Photo credit:  Robert H. Taylor Collection, Princeton University Library.

Across the disciplines every Princeton student undertakes substantial, original research toward the senior thesis. On our undergraduate pages you can find a full description of the options for thesis work in the department, which we divide into three main types: literary and cultural analysis, literary and cultural history, and literary and cultural theory. We also sometimes advise theses that take the form of critical editions, long-form journalism, or hybrids of fiction, poetry, and criticism. The theses below (accessible via the Mudd Manuscript Library from computers on the Princeton network) have been chosen as examples of this range of possibility. Behind them stand hundreds of others, an archive stretching decades back, each a record of curiosity, hard work, and intellectual passion.

Emily Silk (Class of 2010), Fat and Blood and Ghosts: Women's Supernatural Fiction and the Rest Cure Culture in America, 1880-1920

Samantha Pergadia (Class of 2011), Animal Tales: Anthropomorphism and the Management of Compassion

Alexandra Hay (Class of 2012), Island Cities and the Urban Experience: Venice and Manhattan as Dreamscapes, Escapes, and Timescapes

Tara Knoll (Class of 2012), Reading for Reentry: Literature's Role in Alternative Sentencing

Dixon Li (Class of 2014), Between Mold and Molt: Aesthetics and the Matter of Race

Alexandra Morton (Class of 2015), “A chaos—hollow, half–consumed”: The Performing Woman in Mid–Victorian Novels and Culture

Madeleine Reese (Class of 2016), The Acknowledged Animal: Cavell’s Recognition and Animal Suffering in Shakespeare’s Plays

Elliott Eglish (Class of 2017), To Hope in Hell: Figuration at the Limit in Cormac McCarthy and Walter Benjamin

Gunnar Rice (Class of 2017), Seeing Globally in Three Plays of Shakespeare

Jack Lohmann (Class of 2019), “The Sentencing of Nauru” - unavailable

Annabel Barry (Class of 2019), Feverish Readings: Fever and the Mind-Body Relationship in English Letters & Literature, 1785-1872

Sylvie Thode (Class of 2020), Up in Arms: Poetries of Resistance from the Northern Irish Troubles and the American AIDS Crisis - unavailable

Rasheeda Saka (Class of 2020), Fugitive Yearnings: Stillness and Migration in Literatures of the Black Diaspora - unavailable