Certified Fall 2022
Debayudh Chatterjee is a PhD candidate in English (Literary Studies) with a minor in Cinema Studies. His dissertation is titled "Specters of Communism in the Age of Hindutva and Globalization: Mourning and Resistance in Indian Literature and Cinema (1989-2014)." Deb was a 2022 recipient of the...
Certified Fall 2022 Aidan Watson-Morris is a graduate student in Literary Studies and his research interests include transnational modernisms & the novel, critical theory, politics & history of form, and temporality.
Certified Spring 2022 Nadia Hoppe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation traces the cultural history of the toilet in the Soviet Union.
Dissertation: “Transcolonial Nationhood: Global Interplay in Irish and Korean National Theatre" Certified Spring 2022 My dissertation shows how colonial Irish and colonial Korean dramatists interweaved foreign modes and methods of staging nationhood into their narratives. I examine how theatre becomes a site in which the colonized subjects represent, or re-create, their own identity. I compare...
Dissertation: “Strategies of Silence: Representations of Jewish Poles in Polish Literature since the 1980" Certified Fall 2021 In my dissertation, I examine the uses and implications of silence in Polish cultural texts of the last forty years that deal with Poland’s Jewish history. Specifically, I examine why, during a period when discourse regarding Jewish history and culture...
Dissertation: “Neoliberalism, Development, and Environmental Crises in Contemporary South Asian Anglophone Fiction” Certified Spring 2021 I am a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My project, “Neoliberalism, Development, and Environmental Crises in Contemporary South Asian Anglophone Fiction,” explores how South Asian literature represents the...
Dissertation: “A Map of This Place: Memory and the Afterlives of Removal" Certified Spring 2021 My research interests are propelled by two avenues for theorizing the dynamics of diasporic remembrance practices. First, the migration of memory, or, how traumatic cultural memory is carried and mobilized across territorial, generational, and social boundaries. Second,...
Dissertation: "The Tao of South Park: Dissonant Visual Culture and Emergent Political Ontologies" Certified 2004
Dissertation: "Elsewhere England: Southern Africa, British Identity, and the Authorial Informant, 1883-1914" Certified 2005
Certified 2006
Dissertation: "An Intersectional Reading of Gender & Technology" Certified 2008
Dissertation: "The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1924" Certified 2008
Dissertation: "The Cult of Collecting and the Making of Modernism." Certified 2008- Certified Spring 2009
Dissertation: "Precarious Lives: Korean Gay Men and the Internet in Neoliberal and Neo-familial South Korea" Certified Fall 2009 My dissertation engages with the Unit’s 2010 theme of “bios” by examining the contradictory effects of South Korea’s neofamilism and neoliberalism on Korean gay men. While declining birth rates have provoked anxiety about the future of the nation and revalorized the...
Dissertation: "Scripting Anxiety/Scripting Identity: Indian Muntiny, History, and the Colonial Imaginary, 1857-1911" Certified Fall 2009 Gautum Basu Thakur is currently Assistant Professor at Boise State. Scripting Anxiety/Scripting Identity examines the impact of the 1857 Indian Mutiny on British and Indian cultural consciousness and collective memory. I focus on anxious...
Dissertation: "Failure to Deliver: Transitional Masculinities in Late and Post Francoist Film (1960-1980)" Certified Spring 2010 Ana Vivancos is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia. She defended her dissertation in May, 2010. Her thesis studies the evolution of the masculine roles in Spanish popular cinema during the period that includes the last years of Franco’s...
Dissertation: "Beyond Hope: Rhetorics of Mobility, Possibility, and Literacy" Certified Spring 2011 Patrick W. Berry completed his doctoral work in the Center for Writing Studies and Department of English. In the fall of 2011, he will be joining Syracuse University as Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric. His research focuses on a central question: What can literacy really do...
Dissertation: "Sex, Aesthetics, and Modernity in the British Romance of Italy, 1870-1914" Certified Spring 2011 Carl Lehnen's dissertation argues that late Victorian and Edwardian writers—particularly Walter Pater, J. A. Symonds, Vernon Lee, and E.M. Forster—used narratives about travel to Italy in order to articulate non-normative sexualities in terms of the foreign, the anachronistic, and the...
Dissertation: "Ecology of the Color Line: Race and Nature in American Literature, 1895-1941" Certified Fall 2011 John Claborn defended his dissertation, "Ecology of the Color Line: Race and Nature in American Literature, 1895-1941" in Fall 2011. His project contributes to recent scholarly trends in understanding African-American writing as politically and aesthetically pluralist. Employing...
Dissertation: "The National Award in Narrative Literature and the Role of Art in Democratic Spain (1977-2011)" Certified Spring 2012 Sally Perret's dissertation studies a selection of novels that have won the Spanish National Award in Narrative Literature (1977-2011)—a prize that is sponsored by the Spanish state. Drawing from theorists such as Etienne Balibar, Roberto Esposito and Jacques...
Dissertation: "Writing against Democracy: Anarchist Literature and the Aporia of Representation, 1880-1930" Certified Spring 2012 Dan Colson completed his doctoral work in the Department of English in Spring 2012. His dissertation, "Writing against Democracy: Anarchist Literature and the Aporia of Representation, 1880-1930," argues that, while anarchism posed a significant threat to American...
Dissertation: "'Painting with Faces': The Casting Director in American Theatre, Cinema, and Television" Certified Fall 2013 For several years, I worked as a professional dramaturg/literary manager and casting director in New York and Los Angeles. This experience inspired my dissertation, "'Painting with Faces': The Casting Director in American Theatre, Cinema, and Television." Written under the...
Dissertation: "Haunted Narratives: Shadows of the Southeastern Caste Wars in Mexican Literature, 1840-1958" Certified Spring 2015 Sarah's dissertation, "Haunted Narratives: Shadows of the Southeastern Caste Wars in Mexican Literature, 1840-1958," examines how creole intellectuals struggled to represent a grouping of indigenous rebellions known as the Caste Wars and their consequences in the...
Dissertation: "Acts of Imagination: Curating the Early Elizabethan Repertories, 1582–1594" Certified Spring 2016 Due in part to a background in classical music, I am generally interested in ensembles and the performance event. The thing I find most interesting about the English theatre industry before William Shakespeare is how playgoers decided which play to attend on a given afternoon. This...
Dissertation: "Science, Politics, and Soul-Making: The Romantic Encounter with Climate Change" Certified Spring 2017 Michael Verderame defended his dissertation, "Science, Politics, and Soul-Making: The Romantic Encounter with Climate Change," under the direction of Gillen Wood, in May 2017. The dissertation explores the treatment of weather and climate in British literature and culture of...
Dissertation: “Feeling Singular: Masculinity and Desire in the Early Republic, 1786–1822” Certified Spring 2017 Intellectually, I’m intrigued by the cultural logics of failure; specifically, how social conventions seek to elide the messiness and disarray of everyday life. My dissertation, “Feeling Singular: Masculinity and Desire in the Early Republic, 1786–1822,” centers on this problem...
Dissertation: "Mediating Alterity: Transitive Indianness in U.S. Non-Normative Medicine" Certified Summer 2018 My research is firmly committed to medical humanities and social sciences, a field of critical inquiry dedicated to persistent reflexivity in medicine. As a communications and media studies scholar, my method and major focus of study takes shape as social and cultural studies of...
Dissertation: "Encircling the Sun: A Political Ecology of Solar Development in India" Certified Spring 2019 My dissertation is a comparative study examining the social power behind two solar parks in semi-arid India. Specifically, I examine processes of state-making, dispossession, social differentiation and resistance to solar development in Gujarat and Andhra...
Dissertation: "An Architecture of the Land" – The National Assembly Building Complex in Bangladesh Certified Winter 2019 Nubras Samayeen is an architect, urban designer, and Ph.D. candidate in the joint program of Landscape/Architecture and Heritage at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research on Louis Kahn probes Western colonialism and modernism’s instrumentality...
Dissertation: "Grasping for the Mask: German Visions of a Chemical Modernity, 1915 - 1938" Certified Spring 2019 Peter Thompson is a PhD Candidate studying Modern German History at the University of Illinois. His research interests lie at the intersection of German intellectual history and the history of science and technology at the turn of the twentieth century....