Graduate Student Research
Graduate students have written theses in a number of areas of English studies, although most students focus on literary interpretation. Below is a list of some recent titles of M.A. and D.A. theses.
We will continue to update this list with thesis and dissertation titles as our current M.A. and Ph.D. students graduate.
Literature Theses
- Christine de Pizan’s Use of Irony in The City of Ladies: Shifting Boccaccio’s Reputation (M.A.)
- Orality and Textuality: Representations of Discourse Communities in Langland’s Piers Plowman (M.A.)
- Enter the Master Dissector: Metaphorical Human Dissection in The Revenger’s Tragedy (M.A.)
- Anti-Puritan Satire: The Staged Puritan Threat in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (D.A.)
- Traumatic Stress in Macbeth and Shylock (D.A.)
- Shakespeare Pedagogy: "Confusion Now Hath Made This Masterpiece!" (D.A.)
- Sentimental Constructions and Indeterminate Meanings: Thomas Jefferson and the Works of Sterne (D.A.)
- Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Cultural Upheaval: Brackenridge, Freneau, and Undergraduate Uncertainty at the College of New Jersey (D.A.)
- Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and Jane Austen: Modern Man Emerging from an Old Model (M.A.)
- Lovers’ Vows: First and Second Loves in Mansfield Park and the Novel of Second Attachment (D.A.)
- Context and Transcendence: The Ambivalent Nature of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (M.A.)
- Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: The Evolving Gothic Tradition (M.A)
- The Medical Case Study as a Rhetorical Form for Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art (D.A.)
- A Rhetoric of Renewal, Imagination, and The Sublime: The Work Of Landscape in Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life In The Rocky Mountains (M.A.)
- Mary Richardson Walker and America’s Racial Project (M.A.)
- Showdown at Rawhide: The Ed F. Winn Story (M.A.)
- Discursive Riot: Silence and Subversion in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (M.A.)
- The Intimate Circle, Popular Words, and Collectible Books of A. Edward Newton, Early Twentieth-Century American Rare Book Collector (D.A.)
- Voices From the Backwash: The Ignored, Forgotten and Silenced Sketches of Three World War I American Battlefield Nurses (M.A.)
- Smells Like Faulkner: The Use of Synesthetic Smell in Faulkner’s Novels and Short Stories (M.A.)
- E. E. Cummings, the Ambiguous Modernist: A Re-Evaluation of his Work (M.A.)
- J. D. Salinger’s Uncollected Stories and the Development of Aesthetic and Moral Themes in The Catcher In The Rye (M.A.)
- Nothing To Laugh About: The Effects of Humor in Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (M.A.)
- The Archetypal Wise Woman In Postcolonial Works Of Magical Realism Of The Americas: An Examination of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Cien años de soledad , Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Toni Morrison’s Paradise (Ph.D.)
- The Evolutions (and DE-) of Salman Rushdie’s Narrators (M.A.)
- Landscape Aesthetics and Antillean Identity in Derek Walcott’s Omeros (D.A.)
- Failed Hybridity: Creole Identity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (M.A.)
- Examining Unclosed Wounds in the Biografiction of Sherman Alexie and Tim O’Brien (M.A.)
- Images and Echoes: Memory, Imagination and the Mature Perspective in the Works of Harriet Doerr (M.A.)
- A Search for Depth in Robert A. Heinlein’s Short Fiction (D.A.)
- Fact, Fiction, and the Literature Of Truth: A Study Of J. Joseph Mitchell’s Up In The Old Hotel (M.A.)
- Passing as The "Tragic" Mulatto: Constructions of Hybridity in Toni Morrison’s Novels (D.A.)
- Empathetic Imagination: Perception, Aesthetics, and Ethics in Life of PI by Yann Martel (M.A.)
- Andrea Hairston’s Fantastic Trajectory: A Multicultural Science Fiction Aesthetic (D.A.)
- From Dissolution to Realization: The Interdependence Of Self And Place In Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (M.A.)
- Adapting Edward II: Eight Representations of Early Modern Sexuality (Ph.D.)
- “Passionate Struggle Into Conscious Being”: D. H. Lawrence and Creative Nonfiction (Ph.D.)
- The Immortal Child: Jack Kerouac’s Search for the Sublime (M.A.)
- “Fellow-Citizens With the Saints”: Mormon Conversion Narratives and the Rhetoric of Religious Identity (Ph.D.)
Pedagogy Theses (Literature and Composition)
- The Effects of Author Sex on Students’ Evaluations of Student Writing (M.A.)
- Connected Pedagogy: Building a Refined Constructionist Method for a First-Year Composition Course (M.A.)
- "What Do You Have In Mind?" Using Contemplative Strategies to Elicit Thoughtful Writing (M.A.)
- Better Readers, Better Writers: Tutoring Reading in the Writing Center (D.A.)
- The Idea of an Owl: Online Writing Conferences for Second Language Students (D.A.)
- Essentialism and Degrees of Diversity: Examining the Politics of Authority in the Literature Classroom (D.A.)
- Making Connections: Creative Writing Pedagogy and its Implications in the Composition Classroom (D.A.)
- Creative Nonfiction in Introduction to Literature Classrooms and Strategies for Teaching Tracy Kidder’s Home Town (D.A.)
- Options for Teaching Literature and the Environment (D.A.)
- Teaching Shakespeare in Performance: Recent Trends and Annotated Bibliography (D.A.)
- From Strawberries to Strange Cases: A Structural Review of the Pedagogical Canon (M.A.)
- Encouraging Humanist Approaches in Higher Education Literature Classrooms (M.A.)
Last Modified: 06/17/12 at 11:54:46 AM