Program Alumni Dissertation Titles
Statement about Graduate Program in Literature (GPL) at Duke Alumni Dissertation Titles.
Year/Name Dissertation Title
1990 |
|
| Ching, Barbara | The Cultural Work of Burlesque Narrative: Relearning to Read |
| Hearn, Matthew | Studies in Middle English Romance: “King Horn” and the Recuperation of a Category |
1991 |
|
| Colas, Santiago | Latin American Postmodernism: Writing History and Resistance |
| Dienst, Richard | The Worlds of Television: Theories of Culture and Technology |
| Hysjulien, Jamie | The Poets’ Politics: Modern American Poetry and the Aesthetics of Social Change |
| Schwarz, Henry | Forced Bloom: Narrative and Empire in Colonial Bengal |
| Wood, Naomi | Better than Life: Death as a Developmental Trop in Nineteenth-Century British Children’s Fiction |
| Xiaobing, Tang | Writing a History of Modernity: A Study of the Historical Consciousness of Liang Ch’i-Ch’ao |
1992 |
|
| Chay, Deborah | Black Feminist Criticism and the Politics of Reading Jessie Fauset |
| Hegeman, Susan | The Democracy of Cultures: Transformations of the Culture Concept in Modernist America |
| Scanlan, Thomas | Conversion, Suppression, or Limited Partnership: Problems in the Protestant Colonial Ethic |
| Will, Barbara | Genius and Gender in Gertrude Stein |
1993 |
|
| Davies, Lloyd | On Reading Nature: Romanticism, Textuality, and the Alps |
| Makdisi, Saree | Songs of the Tyger: Nature and Empire in British Romanticism |
| Schlick, Yael | Travel, Education, and the Pathways of Feminism in Post-Revolutionary France |
| Speaks, Michael | Architectural Ideologies: Modern, Postmodern, and Deconstructive |
| Wegner, Phillip | Horizons of Future Worlds, Borders of Present States: Utopian Narratives, History, and the Nation |
| Winston, Jane | Buried in Applause: Politics, Cultures, and the Arts of Marguerite Duras |
1994 |
|
| Beller, Jonathan | The Cinematic Mode of Production |
| Casarino, Cesare | The Voyages of Heterotopia: Meditations on Modernity, Crisis and the Sea |
| Kawash, Samira | Racial Properties, Racial Improprieties: Structures of Race in African American Narrative |
| Pavsek, Christopher | The Utopia of Film: The Critical Theory and Films of Alexander Kluge |
| Poor, Sara | Medieval Incarnations of Self: Subjectivity and Authority in the Writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg |
| Seguin, Robert | Around Quitting Time: Work, Technology, and the Forms of Middle-Class Ideology in Modern American Fiction |
1995 |
|
| McMahon, Elise-Noel | Classics Incorporated: Cultural Materialism and Seventeenth-Century French Literature |
| Munoz, Jose | Disidentifications |
| Smith, Faith | John Jacob Thomas and Caribbean Intellectual Life in the Nineteenth Century |
| Talbot, Robert | The Wakefield Master, Robin Hood, and the Agrarian Struggle of the Latter Middle Ages |
| Tandeciarz, Silvia | Engaging Peronism: Gender Conflict and Culture Wars in Recent Argentina Literature |
| Zhang, Xu-Dong | The Politics of Aestheticization: Zhou Zuoren and the Crisis of the Chinese New Culture, 1927-1937 |
1996 |
|
| Cunningham, John | The American Encyclopedia: The Book of the World in the New World |
| Flatley, Jonathan | Modernism and Melancholia: Affect and Aesthetics in the Imagining of Alternative Modernities |
| Kennedy, Rosanne | Scenes of Witnessing: Form, Memory and Gender in Testimonial Film and Literature |
| Moore, David | Geo/graphy Without Borders: Metaphors of Structure for a Twentieth-Century World Literature |
| Tadiar, Neferti | Developing Subjects: Makings of Historical Experience and Contemporary Philippine Literatures |
1997 |
|
| Danius, Sara | The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Modernist Aesthetics |
| Embry, Marcus | The Shadow of Latinidad |
| Harlos, Christopher | American Literary Nationalism and the Modernist Turn |
| Itzkovitz, Daniel | American Modernism, Race and the Rhetoric of “Jewish Difference”, 1880-1940 |
| Jonsson, Stefan | Subject without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity |
| Karaganis, Joseph | American Literary Nationalism and the Modernist Turn |
| Kaufman, Eleanor | The Delirium of Exegesis: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski |
| Smith, Erin | Hard-Boiled Readers: Workers, Consumer Culture and Pulp Magazines, 1923-1951 |
1998 |
|
| Bumstead, Alden | Place Matters: Place and Globalization in Recent United States Fiction |
| Harlos, Christopher | The Jazz Life-Text: Autobiography and Biography in Jazz Art |
| Hines, Maude | Making Americans: National Fairytales and Fantasies of the Transformation, 1865-1900 |
| Janer, Zilkia | Colonial Nationalism: The Nation-Building Literary Field and Subaltern Intellectuals in Puerto Rico, 1849-1952 |
| Lazen, Matthew | The Desert and the Promised Land: Postmodern French Regionalism, 1960-1992 |
| Parchesky, Jennifer | Melodramas of Everyday Life: 1920s Popular Fictions and the Making of Middle America |
| Szeman, Imre | On National Cultures: Literary Politics in Canada, the Caribbean and Nigeria, 1952-1970 |
| von Moltke, Johannes | Beyond Authenticity: Experience, Identity, and Performance in the New German Cinema |
1999 |
|
| Brown, Nicholas | Narratives of Utopia Inchoate: African Fiction and British Modernism |
| Doyle, Jennifer | Sex, Money, and the Aesthetic Ideology of Realism |
| Friedman, Ted | Electric Dreams: Computer Culture and the Utopian Sphere |
| Hampton, Gregory | Changing Bodies: Some Matters of the Body in the Fiction of Octavia E. Butler |
| Mintcheva, Svetlana | Visceral Art: Traumatic Enactments in Karen Finley, Kathy Acker and David Wojnarowicz |
| Murnighan, John | Beatrice’s Smile: Allegory and Mimesis |
| Phillips, Lily | Patrolling the Borders: Citizenship, Nation and Social Protest Literature in the 1950s United States |
| Silverman, Gillian | Public Sentiments: Fantasies of Community in Antebellum America |
| Suarez, Lucia | Caribbean Women Claiming their Islands |
2000 |
|
| Beebe, Roger | Still Too Human: The Limits and Limitations of the Posthuman in Contemporary Visual Culture |
| Brook, Susan | Writing Culture: British Literature and Cultural Theory in the Fifties |
| Ekman, Ulrik | Dots: Between Philosophy and Literature in Derrida |
| Meeker, Natania | The Order of Enlightenment: Epicureanism, Desire, and the Critical Imperative in Eighteenth-Century France |
| Penney, James | The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire |
| Soni, Vivasvan | Affecting Happiness: The Emergence of the Modern Political Subject in the Eighteenth Century |
| Tourino, Christina | Sex and Reproduction in Contemporary Ethnic Literature |
2001 |
|
| Chung, Teresa | A Suspicion of Performance: Discourses of Theatricality and Authenticity in Constructions of the Bourgeois Subject |
| Freeman, David | The Gospel According to Bigger Thomas |
| Frykholm, Amy | Reading the Rapture: Christian Fiction and the Social Structures of Belief |
| Galloway, Alexander | Protocol, or, How Control Exists After Decentralization |
| Manara, Alejandro | From Close(t) Spaces to the Performance of Hybridity |
| Schurer, Norbert | Lennox and Smollett in the Literary Marketplace: Authorship and Readership after Fielding and Richardson |
| Thorne, Christian | The Closet of Epistemology: Towards a History of Scepticism |
2002 |
|
| Middleton, Jason | Documentary/Genre |
| Pillay, Danapalan | Re-reading Apartheid: Governmentality, Identity, Ethics |
| Saal, Ilka | Epic Pleasures: Political Theater Reconsidered |
| Sweeney, Megan | Doing Time, Reading Crime: Rethinking ‘The Female Criminal’ |
2003 |
|
| Barnes, Kristen | Contemporary Cinematic Constructions of French and Francophone African Immigrant Identities, 1950—Present |
| Beasley-Murray, Jon | Posthegemony: Cultural Theory and Latin America October 10th, 1942—April 13th, 2002 |
| Blaustein, Jessica | Alternative Technologies of Domestic Enclosure in the Early Twentieth Century United States |
| Durao, Fabio | Modernism and Coherence: Four Chapters of a Negative Aesthetics |
| LaMacchia, Elizabeth | Women, Abortion, Democracy: Defending Abortion Rights as Constitutionally Protected Political Rights |
| Wang, Yiman | Moving the Image between Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood from the 1920s to 1990s: Reformulating Film Remaking and National Cinema |
| Wu, Min | The Kingdom of Darkness: China in the Rise of the American Empire, 1784-1844 |
2004 |
|
| Carroll, Amy | The Allegorical Performative: Mexican and United States Transnational Tactics for Representing and Reinventing the “New World Border” |
| Karim, Aisha | Text without a People: Globalization and the Third World Novel |
| Martin, Desiree | Bordered Saints: Unorthodox Sanctity along the Border in Mexican and Chicano/a Literature |
| Woodard, David. | Queer Forms of Belonging: The Displacement of Kinship in Twentieth Century African American Literature and Film |
2005 |
|
| Draper, Jack | Redemptive Regionalism in the Brazilian Northeast: Forro and the Flows of Popular Culture in a Global Economy |
| Hsieh, Li-Li | The Politics of Affect: Anger, Melancholy, and Transnational Feminism in Virginia Woolf and Eileen Chang |
| Kim, Julie | Consumer Anthropology: New World Foods and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Empire |
| Obadike, Mendi | Low Fidelity: Stereotyped Blackness in the Field of Sound |
| Vesela, Pavla | Utopias from the First and Second Worlds |
2006 |
|
| Dayaratna, Arnal | Reading India’s Partition Through Literature |
| Ennis, Mike | Historicizing Nahua Utopias |
| Edwards, Erica | Contesting Charisma: Political Leadership in Contemporary African American Culture |
| Garci-Crespo, Nayeli | Becoming Digital: Ghosts of “Old Media” |
| Watson, Jini | The New Asian City: Literature and Urban Form in Postcolonial Asia-Pacific |
| Wilkins, Matthew | Points and Lines: Allegory, Event, and the End of American Modernism |