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English (MA) Theses

Below is a selection of dissertations from the English program in Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences that have been voluntarily included in Chapman University Digital Commons. Additional dissertations from years prior to 2019 are available through the Leatherby Libraries' print collection or in Proquest's Dissertations and Theses database.

Theses from 2024 2024

Interior Chinatown: Chinatown as a Performative Space , Audrey Fong

"Old Cod": The Power of Storytelling in Conor McPherson's The Weir , Sarah Johnson

The Beginning of the End: The Cultivation of Transchronological Perceptuality in Arcadia and “Story of Your Life” , Sawyer Kelly

“No One to Show Us the Way:” Assessing the Contemporary Relevance of the Gay Male Bildungsroman , Matthew Lemas

Posthumanism in Literature: Redefining Selfhood, Temporality, and Reality/ies through Fiction , Eileen Kelley Pierce

Catastrophic Progress: A Queer Materialist Analysis of the 2023 Trans/Bud Light Controversy , Brianna Radke

Banned Books and Educational Censorship: The Necessity of Keeping Queer Books in Schools , Rebecca Rhodes

The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism and Gentrification in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina and Corina , Miranda Roberts

Navigating Identity Through Education in Literature and in the Classroom , Sofia Sakzlyan

Nobody Inside: Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": An Analysis on Whole/Incomplete Bodies, "The Maggie Thing"and Sick and Dancing Mothers , Emily Velasquez

Theses from 2023 2023

“Everything and Nothing”: Exhibiting Irishness at the Chicago World Fair of 1893 , Jessica Bocinski

Beyond Allegory: Postcolonial Debates in Science Fiction , Su Chen

Lovecraftian Queerness: Weird and Queer Temporalities in Lovecraft Country and Detransition, Baby , Eurydice Dye

The Dictator Novel in YA Latinx Fantasy , Catherine Gallegos

Humanization of the Refugee as the Modern Subject in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West , Ani Gazazyan

“Henrietta and Harriet:” Considering the Marginalized Best Friend in Burney’s Cecilia and Austen’s Emma , Elena Goodenberger

Rising Costs of Universities and the Impact on Teaching Effectiveness and Student Outcomes , Patrick Hanna

Failure Facing Pedagogy in First-Year Rhetoric and Composition Classrooms , Karuna Minh Hin

Steps Toward Healing from the Possessive Other: The Vital Role of Fantastical Literature in Trauma Theory , Rebekah Izard

Mirroring Financial Speculation and Late Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction: Worker Gullibility and Guilt as Re-imagination of Human Value , Ian Koh

Oceans of Literature - The Little Mermaid , Makena Metz

What Makes a Woman "Pious and Good": The Function of Several Grimm Brothers' Cautionary Fairy Tales , Hannah Montante

From the Master’s Maternity to Redemptive Nurturing: Liberating Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy , Isabelle Stillman

“Beauty and the Beast” and the Representation of the Female: How Fairy Tales Reinforce and Influence Our Current Understanding of Gender Roles , Elizabeth N. Tran

The Significance of Maintaining Character Integrity in Literary Retellings , Sara Turner

Mrs. Dalloway as a Window for Understanding Life , Kristen Venegas

The Domestic Worker in Latinx Fiction: The Discursive Formation of Latinidad , Constance von Igel de Mello

Dorian Gray: The Myth , Peggy Sue Wood

Theses from 2022 2022

Potential For a Pedagogical Level-Up: Teaching First-Year Composition Through Rhetoric of Gaming , Cayman Beeman

Personhood and Objecthood: Examining the Speaker’s Interiority and Double Consciousness in Citizen: An American Lyric , Winnie Chak

Innately American, Black America’s Inheritance: A Rhetorical Analysis of Black Death & Identity , Montéz Jennings

Examining Wonder Woman through a Feminist Voice: How Patty Jenkins’ 2017 Adaptation Upheaved her Creation, Representation, and 80 Year Legacy , Tatiana Madrid

“Strumpet,” “Huswife,” “Whore”: Centering Othello ’s Bianca , Phoebe Merten

Lack of Affirmative Consent: Trauma in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” , Ansalee Morrison

Traumas and Recovery in Takaya Natsuki's Fruits Basket , Vesper North

Poverty, Social Isolation, Uselessness, and Loneliness: The Fears and Anxieties of 19th-Century British Governesses , Lydia Pejovic

Speaking Up For Generic Asians in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown , Orel Shilon

The Brain Scan as Ideograph , Paige Welsh

Changing the Definition of the Orient Through Hollywood , Amanda Yaghmai

Theses from 2021 2021

The Dystopian Impulse and Media Consumption: Redefining Utopia Via the Narrative Economics of the New Media Age , Turki Alghamdi

Collaborative Storytelling: Composition Pedagogy and Communal Benefits of Narrative Innovation , Aysel Atamdede

Feminist Rhetorics: Theory and Practice of Strategic Silence , Paolena Comouche

Surveillance: The Digital Dark Side , Brittyn Davis

Fanfiction As: Searching for Significance in the Academic Realm , Megan Friess

Realism & Language: How Luis Alberto Urrea Uses Bilingualism to Elevate His Works of Realism , Ashley Gomez

"A Mind of Metal and Wheels": Agrarian Ruralism in Joss Whedon's Firefly and J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings , Christopher Hines

“Why Are We Still Reading About Rosa Parks?”: Essential Questions for Continuation Schools , Samantha Mbodwam

Decolonizing the Body , Daniel Miess

Black Panther Shatters Social Binaries to Explore Postcolonial Themes: How Ancestry, Identity, Revenge, and the Third Space Impact the Ability to Navigate Change and Create New Forms of Cultural Hybridity , Deborah Paquin

Anti-Racist Pedagogy: A Practical Means of Building Bonds Between Marginalized Students and Instructors in the Composition Classroom , Santa-Victoria Pérez

Fear Then and Now: The Vampire as a Reflection of Society , Mackenzie Phelps

Monstrous and Beautiful: Jungian Archetypes in Wilde’s Salomé , Nayana Rajnish

Journeying to a Third Space of Sovereignty: Explorations of Land, Cultural Hybridity, and Sovereignty in Ceremony and There There , Jillian Eve Sanchez

Through the Female Perspective: An Analysis of Male Characters in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey , Natalia Sanchez

The Tiered Workshop: The Effects of Using a Paced Workshop in a Composition Classroom , Madison Shockley

Aztlán Potentialities: Queer Male Chicanx Affect and Temporalities , Ethan Trejo

Partying Like It's 1925: A Comparison and Contrast of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Azuela's The Underdogs , Sarah N. Valadez

Theses from 2020 2020

Stephen Dedalus and the Mind as Hypertext in Ulysses , Ariel Banayan

Lessons from Hybridity: A Look into the Coupling of Image and Text in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory , Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric , and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic , Elizabeth Chen

Dawn of the Undead Classroom: Pop-Culture in the First-Year Composition Classroom , Sierra A. Ellison

Moving Beyond Grades: A Shift in Assessing First-Year Composition , Matthew Goldman

Murmurs of Revolution: Mythical Subversion in Dostoevsky , Connor Guetersloh

The Fallen Woman: An Exploration of the Voiceless Women in Victorian England through Three Plays of Oscar Wilde , Marco Randazzo

The Ubume Challenge: A Digital Environmental Humanities Project , Sam Risak

Student Disposition Towards Discussing Race in the Classroom , Natalie Salagean

Trauma Begetting Trauma: Fukú, Masks, and Implicit Forgiveness in the Works of Junot Díaz , Jacob VanWormer

‘Amore Captus:’ Turning Bedtricks in the Arthurian Canon , Candice Yacono

Theses from 2019 2019

The Contradictory Faces of “Sisterhood”: A Case-Study on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Its Theatrical Adaptation by James Willing and Leonard Rae, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Its Miniseries Adaptation on HBO , Lama Alsulaiman

Terrence McNally’s Universalizing Model: The Role of Disability in Andre’s Mother; Lips Together, Teeth Apart ; and Love! Valour! Compassion! , Alexa Burnstine

A Way to Persist: Storytelling and Its Effect on Trauma in Gábor Schein’s The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus , Duncan Capriotti

Language: A Bridge or Barrier to Social Groups , Adina Corke

Haole Like Me: Identity Construction and Politics in Hawaii , Savanah Janssen

Black Women’s Bodies as the Site of Malignity: Interrogating (Mis)representations of Black Women in 16th and 17th Century British Literature , Tonika Reed

The Efficacy of Varying Small Group Workshops in the Composition Classroom , Daniel Strasberger

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms of Capital” in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us , Allie Harrison Vernon

Theses from 2018 2018

Player-Response: On the Nature of Interactive Narratives as Literature , Lee Feldman

Theses from 2017 2017

The Rhetoric of Disability: an Analysis of the Language of University Disability Service Centers , Katie Ratermann

Theses from 2016 2016

The Ritualization of Violence in The Magic Toyshop , Victor Chalfant

Concrete Reality: The Posthuman Landscapes of J.G. Ballard , Mark Hausmann

Readers in Pursuit of Popular Justice: Unraveling Conflicting Frameworks in Lolita , Innesa Ranchpar

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Home > ARTSSCI > English > dissertations

English Dissertations and Theses

The English Department Dissertations and Theses Series is comprised of dissertations and thesis authored by Marquette University's English Department doctoral and master's students.

Theses/Dissertations from 2024 2024

Speculative Escapism in Contemporary Fantasy: Labor, Utility, Affect , Liamog Seamus Drislane

Disillusionment and Domesticity in Mid-20th-Century British Catholic Literature , Catherine Simmerer

A LIBERATED WEST?: FEMALE AUTHORS’ REPRESENTATIONS OF THE "REAL AND THE FANTASIZED" ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER , Amanda Diane Zastrow

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Lifting the Postmodern Veil: Cosmopolitanism, Humanism, and Decolonization in Global Fictions of the 21st Century , Matthew Burchanoski

Gothic Transformations and Remediations in Cheap Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Wendy Fall

Milton’s Learning: Complementarity and Difference in Paradise Lost , Peter Spaulding

“The Development of the Conceptive Plot Through Early 19th-Century English Novels” , Jannea R. Thomason

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Gonzo Eternal , John Francis Brick

Intertextuality and Sociopolitical Engagement in Contemporary Anglophone Women’s Writing , Jackielee Derks

Innovation, Genre, and Authenticity in the Nineteenth-Century Irish Novel , David Aiden Kenney II

Reluctant Sons: The Irish Matrilineal Tradition of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien , Jessie Wirkus Haynes

Britain's Extraterrestrial Empire: Colonial Ambition, Anxiety, and Ambivalence in Early Modern Literature , Mark Edward Wisniewski

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Re-Reading the “Culture Clash”: Alternative Ways of Reading in Indian Horse , Hailey Whetten

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the Twentieth Century , Danielle Kristene Clapham

Reforming Victorian Sense/Abilities: Disabilities in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Social Problem Novels , Hunter Nicole Duncan

Genre and Loss: The Impossibility of Restoration in 20th Century Detective Fiction , Kathryn Hendrickson

A Productive Failure: Existentialism in Fin de Siècle England , Maxwell Patchet

Inquiry and Provocation: The Use of Ambiguity in Sixteenth-Century English Political Satire , Jason James Zirbel

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

No Home but the World: Forced Migration and Transnational Identity , Justice Hagan

The City As a Trap: 20th and 21st Century American Literature and the American Myth of Mobility , Andrew Joseph Hoffmann

The Fantastic and the First World War , Brian Kenna

Insane in the Brain, Blood, and Lungs: Gender-Specific Manifestations of Hysteria, Chlorosis, & Consumption in 19th-Century Literature , Anna P. Scanlon

Reading Multicultural Novels Melancholically: Racial Grief and Grievance in the Joy Luck Club, Beloved, and Anil's Ghost , Jennifer Arias Sweeney

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

The Ethos of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric and the Democratic Function of American Protest and Countercultural Literature , Jeffrey Lorino Jr

Literary Cosmopolitanisms of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy , Sunil Samuel Macwan

The View from Here: Toward a Sissy Critique , Tyler Monson

The Forbidden Zone Writers: Femininity and Anglophone Women War Writers of the Great War , Sareene Proodian

Theatrical Weddings and Pious Frauds: Performance and Law in Victorian Marriage Plots , Adrianne A. Wojcik

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Changing the Victorian Habit Loop: The Body in the Poetry and Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris , Bryan Gast

Gendering Scientific Discourse from 1790-1830: Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Marcet , Bridget E. Kapler

Discarding Dreams and Legends: The Short Fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty , Katy L. Leedy

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Saving the Grotesque: The Grotesque System of Liberation in British Modernism (1922-1932) , Matthew Henningsen

The Pulpit's Muse: Conversive Poetics in the American Renaissance , Michael William Keller

A Single Man of Good Fortune: Postmodern Identities and Consumerism in the New Novel of Manners , Bonnie McLean

Julian of Norwich: Voicing the Vernacular , Therese Elaine Novotny

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Homecomings: Victorian British Women Travel Writers And Revisions Of Domesticity , Emily Paige Blaser

From Pastorals to Paterson: Ecology in the Poetry and Poetics of William Carlos WIlliams , Daniel Edmund Burke

Argument in Poetry: (Re)Defining the Middle English Debate in Academic, Popular, and Physical Contexts , Kathleen R. Burt

Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England , Steven A. Hackbarth

The Creation of Heaven in the Middle Ages , William Storm

(re)making The Gentleman: Genteel Masculinities And The Country Estate In The Novels Of Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, And Elizabeth Gaskell , Shaunna Kay Wilkinson

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Brides, Department Stores, Westerns, and Scrapbooks--The Everyday Lives of Teenage Girls in the 1940s , Carly Anger

Placed People: Rootedness in G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry , David Harden

Rhetorics Of Girlhood Trauma In Writing By Holly Goddard Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Cisneros, And Jamaica Kincaid , Stephanie Marie Stella

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital , Brandon Chitwood

"Be-Holde the First Acte of this Tragedy" : Generic Symbiosis and Cross-Pollination in Jacobean Drama and the Early Modern Prose Novella , Karen Ann Zyck Galbraith

Pamela: Or, Virtue Reworded: The Texts, Paratexts, and Revisions that Redefine Samuel Richardson's Pamela , Jarrod Hurlbert

Violence and Masculinity in American Fiction, 1950-1975 , Magdalen McKinley

Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood , Susan Muse

Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, and Postnational Identity in Four Novels by Irish Women, 1960-2000 , Sarah Nestor

Truth Telling: Testimony and Evidence in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell , Rebecca Parker Fedewa

Spirit of the Psyche: Carl Jung's and Victor White's Influence on Flannery O'Connor's Fiction , Paul Wakeman

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Performing the Audience: Constructing Playgoing in Early Modern Drama , Eric Dunnum

Paule Marshall's Critique of Contemporary Neo-Imperialisms Through the Trope of Travel , Michelle Miesen Felix

Hermeneutics, Poetry, and Spenser: Augustinian Exegesis and the Renaissance Epic , Denna Iammarino-Falhamer

Encompassing the Intolerable: Laughter, Memory, and Inscription in the Fiction of John McGahern , John Keegan Malloy

Regional Consciousness in American Literature, 1860-1930 , Kelsey Louise Squire

The Ethics of Ekphrasis: The Turn to Responsible Rhetoric in Mid-Twentieth Century American Poetry , Joshua Scott Steffey

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Cognitive Architectures: Structures of Passion in Joanna Baillie's Dramas , Daniel James Bergen

On Trial: Restorative Justice in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley Family Fictions , Colleen M. Fenno

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

What's the point to eschatology : multiple religions and terminality in James Joyce's Finnegans wake , Martin R. Brick

Economizing Characters: Harriet Martineau and the Problems of Poverty in Victorian Literature, Culture and Law , Mary Colleen Willenbring

Submissions from 2008 2008

"An improbable fiction": The marriage of history and romance in Shakespeare's Henriad , Marcia Eppich-Harris

Bearing the Mark of the Social: Notes Towards a Cosmopolitan Bildungsroman , Megan M. Muthupandiyan

The Gothic Novel and the Invention of the Middle-Class Reader: Northanger Abbey As Case Study , Tenille Nowak

Not Just a Novel of Epic Proportions: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man As Modern American Epic , Dana Edwards Prodoehl

Recovering the Radicals: Women Writers, Reform, and Nationalist Modes of Revolutionary Discourse , Mark J. Zunac

Theses/Dissertations from 2007 2007

"The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , Amy M. Amendt-Raduege

The Games Men Play: Madness and Masculinity in Post-World War II American Fiction, 1946-1964 , Thomas P. Durkin

Denise Levertov: Through An Ecofeminist Lens , Katherine A. Hanson

The Wit of Wrestling: Devotional-Aesthetic Tradition in Christina Rossetti's Poetry , Maria M.E. Keaton

Genderless Bodies: Stigma and the Myth of Womanhood , Ellen M. Letizia

Envy and Jealousy in the Novels of the Brontës: A Synoptic Discernment , Margaret Ann McCann

Technologies of the Late Medieval Self: Ineffability, Distance, and Subjectivity in the Book of Margery Kempe , Crystal L. Mueller

"Finding-- a Map-- to That Place Called Home": The Journey from Silence to Recovery in Patrick McCabe's Carn and Breakfast on Pluto , Valerie A. Murrenus Pilmaier

Emily Dickinson's Ecocentric Pastoralism , Moon-ju Shin

The American Jeremiad in Civil War Literature , Jacob Hadley Stratman

Theses/Dissertations from 2006 2006

Literary Art in Times of Crisis: The Proto-Totalitarian Anxiety of Melville, James, and Twain , Matthew J. Darling

(Re) Writing Genre: Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison , Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert

"Amsolookly Kersse": Clothing in Finnegan's Wake , Catherine Simpson Kalish

"Do Your Will": Shakespeare's Use of the Rhetoric of Seduction in Four Plays , Jason James Nado

Woman in Emblem: Locating Authority in the Work and Identity of Katherine Philips (1632-1664) , Susan L. Stafinbil

When the Bough Breaks: Poetry on Abortion , Wendy A. Weaver

Theses/Dissertations from 2005 2005

Heroic Destruction: Shame and Guilt Cultures in Medieval Heroic Poetry , Karl E. Boehler

Poe and Early (Un)American Drama , Amy C. Branam

Grammars of Assent: Constructing Poetic Authority in An Age of Science , William Myles Carroll III

This Place is Not a Place: The Constructed Scene in the Works of Sir Walter Scott , Colin J. Marlaire

Cognitive Narratology: A Practical Approach to the Reader-Writer Relationship , Debra Ann Ripley

Theses/Dissertations from 2004 2004

Defoe and the Pirates: Function of Genre Conventions in Raiding Narratives , William J. Dezoma

Creative Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novel , Michelle Ruggaber Dougherty

Exclusionary Politics: Mourning and Modernism in the Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Amy Levy, and Charlotte Mew , Donna Decker Schuster

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Toward a Re-Formed Confession: Johann Gerhard's Sacred Meditations and "Repining Restlessnesse" in the Poetry of George Herbert , Erik P. Ankerberg

Idiographic Spaces: Representation, Ideology and Realism in the Postmodern British Novel , Gordon B. McConnell

Theses/Dissertations from 2002 2002

Reading into It: Wallace Stegner's Novelistic Sense of Time and Place , Colin C. Irvine

Brisbane and Beyond: Revising Social Capitalism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America , Michael C. Mattek

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

Christians and Mimics in W. B. Yeats' Collected Poems , Patrick Mulrooney

Renaissance Roles and the Process of Social Change , John Wieland

'Straunge Disguize': Allegory and Its Discontents in Spenser's Faerie Queene , Galina Ivanovna Yermolenko

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

Reading American Women's Autobiography: Spheres of Identity, Spheres of Influence , Amy C. Getty

"Making Strange": The Art and Science of Selfhood in the Works of John Banville , Heather Maureen Moran

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Home > College of Arts and Sciences > English Language and Literature > Master's Theses

Master's Theses - English Language and Literature

Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.

“Hideous things have happened here”: Rape myths, rape culture, and healing in adolescent literature , Holly J. Greca

Moments of excess: Type 1 diabetes and the myth of control in adolescent fiction for girls , Michelle E. LeGault

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

A sociophonetic analysis of female-sounding virtual assistants , Alyssa Allen

Vampire narratives: Looking at queer-centric experiences in comparison to hetero-centric norms in order to model a new queer vampiric experience , Marah Heikkila

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Overhearers’ perceptions of familiarity between interlocutors in computer-mediated communication based on GIF usage , Alexa F. Druckmiller

Feminism by proxy: Jane Austen’s critique of patriarchal society in Pride and Prejudice and Emma , Alexis Miller

The memory of mythmaking: Transgenerational trauma and disability as a collective experience in Afrofuturist storytelling , Jessica Tapley

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Body image/imagining bodies: Trauma, control, and healing in graphic memoirs about anorexia , Kristine M. Gatchel

Word-final /t/-release and linguistic style: An investigation of the speech of two Jewish women from metro Detroit , Janet Leppala

Hermione syndrome: Reexamining feminist sidekicks and power in 2000-2010 children’s and young adult fantasy literature , Josiah Pankiewicz

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Fear and (non) fiction: Agrarian anxiety in “The Colour Out of Space” , Antonio Barroso

Sculpted from clay, shaped by power: Feminine narrative and agency in Wonder Woman , Mikala Carpenter

Players in a storm: Climate and political migrants in The Tempest and Othello , Darcie Rees

Reclaiming racial/ethnic identity vs. reconstructing Asian American masculinity in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese , Hyun-Joo Yoo

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

The organization of turn-taking in fieldwork settings: A case study , Amy Brunett

Exploring the political impact of literature and literary studies in American government , Taylor Dereadt

"We met in a bar by happenstance": Master narratives in couples stories , Brent A. Miller

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

What is the negro woman's story?: Negro Story Magazine and the dialogue of feminist voices , Maureen Convery

Illustrating adolescent awareness: Teaching historical injustices and promoting agency through picture books in secondary classrooms , Melissa Hoak

Phonemic inventory of the Shor language , Uliana Kazagasheva

Cannibalism in contact narratives and the evolution of the wendigo , Michelle Lietz

Parody and the pen: Pippi Longstocking, Harriet M. Welsch, and Flavia de Luce as disrupters of space, language, and the male gaze , Kelsey McLendon

Haec fortis sequitur illam indocti possident: A linguistic analysis of demonstratives in genres of early Latin fragments , Erica L. Meszaros

Tricking for change: Establishing the literary trickster in the western tradition , Christopher Michael Stuart

Because, x: A new construction of because in popular culture , Stephanie Walla

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Digital Commons @ USF > College of Arts and Sciences > English > Theses and Dissertations

English Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

The Drama of Last Things: Reckoning in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama , Spencer M. Daniels

African Spirituality in Literature Written by Women of African Descent , Brigét V. Harley

Hidden Monstrosities: The Transformation of Medieval Characters and Conventions in Shakespeare's Romances , Lynette Kristine Kuliyeva

Making the Invisible Visible: (Re)envisioning the Black Body in Contemporary Adaptations of Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Urshela Wiggins McKinney

Lawful Injustice: Novel Readings of Racialized Temporality and Legal Instabilities , Danielle N. Mercier

“Manne, for thy loue wolde I not lette”: Eucharistic Portrayals of Caritas in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Drama 1350-1650 , Rachel Tanski

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Of Mētis and Cuttlefish: Employing Collective Mētis as a Theoretical Framework for Marginalized Communities , Justiss Wilder Burry

What on earth are we doing (?): A Field-Wide Exploration of Design Courses in TPC , Jessica L. Griffith

Organizations Ensuring Resilience: A Case Study of Cortez, Florida , Karla Ariel Maddox

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Using Movie Clips to Understand Vivid-Phrasal Idioms’ Meanings , Rasha Salem S. Alghamdi

An Exercise in Exceptions: Personhood, Divergency, and Ableism in the STAR TREK Franchise , Jessica A. Blackman

Vulnerable Resistance in Victorian Women’s Writing , Stephanie A. Harper

Curricular Assemblages: Understanding Student Writing Knowledge (Re)circulation Across Genres , Adam Phillips

PAD Beyond the Classroom: Integrating PAD in the Scrum Workplace , Jade S. Weiss

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Social Cues in Animated Pedagogical Agents for Second Language Learners: the Application of The Embodiment Principle in Video Design , Sahar M. Alyahya

A Field-Wide Examination of Cross-Listed Courses in Technical Professional Communication , Carolyn M. Gubala

Labor-Based Grading Contracts in the Multilingual FYC Classroom: Unpacking the Variables , Kara Kristina Larson

Land Goddesses, Divine Pigs, and Royal Tricksters: Subversive Mythologies and Imperialist Land Ownership Dispossession in Twentieth Century Irish and American Literature , Elizabeth Ricketts

Oppression, Resistance, and Empowerment: The Power Dynamics of Naming and Un-naming in African American Literature, 1794 to 2019 , Melissa "Maggie" Romigh

Generic Expectations in First Year Writing: Teaching Metadiscoursal Reflection and Revision Strategies for Increased Generic Uptake of Academic Writing , Kaelah Rose Scheff

Reframing the Gothic: Race, Gender, & Disability in Multiethnic Literature , Ashely B. Tisdale

Intersections of Race and Place in Short Fiction by New Orleans Gens de Couleur Libres , Adrienne D. Vivian

Mental Illness Diagnosis and the Construction of Stigma , Katie Lynn Walkup

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Rhetorical Roundhouse Kicks: Tae Kwon Do Pumsae Practice and Non-Western Embodied Topoi , Spencer Todd Bennington

9/11 Then and Now: How the Performance of Memorial Rhetoric by Presidents Changes to Construct Heroes , Kristen M. Grafton

Kinesthetically Speaking: Human and Animal Communication in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century , Dana Jolene Laitinen

Exploring Refugee Students’ Second Language (L2) Motivational Selves through Digital Visual Representations , Nhu Le

Glamour in Contemporary American Cinema , Shauna A. Maragh

Instrumentalization Theory: An Analytical Heuristic for a Heightened Social Awareness of Machine Learning Algorithms in Social Media , Andrew R. Miller

Intercessory Power: A Literary Analysis of Ethics and Care in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon , Alice Walker’s Meridian , and Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child , Kelly Mills

The Power of Non-Compliant Logos: A New Materialist Approach to Comic Studies , Stephanie N. Phillips

Female Identity and Sexuality in Contemporary Indonesian Novels , Zita Rarastesa

"The Fiery Furnaces of Hell": Rhetorical Dynamism in Youngstown, OH , Joshua M. Rea

“We developed solidarity”: Family, Race, Identity, and Space-Time in Recent Multiethnic U.S. American Fiction , Kimber L. Wiggs

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Remembrance of a Wound: Ethical Mourning in the Works of Ana Menéndez, Elías Miguel Muñoz, and Junot Díaz , José Aparicio

Taking an “Ecological Turn” in the Evaluation of Rhetorical Interventions , Peter Cannon

New GTA’s and the Pre-Semester Orientation: The Need for Informed Refinement , Jessica L. Griffith

Reading Rape and Answering with Empathy: A New Approach to Sexual Assault Education for College Students , Brianna Jerman

The Karoo , The Veld , and the Co-Op: The Farm as Microcosm and Place for Change in Schreiner, Lessing, and Head , Elana D. Karshmer

"The weak are meat, and the strong do eat"; Representations of the Slaughterhouse in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature , Stephanie Lance

Language of Carnival: How Language and the Carnivalesque Challenge Hegemony , Yulia O. Nekrashevich

Queer Authority in Old and Middle English Literature , Elan J. Pavlinich

Because My Garmin Told Me To: A New Materialist Study of Agency and Wearable Technology , Michael Repici

No One Wants to Read What You Write: A Contextualized Analysis of Service Course Assignments , Tanya P. Zarlengo

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida , Haili A. Alcorn

The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature , Timothy M. Curran

Seeing Trauma: The Known and the Hidden in Nineteenth-Century Literature , Alisa M. DeBorde

Analysis of User Interfaces in the Sharing Economy , Taylor B. Johnson

Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization , Scott Neumeister

The Spectacle of The Bomb: Rhetorical Analysis of Risk of The Nevada Test Site in Technical Communication, Popular Press, and Pop Culture , Tiffany Wilgar

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals , Cassie Patricia Childs

“The Nations of the Field and Wood”: The Uncertain Ontology of Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Literature , J. Kevin Jordan

Modern Mythologies: The Epic Imagination in Contemporary Indian Literature , Sucheta Kanjilal

Science in the Sun: How Science is Performed as a Spatial Practice , Natalie Kass

Body as Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage , Curtis Le Van

Tensions Between Democracy and Expertise in the Florida Keys , Elizabeth A. Loyer

Institutional Review Boards and Writing Studies Research: A Justice-Oriented Study , Johanna Phelps-Hillen

The Spirit of Friendship: Girlfriends in Contemporary African American Literature , Tangela La'Chelle Serls

Aphra Behn on the Contemporary Stage: Behn's Feminist Legacy and Woman-Directed Revivals of The Rover , Nicole Elizabeth Stodard

(Age)ncy in Composition Studies , Alaina Tackitt

Constructing Health Narratives: Patient Feedback in Online Communities , Katie Lynn Walkup

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Rupturing the World of Elite Athletics: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the Suspension of the 2011 IAAF Regulations on Hyperandrogenism , Ella Browning

Shaping Climate Citizenship: The Ethics of Inclusion in Climate Change Communication and Policy , Lauren E. Cagle

Drop, Cover, and Hold On: Analyzing FEMA's Risk Communication through Visual Rhetoric , Samantha Jo Cosgrove

Material Expertise: Applying Object-oriented Rhetoric in Marine Policy , Zachary Parke Dixon

The Non-Identical Anglophone Bildungsroman : From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic , Jarad Heath Fennell

Instattack: Instagram and Visual Ad Hominem Political Arguments , Sophia Evangeline Gourgiotis

Hospitable Climates: Representations of the West Indies in Eighteenth-Century British Literature , Marisa Carmen Iglesias

Chosen Champions: Medieval and Early Modern Heroes as Postcolonial Reactions to Tensions between England and Europe , Jessica Trant Labossiere

Science, Policy, and Decision Making: A Case Study of Deliberative Rhetoric and Policymaking for Coastal Adaptation in Southeast Florida , Karen Patricia Langbehn

A New Materialist Approach to Visual Rhetoric in PhotoShopBattles , Jonathan Paul Ray

Tracing the Material: Spaces and Objects in British and Irish Modernist Novels , Mary Allison Wise

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Representations of Gatsby: Ninety Years of Retrospective , Christine Anne Auger

Robust, Low Power, Discrete Gate Sizing , Anthony Joseph Casagrande

Wrestling with Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry , Paul T. Corrigan

#networkedglobe: Making the Connection between Social Media and Intercultural Technical Communication , Laura Anne Ewing

Evidence of Things Not Seen: A Semi-Automated Descriptive Phrase and Frame Analysis of Texts about the Herbicide Agent Orange , Sarah Beth Hopton

'She Shall Not Be Moved': Black Women's Spiritual Practice in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, and Home , Rondrea Danielle Mathis

Relational Agency, Networked Technology, and the Social Media Aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing , Megan M. Mcintyre

Now, We Hear Through a Voice Darkly: New Media and Narratology in Cinematic Art , James Anthony Ricci

Navigating Collective Activity Systems: An Approach Towards Rhetorical Inquiry , Katherine Jesse Royce

Women's Narratives of Confinement: Domestic Chores as Threads of Resistance and Healing , Jacqueline Marie Smith

Domestic Spaces in Transition: Modern Representations of Dwelling in the Texts of Elizabeth Bowen , Shannon Tivnan

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Paradise Always Already Lost: Myth, Memory, and Matter in English Literature , Elizabeth Stuart Angello

Overcoming the 5th-Century BCE Epistemological Tragedy: A Productive Reading of Protagoras of Abdera , Ryan Alan Blank

Acts of Rebellion: The Rhetoric of Rogue Cinema , Adam Breckenridge

Material and Textual Spaces in the Poetry of Montagu, Leapor, Barbauld, and Robinson , Jessica Lauren Cook

Decolonizing Shakespeare: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Three Adaptations of Three Plays by William Shakespeare , Angela Eward-Mangione

Risk of Compliance: Tracing Safety and Efficacy in Mef-Lariam's Licensure , Julie Marie Gerdes

Beyond Performance: Rhetoric, Collective Memory, and the Motive of Imprinting Identity , Brenda M. Grau

Subversive Beauty - Victorian Bodies of Expression , Lisa Michelle Hoffman-Reyes

Integrating Reading and Writing For Florida's ESOL Program , George Douglas Mcarthur

Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley , Katherine Marie McGee

Ghosts, Orphans, and Outlaws: History, Family, and the Law in Toni Morrison's Fiction , Jessica Mckee

The "Defective" Generation: Disability in Modernist Literature , Deborah Susan Mcleod

Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity , Joy Ann Sanchez-Taylor

Hermes, Technical Communicator of the Gods: The Theory, Design, and Creation of a Persuasive Game for Technical Communication , Eric Walsh

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Rhetorical Spirits: Spirituality as Rhetorical Device in New Age Womanist of Color Texts , Ronisha Witlee Browdy

Disciplinarity, Crisis, and Opportunity in Technical Communication , Jason Robert Carabelli

The Terror of Possibility: A Re-evaluation and Reconception of the Sublime Aesthetic , Kurt Fawver

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English Department Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.

Muscadine: Poems , Albert Hosia Jerriod Avant

MIDDLE CHILDREN OF HISTORY: MALE-AUTHORED POST-1960s FICTION & THE NIHILISM OF WHITE MALE PROTAGONISTS , Emma C. Baughman

THE (MIS)FORMATION OF IDENTITY IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S NOVELS: IDEOLOGY, COMMUNITY, AND THE SELF , Youngji Cho

COMPUTATIONAL CLOSE READING: A CRITIQUE OF DIGITAL LITERARY METHODOLOGY , Damiano Consilvio

DIAGNOSTIC BRAINS, EXPERIENTIAL MINDS AND METAMODERNISM: MCEWAN, SELF, AND MCCARTHY AS CASE STUDIES , Mohamed Anis Ferchichi

RESISTING ARREST: AN (AUTO-THEORETICAL) ESSAY ON PRISON LITERATURE , James A. Ferry

WAITING TOO LONG TO MOVE AT GREEN LIGHTS , Michael Landreth

IS IT FREEDOM YOU WANT?: FEMINIST MORMON HOUSEWIVES “DEAR FMH” COLUMN AS A PARTICIPANT IN THE ETHICS OF CARE IN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ADVICE COLUMNS , Julia Unger

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

THE TEXT(TILES) OF ADINKRA SYMBOLS: WEST AFRICAN ART, GENDER, & POETIC TRANSLATIONS , Rachel A. Ansong

BLACK FEMINIST AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: HOW IDENTITY CAN AFFECT PEER REVIEW PRACTICES IN THE COLLEGE WRITING CLASSROOM , Eileen M. James

TO SCALE DRAGONS: COMPRISING THINGS LOST AND TWO ESSAYS ON FANTASY , André V. Katkov

THE ALICE ATOM COMPENDIUM , Nick Mendillo

BROKEN DOZER, HAUNTED VALE: THE ECOPOETICS OF AMBIENT LANGUAGE , Andrew Merecicky

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

TRUE CRIME, WOMEN, AND SENSATIONALIZED REPRESENTATIONS IN THE ITALIAN AMERICAN IMAGINARY , Francesca Borrione

FANTASIZING REPRODUCTION: THE BIOLOGIZATION OF THE DESIRE FOR PROGRESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE , Xinqiang Chang

GENDERED & GENREFIED BODIES: HEROISM AS PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE IN SWORD & SORCERY FANTASY , Anthony Conrad Chieffalo

INTIMATE DISTANCES: AN ARCHIPELAGO , Elizabeth Foulke

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

PREPARING FOR DEATH: CANNIBALISM, CONSUMPTION AND INCORPORATION IN WOMEN’S SHIPWRECK NARRATIVES , Danielle Cofer

FEMALE COMIC GROTESQUE CHARACTERS IN VICTORIAN NOVELS: INVESTIGATING THE POSSIBILITIES OF LIMINALITY , Barbara A. Farnworth

READING THE READER: ANALYZING DEPICTIONS OF MALE READERS IN SERIAL VICTORIAN FICTION , Ashton Foley-Schramm

REORIENTING THE FEMALE GOTHIC: CURIOSITY AND THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE , Jenna Guitar

ECOLOGIES OF MATERIALITY AND AESTHETICS IN BRITISH MODERNIST WAR-TIME LITERATURE, 1890-1939 , Molly Volanth Hall

FICTIONS OF CAPTIVITY: RACIALIZING RELIGION IN EARLY U.S. LITERATURE AND CULTURE , Serap Hidir

BETWEEN SIBLINGS: HOW THE SIBLING METAPHOR REIMAGINES AFFECTIVE ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL , Beth Leonardo Silva

OPENING CEREMONY: A WRITING PRACTICE TOWARDS QUEER FUTURITY , Laura Marie Marciano

“THE SKIPPING KING”: MASCULINITY AND EFFEMINACY IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA , Danielle Johanna Sanfilippo

THE MARK OF THE VANISHING READER: INTRADIEGETIC INTERACTION IN MULTIMODAL NARRATIVE , Catherine Ann Winters

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

PRACTICING TRANSLINGUALISM: FACULTY CONCEPTIONS AND PRACTICES , Adrienne Jones Daly

TO BE CONTINUED: SERIALITY IN NEW MEDIA , Ryan Engley

CONSTRUCTING TRANSGRESSION: CRIMINALITY IN EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE , Charles Kell

WELCOME TO THE CLUB: AN ARCHIVAL INQUIRY INTO THE DEWEY LABORATORY SCHOOL AS RHETORICAL EDUCATION , Krysten Manke

“THERE IS NO RACISM IN CUBA”: A FIELD STUDY OF THE “POST-RACE” RHETORIC OF MODERN CUBA , Clarissa J. Walker

CHARMED MODERNISMS: FANTASIES OF SOCIALITY AND DIFFERENCE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE , Kara Watts

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

THE NEW SINCERITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE , Matthew J. Balliro

Understanding Reading Sponsorship Through Analysis of First-Year Composition Students’ Literacy Narratives , Nancy A. Benson

Widening the Sphere: Mid-to-Late Victorian Popular Fiction, Gender Representation, and Canonicity , Anna J. Brecke

Demonstrating Feminist Metic Intelligence Through the Embodied Rhetorical Practices of Julia Child , Lindy E. Briggette

The Men That Sleep Built , Samuel Simas

Questing Feminism: Narrative Tensions and Magical Women in Modern Fantasy , Kimberly Wickham

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Writing Irish America: Communal Memory and the Narrative of Nation in Diaspora , Beth O'Leary Anish

Speaking Truth to Power: Stand-Up Comedians as Sophists, Jesters, Public Intellectuals and Activists , Jillian Belanger

Architectures of Captivity: Imagining Freedom in Antebellum America , Rachel Boccio

Virginia Woolf's Pedagogical Art , William R. Bowden

Undergraduate Student Perspectives on Electronic Portfolio Assessment in College Composition Courses , Bridget Fullerton

Metadata and Relational Architecture: Advancing Arrangement, Agency, and Access with New Methodology , Jenna Morton-Aiken

Agency in Eating Disorders: American Literary and Visual Memoirs of Anorexia and Bulimia , Jenny Platz

To Start, Continue, and Conclude: Foregrounding Narrative Production in Serial Fiction Publishing , Gabriel E. Romaguera

"You Will Hold This Book in Your Hands": The Novel and Corporeality in the New Media Ecology , Jason Shrontz

Exploring the Use of NoRedInk as a Tool for Composition Instruction , Alyson Snowe

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

You Are What You Eat: Investigating Food Discourse and Digitally-Mediated Identities , Katelyn Leigh Burton

Exquisite Clutter: Material Culture and the Scottish Reinvention of the Adventure Narrative , Rebekah C. Greene

“A Peculiar Power of Perception”: Scottish Enlightenment Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic of Language , Rosaleen Greene-Smith Keefe

Absurdity and Artistry in Twentieth Century American War Literature , Brittany B. Hirth

The Color of Grammar and the Surface of Language: 20th Century Avant-Garde Poetics in Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Blaise Cendrars , Sarah E. Kruse

Consent Puzzles: Narrative Ambiguities of Girls' Sexual Agency in Literature and Film from the 1990s , Michele Meek

John Dewey's Letters from Asia: Implications for Redefining "Openness" in Rhetoric and Composition , Karen Pierce Shea

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Automated Essay Evaluation and the Computational Paradigm: Machine Scoring Enters the Classroom , Catherine M. Barrett

Bringing the World Inside: British Modernism and Taste – Gustatory, Social, and Aesthetic , Michael David Becker

Permeable Boundaries: Globalizing Form in Contemporary American and British Literature , Nancy Caronia

AT HOME IN THE DIASPORA: DOMESTICITY AND NATIONALISM IN POSTWAR AND CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN-BRITISH FICTION , Kim Caroline Evelyn

AN EXAMINATION OF ARGUMENTATION IN UNDERGRADUATE COMPOSITION TEXTBOOKS , Wendy Lee Grosskopf

Stories That Shape: The Work of Writing Program Administration , Marcy Isabella

OFF THE HIP: A THERMODYNAMICS OF THE COOL , Rebecca Kanost

INSOMNIA AND IDENTITY: THE DISCURSIVE FUNCTION OF SLEEPLESSNESS IN MODERNIST LITERATURE , Sarah Kingston

TEMPERANCE IN THE AGE OF FEELING: SENSIBILITY, PEDAGOGY, AND POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY , Sarah Hattie Maitland

UNCONSCIOUS STATES: A NOVEL , Rachel May

Life vs. Unlife: Interspecies Solidarity and Companionism in Contemporary American Literature , Barnaby McLaughlin

TOWARD A PSYCHOSOCIAL UNDERSTANDING OF SUICIDE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE OF THE 1990’S , Sara E. Murphy

THE SENTINELLE AFFAIR: A STUDY IN MULTILINGUAL LANGUAGE PRACTICES , Jason Peters

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Firefighters’ Multimodal Literacy Practices , Timothy R. Amidon

ARGUMENT, RHETORIC, AND TRANSCENDENCE: “THE ADHERENCE OF MINDS” WITHIN THE DISCOURSE OF SPIRITUALITY , Gavin Forrest Hurley

OPTING-IN ONLINE: PARTICIPANTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION IN PUBLIC FORUM COMMUNITIES , Jennifer C. Lee

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

LIGHTNING-ROD MEN, MAGNETIC LIVES, BODIES ELECTRIC: ELECTROMAGNETIC CORPOREALITY IN EMERSON, MELVILLE, & WHITMAN , James Patrick Gorham

Women's Historiography in Late Medieval European Literature: Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan , Eva M. Jones

SAVING PRINCE PEACH: A STUDY OF “GAYMERS” AND DIGITAL LGBT/GAMING RHETORICS , M. William MacKnight

Affective Reconfigurations: A New Politics of Difference , Laurie Rodrigues

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Manifestoes: A Study in Genre , Stevens Russell Amidon

Making the Grade: Academic Literacies and First-Generation College Students in a Highly Selective Liberal Arts College , Theresa Perri Ammirati

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

The Colors and Shadows of My Word(s) , Lydia A. Saravia

Theses/Dissertations from 1999 1999

Toni Morrison: Rethinking the Past in a Postcolonial Context , Hanan Abdullatif

Theses/Dissertations from 1998 1998

(Re)Envisioned (Pre)History: Feminism, Goddess Politics, and Readership Analysis of The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of the Horses , Glenna M. Andrade

Theses/Dissertations from 1997 1997

Indicated Silences in American Novels , Catherine Adamowicz

Cynics, Spaces, and Subjects: Toward a Tactical Ethics of Rhetoric , Kristen Francis Kennedy

Theses/Dissertations from 1995 1995

Our Beloved Lizzie; Constructing an American Legend , Gabriela Schalow Adler

My Cambodian Son: Another Race: Another Culture , Patricia Russell

Theses/Dissertations from 1994 1994

An NEH Fellowship Examined: Social Networks and Composition History , Stephanie A. Almagno

The "Fine Line" of Otto Rank , Philip J. Hecht

Theses/Dissertations from 1993 1993

REWRITING THE BODY POLITIC: THE ART OF ILLNESS AND THE PRODUCTION OF DESIRE IN THE DIARIES AND JOURNALS OF ALICE JAMES AND ACHSA SPRAGUE , Susan Grant

Theses/Dissertations from 1992 1992

*Baby Shoe Tattoo*: A Film Script and Critical Preface , Anthony R. Amore Jr.

Out of the Shadows: A Structuralist Approach to Understanding the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft , James A. Anderson

Lilacs in November , Marjorie L. Briody

The Jeovah Imperative: Images of Incest and Blood Sacrifice in Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" and Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" , Penelope Hope Goff

Theses/Dissertations from 1988 1988

Sub-Versions of History in Three Twentieth-Century Novels , Gabriella Schalow Adler

Joyce and the Dialogical: Literary Carnivalization in Ulysses , Stephanie A. Almagno

Home Before Morning: A Teleplay , Susan E. Apshaga

"Dear Uncle George" Ezra Pound's Letters to Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts , Philip J. Burns

Theses/Dissertations from 1984 1984

Style in Children's Literature: A Comparison of Passages from Books for Adults and for Children , Celia Catlett Anderson

Theses/Dissertations from 1978 1978

Robert Frost: A Twentieth Century Poet of Man and Nature , Pauline Elaine Allen

Theses/Dissertations from 1977 1977

CHAUCER AND THE GAME OF LOVE: AN ANALYSIS OF THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS, THE HOUSE OF FAME AND THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLES , Stephen Hyginus Murphy

Theses/Dissertations from 1972 1972

Man's Relationship to Nature and Society in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter , Sherry E. Adams

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Graduate Thesis Examples

The subjects of MA theses have included studies of individual poets or dramatists, novelists or autobiographers, as well as explorations of literary movements, themes or periods. View our more recent titles below.

Our Recent Titles:

• “The Bottom and the Orchard: Where Space and Place are Created, Controlled, and Maintained in  Sula  and  Recitatif ” (2024 Anyabwile)
• “The Great (Genre) Escape” (2024 Perrin)
• “Modality and Sociality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s  Cranford ” (2024 Perry)
• “‘Don’t Question the Experts’: Autistic Autobiographies, Expert Paratexts, and Epistemic Injustice” (2024 Thompson)
• “Preracial Panem: Understanding Racial Identity in Suzanne Collins’s  The Hunger Games  Trilogy and Prequel  The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ” (2024 Wooten)
• “Parts of the Story: An Illustrated Short Story Collection” (2023 Beal)
• “‘What lady wouldn’t wish to join causes with women who stood up for other women?’: Heroines’ Rivalries and Friendships in Popular Romance Novels” (2023 Bradford)
• “Breaking Away: Some Essays on Influence” (2023 Ferrer)
• “Posting to Engage: A Study of the Effects of Recovery-Oriented Rhetoric on Community Building for Individuals with Eating Disorders and Associated Symptoms on Instagram” (2023 Horton)
• “Being Born: A Memoir of Self-Making in Four Parts” (2023 Langford)
• “‘Widen the Lens and See’: Poetry, Photography, and the Act of Witness in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’” (2023 Marlow)
• “Engaging Secondary Students Through Secondary Worlds: An Approach to Teaching Tolkien at the High School Level” (2022 Casey)
• “The Religious and the Secular Mythology in  Idylls of the King ” (2022 Kirkendall)
• “‘…A Hideous Monster’: Social Repression and Rebellion in Gregory Corso’s ‘The American Way’” (2022 LeBey)
• “Individualism, Materialism, and Sacrifice in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale’” (2022 Nalbandian)
• “Burying the Carnival” (2022 Overdurf)
• “Attending to Time in Narratives of Enslavement: Temporal Alterities and Lived Experiences of Time in Toni Morrison’s  Beloved ” (2021 Bischoff)
• “‘Beasts who walk alone’: Narrating Queer Abjection in Djuna Barnes’s  Nightwood  and Jordy Rosenberg’s  Confessions of the Fox ” (2021 McGuirk)
• “Reach Out and Touch Faith: Haptic Reciprocity in Milton’s  Paradise Lost ” (2021 Ricks)
• “Gender Matters: Amante’s Gender Construction in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Grey Woman’” (2021 Willis)
• “Braddon’s Body of Bigamy: A Corpus Stylistics Analysis” (2021 Waxman)
• “‘Memory is all that Matters;’ Queer Latinx Temporality and the Memory-Making Process” (2020 Caicedo)
• “Old Wives’ Tales: Mothers & Daughters, Wives & Witches (Stories)” (2020 Champagne)
• “‘Numbed and Mortified’: Labor, Empathy, and Acquired Disability in  King Lear  and  Titus Andronicus : (2020 Harrington)
• “‘More Forms and Stranger’: Queer Feminism and the Aesthetic of Sapphic Camp (2020 Kennedy)
• “A Discourse and Statistical Approach to Intersections of Gender and Race in Melville’s  Typee ” (2020 Post)
• “Prophetic Un-speaking: The Language of Inheritance and Original Sin in  Paradise Lost  and S alve Deus Rex Judaeorum ” (2019 Darrow)
• “‘The Frame of her Eternal Dream’: From  Thel  to Dreamscapes of Influence” (2019 Gallo)
• “‘The Murmure and the Cherles Rebellying’: Poetic and Economic Interpretations of the Great Revolt of 1381” (2019 Noell)
• “Dialogic Convergences of Spatiality, Racial Identity, and the American Cultural Imagination” (2019 Humphrey)
• “Troubling Vice: Stigma and Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Ambitious Villains” (2019 Simonson)
• “Beyond Mourning: Afro-Pessimism in Contemporary African American Fiction” (2018 Huggins)
• “‘Harmonized by the earth’: Land, Landscape, and Place in Emily Brontë’s  Wuthering Heights ” (2018 Bevin)
• “(Re)membering the Subject: Nomadic Becoming in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature” (2018 Voelkner)
• “Werewolves: The Outsider on the Inside in Icelandic and French Medieval Literature” (2018 Modugno)
• “Towards Self-Defined Expressions of Black Anger in Claudia Rankine’s  Citizen  and Percival Everett’s  Erasure ” (2018 Razak)
• “Echoes Inhabit the Garden: The Music of Poetry and Place in T.S. Eliot” (2018 Goldsmith)
• “‘Is this what motherhood is?’: Ambivalent Representations of Motherhood in Black Women’s Novels, 1953-2011” (2018 Gotfredson)
• “Movements of Hunters and Pilgrims: Forms of Motion and Thought in  Moby-Dick ,  The Confidence Man , and  Clarel ” (2018 Marcy)
• “Speaking of the Body: The Maternal Body, Race, and Language in the Plays of Cherrie Moraga, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tony Kushner” (2018 King)
• “Passing as Jewish: The Material Consequences of Race and the Property of Whiteness in Late Twentieth-Century Passing Novels” (2017 Mullis)
• “Eliot through Tolkien: Estrangement, Verse Drama, and the Christian Path in the Modern Era” (2017 Reynolds)
• “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Urban Space in Postcolonial British Literature” (2017 Rahmat)
• “Models of Claim, Resistance, and Activism in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Frances Burney” (2017 Smith)
• “English Literature’s Father of Authorial Androgyny: The Innovative Perspective of Chaucer and the Wife of Bath” (2017 Ingold)
•  “’Verbal Hygiene’ on the Radio: An Exploration into Perceptions of Female Voices on Public Radio and How They Reflect Language and Gender Ideologies within American Culture” (2017 Barrett)
• “Divided Bodies: Nation Formation and the Literary Marketplace in Salman Rushdie’s  Shame  and Bapsi Sidhwa’s  Cracking India”  (2016 Mellon)
• “Metaformal Trends in Contemporary American Poetry” (2016 Muller)
• “Power Through Privilege: Surveying Perspectives on the Humanities in Higher Education in the Contemporary American Campus Novel” (2016 Klein)
• “‘I always cure you when I come’: The Caregiver Figure in the Novels of Jane Austen” (2016 McKenzie)
• “English Imperial Selfhood and Semiperipheral Witchcraft in  The Faerie Queene, Daemonologie,  and  The Tempest”  (2016 Davis)
• “With Slabs, Bones, and Poles: De/Constructing Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Jesmyn Ward’s  Salvage the Bones , Natasha Trethewey’s  Beyond Katrina , and Selah Saterstrom’s  Slab”  (2016 Lang)
• “The Ghost of That Ineluctable Past”: Trauma and Memory in John Banville’s Frames Trilogy” (2016 Berry)
• “Breaking Through Walls and Pages: Female Reading and Education in the 18th Century British Novel” (2015 Majewski)
• “The Economics of Gender Relations in London City Comedy” (2015 Weisse)
• “Objects, People, and Landscapes of Terror: Considering the Sublime through the Gothic Mode in Late 19th Century Novels” (2015 Porter)
• “Placing the Body: A Study of Postcolonialism and Environment in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid” (2015 Hutcherson)
• “Wandering Bodies: The Disruption of Identities in Jamaica Kincaid’s  Lucy  and Edwidge Danticat’s  The Farming of Bones ” (2015 Martin)
• “Mythogenesis as a Reconfiguration of Space in an ‘Alternate World’: The Legacy of Origin and Diaspora in Experimental Writing” (2015 Pittenger)
• “Cunning Authors and Bad Readers: Gendered Authorship in ‘Love in Excess’” (2015 Bruening)
• “‘The Thing Became Real’: New Materialisms and Race in the Fiction of Nella Larsen” (2015 Parkinson)
• “‘Projections of the Not-Me’: Redemptive Possibilities of the Gothic within Wuthering Heights and Beloved” (2015 Glasser)
• “Distortions, Collections, and Mobility: South Asian Poets and the Space for Female Subjectivity” (2015 Wilkey)
• “From Text to Tech: Theorizing Changing Experimental Narrative Structures” (2015 Ortega)
• “A Moral Being in an Aesthetic World: Being in the Early Novels of Kurt Vonnegut” (2015 Hubbard)

Thesis Proposal Sample Archive

Thesis proposals.

Examples of thesis proposals are included here in PDF format. Copies of theses completed in the M.A. in English & Writing Studies program can be accessed through the Pfau Library's CSUSB ScholarWorks database.

Because the Public & Professional Writing concentration is so new, we do not have a sample proposal for it at this time. Please work closely with your readers who can guide you in its construction.

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Dissertation examples

Listed below are some of the best examples of research projects and dissertations from undergraduate and taught postgraduate students at the University of Leeds We have not been able to gather examples from all schools. The module requirements for research projects may have changed since these examples were written. Refer to your module guidelines to make sure that you address all of the current assessment criteria. Some of the examples below are only available to access on campus.

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Methodology

• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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McCombes, S. (2023, September 11). How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved June 24, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/

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