Dissertations certified

I’ve been involved with the following dissertations, either as adviser (director), as a reviewer (who approves the dissertation before the final examination), or as another member of the examination committee. Except as indicated the authors were enrolled in the Department of English.

Most dissertations are available online through ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

• Elizabeth Howard. “The Parted Voice: Polyvocality in Victorian Elegies.” 2022. Reviewer.

• Trent M. Kays.“Authority in Digital Space: Exploring the Case of the Green Pea Galaxy.” 2020. Department of Writing Studies. Reviewer.

• Melissa L. Merte. “Formally Entangled: Plotting Economic and Romantic Desire in Victorian Narratives.” 2020. Reviewer.

• Elizabeth Alderks. “Not the Truth but the Way: The Ethics of Irony in World Literature.” 2019. Reviewer.

• Emily Durham. “Magic, Madness and Mud: The Progressive Realism of Premchand, Manto and Chughtai. 2018. Department of Asian Languages and Literatures. Reviewer.

• Dawn M. Armfield. “From Traditional to Digital: Understanding Remediation of the Postcard through the Case of PostSecret.com.” 2013. Department of Writing Studies. Reviewer.

• Heather McNeff.  “Finding Happiness: Interfaith Marriage in British Literature, 1745–1836.” 2013. Reviewer.

• Leslie Rogne Schumacher. “A ‘Lasting Solution’: The Eastern Question and British Imperialism, 1875–1878.” 2012. Department of History. Reviewer.

• Sharin Faith Schroeder. “Non-Consensus Realities: Fantasy and the Child in Victorian Religious Debates.” 2011. Reviewer.

• Roopa Sukumaran Berzins. “‘Stagecoach Island’: Persuasive Lessons in Consumption in the Virtual World.” 2011. Committee member.

• Madhurima Chakraborty. “Resistance Literature and Social Justice: Postcolonial Writing and ‘The Idea at the Back of It.’” 2010. Committee chair.

• W. Christopher Scruton. “The Rhetorical Potential of Images in Popular Accounts of Historical Events.” 2010. Department of Wriiting Studies. Reviewer..

• Krista Kennedy. “Textual Curators and Writing Machines: Authorial Agency in Encyclopedias, Print to Digital.” 2009. Reviewer.

• Sara Elizabeth Clare Berrey. “Generations in Print: Revision in American Literature 1850–1900.” 2008. Reviewer and committee chair. 

• Mitchell Paul Ogden. “Refugee Utopias: (Re)theorizing Refugeeism through Cultural Production of the Hmong Diaspora.” 2008. Committee member.

• Jean Jacobson. “How Should Poems Look? The Printer’s Measure and Poet’s Line.” 2008. Adviser.

• Joan Menefee. “Decoding Distraction: Attention in American Culture, 1871–1916.” 2004. Committee chair.

• Steven Hardy. “Expatriate Writing. Expatriate Readers: English Language Fiction Published Along the China Coast in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” 2003. Adviser.

• Betty Bright. “No Longer Innocent: The Book Arts in America. 1960 to 1980.” 2000. Department of Art History. Reviewer. Published as No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America. 1960–1980 (New York, NY: Granary Books, 2005).

• Sarah Wadsworth. “Reading the Marketplace: The Culture of the Book in Nineteenth-Century America.” 2000. Reviewer. Published as In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

• Myungjin Kim. “Dialogism in Dickens’ First-Person Narratives: A Bakhtinian Study.” 1999. Committee chair.

• Yvonne Lindsay. “Yeats and Pater: An Aesthetic Journey.” 1999. Adviser.

• Katherine Mapes. “Intimate Language: The Correspondence between Byron’s Letters and Journals and Don Juan.” 1999. Committee chair. 

• Sang-chul Lee. “Republic of Korea President Kim Young-sam’s Rhetoric in the 1992 Campaign and the First Year in Office: A Case Study of Presidential Rhetoric in Democratization.” 1998. Department of Speech-Communication. Committee member 

• Soo-jae Lee. “Relevance and Processing in Interpreting Null Object Sentences in Korean: The Interaction of Context and Processing Effort.” 1998. Institute of Linguistics and Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Reviewer.  

• Thomas Edward Fitch. “Anima-Animus for String Quartet.” 1997. School of Music. Reviewer.  

• Linda Fletcher. “The Clergyman’s Daughter.” 1997. Reviewer and committee chair. 

• J. Paul Johnson. “Literacy. Technology. and Progress: The Social Construction of World Wide Web Hypertexts in First-Year Composition.” 1997. Reviewer.  

• Robert E. Kibler. “The Road to Jade Dragon Mountain: Ezra Pound’s Aesthetic Movement from West to East and His Creation of a Paradiso Terrestre.” 1997. Reviewer.  

• Christopher Miles Michaelson. “Philosophy Out of the Cave: An Expedition in Philosophical Style.” 1997. Department of Philosophy. Reviewer.  

• William Anthony Rozaitis. “Desire Reduced to a Petal’s Span: William Carlos Williams, Charles Demuth, and Floral Representation in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America.” 1997. Committee member. 

• Helen J. Aling. “Dickens’s Unitarian Theology.” 1996. Committee member. 

• Sonia Nora Feder-Lewis. “History at Home: Reassessing the Role of Women in theVictorian Historical Novel.” 1996. Reviewer.  

• Julie L’Enfant. “Truth in Art: William Michael Rossetti and Nineteenth-Century Realist Criticism.” 1996. Reviewer. and committee chair. Published as William Rossetti’s Art Criticism: The Search for Truth in Victorian Art (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998). 

• David S. Rothstein. “Chivalry and Nostalgia: British Literature and the Formation of a Tory-Medievalist National Identity. 1820–1845.” 1996. Committee chair. 

• Deborah F. Rossen-Knill. “Toward a Pragmatics of Dialogue in Fiction.” 1995. Committee member. 

• Larry Shillock. “Disciplining Vision: Fin de siècle Literature, Optics, and Psychoanalysis. 1885–1900.” 1995. Committee member. 

• Richard Scott Carr. “Who Are We? The Australian Quest for Literary Identity.” 1994. Committee member. 

• Carlos Barney Dews. “Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers.” 1994. Reviewer. Published as Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography (Madison: University of Wicsonsin Press, 1999). 

• Richard Michael Henry. “Pretending and Meaning” 1994. Adviser. Published as Pretending and Meaning: Toward a Pragmatic Theory of Fictional Discourse, Contributions in Philosophy 57 (Westport. CT: Greenwood, 1996). 

• Susan Ann Hyman. “Green Fields: The Spirit of Place in Novels and Memoirs of the Victorian Countryside.” 1994. Committee member. 

• James Maertens. “Promethean Desires: The Technician as Hero and Myths of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” 1993. Reviewer.    

• Daniel Francis CooperAlcarón. “The Aztec Palimpsest: Discursive Appropriations of Mexican Culture.” 1992. Committee member. 

• Ersu Ding. “Meaning and Power: A Study in the Marxist Theory of Language.” 1992. Committee member. 

• LuMing Robert Mao. “Pragmatic Universals and Their Implications.” 1991. Adviser. Published in part as “Beyond Politeness Theory: ‘Face’ Revisited and Renewed,” Journal of Pragmatics 21 (1994): 451–86. 

• Katherine Allison Retan. “The Representation and Resolution of Class and Gender Conflict in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell.” 1991. Reviewer.  

• John Dunning Wenstrom. “Modernist Irony: Frost, Eliot.” 1991. Adviser. 

• Donna Rae White. “The Mabinogi in Children’s Literature: Welsh Legends in English-Language Children’s Books.” 1991. Committee chair. Published as A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature, Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 77 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998). 

• Ruth Wood. “A Challenge to Highbrow Hegemony: A Study Based on Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow American Novels of the Nineteen-Fifties.” 1991. Committee member. 

• Colleen Denney. “Exhibition Reforms and Systems: The Grosvenor Gallery. 1877–1890.” 1990. Department of Art History. Reviewer. Published in part in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, ed. Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1996). 

• Kyungwon Shin. “The English Origins of Wordsworth’s Organicism.” 1990. Committee chair. 

• Miguel Tamen. “Manners of Interpretation.” 1990. Department of Comparative Literature. Reviewer. Published as Manners of Interpretation: The Ends of Argument in Literary Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 

• Kari Joy Winter. “Subjects of Slavery. Agents of History: Women and Power in Female Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1900.” 1990. Adviser. Published as Subjects of Slavery. Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). 

• Elizabeth Frick Baldwin. “Linguistics and Ideology in the ‘English-Only’ Movement.” 1998. Committee chair. 

• Laura Ann Brady. “Collaborative Literary Writing: Issues of Authorship and Authority.” 1988. Committee chair. 

• James Michael Kaufman. “The Rhetoric of Medical Writing: Case Studies of Physicians Writing for Journal Publication.” 1988. Committee chair. 

• Timothy Robert Sweet. “Traces of War: Poetry. Photography. and the Question of Representation in the American Civil War.” 1988. Adviser. Published as Traces of War: Poetry. Photography. and the Crisis of the Union, Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 

• Cynthia Clara Carlton-Ford. 1987. “Conversation, Gender, and Power: Dialogue in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” Reviewer.  

• Julia Marie Gergits.”Women Can Paint Sometimes: Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Novels.” 1987. Committee member. 

• Paula Reed Nancarrow. “Remythologizing the Bible: Fantasy and the Revelatory Hermeneutic of George MacDonald.” 1987. Co-adviser. 

• Jerome D. DeNuccio. “A Testimony of My Innocency: The Literary Dimensions of Robert Keaynes’s Last Will and Testament, 1653.” 1986. Committee member. 

• Carl George Herndl. “Maid/Made in the Image: Solitary Women in Wordsworth’s Early Poetry.” 1986. Committee member. 

• Margaret Ann Crouch. “Concepts and Reality: An Examination of Realism.” 1985. Department of Philosophy. Reviewer.. 

• Sara Joan Eaton. “The Rhetoric of Sexual Revenge in Jacobean Drama.” 1985. Committee member. 

• Michael J. Opitz. “Poetry as Appropriate Epistemology: Gregory Bateson and W. B. Yeats.” 1985. Committee member. 

• Gordon Philip Thomas. “Reading, Writing, and Mutual Knowledge.” 1985. Reviewer.  

• James Dana Alexander. “Aphesis in English.” 1984. Committee member. 

• Matthew Cannon Brennan. “Wordsworth. Turner. and Romantic Landscape Traditions: A Study in the Picturesque and the Sublime.” 1984. Committee member. Published as Wordsworth. Turner. and Romantic Landscape: A Study of the Traditions of the Picturesque and the Sublime, Studies in English and American Literature. Linguistics. and Culture 5 (Columbia. SC: Camden House, 1987). 

• Robert Edward Brooke. “Writing and Commitment: Some Psychosocial Functions of College Writing.” 1984. Committee member. 

• Erle Patrick Moore. “The Broken Pentameter: William Carlos Williams and the Conventions of Poetry.”1984. Committee member. 

• William Michael Kleine. “Syntactic Choice and a Theory of Discourse: Rethinking Sentence-Combining.” 1983. Committee member. 

• Janis Lull. “Language Behavior and Renaissance Poetry: Studies in Shakespeare. Herbert. and Donne.” 1983. Reviewer. 

• Sandra Dianne Sandell. “‘A Very Poetic Circumstance’: Incest and the English Literary Imagination.” 1981. Adviser. 

• John Edgar Tidwell. “Cultural Collaboration and Iconoclasm: The Literary and Cultural Criticism of Alain Locke and Sterling Brown.” 1981. Committee member. 

• Marilyn Marie Cooper. “Implicatures in Dramatic Conversations.” 1980. Reviewer. Published in part as “Implicature, Convention, and The Taming of the Shrew,” Poetics 10 1981: 1–14. 

• Karen Louise Olson Murray. “Speakers in Lyric Poetry.” 1980. Committee chair. 

• Stephen James Adams. “‘To Set All Well Afloat’: Romantic Structures and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” 1970. Committee member. 

• Joel Francis Jackson. “Speech-Act Theory and Reader-Response Criticism.” 1977. Committee member. 

• James Harry McCormick. “The Distinctive Literary Property: A Study of a Theme in Twentieth-Century Criticism.” 1977. Committee member. 

• Barton Winfield Galle. Jr. “Self-Sacrifice versus Self-Help in Selected Victorian Novels.” 1976. Committee member. 

• Russell Joseph Meyer. “Tudor Laughter: A Preliminary Study for a Theory of Humor.” 1976. Committee member.