This page contains honors theses produced by senior English majors. For a list of all honors theses since 2011, click here.
Theses from 2024
Metaautobiography and Identity's Paradox: de Manian and Derridean Readings of Joyce and Svevo, Giancarlo Carlucci
Anarchism, Dreaming, and Technology as Cures to Sexual Violence in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Word for World is Forest, Anastasia Fowler
Theses from 2023
Encountering Impossibility: Georges Bataille’s Acéphalic Lifework, Trijit Pico Banerjee
Theses from 2022
Flatness, Distortion, Nonsense, and the Ordinary in the Novels of Bolaño, O'Brien, and Bernhard, Elizabeth Claire Kissane
“Dear You”: Witnessing Trauma in the World of The Handmaid’s Tale, Caroline Wood
Theses from 2021
“What We Do Minister to Our Gross Selves”: Afflicted Bodies, Illicit Sex, and the Agency of Disease in Romeo & Juliet and Measure for Measure, Deon J. Custard
Choosing the Fall to Rise Up: Gender Consumption and Eve’s Culinary World, Sarah Catherine Herde
Beguiling time, making air, and taking milk for gall: queerness in Macbeth, Erin Lyons
Theses from 2020
“At the heart of legend”: Feminist Revisionist Mythology in Twentieth-Century Poetry, Madison Rozells
Cosmopolitan Americanisms: Post-9/11 Transnational Immigrant Narratives, Bence Xavier Szechenyi
Theses from 2019
The Matrilineal Specter in Kingston's Woman Warrior and Keller's Comfort Woman, Theodore V. Burns
Sentimental Arcs From Grief to Mourning in An Unnecessary Woman and Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine, Carl D. Deakins Mx
Caught Between: Achille, the Instar and Intention/Reception in Walcott’s Omeros, Peter Nadel
Modernist Temporalities: Figures of Time in the Novels of Virginia Woolf, Tyler Parke
Dickens and Trauma: The Art of Autobiographical Fiction, Sarah M. Rothmann
Some Strive to Remember, Others Wish They Could Forget: The Intersection of Culture and Trauma in Vietnam War Literatures, William Sanders
Theses from 2018
Queering Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Radical Thought and Transformative Vision, Justin Ameen Hoden
Of Bucks, Butterflies, and Black Lives: An Analysis of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, John C. McWilliams
Theses from 2017
Finding Closure: Trauma Narratives in Graphic Literatures, Katharina Harling
Waste, Time and Film in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Nathan T. Moreau
Theses from 2016
Chaucer's Women and Women Chaucerians: Unveiling the Modern Academy as a Medieval Institution through Chaucer's Poetry, Cheyenne J. Cannarozzo
Poetics of the Heartland: The Lyric Voices of James Wright and Stanley Plumly, William R. Cleaves
Safely Shooting a Quiet Woman: A Study of Patriarchy, Sexuality, Racism, and Putrefaction in John Webster’s Plays, Rebecca C. Dobbin
Reading "A Politics of Location": An Ethical Mapping of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Michela J. Moscufo
La Mujer en La Frontera: Gender and Assimilation in Pedro Juan Soto’s Spiks, Joseph Foster’s Stephana, and José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, Jacqueline L. Paredes
Empathy, Medicine, and the Novel, Anna Sophia Williams
Theses from 2015
"She among them but never of them": Race and Sexuality through Tomboy Transformation Narratives of the Postwar Era, Michael John Creedon
Reflections in the Author's Eye: Optics, Involution, and Artifice in the Novels and Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Amelia J. Oliver
"Infinitesimal Progress": Rethinking Bergsonian Modalities of Time in William Faulkner's Novels, 1929-1932, Beau P. Sperry
“To my virginity!”: Queerness, Silencing, and Dominicanity in Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Nicholas Jason Steverson
Theses from 2014
Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie, Kathryn A. Ailes
Materiality and the Literary Letter, Alexandra McDowell Carley
How the Mind Refigures Memory: The Role of Social Construction and Fallibility in the Fictions of Faulkner, Woolf, and Nabokov, Rebecca H. Salzman-Fiske
Religion and the Postmodern in Contemporary North American Fiction, Alexandra T. Sentner
"Another Landscape, Another Tongue:" The Queer Language of Silence in Virginia Woolf's Fiction, Sarah Streat
Theses from 2013
Satire and the Necessity of Locale: Genealogical Readings in Max Beerbohm and Karl Kraus, Matthew Joseph Bettles
Jane Austen and the Art of Revision: Reading, Fiction, Feminism, Natalie R. Thompson
Theses from 2012
Child of the Black Atlantic: Negotiating Identities in Helene Cooper’s Memoir, Tasheana S. Dukuly
Love, Crime, and Township Identity in Fred Khumalo's "Bitches' Brew" and "Seven Steps to Heaven", Erica Rose Long
The Problem of the Ordinary: Liberating the Fantastic and the Uncanny, Meghan R. Napier
Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell: Authorship, Collaboration, and Divergence, Maria J. Rouvalis
Counting "Whole Persons" in David Foster Wallace's Fiction, Charles J. Thaxton
The Evolution of Chivalric Values in the Order of the Garter: Edward III to Elizabeth I, Sarah Joy Vigne Ms.
"The Vindication of Spinsters: Winifred Holtby's Case for Female Satisfaction", Katherine Ann Wiryaman