See also the winners of the
Prize for Best Thesis and the Prize for Best Major.
2006:
- April Anderson, "Vampire of Her Time: Reconsidering the Role of Florence Dombey in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son." Advisor: Nina Auerbach.
- Patrick Dillon, "Dimensions of Erewhon: The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport's 'The Dawn in Erewhon'." Advisor: Charles Bernstein.
- Kathryn Fleishman, "Tee-hee! Quod She, My Vulgar Darling: Detecting the Adolescent Female Voice in Nabokov's Lolita and Chaucer's Miller's Tale." Advisor: Rebecca Bushnell. Winner: Best Thesis Prize.
- Jessica Lahrman, "Metaphorical Illness in Hemingway's Works." Advisor: David Espey.
- Ruth McAdams, "Gallimaufray and hellebore: Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson in dialogue with the past." Advisor: Sean Keilen.
- Moira Moody, "Significant Use: Examining the aesthetics of feeling in Robert Creeley's later poetry." Advisor: Josephine Park.
- Ekaterina Napalkova, "Martyrs, Mothers, Soldiers: Gender Performativity and Gendered Intent in Thackeray's Vanity Fair." Advisor: Jean-Michel Rabate.
- Jonathan Passaro, "Reducing the Round Table: Visual and Textual Narrative Redaction in Medieval Arthurian Romance." Advisor: Emily Steiner.
- Renee Pristas, "The Colony of the Victorian Orphan: Imperial Buttress or Debilitating Other?" Advisor: Nancy Bentley.
- Neha Sharma, " 'Colonization in Reverse': Linguistic, Nationalist and Gender Discourse in Louis Bennett's Jamaica Labrish." Advisor: Stuart Curran.
- Joseph Titano, " 'A Capital Fellow': Heathcliff and Emily Bronte's Social Criticism." Advisor: Sanjay Krishnan.
- Natalie Ward, "Iser's Aesthetic Response Theory Viewed in the Context of Collaborative Hyperfictions." Advisor: James English.
2005:
- Andrew Amodeo, "Pagan Antiquity and Medieval Authorship"
- Rachel Balik, "Sight for Sore Eyes: The Redemptive Powers of Genre as Art in The Winter's Tale"
- Anne-Marie Bellshot, "Split Personality: Rebecca, Psycho, and Subverting the Feminine Gothic"
- Ian Duncan, "Autobiography or Autrebiography: J. M. Coetzee's Memoirs"
- Susanne Flood, "If I've Told You Once: Imitating Ovid in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis"
- Sarah Herold, "Artistic Representations of Women in Middlemarch"
- Aryn Klich, "Langland's Quest to Redefine Vernacular Authority in Piers Plowman"
- Kent Lasnoski, "Measure for Measure: A Parable of Community"
- Adam Levin, "An Exhibition of the Internal: The Effects of Perception on Consciousness in Henry James's The Ambassadors"
- Rebecca Richman, "Critics and Fans: A Reception History of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings"
- Willa Rohrer, "'Stinging Red, Smarting Pink': The Ethics of Representation in Nabokov's Lolita." Co-winner, Best Thesis Award.
- Danielle Savitsky, "'Terrible Beauty': Desire, Glamour, and the Aesthetics of Tuberculosis"
- Amir Shachmurove, "The Great Truth of Old Ideas: The English Past in Pride and Prejudice, Sybil, and Daniel Deronda." Co-winner, Best Thesis Award.
- Tom Zylkin, "The 'Difficult' Text: The Sound and the Fury and the Failure of Language"
2004:
- Bindi Bhagat, "Marketing Fascism: Cultural Predispositions to Anti-Democratic Processes in 1930s America"
- Robert Blum, "'Seeking Hopelessly to Fill the Void': Remedios Varo's Surrealism and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49"
- Johanna Busch, "Angel in the House, the Darwinian Female, and the New Woman: Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Models of Marriage, and the Irreconcilability of the Sexes"
- Gregory Cooper, "Joyce and Picasso: Word, Image, and the Paradigm of Audience Perspective"
- Ariel Djanikian, "Milan Kundera and the Epistemological Novel: An Essay on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality"
- Katherine Fox, "The Laughing Antiquary: 'Tam O'Shanter' and Robert Burns's Antiquarian Trade"
- Vivian Hsu, "Revolutionary Politics and Philosophical Skepticism in Shelley's Poetry and Prose"
- Lynn Huang, "Between Manuscript and Print: George Gascoigne as the Professional Poet." Winner, 2004 Best Thesis Award.
- Christopher McCloskey, "Framing The Portrait of a Lady: Contexts of Revision"
- Megan Seah, "The Monk and the Burden of Virtue: Dissembling Vice"
- Megan Scanlon, "Just Rewards for an Intimate Teacher: Explaining the Popularity and the Pedagogy of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying"
- Nancy Sun, "De Quincey Who 'Boasteth Himself to Be a Philosopher': Reinterpreting Coleridgean Ideals in the Confessions"
- Eleanor Tai, "Twilight Sleep: Edith Wharton the Modernist"
- Robert Tawse, "Milton Negotiates the Muse: Orpheus, the Hebrew Prophets, and the Miltonic Model"
- Sara Zenreich, "'The language she told it in': Multivocality and Dialogization of Gender in Toni Morrison's Beloved"
2003:
- Matthew Blackstone, "Second-Hand Trauma: Why and How Non-Survivors Must Represent the Holocaust." Advisor: Herman Beavers.
- Julie Brown, "The Expressive Interior in Wallace Stevens's Poetry." Advisor: Susan Stewart.
- Nikki Cyter, "'The Hive Itself Does Speak': The Language of the Commonplace in Pastorius's Beehive Manuscript and Shakespeare's Hamlet." Advisor: Peter Stallybrass.
- Elizabeth Denburg, "Stowe's 'Anti-Patriarchal Operation': Negotiating Race and Gender in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Advisor: Eric Cheyfitz.
- Elizabeth Donaldson, "Janeites and Their Discontent." Advisor: John Richetti.
- Paul Flynn, "The Visual Novel: The Artistic Role of the Printed Text in Prose." Advisor: Erin O'Connor.
- Rachel Friedman, "Staging Silence: Re-Imagining the Women in Shakespeare's Othello." Advisor: Cary Mazer.
- Sharon Fulton, "Compilation as Containment." Advisor: David Wallace. Winner, 2003 Best Thesis Award.
- Adam Gordon, "Reading in the Dark: Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym." Advisor: Joan Dayan.
- Caedmon Haas, "'What whiteness will you add to this whiteness / what candour?': Language and Paradise in the Pisan Cantos." Advisor: Susan Stewart.
- Blake Harrison, "Wandering in the Twilight of the Aura: Robert Walser and Walter Benjamin as Modernist Flaneurs." Advisor: Jean-Michel Rabate.
- Leah Hooper, "'You're but a pun-y': Hegemony, Resistance, and Play in Joyce's Finnegans Wake." Advisor: Vicky Mahaffey.
- Melanie Kefalidis, "The Ideology of The Bell Jar: Mademoiselle, Mass Culture and Images of Women." Advisor: Rita Barnard.
- Marissa Miley, "Reconsidering Dickens and His Illustrious Affairs with Melodramatists and Realists." Advisor: Michael Gamer.
- Tristan Schweiger, , "Samples of the Finest Orientalism: Byron the Anti-Imperialist." Advisor: Stuart Curran.
2002:
- Suzy Berger, "Who is on the cover of this book?": Interpreting Othello in an Urban Classroom." Advisor: Jean Howard.
- Laura Sieh Chu, "An Infusion of Architecture: Renovating a Symbolic Reading of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale." Advisor: Emily Steiner.
- Akiva Fox, "'The Fruit of that Forbidden Tree': The Many Meanings of a Central Object of Paradise Lost." Advisor: Sean Keilen.
- Elizabeth Ketels, Sanctifying American 'Individualism': Franklin's Autobiography in Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'." Advisor: Eric Cheyfitz.
- Sara Murphy, "A Poet's Progress: Bunyanesque Walking in Blake's Milton." Advisors: Stuart Curran and Dan Traister. Co-winner, 2002 Best Thesis Award.
- Yaran Noti, "Pieces of Poetry and Poetry in Pieces: A Print History of Spenser's Faerie Queene." Advisor: Peter Stallybrass.
- Afia Ofori-Mensa, "'A Way to Fly between Them': First-Generation American Literature and Identity." Advisor: Michael Awkward.
- Jonathan Petts, "Of Mentors and Malays: Thomas De Quincey and the Exorcism of Wordsworthian Aesthetics." Advisor: Susan Stewart.
- Rudy Ramirez, "Rock Stars! Celebrities! James Joyce!: Pop Novels and Ulysses." Advisor: Vicki Mahaffey.
- Brenner Thomas, "Arts and Letters: Epistolarity in Pamela." Advisor: Toni Bowers. Co-winner, 2002 Best Thesis Award.
- Melissa Torres, "Communities without Boundaries: Redefining Language in Ulysses." Advisor: Vicki Mahaffey.
- Alex Wong, "Outside the Love Triangle: Empire, Aesthetics and Sexuality in the Novels of Willa Cather." Advisor: Max Cavitch.
2001:
- Katie Alex, "The Conception of British Women's Literary Authority: Authorship, Motherhood, and the English Reformation." Advisor: Rita Copeland.
- Katherine Ambrogi, "Expressive Nations: Music in the National Tale." Advisor: Michael Gamer.
- Meghan Bilton, "DIDACTIC SENSATIONALISM: Evidence of Social Critique within Wilkie Collins' 1860s Fiction." Advisor: Erin O'Connor.
- Rachel Burton, "Unrealized Claims of a So-Called 'Revolutionary' Movement: An Examination of Robert Kendall's Hypertext Poetry." Advisors: Bob Perelman and Jim English.
- Melissa Duclos, "The Black Mountain Poets: Individuals Forced into a School." Advisor: Al Filreis.
- Susanna Goldfinger, "Mining the Colonial Imagination: Desire and Possession in John Donne's Elegy 19." Advisor: Sean Keilen.
- Jack Guinn, "Visionary Perspectives from Errant Children." Advisor: Greg Flaxman.
- Pamela Kuklinski, "Oppressed Race and Repressed Desires: The Homophobic Reception of James Baldwin." Advisor: Herman Beavers.
- Rumela Mitra, "Oscar Wilde: Life and Art as Intertwined Texts." Advisor: Erin O'Connor.
- Jasmine Park, "The Plastic Sublime: A Cultural History of the I-MAC." Advisor: Jean-Michel Rabate.
- Elizabeth Radin, "To the Beat of a Different Drum: Reading the American Beat Generation through French Surrealism." Advisor: Bob Perelman.
- Robin Rolewicz, "Creating Identities: Criticism, Authorship, and the Nation in Novels." Advisor: Michael Gamer.
- Gregory Steirer, "Cooper's __________: Narrating Absence in Safe." Advisor: Nancy Bentley. Winner, 2001 Best Thesis Award.
- Elysa Voshell, "'Smile Please, Not Quite So Serious': Humor and Subversion in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight." Advisor: Max Cavitch.
- Kristen Webster, "'Dear Diary': The Defense and Affirmation of Identity in the Early Journals of Frances Burney and James Boswell." Advisor: John Richetti.

