Penn State Penn State: College of the Liberal Arts
Recent Dissertations

Recent Dissertations

2019, Alexander Fyfe, “Forms of Resilience: African Fiction and the Crisis of Capitalism” (Advisor: Rosemary Jolly).

2019, Elizabeth Liendo, “Pain and Pleasure: Fictions of Erotic Violence from Ovid to Spenser” (Advisor: Robert Edwards).

2018, Molly Appel, “The Students of Human Rights: Literature, Pedagogy, and the Long Sixties in the Americas” (Advisor: Rosemary Jolly).

2017, Andres Amerikaner, “Market Realism: Latin American Literary Movements after the Boom” (Advisor: Sophia McClennen).

2017, Max Jensen, “Archaic Modernism and Spanish Poetry, 1898-1975” (Advisor: Jonathan Eburne).

2017, Kelly Lehtonen, “The Heroic Sublime in Renaissance Epic: Tasso, Spenser, Milton” (Advisor: Patrick Cheney).

2017, Lea Pao, “Informational Practices in German Poetry: Ernst Meister, Oswald Egger, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock” (Advisor: Jonathan Abel).

2017, Darwin Tsen, “Postsocialist Collectivities: Institutions, Aesthetics, Politics in the Sinophone Novel” (Advisor: Eric Hayot).

2016, Angela San Martin Vasquez, “Inter-American Modern and Modernist Poetry: The Poetics of Reimagining the Americas” (Advisor: Djelal Kadir).

2015, Morgan Bozick, “Before Lady MacBeth: Destructive Queens and the Periodization of Early British Literature” (Advisor: Caroline Eckhardt).

2015, Micah Donohue, “The Whirpool and the Mountain: Scenes of Cannibalistic Worlding in American Literature” (Advisor: Thomas Beebee).

2015, Anouar El Younssi, “Al-Tajrīb” (Experimentalism) in the Moroccan New Novel and the Debate over Legitimacy” (Advisor: Jonathan Eburne).

2014, Hui-chuan Wu, “Miraculous Economies: Asian Values, Domesticity, and Transpacific Literature” (Advisor: Eric Hayot).

2014, Yuka Amano, “Reading as Ritual: Desire for Textual Community in Works by Jeremias Gotthelf, Izumi Kyoka, Yanagita Kunio, and Annette Von Droste-Hulshoff” (Advisor: Charlotte Eubanks).

2014, Jason Brooks, “Medea Unmasked: Innokentii Annenskii’s Proto-Feminist Translation of Euripides’ Medea” (Advisor: Adrian Wanner). (Advisor: Adrian Wanner).

2014, Juliana Chapman, “Boethian Music in Thomas of Britain, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, and their Contemporaries, c. 1200-1600” (Advisor: Caroline Eckhardt).

2014, Beyza Lorenz, “Travel and Translatio: Itinerant Writing across Ottoman Worlds” (Advisors: Djelal Kadir and Nergis Erturk).

2014, Michelle Decker, “African Genres: Literature, Geography, and Poetics in the Long East Coast” (Advisor: Eric Hayot).

2013, Sara Marzioli, “Invisible Diasporas: Afro-Modernism in Italy”

2013, Renae Mitchell, “Monuments of Culture and the Cult of the Monument”

2012, Mich Nyawalo, “From Trickster to Badman to “Gangsta”: Globalizing the Badman Mythoform in Hip-Hop Music”

2012, Atia Sattar, “The Aesthetics of Experiential Medicine: Literature and Scientific Inquiry in the Nineteenth Century”

2012, German Campos-Munoz, “Classical Conjunctions: The Greco-Roman Tradition in Latin America”

2012, Kerri Pierce, “Reconnection and/or Recommencement: Narrative Desire and the Blank Page in Anna Seghers’s Transit, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and J. L. Borges’s “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

2012, Lisa Rothlisberger, “NAFTA Culture: Trade Policy and Cultural Exchange in the Global Era”

2012, Yuk Sunny Tien, “Literary Humor and Chinese Modernity: The Adaptation and Translation of Shakespeare, Wilde, and Shaw”

2011, Ipek Kismet Bell, “Rampant Modernism and Its Cityscapes: Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Robert Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitusu”

2011, Annika Farber, “Ethical Reading and the Medieval Artes Amandi: The Rise of the Didactic in Andreas Capellanus, Jean De Meun, and John Gower”

2010, Kyle Anderson, “Promises of Modern Renaissance: Italian Presences in Chinese Modernity”

2010, Nathan Devir, “Archetypes and Avatars: A Case Study of the Cultural Variables of Modern Judaic Discourse through the Selected Literary Works of A. B. Yehoshua, Chaim Potok, and Chochana Boukhobza”

2010, Deberniere Torrey, “Set Apart by Mind and Soul: Subjectivity in the Writings of Early Korean Catholics”

2009, Ayumi Ohmoto-Frederick, “Glimpsing Liminality and the Poetics of Faith: Ethics and the Fantastic Spirit”

2009, Maria Tubio, “Transatlantic Existentialisms: Existentialist Triangulations in France, the Rio de la Plata, and the United States of America”

2009, Ziad Bentahar, “Connecting North and Sub-Saharan Africa through Literature, Film and Music”

2009, Nicole Sparling, “Womb Genealogies: Conceiving the New World”

2008, Luz Kirschner, “Diaspora and Representation: Jewish Argentine, Turkish German, and Chinese American Women Writers”

2008, Sara Armengot, “Typology and the Promised Lane in Twentieth-Century Inter-American Literature and Film”

2008, Kahori Tateishi, “Ideograms in Modern Perspective: The Reconfiguration of Textual Space in Anglo-American and Japanese Modernisms”

2007, Ikuho Amano, “Ascending Decadence: A Comparative Study of Dilemmas and Pleasures in Japanese and Italian Anti-Modern Literary Discourses”

2006, Lenka Pankova, “Slavic Literacy  Masochism: Strong Women and their Slaves in Interwar”

2006, Lisa Ruch, “The British Foundation Legend of Albina and Her Sisters: Its Sources, Development, and Place in Medieval Literature”

2006, Adam Miyashiro, “Monstrosity and Ethnography in Medieval Europe: Britain, France, Iceland”

2006, Aaron Rosenberg, “Eastern African Popular Songs: Verbal Art in States of Transformation”

2006, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, “Counter-representing the Self in the Postmodern: Anti-Representational Poetics in the Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Sandra Cisneros, Ishmael Reed, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Haruki Murakami’

2006, Khadidiato Gueye, “Mapping the Liminal Identities of Mulattas in African, African American, and Caribbean Literatures”

2006, Quentin Youngberg, “From Misrepresentation to Misapprehension: Discursive Resistance and the Politics of Displacement in Native America”

2005, William Castro, “The Criminal Subject: Transversal Power and the Neoliberal Corpus Delicti”

2005, Rose Lugano, “The Portrayal of the Girl Child in Selected African Female Bildungsromane”

2005, Nathan Faries, “The Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Christianity”

2005, Kumiko Sato, “Culture of Desire and Technology: Postwar Literatures of Science Fiction in the US and Japan”

2005, Ocie Kilgus, “Literary Protest against Coca-Colonization in the Works of Campbell, Penuelas, Lispector, Mengual, Cordova, Neruda, and Espada”

2005, Mootacem Mhiri, “A Study in Self-Writing and Identity: The Transcultural and Transnational Poetics of Ameen Rihani and Paul Smail”

2004, Alan Jalowitz, “Holding the Center: American and German Epic Poetry, 1850-1950”

2004, Njeri Githire, “Voices from Ex/Isle: Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women Writers Break Geographical Confines”

2004, Barbara Alfano, “Subjecting the Nation: The United States of America in Contemporary Italian Narrative and Cinema”

2003, Hyung-Jin Lee, “Censorship of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Jo-Yeol Park: A Comparative Study”

2003, Giuliana Perco, “Looking for the Hidden Plot: Non-Linear Narratives, Open Works, and Hyperfictions”

2003, Yoshihiro Yasuhara, “Theorizing Anarchy and Revolution: The Possible Reconciliation of Aesthetics  and Politics in Ishikawa Jun and Andre Gide”

2003, Songyi Zheng, “Globalization and Transformation of Traditional Folk Arts in China and Japan”

2003, Oscar Fernandez, “Proliferation of Disease in Iberoamerican Fiction”

2002, Sharon Bailey, “The Dream of a Better Way to Live: The New Man in English, German and Russian Literature of the Early Twentieth Century”

2002, Canan Habib, “A Hypertext Translation of the Israeli Author Benny Ziffer’s Novel Turkish March: Analysis of the Text from the Point of View of Literature, Culture, Hypertext Theory, and Marketing”

2001, Liza Acosta, “Standing at the Threshold: Ritual in Inter-American Women’s Drama”

2001, Lori Ween, “Familiar Magic: The Marketing of Difference in Novels”

2001, Ayo Coly, “Searching for Home: The Expatriate African”

2001, Anbin Shi, “Redefining Chinese-ness in the Era of Globalization: A Comparative Approach”

2001, Rossella Malago, “Shakespeare adn Tasso: The Forms of Passion and Suffering”

2000, Heather Hayton, “Waiting for the Verb: Translating Desire and Faction in Midieval Literature” 2000, Monika Giacoppe, “Creating a Usable Past: History in Contemporary Inter-American Women’s Fiction”

2000, Ulrike Brisson, “Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Writings: Female Heroes, Danger, and Death”

2000, Javier Lorenzo, “Modeling the Self: Ontological and Political Uses of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature”