Honors Theses from 2022
Afro-Diasporic (Dis)Illusionment: Perceptions of the American Dream in Americanah and Behold the Dreamers, Sabrien Abdelrahman
Ambitious Boys and Girls: Childhood Failure and Gender Norms in Little Women and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ceci Hughes
"But a Contraband is a Free Man:" Civil War Literature and the Figure of the "Contraband", Mary A. Kardos
'Carcern' and 'Wordcræft': Enclosure, Connection and Gender in Cynewulf's "Juliana" and "Elene", Katherine Grotewiel
Feelings of Fallenness: Affect and Gender in Victorian Fallen Woman Novels, Kate Kowalski
Framing the Female Narrative: Male Audiences and Women's Storytelling Within Two Brontë Novels, Sammy Murphy
'Geomorlic' or 'Eorlic?' Uncovering Early English Emotional Communities in "The Wanderer," "Deor," and "The Wife’s Lament", Hunter Phillips
Honors Theses from 2021
Flipping the Castle: Evolution of Gothic Spaces in the Domestic Sphere, Kate Lucas
“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions of Nature in Edith Wharton’s Fiction, Jonathan Malks
Laurence Sterne: A Different Way of Approaching the Notion of Life in the Early Novel, Robert Metaxatos
mo(u)rning person, Kate Dragonetti
Purple Magpie Terrace: A Story of His and Hers, Zheng Yu
The Humorous Tradition in Arthurian Grail Literature, Benjamin Woessner
Whole and Hybrid: Resisting Essentialism in The Satanic Verses and The Impressionist, Louise Strange
Honors Theses from 2020
Blue Cathedral, Jessica Urgo
Charlotte Brontë's Victorian Women: A Psychological Analysis in Light of Jungian Theory, Virginia Elam
Confronting Toxicity from the Beehive: Ecofeminist Alternatives to Capitalism, Bianca Bowman
Emergency Contact, Sophia Shealy
J.G. Ballard and the Anthropocene, Noah Terrell
Resurrecting the Women of The Waste Land, Angela Rose Granados West
Speaker into Specimen: The Representation of Dialect in Victorian Fiction, Hunter Hall
Tell Me What You Really Think (A Novel), Marriya Schwarz
The Commodification of Helen: Tracing the Phallic Economy of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Quinn Arnone
The Homoerotic Architectures of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Samuel McIntyre
The Sun Sets on Chinchontepec: (Re)productions of Salvadoran Memory, Aida Campos
“You Only Have Time to Explode’”: Nathanael West’s Novels, Mass Media, and Illusory Dreams, Edward Millman
Honors Theses from 2019
An Incongruous Present: Identifying the Absurd Aesthetic in William Faulkner’s "Requiem for a Nun" (1951), Blake Hani
A Portrait of Women’s Property: An Analysis of Married Women’s Property Rights in The Portrait of a Lady, The Spoils of Poynton and Howards End, Kelsey Llewellyn
Billy's Burg: Investigating Colonial and Capitalist Constructions through Poetry, Ryan Onders
Creative Currencies: Circulation and Sovereignty in The Alchemist, Urania, and The Blazing World, Jacqueline Keshner
Haunted Housewives: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Gothic, Caroline Kessler
(In)Human Anatomies: Constructions of Whiteness and Otherness in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Katherine Avery
'I walk pure before God!': Narrative Structure and Reimagined Negotiations in the Victorian Female Bildungsroman, Devon Boyers
Mine, Brooke Stephenson
Recovering Affiliates: Reclassifying Emily Dickinson's Variant Poems, Anna McAnnally
Sensational Investigations: Social decay and reform in the Victorian sensation novel, Colleen Wilson
The Sacred Touch of Hallowed Hands: Tracing the Holy through the Haptic in George Eliot’s Early Work, Katharine Isabel Williams
"This Great Theatre of Nature": Henry Fielding and the Ancient Comic Stage, Stephen Ryan
Thoughtful Books and Thoughtful Lives: Androgyny and Gender Dynamics in the Works of Sherwood Anderson, Rick Stevenson
Wordsworth's British Empire: Property, Liberty, and the Slave Question, Anna Wingfield
Honors Theses from 2018
Education in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, Jiayue Jiang
"Glimmerings, Hints, and Secret Amazements": William Blake, Walt Whitman, and the Spiritual Incantations of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", Elijah Levine
"O God Within My Breast": The Religion of Emily Brontë, Christina Danberg
“Reader, I Did Not Marry Him:” Marriage Proposals, Choice, and Female Desire in the Victorian Era, Elizabeth Rose Flood
Resistance and Women's Solidarity in The Handmaid's Tale, from 1985 to 2017, Dana S. Florczak
Stripping the Paint: Uncovering the Self-Made Man in The Rise of Silas Lapham and The Great Gatsby, Emma Elena Johnson
Transparent Sketches: A Field Journal of Silence, Annabel McSpadden
Virginia Woolf and the 'Objective' Camera: The Relationship Between Text and Image in Three Guineas and Orlando, Meilan Solly
Winter's Bane: Part One, Jessica Molz
Honors Theses from 2017
Aphra Behn, One of Churchill’s Top Girls?: Assessing Caryl Churchill’s Lack of Deference to Behn’s Legacy, Hayley A. Hahn
Defining Ambiguous: Lesbianism and the Vampire in “Christabel” and Carmilla, Holly E. Reynolds
"If there be such space:" Haunted Landscapes and Crises of Sonhood in Cormac McCarthy's Westerns, Kayla M. Armstrong
Love on a Blighted Star: Nature and Female Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, Emily M. Armstrong
Patients, Prose, and Poetry: The Medical and Literary World of William Carlos Williams, Sarah Heins
Rites: Poems, Lydia G. Brown
Scattered Prizes: Colonial Fantasies and the Material Body in the English Renaissance Blazon, Aidan J. Selmer
The Northern Novel of Manners: Wuthering Heights & The Invention of a Genre, Cameron I. Menchel
The Subversion of Wagnerian Gender Dynamics in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sophia S. Farion
Working the Garden: Women and Religion in Apocalyptic Fiction, Sarah C. Collier
Honors Theses from 2016
Catharsis, Shannon Callahan
“Insane for the destination:” Disrupting the Teleological Impulses of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, Noah Christopher Brooksher
Our Lady (a novel in progress), Molly Earner
Renegotiating the Apocalypse: Mary Shelley’s "The Last Man", Kathryn Joan Darling
Telling the Stories that Can't Be Told: Translating War in Hemingway, Vonnegut, and O'Brien, Emily A. Nye
The Ludic Life of Things: Explorations in the Vitality of the Ludic Object in Contemporary Narratives, Eamonn deLacy
The Revolutionary New Woman: Renegotiating her Social Contract through Sex, Nicole Walsh
Honors Theses from 2015
“A Constant Unfolding of Far-Resonate Action”: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Spinoza, and the Ethics of Power, Zachary J. Hardy
"A product of her body as well as soul": Narrative fullness and the feminine body in the work of Julia Ward Howe, Sarah J. Schuster
Bouts of Brain Fever: Female Rebellion and the Dubiety of Illness in Victorian Fiction, Stephanie R. Mason
Deconstructing Terror: The Political Theatre of Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, and Martin Crimp, Beatrice Loayza
Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and Zuzak's The Book Thief: Impossible Narration in Millennial Fiction, Maria Dougherty
Girls without Faces & Other Stories, Molly E. Greer
He Do the Police in Different Voices: the Influence of Detection Fiction in T. S. Eliot's Works, Claire Weaver
"How Do I Know What I Think Till I See What I Say?" William James's and Carl Jung's Ideas on the Unconscious Mind As Applied to Stegner, Diana J. Floegel
Open wounds, shrunk...but wounds still: Mental Illness in the Life and Literature of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Leah C. Bailey
Portraits of Strangers, Dana Lotito
The Pendragon Cycle: Celtic Christianity in the Arthurian Legend through Bards, Prophets, and Historians, Rebecca L. Heine
Thrown Into America: Existentialism in the New World, William Toler Marsh
Honors Theses from 2014
"A Density of Meaning": Literary Representations of the British Museum, 1818-1929, Rory E. Sullivan
“All Persons Living and Dead Are Purely Coincidental:” Unity, Dissolution, and the Humanist Wampeter of Kurt Vonnegut’s Universe, Danielle M. Clarke
A Love Story, a Tragedy, or Both, Hannah Boes
A New Wessex: The Influence on Shakespeare on Genre in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, Catherine G. Strycharz
"As the Work had its origin in love": Masculine Responsibility and the Economy of Sympathy in Anti-Tom Novels, 1852-1854, Eleanor A. Pace
"Can't They Stop The Guns?" Trauma and Inter-War Detective Fiction, Kyla J. Ainsworth
Charlotte Bronte's Other Belgian Novel: Sex, the Foreign Body, and the Legacy of Brussels in "Jane Eyre", Rachel M. Watson
Freedomland, Elyse J. Endick
Memory Dress: Fiction and Nonfiction Inspired by Fukushima, Jordan Thomas Sutlive
"See here my show": Providence and The Theatrum Mundi in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Miles S. Drawdy
Taboos and Primitivism: James Frazer, H.G. Wells, and the Intersection of Anthropology and Science Fiction, Eleanor L. Riesenberg
"The Art of Questioning": Interrogations of Exceptionalist History and Cultural Mythology in the Novels of Salman Rushdie and William Faulkner, Hannah R. Barnhart
The Reverie Genre: Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Eliot, and the Roots of Modern Consciousness, Corinne Tucker
“Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar”: Wallace Stevens and the Visual Arts, Olivia Sweet
"Wit so rare and grace so peerless": The Collaborative Construction of Frances Sargent Osgood's Public Image, Madeline V. Benjamin
Honors Theses from 2013
Letters, Desire, and the Novel in the Late Nineteenth Century, Kayla Grant
Liminal Agency: Texts, Textiles, and Gendered Performance in the Courtship Narrative of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Emily L. Loney
Still Lives, Claire Lewis Pittman
