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Honors Directory

The English Honors Program provides senior majors with the opportunity to develop a substantial scholarly project in close consultation with a Penn English faculty member. Selected students explore cutting-edge research, workshop their drafts with fellow thesis writers, and present their scholarship to the Department.

See below for the list of English Honors recipients, their final project titles, and the names of their senior thesis directors:

 

2024

Margaret Arfaa
"Mr. Wrong: George Eliot on Morality and Marriage"
Honors Director(s): S. Pearl Brilmyer
Rebekah Lyn Donnell
"Perseus to Percy Jackson: Adaptation of the Epic Hero in Oral Tradition, Literature, and Popular Media"
Honors Director(s): Caroline Batten
Janay A. Draughn
"When Her Haints & Bodies Are Blue: A Southern Black Feminist Poetic of Haunting in Bernice McFadden's Nowhere Is a Place"
Honors Director(s): Margo Natalie Crawford
Emma B. Herndon
"Intertexting: Relationality and Communication Technology in Modern Irish Literature"
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Xiaoyang Hua
"Enclosed Spaces and (Un)successful Connections: The Politics of Psychoanalysis and Relationality in Samuel Beckett's Murphy and J.M. Coetzee's Life & Time of Michael K"
Honors Director(s): Jed Esty
Cagney N. Kelshaw
"Dweorgas and Dvergir: Disease, Disorder, and Deviance in Old English and Norse Literature"
Honors Director(s): Caroline Batten
Tyler J. Kliem
A New Yiddish Type: Reconstructing the "Albatros"
Honors Director(s): Kathryn Hellerstein
Allyson E. Nelson
"Going, Going, Gone? The Mutual Reinforcing of Family and Nostalgia within American Baseball Literature and Film in the 20th Century"
Honors Director(s): Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Jean J. Paik
"Embodied Resistance: Collectivizing the Body in the Literatures of Korean Women Factory Workers"
Honors Director(s): Chi-ming Yang

2023

Andrew B. Basile
Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Worlds
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Emily J. Becker
A Prescient Defense of Critical Reading: The Narrator's Perspective in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Honors Director(s): Rita Copeland
Francesca T. Davis
The You You Know: Envisioning the Capitalist's Idealized Proletariat in Blade Runner and Severance
Honors Director(s): Melissa Jensen
Haley L. Nguyen
'Man vs Monster': Manga and the Age of the Antihero
Honors Director(s): Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Tiffany L. Park
'That Land is Your Dream?': Denaturalizing the Nature of Belonging in Isaac Lee Chung's Minari
Honors Director(s): David L. Eng
Quinn A. Robinson
'The Experience is Dialect': Narrative and Resistive Possibilities of Pidgin in All I Asking For Is My Body and Rolling the R's
Honors Director(s): Josephine Park
Sofia E. Sears
Unseamly Girlhoods: Restitching Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman With Shelley Jackson's 'Patchwork Girl'
Honors Director(s): Whitney Trettien
Ashna S. Yakoob
You're Not the Boss of Me Now: Analyzing the Neoliberalism and Slackerism in American Situational Comedy
Honors Director(s): Rahul Mukherjee

2022

Jane E. Bua
Critical-Creative Thesis: Translating the Music of Melancholy in Victor Hugo's 'Demain, dés l´aube'
Honors Director(s): Kenneth Goldsmith
Kennedy A. Crowder
A Reading of Liminal Waste and Dirt in Toni Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye' (1970)
Honors Director(s): Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Rachel S. Dennis
Haunting with The Wooster Group's 'Reverse Theatrofilm' Hamlet
Honors Director(s): Zachary Lesser
Kaliyah A. Dorsey
'Clear the Field of Static': Fragmentin the American Grammar of Violence in Contemporary Black Experimental Poetry
Honors Director(s): Margo Natalie Crawford
Anna J. Fleming
'You Men Love With Your Eyes': Voyeurism, Queer Spectacles, and Aestheticizing Queer Desire in Wilde's Shakespeare
Honors Director(s): S. Pearl Brilmyer
Avery M. Johnston
Incarnational Ecology: Liturgical Time, Seasonal Cycling, and Sacred Secularity in 'Sir Gwain and the Green Knight'
Honors Director(s): Emily Steiner
Megan G. Lentz
The Florida Grotesque: Strangeness as Neoliberal Violence in Filmic Representations of he State. A Graphic Thesis
Honors Director(s): Julia Alekseyeva
Claire E. Medina
'God Liked to Watch': A Theology of Pleasure in the Middle English Clannesse
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
James D. Morrison
Proper Masculine Reproduction: Deliverance and teh Homotopian Imperative
Honors Director(s): David Wallace
Sumant M. Rao
The Relational Body in Margaret Cavendish's Philosophy: 'New Materialism' and a Feminist History of Science
Honors Director(s): Emily Steiner
Hawthorne R. Ripley
Woolf and Spielrein's 'Moments of Becoming': Symbols of Dissolution for the Inter War Period
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté

2021

Benjamin Bond
By Types, Shadows, and Metaphor: Language and Meaning in John Bunyan's THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
Honors Director(s): Suvir Kaul
Ashley N. Codner
Caught In/Between: Expressions of Liminality in Jazz Aesthetic Literature
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers
Keely J. Douglas
Holy Sex and Salvation for All: Gendered Defences Against Heretication in the Writings of Middle English Women Mystics
Honors Director(s): David Wallace
Elizabeth C. Eckhard
'No More Trouble': Rememory and Abolition Feminism within the Jim Crow Prison in SING, UNBURIED, SING and the Parchman Blues
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers
Alice W. Goulding
'What the Sand Gets, the Sand Keeps Forever': India, England, and the Signification of Empire in Wilkie Collins's THE MOONSTONE
Honors Director(s): Emily Steinlight
Christina R. Irmen
Through the Eyes of Eckleburg: How Genre Reinterprets Gatsby
Honors Director(s): Nancy Bentley
Melannie D. Jay
'Ever in the Formest Prees': Interpreting Arthur as Malory's Epic Hero
Honors Director(s): Emily Steiner
Suzan Kim
Queered Surfaces: Skin as a Relational Medium in Stieg Larsson's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
Honors Director(s): Rahul Mukherjee
James C. Noonan
Shaw's Unsocialist Socialism: Marxism in the Drama of George Bernard Shaw
Honors Director(s): Cary Mazer
Oritesemughone Ogbemi
Theories of the Subjective Experience of Time in Ghost Stories
Honors Director(s): S. Pearl Brilmyer
Caitlin Quinn
'What No Book of Travels Could Inform You of': Constructing the Female Eye Witness in OROONOKO, OR THE ROYAL SLAVE and THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS
Honors Director(s): Suvir Kaul
Avneet K. Randhawa
Towards a new Embodiment: Teh Limits of Language in WOMEN IN LOVE
Honors Director(s): Jed Esty
Jadyn A. Wilensky
When Humanity Falls Apart: The Black Women Who Emerge from Poetic Chaos
Honors Director(s): Simone White
Linda Zou
'Living in the fucking past': New Zealand's Neoliberal Conservatism in ONCE WER WARRIORS and HEAVENLY CREATURES
Honors Director(s): James English

2020

Charlotte L. Bausch
Letters, Telegrams, and the Criminal Body: Lady Audley's Secret and the Dark Side of Victorian Communication Networks
Honors Director(s): S. Pearl Brilmyer
Zoe E. Braccia
Payment Received in Full: Women's Labor Contributions to the Philadelphia Printing Industry at the Turn of the 19th Century
Honors Director(s): Whitney Trettien
Yujiao Chen
'Pure Intensity': Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School
Honors Director(s): Heather K. LoveJosephine Park
Rodney E. Dailey
The Beautiful Boy: A Racial Archeology of 19th- and 20th-Century American Literature
Honors Director(s): David Kazanjian
Imani Davis
Things Lovely and Dangerous Still': Towards a Queer Black Love Poetics
Honors Director(s): Dagmawi Woubshet
Stacey E. Fox
The State of Play: Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Labor of AAA Game Development
Honors Director(s): Whitney Trettien
Sydney Gelman
Chronotopes Under Capitalism: Ruptured Modernity in George Eliot's 'The Mill on the Floss'
Honors Director(s): Paul Saint-Amour
Claire M. Huffman
From God to Man: Public and Personal Influences on the Chronology of Christ in Milton's Poetry
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Alyssa L. Mulé
'Dare to Know': Freedom, Resistance, and Primo Levi's 'The Canto of Ulysses'
Honors Director(s): Rita Copeland
Juliette E. Palermo
'The Manly Part of Thee': Re-Reading Aphra Behn's Poetry with Contemporary Queer and Trans* Theory
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Mariana S. Vega
Viral Monstrosity & The Networked Novel: A 'Hacktivist' Reading of Mary Shelley's Radical Politics in Frankenstein
Honors Director(s): Chi-ming YangDeborah Burnham

2019

Yehudith E. Dashevsky
Pronouns in Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem: Retaining Individuality in Mass Tragedy
Honors Director(s): Deborah Burnham
Adelaide J Gorelick
The Jacobean Shakespeare
Honors Director(s): Phyllis Rackin
Kristy Hsi
Shifting Cultures and Identities in Asian American Protagonists’ Coming-of-Age Stories
Honors Director(s): Melissa Jensen
Lillianne R. Leight
An Exploration of Interaction in Children’s Literature: From Historical Movable Books to Digitally Influenced Modern Books
Honors Director(s): Michael GamerWhitney Trettien
Carolyn Z. Liu
Functional illiteracy: A Poem Collection
Honors Director(s): Simone White
Trang M. Luu
Locating the Ghosts of Queer Subalternity in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt
Honors Director(s): Josephine Park
Jiwon E. Shin
The Pictorial and the Ordinary in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse
Honors Director(s): Heather K. LoveJean-Michel Rabaté
Derek J. Willie
'A Nature Like Some Mighty River': Historical Difference and Readerly Subjectivity in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss
Honors Director(s): Emily Steinlight

2018

Ramathi H. Bandaranayake
Medicine's Split Face: Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy and Wartime Medical Ethics in Post-Memory
Honors Director(s): Paul Saint-Amour
Natalie V. Burke
From Fact and Reason: Student Notes by Christopher Heydrick, University of Pennsylvania, 1788-1792
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Jeffrey R. Careyva
The Hedgehog and the Highway: Derrida and Knowing the Animal in Poetry
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Cameron G. Dichter
Tracing Transcendence: Distinguishing Secular and Spiritual Belief through the Eyes of the Law
Honors Director(s): Nancy Bentley
Nicholas Escobar
Judging Well: John Dryden's The State of Innocence and Fall of Man
Honors Director(s): Zachary Lesser
Joshua Z. Glahn
Disembodying Narrative: Aesthetic Identities and Change in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient
Honors Director(s): Lance Wahlert
Kassidi S. Jones
The Periodical Poets: Nature, Faith, and Patriotism in Black Women's Reconstruction-era Poetry
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers
Jillian T Karande
A Mind Divided: Margot Ruddock's Impact on the Work of W. B. Yeats
Honors Director(s): Jed Esty
Savannah R. Lambert
Discount for Girls: Authors, Protagonists, Judges, and the Gendering of Literary Value
Honors Director(s): James English
Stella M. Lemper-Tabatsky
The Oceanic Sublime in Moby-Dick; or, the Novel as Philosophical Discourse
Honors Director(s): Michael Gamer
Maya R. Levine
Accommodation Anonymity, Embodying Faith: The Apprenticeship of Julian of Norwich
Honors Director(s): David Wallace
Darby E. Mason
A Story of the Oregon Trail: A Critical Edition
Honors Director(s): Nancy Bentley
Amari I. Mitchell
'Enter to Learn': Revisiting Brown v Board's Impact on African-American Literature and Culture
Honors Director(s): Salamishah Tillet
Nina R. Rohr
Extraordinary Ordinary Girls: The Multi-Generational Influence of Female Protagonists in Children's Books
Honors Director(s): Melissa Jensen
Daniel J. Sample
Joyce and Beckett: What We Talk About When We Talk About Style
Honors Director(s): James English
Karis L. Stephen
Black Travel through Time and Space: Music Videos from Sun Ra to Erykah Badu
Honors Director(s): Rahul Mukherjee
Amy Stidham
The Ethos of the Conscious Unconscious: W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and H.D.'s Theories of a Universal Mind
Honors Director(s): Josephine Park
Julia J. Wang
Reading and 'thick milky': Information Storage in The Beehive and Twitter
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass

2017

Liza M Davis
Writing through the silences: Queering narrative construction at sites of radical Black art
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers
Stephanie L. Felt
My Little Temple Stands Alone Representations of the Body in the Japanese Shishosetsu and Nikutai Bungaku Literary Discourses of Mishima Yukio and Dazai Osamu
Honors Director(s): Justin McDaniel
Nicole R. Flibbert
The Royal Merchant: A Transcription, Annotation and Introduction of a Sevententh Century Play in Manuscript
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Cary Anne Kane
Shifting Forms: Combining Literature and Medicine in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Honors Director(s): Lance Wahlert
Ava I. Kikut
Ostracizing Werter: Sentimentalism, Suicide, and Repression in Post-Revolutionary America
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Rebecca E. Pritzker
Sensing Sensibility: Jane Austen's Pedagogical Sympathy
Honors Director(s): Michael GamerToni Bowers
Nayeli Riano
Introduction to 'Pastorcillos', or 'Little Shepherds': Exploring a Miscellaneous Manuscript book from Spain's Early Modern Period
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Cody S. Smith
Unwomanly: The Spinster Figure in Victorian Literature
Honors Director(s): Nancy Bentley
Ester Y. Yoon
Darling, Can't We Sleep a Little Longer?: Translating John Keats's 'Endymion' and the Film Vampires of Jim Jarmusch
Honors Director(s): Chi-ming Yang
Sarah D. Zandi
A Prisoner of the White Lines on the Freeway: Hunger as Vehicle in American Wormen's Travelogues
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers

2016

Saraf N Ahmed
Wanna Know How She Got These Scars? Constructing Female Identity in the Films of Christopher Nolan
Honors Director(s): Timothy Corrigan
Kyla F Balkan
Salient Stereotypes and the Confines of Femininity: Variable Conceptions and Popularity of Constance in King John
Honors Director(s): Phyllis Rackin
John D Baranik
Temporality and Choice in Milton's Sonnets
Honors Director(s): Rebecca Bushnell
Emily M. Chisholm
Scotland's Ambiguous Ruine: Eighteenth-Century Ballads, Pamphlets, and a New Nationalism
Honors Director(s): Suvir Kaul
John M Conway
(Anti)Collaborators: The French Translations of Ulysses
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Sean W. Gill
Noname, Nemo, Nameless: The Author as Material Bias in the Henry Reed Papers
Honors Director(s): Emily Steinlight
Meaghan A. Harding
Structural Decay and Transformation: The Erosion of American Social Values Through the Lens of Breaking Bad
Honors Director(s): Rahul Mukherjee
Soomin (Suzy) Kim
The Vanishing & the Dismembered: Serializing Flesh in the Novels of Charles Dickens
Honors Director(s): Emily Steinlight
Randi S. Kramer
Killing a Watchman; Setting a Mockingbird: The Development of Harper Lee's Classic
Honors Director(s): Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Sophia J. Lee
Rape and Female Subjectivity in Shakespeare's Lucrece
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Alexandra L Malakhoff
Let Us Once Again Assail Your Ears: Quantifying Speech and Assessing Reviewership in 19th-Century Hamlets
Honors Director(s): James English
Michael McBride
Almost Masterpieces: Creativity, Commerce, and the Virtue of Failure in Hollywood
Honors Director(s): Peter Decherney
Victoria Nicole Moffitt
Compounded Metamorphoses: The Nexus of Concealment Revelation and Empathy When Myth is the Mask in Twentieth Century Women's Poetry
Honors Director(s): Taije Silverman
Gabriel A. Ojeda-Sague
'Another, Then Another': Gay Male Orgy and Political Futurity
Honors Director(s): Charles Bernstein
Mabel Oviedo
Undocumented, Forgotten, and Fighting for the American Dream: An Analysis of the Politics of Belonging in the United States
Honors Director(s): Chi-ming Yang
Kirara Sato
'Speak of me as I am': The Different Races of 'Black' Othello
Honors Director(s): Cary Mazer

2015

Kathryn Antonsson
I'm Devoted and You Know It: The Innovation and Provocation of Kanye West and Miles Davies
Honors Director(s): Salamishah Tillet
Katelyn S. Behrman
Breaking the Shatterproof Family: Kinship Norms and Family Structure in Victorial England
Honors Director(s): Emily Steinlight
Evan M. Caldwell
American Psychosis: The Violence of Advertising, Media, and Consumerism in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho
Honors Director(s): Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Victoria N. Ford
We Cannot Live Without Our Lives: Reading the Legacy of The Combahee River Collective as Survival Literature
Honors Director(s): Salamishah Tillet
Monika K. Haebich
Reborn This Way: Analyzing the Fashion and Performance of the Body in Creating Identity
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Heather M Holmes
'Shooting Back': Resistance to Occupation in the Palestinian Films of the Second Intifada
Honors Director(s): Amy Kaplan
Abrina L. Hyatt
Finding God in Oneself & For Colored Girls: A Revolutionary Performance of Language, Naming, & Spacing
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers
Rachel S. Miao
Greek Models: Stylistic Inheritance in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
Honors Director(s): Jed Esty
Carolina I Ortiz
Rewriting History: Tracing Resistance Across Generations of Japanese American Woods on Internment
Honors Director(s): Josephine Park
Julia A Rossi
'Alloy' Nationalism: Thomas Carlyle, Transcendentalism, and the Imperial English Language
Honors Director(s): Emily Steinlight
Issac N. Silber
Kumina on the National Stage: The Cultural Politics of African-Jamaican Religious Practice
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers

2014

Nora Castle
'surface surface surface': The Text of American Psycho
Honors Director(s): Jean-Christophe Cloutier
Rachel Del Valle
Sylvia Plath as American Cultural Prop
Honors Director(s): David Kazanjian
Matthew J Fernandez
Re-enacting Self, State and Trauma: Civil War Memory and John Brown's Body
Honors Director(s): Peter Conn
Patrick A Fitz
'Utmost Power with Adverse Power Opposed': The Political Economy of Migrant Farm Labor in Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle
Honors Director(s): Rita Barnard
Brittney P Joyce
Trawing in Silences: Intimacy and Authority in the Writing of Junot Diaz
Honors Director(s): Jed Esty
Lauren Kaufmann
A Renaissance of Bromance: Homoeroticism, Discourse, and the Trouble of Emulation in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlement of Verona and The Two Noble Kinsmen
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Jessica Lawson
Roots: Black Classicism and Africanness in teh Classical Tradition
Honors Director(s): Thadious Davis
Nicholas M Mancall-Bitel
Put it this way, Allen Ginsberg
Honors Director(s): Bob Perelman
Sara Schonfeld
Superheroes after 9/11: Caped Crusaders as "Fables of Counter-Terrorism"
Honors Director(s): Peter Decherney
Michael R Scognamiglio
The Performance of Obsolescence: Deindustrialization, Memorialization and Theater in Gloucester Massachusetts
Honors Director(s): David Kazanjian
Hannah G Van Sciver
Quoting Poetry in Contemporary Drama: Poetry as Resurrection, and Redemption from Death.
Honors Director(s): Cary Mazer

2013

Melany J Barr
Ghostly Trajectories: The Supernatural Theme in Henry James and James Joyce
Honors Director(s): Jed Esty
Alexa M Bryn
The Politics of Crosshatching: Formal Hybridity in Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard
Honors Director(s): Amy Kaplan
Deedee Z Cheng
Tigers, not daughters, what have you performed? An inductive psychosexual examination of female agency in King Lear
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Janet A Chow
The Mirage of Femininity: Timothy Mo's Women, Self-Orientalism, and the Margins of the Man Booker Prize
Honors Director(s): Chi-ming Yang
Taylor G Cook
Contributions of Spirit and Myth to Female Anishinaabe Identity in Tracks and The Plague of Doves
Honors Director(s): Timothy Powell
Laura R Francis
Embodying Chastity: Allegory and Gender Dynamics in Books III, IV, and V of The Faerie Queene
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Emily Y Harnett
Signs, Symbols, Surface and Depth: How we Read Pale Fire Now
Honors Director(s): James English
Louisa G Jacquinto
The Colony Restaurant: Food and Dining in Eben Venter's Trencherman
Honors Director(s): Rita Barnard
Anya K Lichtenstein
To Speak in the Old Style, To Act in the New: Beckett's Happy Days and the Realist Theater
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Rivky (Jennifer) Mondal
Alone Together: Defining the Beckettian 'pseudo-couple' with Mercier and Camier, Waiting for Godot, and How It Is"
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Elaine S Ogden
Never been so bewitched by any woman: The Colliding Evolution of Darcy and Dracula
Honors Director(s): James English
Oliver H Pare
Mistah Kurtz- he ain't dead: T.S. Eliot's Visions and Revisions of John Donne
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Gina J Shin
But They Digress: Perverse Sexualities in Marlowe's and Shakespeare's Epyllion
Honors Director(s): Zachary Lesser
Richard W Thomson
To Be is To Bee Seen: Postcolonial Theory, Existentialism, and the Theatre of Athol Fugard
Honors Director(s): Rita Barnard

2012

Danielle A. Bainbridge
'The Two Women Shook Hands': A Dramaturgical Reading of Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Sistren's Lionheart Gal
Honors Director(s): Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Michael P. Contillo
On Charlotte Brontee's 'Villette': Defining a Dialectic 'Denunciating a Doctrine'
Honors Director(s): Deborah Burnham
Marissa Kahn D'Onofrio
SUBVERSIVE LANGUAGE IN MARLENE VAN NIEKERK'S AGAAT (2006)
Honors Director(s): Rita Barnard
Karolina R. Ensor
DANCE OF THE DOUBLE: A LACANIAN STUDY OF BLACK SWAN
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Steven R. Green
Out of the Past and Onto the Screen: Christopher Nolan and Blockbuster Noir
Honors Director(s): Timothy Corrigan
Sarah J. Heinz
'Birth of a Monster': Melodrama in the Romantic Period
Honors Director(s): Michael Gamer
Jessica S. Kim
'First Impressions': Marriages in Jane Austen's Works as Participants in Political Debate
Honors Director(s): Michael Gamer
Rebecca A. Levine
'Remains Without Remaining': Trauma and Melancholia in the Design, Construction, and Destruction of Holocaust Memorials
Honors Director(s): Aaron Levy
Rebecca J. Lipperini
'Harry Potter' and the Problem of Death
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
James T Santel
Saul Bellow and the Social Novel
Honors Director(s): Peter Conn

2011

Anusha M. Alles
'The Work was the Same': Bridging Resistances and Criticism with Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eater
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers
Chloe R. Castellon
The Twilight of the Mind: Erika Kohut's Drive to Jouissance in 'The Piano Teacher'
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Rachel M. Cohen
'Thus play I in one person many people': Performing Kingship in 'Richard II'
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Megan H. Edelman
'First to a Torrent, then a Deluge Swells': Political Poetics and Models of Kingship in John Denham's Cooper Hill
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Anne Huang
Resistance to Received Foresight: The Presence of Statius' TheBaid in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
Honors Director(s): Rita Copeland
Trisha Y. Low
Guts: On Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, a Poetic of Masochism
Honors Director(s): Charles Bernstein
Kaneesha C. Parsard
Douglarise de nation: Politicized Intimacies and the Literary Dougla
Honors Director(s): David L. Eng
Landon S. Reitz
Milton, Klopstock, and the Grammar of Heroism
Honors Director(s): Melissa E. Sanchez
Petal K. Samuel
Ouvri Bayi' Pou' Moi': The (Im)Possibilities of Creole Intimacies in Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco
Honors Director(s): Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Emily R. Schultheis
Philadelphia and the Making of Jane Austen: Austen's Novels in America 1816-1838
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Valeria A. Tsygankova
Representing Church and State: Paratexts of the 'Queen Elizabeth Bible'
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass

2010

Joshua B. Bennett
Cripwalking on Water: Reading the Extraordinary Body in Post-Modern African American Fiction
Honors Director(s): Salamishah Tillet
Dalglish Chew
Writing, Mourning, and the New South Africa: Betrayal and Perversion in J.M Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg
Honors Director(s): Rita Barnard
Jillian R. Dent
Grounding Aemilia Lanyers's Salve Rex Deus Judaorum in Cooke-Ham
Honors Director(s): Margreta de Grazia
Lee B. Huttner
Documents of Barbarism: Subversive Stagings of History from the Medieval to Marlowe
Honors Director(s): Rita Copeland
Maxime D. McKenna
In the WAke of Fair Use: Incest, Citation, and the Legal Legacy of Finnegans Wake
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Maxine Y. Mendoza
Having Fixed the Gaze of her Mind on Higher Things: Modes of Spiritual Power, Virginity and the Sanctity int he Visual and Textual Iconography of Women's Acetism in 12th Century Hagiography
Honors Director(s): David Wallace
Sebastian K. Modak
Girmityas, Malums, and Afeemkhors Across the Black Water: Language, History and Globalization in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies
Honors Director(s): Paul Saint-Amour
Curtis G. Rogers
O Wilde West (Coast) Wind: Richard Brautigan and Romantic Ruin
Honors Director(s): Charles Bernstein
Jasmine N. Salters
(Re) Writing or (Re) Wronging Their Own Image: Black Women on a White Screen
Honors Director(s): Thadious Davis
Michael A. Strother
Written in Stars: Re-Reading the Canterbury Tales through the Prism of Contemporary Astrology
Honors Director(s): David Wallace
John Henry Whitham
A Jew in Black Nazareth: Racial Identity and Authenticity in Waldo Frank's 'Holiday'
Honors Director(s): Thadious Davis
Joseph R. Yeakel
The Lunar Book: Practical Texts in the Age of Revolution
Honors Director(s): Michael Gamer

2009

Kimberley Eckman Banta
Honors in Creative Writing, 2011: You Have a Penn in Me
Elizabeth Di Iulio
'To be Loved and Chosen By a Good Man': Dispelling the Feminist Myth: Little Women as Sentimental-Religious Conduct Literature
Honors Director(s): Deborah Burnham
Elaine I. Ely
Refracting Race: Zoe Wicomb's Playing in the Light
Honors Director(s): Rita Barnard
Jennifer F. Jackson
Classical Myth and Gender Politics in J.M. Coetzee's Foe
Honors Director(s): David Kazanjian
Aliza M. Machefsky
'Not That Kind': Plants from the New World and the Transformation of European Botanical Knowledge
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Erica R. Machulak
Experiments in Truth-Telling: Pamela's Shift in Narrative Habit
Honors Director(s): Toni Bowers
Nicholas B. Mayer
(De/Ef) Facing Shakespeare: Investigating Joyce's Dramatization of Masochistic Cuckoldry in Exiles and 'Circe'
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Daniel P. McIntosh
Beast with Two Backs: Shakespeare and Political Theatre in Apartheid South Africa
Honors Director(s): Ania Loomba
Brooke S. Palmieri
What the Bees Have Taken Pains For: Francis Daniel Pastorius, The Beehive, and Commonplacing in Colonial Pennsylvania
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Alyssa Sclafani
'Was Ever Audience in this Humour Won?': Theatricality and Villainy in Othello and Richard III
Honors Director(s): Margreta de Grazia
Alexander J. Ullman
James Joyce and Jazz Modernism
Honors Director(s): James English
Benjamin J. Wiebracht
Traces of the Marvelous in Conrad's British Neocolonialism and the Rise of Magical Realism
Honors Director(s): Jed EstyPaul Saint-Amour

2008

Matthew U Abess
Treasury of Song for the Home Circle
St. John Barned-Smith
Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est; Cicero and Caesar on 55th Street
Gabriel S. Crane
The Mississippi Project
Daniel A. Goldstein
Break&lt
Rebecca T. Kantor
Enchantment
Pamela D. Rook
Wall Dreams

2007

Samuel W. Donsky
Horoscopes for Horses
Julia K. Tamulis
"Men Are Spunges, Which to Pour Out, Receive": Donne's Courtly Poetry
Honors Director(s): Emily Steiner
Elaine Y. Wong
'Will Teddy Leave': Shoeshiners in the Reading Terminal Market

2006

April Anderson
Vampire of Her Time: Reconsidering the Role of Florence Dombey in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son
Honors Director(s): Nina Auerbach
Patrick Dillon
Dimensions of Erewhon: The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport's 'The Dawn in Erewhon'
Honors Director(s): 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
Honors Director(s): Rebecca Bushnell
Jessica Lahrman
Metaphorical Illness in Hemingway's Works
Honors Director(s): David Espey
Ruth McAdams
Gallimaufray and hellebore: Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson in dialogue with the past
Honors Director(s): Sean Keilen
Moira Moody
Significant Use: Examining the aesthetics of feeling in Robert Creeley's Later Poetry
Honors Director(s): Josephine Park
Ekaterina Napalkova
Martyrs, Mothers, Soldiers: Gender Performativity and Gendered Intent in Thackeray's Vanity Fair
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Jonathan Passaro
Reducing the Round Table: Visual and Textual Narrative Redaction in Medieval Arthurian Romance
Honors Director(s): Emily Steiner
Renee Pristas
The Colony of the Victorian Orphan: Imperial Buttress or Debilitating Other?
Honors Director(s): Nancy Bentley
Neha Sharma
'Colonization in Reverse': Linguistic, Nationalist and Gender Discourse in Louis Bennett's Jamaica Labrish
Honors Director(s): Stuart Curran
Joseph Titano
'A Capital Fellow': Heathcliff and Emily Bronte's Social Criticism
Honors Director(s): Sanjay Krishnan
Natalie Ward
Iser's Aesthetic Response Theory Viewed in the Context of Collaborative Hyperfictions
Honors Director(s): 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
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
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 <em>Jude the Obscure</em>, 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
Melanie Kefalidis
The Ideology of The Bell Jar: Mademoiselle, Mass Culture and Images of Women
Honors Director(s): Rita Barnard
Christopher McCloskey
Framing The Portrait of a Lady: Contexts of Revision
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
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers
Julie Brown
The Expressive Interior in Wallace Stevens's Poetry
Honors Director(s): Susan Stewart
Nikki Cyter
'The Hive Itself Does Speak': The Language of the Commonplace in Pastorius's Beehive Manuscript and Shakespeare's Hamlet
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Elizabeth Denburg
Stowe's 'Anti-Patriarchal Operation': Negotiating Race and Gender in Uncle Tom's Cabin
Honors Director(s): Eric Cheyfitz
Elizabeth Donaldson
Janeites and Their Discontent
Honors Director(s): John Richetti
Paul Flynn
The Visual Novel: The Artistic Role of the Printed Text in Prose
Honors Director(s): Erin O’Connor
Sharon Fulton
Compilation as Containment
Honors Director(s): David Wallace
Adam Gordon
Reading in the Dark: Edgar Allan Poe's <em>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Honors Director(s): Joan Dayan
Caedmon Haas
'What whiteness will you add to this whiteness / what candour?': Language and Paradise in the Pisan Cantos
Blake Harrison
Wandering in the Twilight of the Aura: Robert Walser and Walter Benjamin as Modernist Flaneurs
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Leah Hooper
'You're but a pun-y': Hegemony, Resistance, and Play in Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Honors Director(s): Vicki Mahaffey
Marissa Miley
Reconsidering Dickens and His Illustrious Affairs with Melodramatists and Realists
Honors Director(s): Michael Gamer
Tristan Schweiger
Samples of the Finest Orientalism: Byron the Anti-Imperialist
Honors Director(s): Stuart Curran

2002

Suzana Berger
'Who is on the cover of this book?': Interpreting Othello in an Urban Classroom
Honors Director(s): Jean Howard
Laura Sieh Chu
An Infusion of Architecture: Renovating a Symbolic Reading of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale
Honors Director(s): Emily Steiner
Akiva Fox
'The Fruit of that Forbidden Tree': The Many Meanings of a Central Object of Paradise Lost
Honors Director(s): Sean Keilen
Elizabeth Ketels
Sanctifying American 'Individualism': Franklin's Autobiography in Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'
Honors Director(s): Eric Cheyfitz
Sara Murphy
A Poet's Progress: Bunyanesque Walking in Blake's Milton
Honors Director(s): Daniel Traister
Yaran Noti
Pieces of Poetry and Poetry in Pieces: A Print History of Spenser's Faerie Queene
Honors Director(s): Peter Stallybrass
Afia Ofori-Mensa
'A Way to Fly between Them': First-Generation American Literature and Identity
Honors Director(s): Michael Awkward
Jonathan Petts
Of Mentors and Malays: Thomas De Quincey and the Exorcism of Wordsworthian Aesthetics
Honors Director(s): Susan Stewart
Rudy Ramirez
Rock Stars! Celebrities! James Joyce!: Pop Novels and Ulysses
Honors Director(s): Vicki Mahaffey
Brenner Thomas
Arts and Letters: Epistolarity in Pamela
Honors Director(s): Toni Bowers
Melissa Torres
Communities without Boundaries: Redefining Language in Ulysses
Honors Director(s): Vicki Mahaffey
Alex Wong
Outside the Love Triangle: Empire, Aesthetics and Sexuality in the Novels of Willa Cather
Honors Director(s): Max Cavitch

2001

Kate Alex
The Conception of British Women's Literary Authority: Authorship, Motherhood, and the English Reformation
Honors Director(s): Rita Copeland
Katherine Ambrogi
Expressive Nations: Music in the National Tale
Honors Director(s): Michael Gamer
Meghan Bilton
DIDACTIC SENSATIONALISM: Evidence of Social Critique within Wilkie Collins's 1860s Fiction
Honors Director(s): Erin O’Connor
Rachel Burton
Unrealized Claims of a So-Called 'Revolutionary' Movement: An Examination of Robert Kendall's Hypertext Poetry
Honors Director(s): Bob Perelman
Melissa Duclos
The Black Mountain Poets: Individuals Forced into a School
Honors Director(s): Al Filreis
Susanna Goldfinger
Mining the Colonial Imagination: Desire and Possession in John Donne's Elegy 19
Honors Director(s): Sean Keilen
Jack Guinn
Visionary Perspectives from Errant Children
Honors Director(s): Gregory Flaxman
Pamela Kuklinski
Oppressed Race and Repressed Desires: The Homophobic Reception of James Baldwin
Honors Director(s): Herman Beavers
Rumela Mitra
Oscar Wilde: Life and Art as Intertwined Texts
Honors Director(s): Erin O’Connor
Jasmin Park
The Plastic Sublime: A Cultural History of the iMac
Honors Director(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté
Elizabeth Radin
To the Beat of a Different Drum: Reading the American Beat Generation through French Surrealism
Honors Director(s): Bob Perelman
Robin Rolewicz
Creating Identities: Criticism, Authorship, and the Nation in Novels
Honors Director(s): Michael Gamer
Elysa Voshell
'Smile Please, Not Quite So Serious': Humor and Subversion in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight
Honors Director(s): Max Cavitch
Kristen Webster
'Dear Diary': The Defense and Affirmation of Identity in the Early Journals of Frances Burney and James Boswell
Honors Director(s): John Richetti