Abstractions from Milton's Allegory to Wordsworth's Psychology of the Poet
Dissertation Advisers: Sophie Gee, Esther Schor, Susan Stewart, Susan Wolfson
The Second Science: Feminist Natural Inquiry in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Dissertation Advisers: Claudia Johnson, Deborah Nord, Rachel Bowlby (University College, London)
Doorstep Moments: Close Encounters with Minor Characters in the Victorian Novel
Advisers: Meredith Martin, Jeff Nunokawa, Gayle Salamon
Probability: A Literary History, 1479- 1700
Advisers: Jeff Dolven, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Russ Leo, Nigel Smith
On the Metareferential Mode and 19th Century British Literature
Advisers: Claudia Johnson, Meredith Martin, Deborah Nord
The Reformation of Indifference: Adiaphora, Toleration, and English Literature in the Seventeenth Century
Advisers: Bradin Cormack, Russ Leo, Nigel Smith
Who's Laughing Now?: Black Affective Play and Formalist Innovation in Twenty-First Century Black Literary Satire
Dissertation advisers: Anne Cheng, William Gleason, Daphne Brooks (Yale)
Mere Curiosity: Knowledge, Desire, and Peril in the British and Irish Gothic Novel, 1796-1820
Dissertation advisers: Claudia Johnson, Esther Schor
Rethinking Renaissance Symbolism: Material Culture, Visual Signs, and Failure in Early Modern Literature, 1587-1644
Dissertation advisers: Russ Leo, Rhodri Lewis, Nigel Smith
I Changed My Sex! Pedagogy and the Trans Narrative
Advisers: Zahid Chaudhary, Diana Fuss, Gayle Salamon
Poetic Forgetting
Advisers: Diana Fuss, Joshua Kotin, Susan Stewart
The Poetics of Space and Sensation in Scotland and Kenya
Dissertation advisers: Benjamin Conisbee Baer, Zahid Chaudhary, Simon Gikandi
2019-2020
On Black Breath
Dissertation advisers: Ruha Benjamin, Anne Cheng, Simon Gikandi, Kinohi Nishikawa
The Case of the Self-Conscious Detective Novel: Modernism, Metafiction, and the Terms of Literary Value
Dissertation advisers: Maria DiBattista, William Gleason, Benjamin Widiss (Hamilton College)
Restoring Empire: British Imperial Nostalgia, Colonial Space, and Violence since WWII
Dissertation advisers: Eduardo Cadava, Simon Gikandi, Rachel Price, Ato Quayson (Stanford)
Being a Lover of the World: Lyric Poetry and Political Disaffection after the English Civil War
Dissertation advisers: Bradin Cormack, Nigel Smith, Susan Stewart
Go On Your Nerve: Confidence in American Poetry, 1860-1960
Dissertation advisers: Diana Fuss, William Gleason, Joshua Kotin
Objects of Correction: Literature and the Birth of Modern Punishment
Dissertation Advisers: Leonard Barkan, Bradin Cormack, Sophie Gee, Nigel Smith
Dissertation is available for review in 22 McCosh Hall.
Novel Subjects: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Transformation of British Subjecthood
Dissertation advisers: Claudia Johnson, Deborah Nord, Esther Schor
Dissertation is available for review in 22 McCosh Hall.
Anglo-Saxon and Arabic Identity in the Early Middle Ages
Dissertation Advisers: Andrew Cole, Michael Cook, D.Vance Smith
Dissertation is available for review in 22 McCosh Hall.
2018-2019
Popular Science and Modernist Poetry
Dissertation Advisers: Diana Fuss, Joshua Kotin, Meredith Martin
Shakespeare and the Spectacle of University Drama
Dissertation Advisers: Leonard Barkan, Jeff Dolven, Russ Leo, Nigel Smith
The dissertation is available for review in the Department of English office, 22 McCosh Hall.
2017-2018
The Sensation of Language: Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley
Advisers: Claudia Johnson, Esther Schor, and Susan Wolfson
The Pace of Modern Fiction: A History of Narrative Movement in Modernity
Advisers: Rachel Bowlby, Maria DiBattista, and Lee Mitchell
Modernist Poetry and the Poetics of Temporality: Between Modernity and Coloniality
Advisers: Zahid Chaudhary, Simon Gikandi, Michael Wood
2016-2017
Pouring Eastward: Editing American Regionalism, 1890-1940
Dissertation Advisers: Maria DiBattista, William Gleason, Lee Mitchell
Tragic Resistance: Decolonization and Disappearance in Postcolonial Literature
Dissertation Advisers: Eduardo Cadava, Simon Gikandi, F.Nick Nesbitt
By and About: An Antiracist History of the Musicals and the Antimusicals of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston
Advisers: Daphne Brooks (Yale), Valerie Smith (Swarthmore), Stacy Wolf, William Gleason (reader)
Modern Fiction and its Phantoms
Advisers: Maria DiBattista, Diana Fuss, Joshua Kotin
2015-2016
Migrant Modalities: Radical Democracy and Intersectional Praxis in American Literatures, 1923-1976
Advisers: Daphne Brooks (Yale), Valerie Smith (Swarthmore), Alexandra Vazquez (NYU), Kinohi Nishikawa (reader), Department of English, Princeton University
Visible Plots, Invisible Realms
Advisers: Claudia Johnson, Sarah Rivett, Susan Wolfson
Being Property Once Myself: In Pursuit of the Animal in 20th Century African American Literature
Advisers: Anne Cheng, William Gleason, Imani Perry
The Trauma Hero and the Lost War: World War II, American Literature, and the Politics of Trauma, 1945-1975
2014-2015
Dead Letters: The Afterlife Before Religion
Dissertation available for review in 22 McCosh Hall.
2013-2014
"Irrational Actors: Literature and Logic in Early Modern England"
"A Way of Seeing: Modernism, Illustration, and Postcolonial Literature"
"Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Modern Transport"
"Fascinated Moderns: The Attentions of Modern Fiction"
"Gadgetry: New Media and the Fictional Imagination"
2012-2013
"Recovering Global Women's Travel Writings from the Modern Period: An Inquiry Into Genre and Narrative Agency"
"The Self Unenclosed: A New Literary History of Pragmatism, 1890-1940"
"Material Losses: Urban Ephemera in Contemporary American Literature and Culture"