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English Department Dissertations Collection

Current students, please follow this link to submit your dissertation.

Dissertations from 2023 2023

In Search of Middle Paths: Buddhism, Fiction, and the Secular in Twentieth-Century South Asia , Crystal Baines, English

Save Our Children: Discourses of Queer Futurity in the United States and South Africa, 1977-2010 , Jude Hayward-Jansen, English

Epistemologies of the Unknowable in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature , Maria Ishikawa, English

Revenge of the Nerds: Tech Masculinity and Digital Hegemony , Benjamin M. Latini, English

The Diasporic Mindset and Narrative Intersections of British Identity in Transnational Fiction , Joseph A. Mason, English

A 19TH CENTURY ETHNOGRAPHIC EXHIBIT UN/CAGED: NARRATIVES OF INFORMAL EMPIRE, AFROLATINIDAD, AND CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC (RE)FRAMINGS , Celine G. Nader, English

Dissertations from 2022 2022

Writing the Aftermath: Uncanny Spaces of the Postcolonial , Sohini Banerjee, English

Science Fiction’s Enactment of the Encouragement, Process, and End Result of Revolutionary Transformation , Katharine Blanchard, English

LITERARY NEGATION AND MATERIALISM IN CHAUCER , Michelle Brooks, English

TRANSNATIONAL POLITICAL AND LITERARY ENCOUNTERS: THE IDEA OF AMERÍKA IN ICELANDIC FICTION, 1920–1990 , Jodie Childers, English

When Choices Aren't Choices: Academic Literacy Normativities in the Age of Neoliberalism , Robin K. Garabedian, English

Redefining Gender Violence: Radical Feminist Visions in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction and Women of Color Activism 1990-2010 , Hazel Gedikli, English

Stories Women Carry: Labor and Reproductive Imaginaries of South Asia and the Caribbean , Subhalakshmi Gooptu, English

The Critical Workshop: Writing Revision and Critical Pedagogy in the Middle School Classroom , Andrea R. Griswold, English

Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race and the Form of Comedy , Yunah Kae, English

At the Limits of Empathy: Political Conflict and its Aftermath in Postcolonial Fiction , Saumya Lal, English

The Burdens and Blessings of Responsibility: Duty and Community in Nineteenth- Century America , Leslie Leonard, English

No There There: New Jersey in Multiethnic Writing and Popular Culture Since 1990 , Shannon Mooney, English

Ownership and Writer Agency in Web 2.0 , Thomas Pickering, English

Combating Narratives: Soldiering in Twentieth-Century African American and Latinx Literature , Stacy Reardon, English

“IT DON’T ‘MEAN’ A THING”: TIME AND THE READER IN JAZZ FICTIONAL NARRATIVE , Damien C. Weaver, English

SATURNINE ECOLOGIES: ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD, 1542-1688 , John Yargo, English

Dissertations from 2021 2021

"On Neptunes Watry Realmes": Maritime Law and English Renaissance Literature , Hayley Cotter, English

Theater of Exchange: The Cosmopolitan Stage of Jacobean London , Liz Fox, English

“The Badge of All Our Tribe”: Contradictions of Jewish Representation on the English Renaissance Stage , Becky S. Friedman, English

On Being Dispersed: The Poetics of Dehiscence from "We the People" to Abolition , Sean A. Gordon, English

Echoing + Resistant Imagining: Filipino Student Writing Under American Colonial Rule , Florianne Jimenez, English

When Your Words Are Someone Else's Money: Rhetorical Circulation, Affect, and Late Capitalism , Kelin E. Loe, English

Indigenous Impositions in Contemporary Culture: Knotting Ontologies, Beading Aesthetics, and Braiding Temporalities , Darren Lone Fight, English

NEGRITUDE FEMINISMS: FRANCOPHONE BLACK WOMEN WRITERS AND ACTIVISTS IN FRANCE, MARTINIQUE, AND SENEGAL FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1980S , Korka Sall, English

Negotiating Space: Spatial Violation on the Early Modern Stage, 1587-1638 , Gregory W. Sargent, English

Stranger Compass of the Stage: Difference and Desire in Early Modern City Comedy , Catherine Tisdale, English

Dissertations from 2020 2020

AFFECTIVE HISTORIES OF SOUTHERN TRAUMA: SHAME, HEALING, AND VULNERABILITY IN US SOUTHERN WOMEN’S WRITING, 1975–2006 , Faune Albert, English

Materially Queer: Identity and Agency in Academic Writing , Joshua Barsczewski, English

ANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMS , Gayathri M. Hewagama, English

WRITING AGAINST HISTORY: FEMINIST BAROQUE NARRATIVES IN INTERWAR ATLANTIC MODERNISM , Annaliese Hoehling, English

Passing Literacies: Soviet Immigrant Elders and Intergenerational Language Practice , Jenny Krichevsky, English

Lisa Ben and Queer Rhetorical Reeducation in Post-war Los Angeles , Katelyn S. Litterer, English

Daring Depictions: An Analysis of Risks and Their Mediation in Representations of Black Suffering , Russell Nurick, English

From Page to Program: A Study of Stakeholders in Multimodal First-Year Composition Curriculum and Program Design , Rebecca Petitti, English

Forms of the Future: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Visioning Work of Aesthetics in U.S. Poetry, 1822-1863 , Magdalena Zapędowska, English

Dissertations from 2019 2019

Black Men Who Betray Their Race: 20TH Century Literary Representations of the Black Male Race Traitor , Gregory Coleman, English

“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives in Modern Fiction , Sarah D'Stair, English

Afrasian Imaginaries: Global Capitalism and Labor Migration in Indian Ocean Fictions, 1990 – 2015 , Neelofer Qadir, English

Divided Tongues: The Politics and Poetics of Food in Modern Anglophone Indian Fiction , Shakuntala Ray, English

Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage , William Steffen, English

Gilded Chains: Global Economies and Gendered Arts in US Fiction, 1865-1930 , Heather Wayne, English

“ÆTHELTHRYTH”: SHAPING A RELIGIOUS WOMAN IN TENTH-CENTURY WINCHESTER , Victoria Kent Worth, English

Dissertations from 2018 2018

Sex and Difference in the Jewish American Family: Incest Narratives in 1990s Literary and Pop Culture , Eli W. Bromberg, English

Rhetorical Investments: Writing, Technology, and the Emerging Logics of the Public Sphere , Dan Ehrenfeld, English

Kiskeyanas Valientes en Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers and the Spaces of Contemporary American Literature , Isabel R. Espinal, English

“TO WEIGH THE WORLD ANEW”: POETICS, RHETORIC, AND SOCIAL STRUGGLE, FROM SIDNEY’S ARCADIA TO SHAKESPEARE’S THEATER , David Katz, English

CIVIC DOMESTICITY: RHETORIC, WOMEN, AND SPACE AT HULL HOUSE, 1889-1910 , Liane Malinowski, English

Charting the Terrain of Latina/o/x Theater in Chicago , Priscilla M. Page, English

The Politics of Feeling and the Work of Belonging in US Immigrant Fiction 1990 - 2015 , Lauren Silber, English

Turning Inside Out: Reading and Writing Godly Identity in Seventeenth-Century Narratives of Spiritual Experience , Meghan Conine Swavely, English

Dissertations from 2017 2017

Tragicomic Transpositions: The Influence of Spanish Prose Romance on the Development of Early Modern English Tragicomedy , Josefina Hardman, English

“The Blackness of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity in 20th/21st Century African American Culture , Casey Hayman, English

Waiting for Now: Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time , Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji, English

Latina Identities, Critical Literacies, and Academic Achievement in Community College , Morgan Lynn, English

Demanding Spaces: 1970s U.S. Women's Novels as Sites of Struggle , Kate Marantz, English

Novel Buildings: Architectural and Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction , Ashley R. Nadeau, English

CATCH FEELINGS: CLASS AFFECT AND PERFORMATIVITY IN TEACHING ASSOCIATES' NARRATIVES , Anna Rita Napoleone, English

Dialogue and "Dialect": Character Speech in American Fiction , Carly Overfelt, English

Materializing Transfer: Writing Dispositions in a Culture of Standardized Testing , Lisha Daniels Storey, English

Theatres of War: Performing Queer Nationalism in Modernist Narratives , Elise Swinford, English

Dissertations from 2016 2016

Multimodal Assessment in Action: What We Really Value in New Media Texts , Kathleen M. Baldwin, English

Addictive Reading: Nineteenth-Century Drug Literature's Possible Worlds , Adam Colman, English

"The Book Can't Teach You That": A Case Study of Place, Writing, and Tutors' Constructions of Writing Center Work , Christopher Joseph DiBiase, English

Protest Lyrics at Work: Labor Resistance Poetry of Depression-Era Autoworkers , Rebecca S. Griffin, English

From What Remains: The Politics of Aesthetic Mourning and the Poetics of Loss in Contemporary African American Culture , Kajsa K. Henry, English

Minor Subjects in America: Everyday Childhoods of the Long Nineteenth Century , Gina M. Ocasion, English

Enduring Affective Rhetorics: Transnational Feminist Action in Digital Spaces , Jessica Ouellette, English

The School Desk and the Writing Body , Marni M. Presnall, English

Sustainable Public Intellectualism: The Rhetorics of Student Scientist-Activists , Jesse Priest, English

Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Devotion , Katey E. Roden, English

Dissertations from 2015 2015

“As Child in Time”: Childhood, Temporality, and 19th Century U.S. Literary Imaginings of Democracy , Marissa Carrere, English

A National Style: A Critical Historiography of the Irish Short Story , Andrew Fox, English

Homosexuality is a Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled the Lyric, Community and the Ideology of Sex to Theorize a Gay Poetic , Christopher M. Hennessy, English

Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, and the Fop Figure in Early Modern English Drama , Jessica Landis, English

Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering the Self in the Working Class Escape Narrative , Christine M. Maksimowicz, English

Metabolizing Capital: Writing, Information, and the Biophysical World , Christian J. Pulver, English

Audible Voice in Context , Airlie S. Rose, English

The Role of Online Reading and Writing in the Literacy Practices of First-Year Writing Students , Casey Burton Soto, English

Dissertations from 2014 2014

RESURRECTION: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BLACK CHURCH IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR CULTURE , Rachel J. Daniel, English

Seeing Blindness: The Visual and the Great War in Literary Modernism , Rachael Dworsky, English

HERE, THERE, AND IN BETWEEN: TRAVEL AS METAPHOR IN MIXED RACE NARRATIVES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE , Colin Enriquez, English

Interactive Audience and the Internet , John R. Gallagher, English

Down from the Mountain and into the Mill: Literacy Sponsorship and Southern Appalachian Women in the New South , Emma M. Howes, English

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction , Ruth A.H. Lahti, English

"A More Natural Mother": Concepts of Maternity and Queenship in Early Modern England , Anne-Marie Kathleen Strohman, English

Dissertations from 2013 2013

Letters to a Dictionary: Competing Views of Language in the Reception of Webster's Third New International Dictionary , Anne Pence Bello, English

Staging the Depression: The Federal Theatre Project's Dramas of Poverty, 1935-1939 , Amy Brady, English

Our Story Has Not Been Told in any Moment: Radical Black Feminist Theatre From The Old Left to Black Power , Julie M Burrell, English

Writing for Social Action: Affect, Activism, and the Composition Classroom , Sarah Finn, English

Surviving Domestic Tensions: Existential Uncertainty in New World African Diasporic Women's Literature , Denia M Fraser, English

From Feathers to Fur: Theatrical Representations of Skin in the Medieval English Cycle Plays , Valerie Anne Gramling, English

The Reflexive Scaffold: Metatheatricality, Genre, and Cultural Performance in English Renaissance Drama , Nathaniel C. Leonard, English

The World Inscribed: Literary Form, Travel, and the Book in England, 1580-1660 , Philip S Palmer, English

Shakespearean Signifiers , Marie H Roche, English

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Recent PhD Dissertations

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See here for a full list of dissertations since 1904 .

Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.

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Ph.D. Program

Click  here for the Handbook for Graduate Study in English .  This document includes departmental policies and procedures concerned with graduate study.

The Berkeley English Department offers a wide-ranging Ph.D. program, engaging in all historical periods of British and American literature, Anglophone literature, and critical and cultural theory. The program aims to assure that students gain a broad knowledge of literature in English as well as the highly-developed skills in scholarship and criticism necessary to do solid and innovative work in their chosen specialized fields.

Please note that the department does not offer a Master’s Degree program or a degree program in Creative Writing. Students can, however, petition for an M.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing upon completion of the Ph.D. course requirements (one of which must be a graduate writing workshop) and submission of a body of creative work.

Students interested in combining a Ph.D. in English with studies in another discipline may pursue Designated Emphases or Concurrent Degrees in a number of different fields

Normative time to complete the program is six years. The first two years are devoted to fulfilling the course and language requirements. The third year is spent preparing for and taking the Ph.D. oral qualifying examination. The fourth through sixth years are devoted to researching and writing the prospectus and dissertation.

The general goal of the first two years is to assure that the students have a broad and varied knowledge of the fields of British and American literature in their historical dimensions, and are also familiar with a wide range of literary forms, critical approaches, and scholarly methods. Students will complete twelve courses distributed as follows:

• 1) English 200, “Problems in the Study of Literature”
• 2) Medieval through 16 th -Century
• 3) 17 th - through 18 th -Century
• 4) 19 th -Century
• 5) 20 th -Century
• 6) a course organized in terms other than chronological coverage.
• 7-12) Elective courses.

(A thirteenth required course in pedagogy can be taken later.) Students who have done prior graduate course work may transfer up to three courses for credit toward the 12-course requirement. Up to five of the 12 courses may be taken in other departments.

Students must demonstrate either proficiency in two foreign languages or advanced knowledge in one foreign language before the qualifying examination. There are no "canonical languages" in the department. Rather, each specifies which languages are to count, how they relate to the student's intellectual interests, and on which level knowledge is to be demonstrated. "Proficiency" is understood as the ability to translate (with a dictionary) a passage of about 300 words into idiomatic English prose in ninety minutes. The proficiency requirement may also be satisfied by completing one upper-division or graduate literature course in a foreign language. The advanced knowledge requirement is satisfied by completing two or three literature courses in the language with a grade of "B" or better.

At the end of the second year each student’s record is reviewed in its entirety to determine whether or not he or she is able and ready to proceed to the qualifying exam and the more specialized phase of the program.

The Qualifying Examination

Students are expected to take the qualifying examination within one year after completing course and language requirements. The qualifying exam is oral and is conducted by a committee of five faculty members. The exam lasts approximately two hours and consists of three parts: two comprehensive historical fields and a third field which explores a topic in preparation for the dissertation. The exam is meant both as a culmination of course work and as a test of readiness for the dissertation.

The Prospectus and Dissertation

The prospectus consists of an essay and bibliography setting forth the nature of the research project, its relation to existing scholarship and criticism on the subject, and its anticipated value. Each candidate must have a prospectus conference with the members of their committee and the Graduate Chair to discuss the issues outlined in the proposal and to give final approval to the project. The prospectus should be approved within one or two semesters following the qualifying exam.

The dissertation is the culmination of the student's graduate career and is expected to be a substantial and original work of scholarship or criticism. Students within normative time complete the dissertation in their fourth through sixth years.

PhD Program in English Language and Literature

The department enrolls an average of ten PhD students each year. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package. We also offer a large and diverse graduate faculty with competence in a wide range of literary, theoretical and cultural fields. Each student chooses a special committee that works closely along side the student to design a course of study within the very broad framework established by the department. The program is extremely flexible in regard to course selection, the design of examinations and the election of minor subjects of concentration outside the department. English PhD students pursuing interdisciplinary research may include on their special committees faculty members from related fields such as comparative literature, medieval studies, Romance studies, German studies, history, classics, women’s studies, linguistics, theatre and performing arts, government, philosophy, and film and video studies.

The PhD candidate is normally expected to complete six or seven one-semester courses for credit in the first year of residence and a total of six or seven more in the second and third years. The program of any doctoral candidate’s formal and informal study, whatever his or her particular interests, should be comprehensive enough to ensure familiarity with:

• The authors and works that have been the most influential in determining the course of English, American, and related literatures
• The theory and criticism of literature, and the relations between literature and other disciplines
• Concerns and tools of literary and cultural history such as textual criticism, study of genre, source, and influence as well as wider issues of cultural production and historical and social contexts that bear on literature

Areas in which students may have major or minor concentrations include African-American literature, American literature to 1865, American literature after 1865, American studies (a joint program with the field of history), colonial and postcolonial literatures, cultural studies, dramatic literature, English poetry, the English Renaissance to 1660, lesbian, bisexual and gay literary studies, literary criticism and theory, the nineteenth century, Old and Middle English, prose fiction, the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the twentieth century, and women's literature.

By the time a doctoral candidate enters the fourth semester of graduate study, the special committee must decide whether he or she is qualified to proceed toward the PhD. Students are required to pass their Advancement to Candidacy Examination before their fourth year of study, prior to the dissertation.

PhD Program specifics can be viewed here: PhD Timeline PhD Procedural Guide

Special Committee

Every graduate student selects a special committee of faculty advisors who work intensively with the student in selecting courses and preparing and revising the dissertation. The committee is comprised of at least three Cornell faculty members: a chair, and typically two minor members usually from the English department, but very often representing an interdisciplinary field. The university system of special committees allows students to design their own courses of study within a broad framework established by the department, and it encourages a close working relationship between professors and students, promoting freedom and flexibility in the pursuit of the graduate degree. The special committee for each student guides and supervises all academic work and assesses progress in a series of meetings with the students.

At Cornell, teaching is considered an integral part of training in academia. The field requires a carefully supervised teaching experience of at least one year for every doctoral candidate as part of the program requirements. The Department of English, in conjunction with the  John S. Knight Institute for Writing  in the Disciplines, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching in the university-wide First-Year Writing Program. The courses are writing-intensive and may fall under such general rubrics as “Portraits of the Self,” “American Literature and Culture,” “Shakespeare,” and “Cultural Studies,” among others. A graduate student may also serve as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate lecture course taught by a member of the Department of English faculty.

Language Requirements

Each student and special committee will decide what work in foreign language is most appropriate for a student’s graduate program and scholarly interests. Some students’ doctoral programs require extensive knowledge of a single foreign language and literature; others require reading ability in two or more foreign languages. A student may be asked to demonstrate competence in foreign languages by presenting the undergraduate record, taking additional courses in foreign languages and literature, or translating and discussing documents related to the student’s work. Students are also normally expected to provide evidence of having studied the English language through courses in Old English, the history of the English language, grammatical analysis or the application of linguistic study to metrics or to literary criticism. Several departments at Cornell offer pertinent courses in such subjects as descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics and the philosophy of language.

All PhD degree candidates are guaranteed five years of funding (including a stipend , a full tuition fellowship and student health insurance):

• A first-year non-teaching fellowship
• Two years of teaching assistantships
• A fourth-year non-teaching fellowship for the dissertation writing year
• A fifth-year teaching assistantship
• Summer support for four years, including a first-year summer teaching assistantship, linked to a teachers’ training program at the Knight Institute. Summer residency in Ithaca is required.

Students have also successfully competed for Buttrick-Crippen Fellowship, Society for the Humanities Fellowships, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Shin Yong-Jin Graduate Fellowships, Provost’s Diversity Fellowships, fellowships in recognition of excellence in teaching, and grants from the Graduate School to help with the cost of travel to scholarly conferences and research collections.

Admission & Application Procedures

The application for Fall 2024 admission will open on September 15, 2023 and close at 11:59pm EST on December 1, 2023.

Our application process reflects the field’s commitment to considering the whole person and their potential to contribute to our scholarly community.  Applicants will be evaluated on the basis of academic preparation (e.g., performance in relevant courses, completion of substantive, independent research project). An applicant’s critical and creative potential will be considered: applicants should demonstrate interest in extensive research and writing and include a writing sample that reveals a capacity to argue persuasively, demonstrate the ability to synthesize a broad range of materials, as well as offer fresh insights into a problem or text. The committee will also consider whether an applicant demonstrates a commitment to inclusion, equity, and diversity and offers a substantive explanation for why study at Cornell is especially compelling (e.g., a discussion of faculty research and foci). Admissions committees will consider the entire application carefully, including statements and critical writing, as well as transcripts, letters of recommendation, and a resume/cv (if provided). Please view the requirements and procedures listed below, if you are interested in being considered for our PhD in English Language and Literature program.

Eligibility: Applicants must currently have, or expect to have, at least a BA or BS (or the equivalent) in any field before matriculation. International students, please verify degree equivalency here . Applicants are not required to meet a specified GPA minimum.

To Apply: All applications and supplemental materials must be submitted online through the Graduate School application system . While completing your application, you may save and edit your data. Once you click submit, your application will be closed for changes. Please proofread your materials carefully. Once you pay and click submit, you will not be able to make any changes or revisions.

Deadline: December 1st, 11:59pm EST.  This deadline is firm. No applications, additional materials, or revisions will be accepted after the deadline.

PhD Program Application Requirements Checklist

• Academic Statement of Purpose Please describe (within 1000 words) in detail the substantive research questions you are interested in pursuing during your graduate studies and why they are significant. Additionally, make sure to include information about any training or research experience that you believe has prepared you for our program. You should also identify specific faculty members whose research interests align with your own specific questions.  Note that the identification of faculty is important; you would be well advised to read selected faculty’s recent scholarship so that you can explain why you wish to study with them. Do not rely on the courses they teach.  Please refrain from contacting individual faculty prior to receiving an offer of admission.
• Personal Statement Please describe (within 1000 words) how your personal background and experiences influenced your decision to pursue a graduate degree and the research you wish to conduct.  Explain, for example the meaning and purpose of the PhD in the context of your personal history and future aspirations.  Please note that we will pay additional attention to candidates who identify substantial reasons to obtain a PhD beyond the pursuit of an academic position. Additionally, provide insight into your potential to contribute to a community of inclusion, belonging, and respect where scholars representing diverse backgrounds, perspectives, abilities, and experiences can learn (productively and positively) together.
• Critical Writing Sample Your academic writing sample must be between 3,000 and 7,500 words (12-30 pages), typed and double-spaced. We accept excerpts from longer works, or a combination of shorter works.
• Three Letters of Recommendation We require 3 letters of recommendation.  At the time of application, you will be allowed to enter up to 4 recommenders in the system.  Your application will be considered “Complete” when we have received at least 3 letters of recommendation.   Letters of recommendation are due December 1 . Please select three people who best know you and your work. Submitting additional letters will not enhance your application. In the recommendation section of the application, you must include the email address of each recommender. After you save the information (and before you pay/submit), the application system will automatically generate a recommendation request email to your recommender with instructions for submitting the letter electronically. If your letters are stored with a credential service such as Interfolio, please use their Online Application Delivery feature and input the email address assigned to your stored document, rather than that of your recommender’s. The electronic files will be attached to your application when they are received and will not require the letter of recommendation cover page.
• Transcripts Scan transcripts from each institution you have attended, or are currently attending, and upload into the academic information section of the application. Be sure to remove your social security number from all documents prior to scanning. Please do not send paper copies of your transcripts. If you are subsequently admitted and accept, the Graduate School will require an official paper transcript from your degree-awarding institution prior to matriculation.
• English Language Proficiency Requirement All applicants must provide proof of English language proficiency. For more information, please view the  Graduate School’s English Language Requirement .
• GRE General Test and GRE Subject Test are NO LONGER REQUIRED, effective starting with the 2019 application In March 2019, the faculty of English voted overwhelmingly to eliminate all GRE requirements (both general and subject test) for application to the PhD program in English. GRE scores are not good predictors of success or failure in a PhD program in English, and the uncertain predictive value of the GRE exam is far outweighed by the toll it takes on student diversity. For many applicants the cost of preparing for and taking the exam is prohibitively expensive, and the exam is not globally accessible. Requiring the exam narrows our applicant pool at precisely the moment we should be creating bigger pipelines into higher education. We need the strength of a diverse community in order to pursue the English Department’s larger mission: to direct the force of language toward large and small acts of learning, alliance, imagination, and justice.

General Information for All Applicants

Application Fee: Visit the Graduate School for information regarding application fees, payment options, and fee waivers .

Document Identification: Please do not put your social security number on any documents.

Status Inquiries:  Once you submit your application, you will receive a confirmation email. You will also be able to check the completion status of your application in your account. If vital sections of your application are missing, we will notify you via email after the Dec. 1 deadline and allow you ample time to provide the missing materials. Please do not inquire about the status of your application.

Credential/Application Assessments:  The Admission Review Committee members are unable to review application materials or applicant credentials prior to official application submission. Once the committee has reviewed applications and made admissions decisions, they will not discuss the results or make any recommendations for improving the strength of an applicant’s credentials. Applicants looking for feedback are advised to consult with their undergraduate advisor or someone else who knows them and their work.

Review Process:  Application review begins after the submission deadline. Notification of admissions decisions will be made by email by the end of February.

Connecting with Faculty and/or Students: Unfortunately, due to the volume of inquiries we receive, faculty and current students are not available to correspond with potential applicants prior to an offer of admission. Applicants who are offered admission will have the opportunity to meet faculty and students to have their questions answered prior to accepting. Staff and faculty are also not able to pre-assess potential applicant’s work outside of the formal application process. Please email [email protected] instead, if you have questions.

Visiting: The department does not offer pre-admission visits or interviews. Admitted applicants will be invited to visit the department, attend graduate seminars and meet with faculty and students before making the decision to enroll.

Transfer Credits:  Students matriculating with an MA degree may, at the discretion of the Director of Graduate Studies, receive credit for up to two courses once they begin our program.

For Further Information

Contact [email protected]

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The graduate program in English provides you with a broad knowledge in the discipline, including critical and cultural theory and literary history. This solid foundation enables you to choose your own path based on the wide variety of areas of concentration. Our flexible program allows you to take courses outside the department to further explore your chosen field(s). Our program emphasizes excellence in writing, innovative scholarship, and eloquent presentations—important skills you will need in your future profession. The program and its faculty are committed both to diversity in its student body and in the diversity of thought and scholarship.

Examples of student theses and dissertations include “The Write to Stay Home: Southern Black Literature from the Great Depression to Early Twenty-first Century,” “Profaning Theater: The Drama of Religion on the Modernists Stage,” and “Sentimental Borders: Genre and Geography in the Literature of Civil War and Reconstruction.”

Graduates have secured faculty positions at institutions such as Brown University, Columbia University, and University of California, Los Angeles. Others have begun their careers with leading organizations such as Google and McKinsey & Company.

Additional information on the graduate program is available from the Department of English and requirements for the degree are detailed in Policies .

Areas of Study

Unspecified | Medieval | Renaissance/Early Modern | 18th Century/Enlightenment | 19th Century British/Romantics/Victorian | Early American (to 1900) | 20th Century British | 20th Century American | Criticism and Theory | The English Language | Transnational Anglophone/Postcolonial | African American Literature | Drama | Poetry

Admissions Requirements

Please review admissions requirements and other information before applying. You can find degree program-specific admissions requirements below and access additional guidance on applying from the Department of English .

Writing Sample

The writing samples (one primary and one secondary) are highly significant parts of the application. Applicants should submit 2 double-spaced, 15-page papers of no more than 5,000 words each, in 12-point type with 1-inch margins. The writing samples must be examples of critical writing (rather than creative writing) on subjects directly related to English. Applicants should not send longer papers with instructions to read an excerpt or excerpts but should edit the samples themselves so that they submit only 15 pages for each paper. Applicants who know the field in which they expect to specialize should, when possible, submit a primary writing sample related to that field.

Statement of Purpose

The statement of purpose is not a personal statement and should not be heavily weighted down with autobiographical anecdotes. It should be no longer than 1,000 words. It should give the admissions committee a clear sense of applicants’ individual interests and strengths. Applicants need not indicate a precise field of specialization if they do not know, but it is helpful to know something about a candidate’s professional aspirations and sense of their own skills, as well as how the Harvard Department of English might help in attaining their goals. Those who already have a research topic in mind should outline it in detail, giving a sense of how they plan their progress through the program. Those who do not should at least attempt to define the questions and interests they foresee driving their work over the next few years.

Standardized Tests

GRE: Not Accepted

While there are no specific prerequisites for admission, a strong language background helps to strengthen the application, and students who lack it should be aware that they will need to address these gaps during their first two years of graduate study.

While a candidate's overall GPA is important, it is more important to have an average of no lower than A- in literature (and related) courses. In addition, while we encourage applications from candidates in programs other than English, they must have both the requisite critical skills and a foundation in English literature for graduate work in English. Most of our successful candidates have some knowledge of all the major fields of English literary study and advanced knowledge of the field in which they intend to study.

Theses & Dissertations

Theses & Dissertations for English

See list of English faculty

APPLICATION DEADLINE

Questions about the program.

Department of English

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Ph.d. in literature.

Our PhD students are involved in a range of interdisciplinary and public initiatives. For example, some affiliate with interdisciplinary  Designated Emphases ; others have received grants to create  podcasts , convene interdisciplinary  working groups , or organize and annual graduate student conferences . Each year one student participates in a year-long exchange program with the  Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies  in Mainz, Germany; some have worked as Graduate Assistants and researchers for research centers such as the  Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program , the experimental media  Modlab , and the university’s  Datalab .

Students graduate with the qualitative and quantitative skills necessary for professional research and teaching in English, as well as extensive pedagogical training and a range of teaching experience that includes writing and composition, as well as designing and teaching Introduction to Literature courses. Our Alumni Directory  includes titles of recent dissertations, as well as information about the diverse careers for which the PhD has helped prepare our graduates. There is an option to complete an MA in literature , but it is not a stand-alone program.

Questions? Contact: [email protected]  

Admissions / Online Application

Degree requirements for the Ph.D. program   (links to more details) include 50 units of coursework with at least 44 units taken for a letter grade, proficiency in one foreign language proficiency before degree conferral, preliminary and qualifying examinations, and a dissertation. In addition, there are also opportunities for students to pursue a Designated Emphasis and gain teaching experience.

Coursework Requirements

2 Core Courses (8 units)

• English 200: Introduction to Graduate Studies (taken as Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory)
• One survey course in literary theory (Critical Theory 200A or 200C taken for a grade).

1 Workshop (2 units)

• English 288: Prospectus Workshop (taken as Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory); students may petition to complete this course independently with a Prospectus Adviser.

10 Graduate-level Seminars (40 units)

• All courses must be taken for a grade.
• Five courses must satisfy the breadth requirement (see below).
• Five courses will be comprised of electives (see below).
• Students may count one undergraduate 100-level course as one of their ten required courses.
• Aside from ENL 200, no course graded Satisfactory-Unsatisfactory may count as one of the twelve required seminars. Independent and group studies may not be taken for a grade.

13 Total Graduate Courses (50 units; 44 units taken for a grade)  Additionally, students who enter the Ph.D. program without a MA degree can earn one en route to the Ph.D. degree.

The English Ph.D. requires a reading knowledge of one foreign language before completing the degree; it is not an admissions requirement. This could be satisfied through previous or current coursework or an exam. Any of the following demonstrates proficiency:

Completion within the past eight years of 3 semester-length, or 4 quarter-length courses in a foreign language at the undergraduate level. Students must earn a passing grade, but courses may be taken on a Pass/No Pass basis.

Students may take the Placement Test offered by the UC Davis Language Center , testing out of the language at the intermediate level.

A Pass in the language exam offered in the English Department at the beginning of Fall or Spring quarter each year.

The breadth requirements must be fulfilled by coursework in the Department of English or coursework taught by English Department faculty.  Five courses (of the total 40 units above) will satisfy this requirement. Students must complete two Earlier Period courses, and two Later Period courses, and one Focus course. 

Earlier Period Courses Pre-1800; or Pre-1865 if the course focus is on American literature

Later Period Courses post-1800; or post-1865 if the course focus is on American literature

Focus Course Interdisciplinary, Identity, Genre, Other National, Method, Theory

Faculty and/or the Graduate Advisor may choose to designate a course as fulfilling more than one category, but students may use the course to fulfill only one requirement. For instance, a student could use a course on women in Early Modern literature to satisfy the Earlier Period requirement, or the Focus (Identity) requirement, but not both. A student could use a course on Cold War Drama to satisfy the Later Period requirement or the Focus (Genre) requirement, but not both.

The electives requirement can be fulfilled by actual offered seminars inside or outside the English Department.  Five elective courses will satisfy degree requirements. UWP 390 is acceptable as one of the electives. Also, be aware 299s are ungraded but still count towards overall units. With the approval of the Graduate Adviser, students may also enroll in a graduate class at another University of California campus through the Intercampus Exchange Program .

Students who enter the Ph.D. program with MA coursework from another institution may petition the Graduate Adviser for a Course Waiver up to three of the twelve required seminars; each approved petition will reduce the number of required courses by one. Students may not reduce their coursework to fewer than nine seminars.

Students holding an MA may also petition the Graduate Adviser for course relief for up to five of the breadth requirements; each approved petition allows the student to substitute elective courses. ENL 200 may not be waived or relieved.

For each waiver or relief request, students must submit to the English Graduate Office a Course Waiver or Relief Request form (available in the office) along with the syllabus from the course and the student's seminar paper.

Graduate students may participate in a Designated Emphasis (DE) , a specialization that might include a new method of inquiry or an important field of application which is related to two or more existing Ph.D. programs. The DE is awarded in conjunction with the Ph.D. degree and is signified by a transcript notation; for example, “Ph.D. in Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Native American Studies.”  More information .

In the Spring Quarter of the second year or Fall Quarter of the third year of graduate study, students take a Preliminary Examination in two historical fields and one focus field. Three faculty members conduct the oral examination, each representing one of the fields. Prior to taking the Preliminary Examination, students must have completed the following:

Introduction to Graduate Studies (ENL200)

Survey of Literary Theory (CRI200A or CRI200C)

Four of five Breadth Requirements

Four of five Elective Requirements

Additionally, students select one focus field. A student may devise her/his own focus list in collaboration with two faculty members or, as is more common, choose one from among the following:

Black Studies

Critical Theory

Disability Studies

Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities

Film Studies

Media Technologies

Performance Studies

Postcolonial Theory

Psychoanalysis

Queer Feminisms

Queer Theories

Race and Ethnicity Studies

Science and Literature

Science Fiction

English 299 (Independent Study) is ordinarily used the quarters before the Preliminary Examination to prepare for the oral  examination and is graded Satisfactory-Unsatisfactory. Students may register for ENL 299 under the Graduate Advisor or a faculty member in the field of their exam for the quarter(s) they intend to study.

In the event that the student does not pass the exam, the exam chair will report the decision to the Graduate Adviser, who will work with the committee to decide whether the student should be given a chance to retake the exam (no less than six months later) or whether the student should be dismissed from the program. The Graduate Adviser will report this final decision to the student within 72 hours of the exam’s conclusion.

Any remaining requirements after taking the Preliminary Examination must be completed before scheduling the Qualifying Examination.

Students will select two historical fields from among the following list.   Students who would like to do non-consecutive historical fields need to get prior approval from the Graduate Adviser.  These lists and additional helpful documents can be accessed via our box folder "Preliminary Exam" in the English Graduate Program file.

The Qualifying Examination  happens as early as the spring of the third year and should be taken no later than the spring of the fourth year . The reading list for this exam, which is conducted orally, is constructed by the student in consultation with his or her three-person dissertation committee. When making their lists, students may consult the standard lists for preliminary exams available on the department's Box site. If the student has elected a designated emphasis (DE), materials from that field should also be incorporated into the Qualifying Exam reading list.

Graduate Studies requires the Qualifying Examination Application (GS319) to be submitted at least 30 days prior the the scheduled exam date.

Qualifying Examination Committee  The student, in consultation with their Prospectus Adviser and, if needed, the Graduate Adviser, nominates  four   faculty to serve on the Qualifying Examination Committee: 

• The three proposed Dissertation Committee members 
• One member must be from outside the English graduate program (this may be a member of the Dissertation Committee). 

The QE Committee is responsible for administering the exam. Neither the “Prospectus Adviser” nor the Dissertation Director (in many, though not all, cases these will be same) may be the chair of the QE Committee. Students with a designated emphasis (DE) must include one faculty member affiliated with the DE on both their qualifying and dissertation committee. DE paperwork must be approved before the QE application is submitted. The exam will focus on the Prospectus and the Qualifying Exam reading list. The bibliography of the prospectus will normally overlap substantially with the Qualifying Exam reading list.

The Qualifying Exam Report (GS343) must be submitted withing 72 hours of the exam. Upon successful completion, students receive the Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Plan B (GS321) .

If you are disabled, you are entitled to accommodations for all requirements of the program you’re enrolled in, a process formally handled by the Student Disability Center . We recommend starting the process of coordinating with the SDC early in your graduate school journey, as it can take time for the Center to process information.  We must work with the SDC to implement your accommodations for your exams.  Please indicate your need for accommodations to us as soon as possible, so we can include the Center in our exam scheduling process.  Please notify us by the fourth week of the quarter in which you intend to sit the exam.

The dissertation must be an original work of scholarship and/or interpretation. It may be critical, bibliographical, historical, or biographical in its subject. Students work with a dissertation director and consult with two official readers as well as with other faculty knowledgeable about the project. A dditional details . 

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The Library

Browse by phd thesis by university of warwick department.

Addyman, Mary (2016) 'All bundled together in endless confusion’ : museums, collecting and material practices in late Victorian culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Adjei, Cassie (2015) Duality, genre and the "Modern Mulatto" : bresponse and representation in contemporary British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Alhathlool, Khalid (2013) "Attachment to the soil and aspiration toward departure" : tradition, modernity, cosmopolitanism, globalisation & identity in Amin Maalouf. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Angelov, Dimitar (2008) Language, selfhood and otherness in the works of D. H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Akel, Regina (2007) The journals of Maria Graham (1785-1842). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ashby, Kevin John (1998) Disciplines of the king : Arthurianism, historiography, poetics and surveillance in Tennyson's Idylls of the king (1859). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Attridge, Steve (1993) The soldier in late Victorian society : images and ambiguities. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Andermahr, Sonya (1993) Difference, identification and desire : contemporary lesbian genre fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Armitt, Lucie (1992) Pushing back the limits: the fantastic as transgression in contemporary women's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Al-Issa, Ahmad (1989) Polyphony and the anxiety of influence in the fiction of Henry James. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Aston, Elaine (1987) Outside the doll's house : a study in images of women in English and French theatre, 1848-1914. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Audette, Florestine (1979) Religious elements in Marlowe's 'Tamburlaine'. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bondré, Natasha (2020) Reading ‘Emperor Oil’ in the expanded Caribbean : petroleum, ecology and Caribbean literature in the twentieth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bailey, Thomasin Mary (2020) Authority and influence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bibizadeh, Roxanne Ellen (2019) Freedom and unfreedom in the literature of the Iranian and Arab diaspora. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Borg Cardona, Karen (2018) The failed quest in contemporary world literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Breidenbach, Birgit (2017) Stimmung and modernity: the aesthetic philosophy of mood in Dostoevsky, Beckett and Bernhard. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bhattacharya, Sourit (2017) The crisis of modernity : realism and the postcolonial Indian novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brljak, Vladmir (2015) Allegory and modernity in English literature c. 1575-1675. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bumrungsalee, Intira (2013) Translating culture in films : subtitling in Thailand. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bahrawi, Nazry (2013) Sacred impulses, sacrilegious worlds : postsecular intimations in Graham Greene and Naguib Mahfouz. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Barnard, Donald Edwin (2012) A critical edition of Derek Walcott's Omeros. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brown, La Tasha Amelia (2011) The diasporic black Caribbean experience : nostalgia, memory and identity. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bugeja, Norbert (2010) Rethinking the liminal : threshold conciousness in four Mashriqi memoirs. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Beer, Lewis (2010) Fortune and desire in Guillaume de Machaut. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Byatt, Jim (2009) Taboo and transgression : reconfiguring the monstrous in contemporary British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brigley, Zoë (2007) Exile and ecology: the poetic practice of Gwyneth Lewis, Pascale Petit and Deryn Rees-Jones. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Biswell, Andrew (2002) Conflict and confluence: Anthony Burgess as novelist and journalist. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Brock, Claire (2002) The feminization of fame from Rousseau to de Staël. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Breen, Peter Thomas (1993) Place and displacement in the works of Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bakshi, Parminder Kaur (1992) Distant desire : the theme of friendship in E.M. Forster's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Becket, Fiona (1992) Metaphor and "metaphysic" : the sense of language in D.H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Barker, Jill (1992) Characterizations of otherness in the sixteenth century moral plays and their morality actecedents. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Bendjeddou, Mohamed Yazid (1985) Two literary responses to American society in the early modern era : a comparison of selected novels by Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair in relation to their portrayal of the immigrant, the city, the business tycoon, women, and the problem of labour, 1900-1929. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Belsey, Catherine (1973) Patterns of conflict in the English morality plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Buckley, Brian R. (1972) Lawrence's novels : themes and precedents. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Castle, Nora (2022) Food futures : food, foodways, and environmental crisis in contemporary science fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cao, Siyu (2020) Performing post-Britishness : a quest for independence in the contemporary literature of England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Champion, Giulia (2020) The empire bites back : literary cannibalism in the extractiono(s)cene. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Campion, Louise G. E. (2019) Christ in the kitchen, Christ in the chamber: the language and imagery of domestic space in late medieval religious literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cohut, Maria-Silvia (2018) Before and beyond the glass: women and their mirrors in the literature and art of nineteenth-century Britain. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Choksey, Lara (2017) 'Life itself' in Doris Lessing's space fiction : evolution, epigenetics and culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Charlwood, Catherine (2017) Models of memory : cognition and cultural memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Chen, Chi-Fang (2016) A study of political humour in British literature in the 1790s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Collins, Nicholas J. (2015) Forming the nation : early modern England and modern Ireland. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Christie, James, (Researcher in English) (2013) Fredric Jameson and the art of Modernism. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cowaloosur, Vedita (2013) "The home and the world" : representations of English and bhashas in contemporary Indian culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cornford, Thomas (2012) The English theatre studios of Michael Chekhov and Michel Saint-Denis, 1935-1965. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Carta, Giorgia (2012) The other half of the story : the interaction between indigenous and translated literature for children in Italy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Cirstea, Arina-Nicoleta (2010) Urban imaginaries : mapping space and self in the writing of Doris Lessing, Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Carlin, Gerald (1994) Art and authority : a comparative study of the modernist aesthetics of Ezra Pound. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Concepción, Díez-Medrano (1993) Women's condition in D.H. Lawrence's shorter fiction : a study of representative narrative processes in selected texts. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Campbell, Irene (1992) Frank Swinnerton : the life and works of a bookman. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Coe, Jonathan (1986) Satire and sympathy : some consequences of intrusive narration in Tom Jones and other comic novels. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Curtis, Francis Brett (1979) Shelley and the idea of epic : a study, with particular reference to three pre-1818 narratives. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Clews, David (1972) The Dickens - Thackeray debate. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Daroy, Alys (2022) Biophilic Shakespeare : towards an ecology of form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dakkak, Nadeen (2020) “An immense cargo of wanderers seeking their own destruction” : migration to the Arab Gulf states in Arabic fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dashwood, Rita J. (2018) Women in residence: Forms of belonging in Jane Austen. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Daniel, Robert W. (2018) The manuscript poetry of Thomas St Nicholas and the writing of ‘scripturalism’ in seventeenth-century England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dean, Dominic (2016) The child and authority in contemporary literature and critical culture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Davis, Christopher P. (Researcher in literature) (2016) Reading, writing and understanding the postcolonial. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Degirmencioglu, Nesrin (2013) Uneven cities : the dialectic of urban modernity and literary form in Dos Passos, Tanpınar, Auster and Pamuk. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

DiMeo, Michelle Marie (2009) Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615-91): science and medicine in a seventeenth-century Englishwoman’s writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Deckard, Sharae Grace (2007) Exploited Edens: paradise discourse in colonial and postcolonial literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dauncey, Sarah (2003) The uses of silence : a twentieth-century preoccupation in the light of fictional examples, 1900-1950. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dent, Shirley (2000) Iniquitous symmetries: aestheticism and secularism in the reception of William Blake's works in books and periodicals during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dixon, John Spencer (1991) Representations of the East in English and French travel writing 1798-1882 : with particular reference to Egypt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Dusinberre, Juliet (1969) Attitudes to women in Jacobean drama. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Emmett, Christine (2020) Inequality, moralism and legitimacy in South African literature : re-reading apartheid from Millin to Wicomb. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

El-Masry, Heba Fawzy (2017) A comparative study of Arthur John Arberry’s and Desmond O’Grady’s translations of the seven Mu‘allaqāt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Eardley, Alice (2008) An edition of Lady Hester Pulter's Book of 'Emblemes'. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Erdogan, Armagan (2002) Encountering the foreign : the educative effect of the foreign in George Eliot's novels of English life. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Efstratiou, Dimitris (2001) Disintegration of essence and subjectivity : the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Earnshaw, Brian (1982) Translations from the German and their reception in Britain, 1760-1800. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Farnsworth, Fiona Emily (2020) Contemporary literary foodways between Sub-Saharan Africa and the USA. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fletcher, Andrew (2019) Shakespeare and the fiction of theatre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza (2015) Howard Barker's drama of aporias : from a phenomenology of the body to an ontology of the flesh. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fowler, Benjamin Brynmor (2015) (Re)directing the text : politics & perception in the work Katie Mitchell & Thomas Ostermeier. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Frank, Lucy Elizabeth (2003) Sarah Piatt and the politics of mourning. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fernández de Pinedo, Eva (2002) From the Virgin of Guadalupe to El Santo : new motifs and directions in contemporary Chicano/a writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Frith, Gill (1988) The intimacy which is knowledge : female friendship in the novels of women writers. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Funk, Gisela (1988) The sealed room : Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin : a study in the genesis of fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Flower, Celeste (1985) A study of aspects of the 'Romances amorosos' of Luis de Góngora. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Fairclough, Peter (1976) Humour in the novel 1800-1850 : the moral vision and the autonomous imagination. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gyawali, Amulya (2023) The invention of nature: state-building and environment-making in the extended Himalaya. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gill, Jagvinder (2010) Re-oriented Britain : how British Asian travellers and settlers have utilised and reversed Orientalist discourse 1770-2010. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gott, Henry Michael (2010) Ascetic modernism in Eliot and Flaubert. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Goodman, Gemma (2010) Cornwall : an alternative construction of place. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gunne, Sorcha (2010) ‘A mirror with two sides’ : liminal narratives and spaces of gender violence and communitas in South African writing, 1960–present. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Graham, James (James John George) (2006) Writing the land : representations of 'the land' and nationalism in Anglophone literature from South Africa and Zimbabwe 1969-2002. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ganobcsik-Williams, Gruffudd Aled (2001) The sweat of the brain: representations of intellectual labour in the writings of Edmund Burke, William Cobbett, William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Gallagher, Ron (1986) Science fiction and language : language and the imagination in post-war science fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Greenslade, William (1982) The concept of degeneration, 1880-1910, with particular reference to the work of Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and H. G. Wells. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Garnett, George Rhys (1977) The search for the self in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Green, Robert (1977) The novels of Ford Madox Ford. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Heath, Thomas (2022) Actor training in the flow state : towards a rhetoric for play in contemporary actor training. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hugo, Esthie Esmaré (2022) Gothic ecologies : world-literature and commodity frontiers from the plantation to the present. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hillion, Marianne (2021) Between the epic and the ordinary : locating the politics of contemporary Indian urban writing in English (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hatfull, Ronan (2018) ‘The other RSC’: the history and legacy of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hudson, Julie Patricia (2017) The environment on stage: scenery or shapeshifter? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Huang, Bo-Yuan (2014) China on the periphery : transitions of Chinese "Orientalism" from Oliver Goldsmith to Thomas De Quincey. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hassen, Rim (2012) English translations of the Quran by women : different or derived? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hentea, Marius (2010) Social reality and narrative form in the fiction of Henry Green. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hartwig, David W. (2010) The place of Shakespeare : performing King Lear and The tempest in an endangered world. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Holroyd, Sophia Jane (2002) Embroidered rhetoric: the social, religious and political functions of elite women's needlework, c.1560-1630. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hampton-Reeves, Stuart (1997) Henry VI in performance : history, culture and Shakespeare reproduced. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hapgood, Lynne (1990) "Circe among cities" : images of London and the languages of social concern, 1880-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Higgins, Ian (1989) The sentiments of a Church-of-England man : a study of Swift's politics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Head, Dominic (1989) The modernist short story : theory and practice in five authors. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hadfield, Duncan John (1982) Real and imaginary golf-courses : systems of order in Malcolm Lowry's Under the volcano. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hancock, Ann (1981) The life of Henry Yorke and the writing of Henry Green. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hunter, Shelagh (1981) Transformations of pastoral : studies in the idyllic fiction of Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Hermans, Theo (1977) Aspects of the structure of Modernist poetry, 1908-1918 : a structural and comparative study of the poetic writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Georg Heym, T.E. Hulme, Max Jacob, Ezra Pound, Pierre Reverdy, and Georg Trakl. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Intepe, Demet (2020) Environmental justice and writers as activists in multi-ethnic U.S. literatures, film, and theater. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ivanova, Rossitza Pentcheva (2006) Cross-cultural and tribal-centred politics in American Indian studies: assessing a current split in American Indian literary scholarship and re-interpreting Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Tracks. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Inan, Dilek (2000) The city and landscapes beyond Harold Pinter's rooms. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Imoru, Nike M. (1994) A theatre of black women : constructions of black female subjectivity in the dramatic texts of African-American women playwrights in the 1920s and 1970s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ibrahim, Hasnah binti Haji (1992) Oh Babel! : the problems of translating Malay verse into English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Iliopoulos, Spyridon (1985) 'Out of a medium's mouth' : Yeats's art in relation to mediumship, spiritualism and psychical research. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Janssen, Catharina Gertruda Maria (2021) ‘Future scholars, future poets’ : the contemporary reception of Sir William Jones’s translations of oriental literature, 1770-1835. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jackson, Joseph Horgan (2011) Devolving black British theory : race and contemporary Scottish literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jones, Jonathan D. (2003) Orphans : childhood alienation and the idea of the self in Rousseau, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Jones, David Francis (1987) Swift's use of the literature of travel in the composition of "Gulliver's travels". PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khattak, Aiman (2022) The bio-political empire sovereignty, race and war in Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kaur, Gurpreet (2017) Beyond the binary : postcolonial ecofeminism in Indian women's writing in English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khan, Gohar Karim (2013) Narrating Pakistan transnationally : identity, politics and terrorism in Anglophone Pakistani literature after "9/11". PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kim, Paul Chi Hun (2013) The notion of nature in Coleridge and Wordsworth from the perspective of ecotheology. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kritsis, Konstantinos (2013) Exploring theatre translation : the translator of the stage in the case of a Stanislavskian actor. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kirwan, Peter (2011) Shakespeare and the idea of apocrypha : negotiating the boundaries of the dramatic canon. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kenward, Claire (2011) 'Memory wrapped round a corpse' : a cultural history of English Hecubas. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kurata, Kenichi (2010) Vicissitudes of desire in George Eliot’s fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kahn, Kristian Thomas (2009) The boy figure and male same-sex desire in Britain from Walter Pater to E.M. Forster. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kaisary, Philip James (2008) The literary impact of the Haitian Revolution. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kamali, Leila Francesca (2007) Spectres of the shore : the memory of Africa in contemporary African-American and Black British fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kim, Rina (2007) Beyond mourning and melancholia : women and Ireland as Beckett's lost others. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kawanami, Ayako (2006) The art of dissembling in three Elizabethan writers: John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Shakespeare. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Komporaly, Jozefina (2001) Configurations of mothering in post-war British women's playwriting. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Key, Jonathan Benjamin (1999) Paranoia and irony in the Anglophone dectective narrative and the novels of Umberto Eco. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kavanagh, Kevin Sean (1997) Raymond Williams and the limits of cultural materialism. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kastelein, Barbara (1994) Popular/post-feminism and popular literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Khan, Nosheen (1986) Women's poetry of the First World War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kirk, Peter Nigel (1983) The voice of authority : Evelyn Waugh's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Kerr, Douglas (1978) A comparison of some French and English literary responses to the 1914-1918 War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Liu, Li (2023) ‘What do texts want?’: the want and liminality of working-class females in mid-victorian bourgeois paternalistic literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Love, Angus (2020) Alain Badiou’s twisted contemporaneity : inaesthetics and the contemporary. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Laug, Katja (2019) Mementoes of the broken body: Cormac McCarthy’s aesthetic politics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Littau, Karin (2018) Sub-versions of reading. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Loh, Waiyee (2016) Empire of culture : contemporary British and Japanese imaginings of Victorian Britain. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Leonard, Alice (2014) Error in Shakespeare : Shakespeare in error. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lewis, Jennifer (2014) Variations around a theme : the place of Eatonville in the work of Zora Neale Hurston. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Liao, Chia-hui (2011) A critical study of the reception and translation of the poetry of Wang Wei in English. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ludlow, Elizabeth (2008) 'We can but spell a surface history': the biblical typology of Christina Rossetti. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lawlor, Clark (1993) The classical and the grotesque in the work of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Lawley, Paul Anthony, Ph.D. (1978) The paradox of self-annihilating expression : representations of ontological instability in the drama of Samuel Beckett. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mukim, Mantra (2022) Lyric failure : Samuel Beckett and poetic form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mak, Wing Haang (2018) Kinaesthetic bodies in contemporary literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Martín-Castaño, Mónica (2017) Translating Disney songs from The Little Mermaid (1989) to Tarzan (1999) : an analysis of translation strategies used to dub and subtitle songs into Spanish. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Murgia, Claudio (2016) [Beyond] posthuman violence : epic rewritings of ethics in the contemporary novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McGowan, Jack (2016) Slam the book: the role of performance in contemporary UK poetics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Maughan, Christopher J. (2015) Activism Ltd : environmental activism and contemporary literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Morrissey, Joseph J. (2013) Gentry women and work and leisure 1770-1820. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mearns, Gabrielle (2012) Appropriate fields of action : nineteenth-century representations of the female philanthropist and the parochial sphere. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Marques dos Santos, Ana Teresa Brisio (2012) Translation, radio and drama during the Estado Novo. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mathieson, Charlotte Eleanor (2010) Bodies in transit : mobility, embodiment and space in the mid-nineteenth century novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McIntosh, Malachi (2010) "Home" : emigration, identity and modern Caribbean literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Murray, Chris M. (2009) The tragic Coleridge : the philosophy of sacrifice in the life and works. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Muzica, Evghenii (2006) 'A place where three roads meet': Sophocles's Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet after Freud. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

MacCartey, Kelli (2004) "different sentiments & different connections supports them" : sensibility, community, and diversity in British women's Romantic-period poetry. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McKenzie, Sarah (2003) Death, inheritance and the family : a study of literary responses to inheritance in seventeenth-century England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

McKenzie, Mary Virginia (2003) Gertrude Stein's 'Melanctha' : a feminist and deconstructive approach. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Muto, Hiroshi (2001) The 'disembodied voice' in fin-de-siècle British literature : its genealogy and significances. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mason, Emma (2000) Religious intellectuals : the poetic gravity of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Mounsey, Chris (1992) William Blake's The Four Zoas : a reassessment of its implied metaphysics. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Matthews, Julia (1991) Characterization and structure in the development of Tudor comedy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Middleton, Tim (1991) The operation of discourse as a motive for critical practice : a Bakhtinian perspective. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko (1985) Feminine writing and the problem of the self : an examination of Virginia Woolf's novels in the light of recent critical and psychoanalytic theories. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Munns, Jessica (1980) A critical study of Thomas Otway's plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nichols, K. Madolyn (2014) The women who leave : Irish women writing on emigration. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nardi, Valeria (2012) Translation in advertising : marketing cars in Italy and the UK since the 1980s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Neculai, Catalina (2008) ‘Some fanatical New York promoting’: literary economies of urban regime transformation in New York City, 1970s-1980s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Niebrzydowski, Sue (1998) Verry matrymony : representations of the Virgin Mary and her mother, Saint Anne, as wives in medieval England, 1200-1540. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Nicholson, John Andrew Lamont (1983) Poetry and action in Byron's development. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Oloff, Kerstin Dagmar (2007) Modernity and the novel in the expanded Caribbean : Wilson Harris, Patrick Chamoiseau and Carlos Fuentes. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

O'Brien, George (1979) Life on the land : the interrelationship between identity and community in the Irish fiction of Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton and Charles Lever. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

O'Toole, Bridget (1974) The poet and the city : the city as a theme in English poetry of the nineteenth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Pitt Scott, Harry (2022) Energy futures : finance and petroculture. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Phillips, Leah Beth (2016) Myth (un)making : the adolescent female body in mythopoeic YA fantasy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poltrack, Emma (2015) The history and working practices of the Propeller Theatre Company (1997-2011). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Putz, Adam (2010) Shakespeares wake : appropriation and cultural politics in Dublin, 1867-1922. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Piasecki, Bohdan A. (2010) Anthologies of contemporary Polish poetry in English translation : paratexts, narratives, and the manipulation of national literatures. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Parkes, Simon John (2009) Home from the wars: the Romantic revenant-veteran of the 1790s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poyner, Jane (2003) The fictions of J. M. Coetzee: master of his craft? PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Poulson, Sally (2000) Reversed perspectives : a re-examination of the later novels of William Wilkie Collins. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Pearl, Monica B. (1999) Alien tears : mourning, melancholia, and identity in AIDS literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Potts, Tracey (1997) Can the Imperialist read? Race and feminist literary theory. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Petrone Fresco, Gabriella (1991) Shakespeare's reception in 18th century Italy : the case of Hamlet. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Qiao, Qingquan (2018) China in Britain in the interwar period : Bertrand Russell, W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Shih-I Hsiung. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Quinn, Patrick J. (1988) Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon : from early poetry to autobiography. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rudd, Lindy Jane Settle (2023) Lessons from Shakespeare : examining early modern pedagogy as ‘pattern, precedent and lively warrant’ for the modern national curriculum. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Richards, Julian (2022) “This Man Is Great” : Glen Byam Shaw directs Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1951-1959. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rybczak, Emil (2020) A bibliographical enquiry into Thomas Johnson's A Collection of the Best English Plays. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rao, Divya Ramakrishna (2019) New alphabet in sight: representation and the reframing of Dalit identity. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rumbold, Matthew (2017) Epic relation : the sacred, history and late modernist aesthetics in Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robertson, Lisa C. (2016) New and novel homes : women writing London's housing, 1880-1918. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rzepa, Joanna M. (2014) Literary and theological modernisms : Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Józef Wittlin. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rudland, Sophie (2013) Faith, feeling and gender in the writing of Hartley, Wollstonecraft and Blake. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reddick, Yvonne J. (2012) The genius of the stream : Ted Hughes and fluvial influence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ray, Sumana (2011) The rise of the 'liminal Briton' : literary and artistic productions of black and Asian women in the Midlands. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rahwan, Yamen Rahmoun (2010) Constellations of allegory : Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter and J.M. Coetzee. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reuter, Anne-Marie (2009) Fictions of authority : enchanters, teachers and mentors in selected fiction of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Roynon, Tessa Kate (2006) Transforming America : Toni Morrison and classical tradition. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Regan, Lisa (2005) 'Men who are men and women who are women': fascism, psychology and feminist resistance in the work of Winifred Holtby. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rogers, Natasha (2004) The representation of trauma in narrative : a study of six late twentieth century novels. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robson, Lynn Alison (2003) 'No nine days wonder': embedded Protestant narratives in early modern prose murder pamphlets 1573-1700. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ray, Nicholas (2002) Tragedy and otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, psychoanalysis. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Reeves, Kate (2000) Laughter and madness in post-war American fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robson, Julia Caroline (2000) The dialectic of self and other in Montaigne, Proust and Woolf. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ruben, Mel (1998) Grace under pressure : re-reading Giselle. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Robbins, Catherine Ruth (1996) Decadence and sexual politics in three fin-de-siècle writers : Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Vernon Lee. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Rao, Eleonora (1991) Strategies for identity : the fiction of Margaret Atwood. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sangangamsakun, Thirayut (2021) Trans-Victorian : rewriting Victorian fiction in Thailand. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shin, Jung Ju (2020) (Re)turn of the abject: representation of Asian (American) masculinity in the West. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shorland, Sophie (2019) ‘Blazing stars’: early modern celebrity culture, 1580-1626. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Schauss, Martin (2018) Like a Thing Forsaken: Beckett, Sebald and the Politics of Materiality. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scherer, Madeleine (2018) A global schema: the Graeco-Roman underworld in Ireland and the Caribbean. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Stock, Robert P. (2018) Do you hear what I hear? : inferring voice in celebrity translation in the theatre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Stones, Andrew (2018) Lines of flight: Gilles Deleuze and the becoming of world literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Starr, Robert (2017) 'Nailed to the rolls of honour, crucified' : Irish literary responses to the Great War. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shafer, Joseph R. (2017) Resistances in bodily form: post-1945 American Poetry and D.H. Lawrence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Katherine Jo (2016) Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry in early modern England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Santos, Emanuelle Rodrigues dos (2016) Late postcoloniality : state, violence and wealth in the literatures of early 21st century Portuguese-speaking Africa. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Selleri, Andrea (2013) The author as a critical category, 1850-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sheeha, Iman (2013) Staging the servant : an examination of the roles of household servants in early modern domestic tragedy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Skomorokhova, Svetlana (2012) "Arising from the depths" (Kupala) : a study of Belarusian literature in English translation. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Christian, (Researcher in English) (2012) Shakespeare's influence on Marx, Freud and the Frankfurt school critical theorists. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scarth, Katherine Ada (2012) Near London and Brighton : suburbs in fiction, 1780s-1820s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scott, Francesca M. (2011) The fuzzy theory and women writers in the late eighteenth century. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Smith, Victoria Ellen (2011) If walls had mouths : representations of the Anglo-Fante household and the domestic slave in nineteenth-century Cape Coast (Ghana). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Senior, Emily (2010) Communicating disease : the Caribbean and the medical imagination, 1764–1834. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sheils, Barry (2010) Playing at being : style, ethics, and W.B. Yeats. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Spratley, Peter F. (2008) Wordsworth's sonnet corpus. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Scott, Charlotte (2005) Shakespeare and the idea of the book. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sim, Wai-chew (2002) Globalisation and dislocation in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Sedgwick, James Martin (2001) Emily Dickinson's grotesque: ambivalent interactions with uncertainty. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Swain, Stella (1992) The uses of madness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction : the relation between narrative strategy and disturbed states of consciousness. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shuttleworth, Antony (1991) The poetics of impurity : Louis MacNeice, writing and the thirties. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Salgado, Kshanike Minoli (1991) Towards a definition of Indian literary feminism : an analysis of the novels of Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal and Anita Desai. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Surma, Anne (1991) Disputing authorities : the longer fiction of Rebecca West. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Shaaban, Bouthaina (1981) Shelley's influence on the Chartist poets, with particular emphasis on Ernest Charles Jones and Thomas Cooper. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Tan Xing Long, Ian (2020) Poetry as appropriative proximity : Wallace Stevens, Martin Heidegger and the language of being. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Ttoouli, George (2017) Twentieth century North American serial poetic form & ecological thinking. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Thomas, Sita Chandra (2017) ‘In search of a new national story’: Issues of cultural diversity in the casting and performance of Shakespeare in Britain 2012–2016. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor-Brown, Emilie (2016) Miasmas, mosquitoes, and microscopes: parasitology and the British literary imagination, 1885-1935. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Tsang, Michael Yat Him (2015) At interregnum : Hong Kong and its English writing. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor, Juliette (2003) Foreign music: linguistic estrangement and its textual effects in Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and Rushdie. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Terry, Jennifer Ann (2003) "Shuttles in the rocking loom of history": dislocation in Toni Morrison's fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Turner, Rachael Lucy (2000) Myth, biography and the female role in the plays of Pam Gems. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Townsend, Joanna Kate (1999) Speaking the body, representing the self : hysterical rhetoric on stage. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Taylor, Jenny Bourne (1987) Wilkie Collins and nineteenth-century psychology : cultural significance and fictional form. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Turton, Glyn (1984) Turgenev and the context of English literature, 1850-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Udomlamun, Nanthanoot (2013) Materiality and memory in contemporary diasporic and postcolonial fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Verlander, Freya (2020) (Skin)aesthetics: a study of skin(s) in spectatorship. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Vince, Máté (2013) From 'aequivocatio' to the 'Jesuitical equivocation' : changing concepts of ambiguity in early modern England. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Voyiatzaki, Evi (2000) The body in the text : James Joyce's Ulysses and the modern Greek novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Verma, Rajiva (1972) Concepts of myth and ritual, and criticism of Shakespeare, 1880-1970. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wolfgang, William Floyd (2020) Grassroots Shakespeare: amateur and community-based Shakespeare performance in the United States of America. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wills, James (2020) Fictions of justice : literary lawyers in the American South, 1946-1966. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wu, Aurelia D. (2019) The cultural legacy of Oscar Wilde in modern China and beyond (1909–2019). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Watt, Gary (2018) Performance rhetoric in Shakespeare and law. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Weaver, Camilla (2017) Reading seeing: visuality in the contemporary novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Whitehouse, Paul C. (2016) Violence and frontier in twentieth century Native American literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wood, Laura Clare (2015) Works of taste and fancy : the woman and the child reader in nineteenth century literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Williams, Alun Rhys (2014) Architects of impurity : a study of the political imagination in contemporary fantastic fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wako, Miho (2012) Figured in lively paint : Eastern decorative art, English aestheticism, and consumer culture 1862-1900. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

West, John Peter (2011) Dryden and enthusiasm. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

White, Troy Nelson (2010) The Gothic threshold of Sabine Baring-Gould : a study of the Gothic fiction of a Victorian squarson. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Webb, Andrew (Andrew S.) (2010) ‘His country...not the country he had fought for’ : British literatures and world lit. theory : the case of Edward Thomas. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wells, Sherah Kristen (2009) 'Another world,/its walls are thin': psychosis and Catholicism in the texts of Antonia White and Emily Holmes Coleman. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wallbank, Adrian J. (2008) Political, religious, and philosophical mentoring of the Romantic period : the dialogue genre. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wood, Madeleine Alice (2008) Victorian familial enigmas: inheritance and influence. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Westall, Claire Louise (2007) What should we know of cricket who only England know? : cricket and its heroes in English and Caribbean literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wong, Hiu Wing (2006) "Talk-stories" in the fictions of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Weller, Saranne Esther Elizabeth (2001) 'Written with a Mrs Stowe's feeling' : Uncle Tom's cabin and the paradigms of Southern authorship in the anti-Tom tradition, 1852-1902. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wang, Nian En (1992) The xing : a comparative approach to Chinese theories of the literary symbolic. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Webster, Duncan (1984) Representing the economy and the economies of representation : readings in the fiction and criticism of Henry James. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Wheale, John William (1983) Redemption in the work of Francis Stuart. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yoon, Jaewon (2022) Post-millennial American and British finance-crisis fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yiannitsaros, Christopher (2016) Deadly domesticity : Agatha Christie's 'middlebrow' Gothic, 1930-1970. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yoon, Sun Kyoung (2011) (Re)-constructing Homer : English translations of the Iliad and Odyssey between 1850 and 1950. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Yun, Hunam (2010) Appropriations of Irish drama by modern Korean nationalist theatre : a focus on the influence of Sean O’Casey in a colonial context. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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English Dissertations and Theses

The English Department Dissertations and Theses Series is comprised of dissertations and thesis authored by Marquette University's English Department doctoral and master's students.

Theses/Dissertations from 2024 2024

Speculative Escapism in Contemporary Fantasy: Labor, Utility, Affect , Liamog Seamus Drislane

Disillusionment and Domesticity in Mid-20th-Century British Catholic Literature , Catherine Simmerer

A LIBERATED WEST?: FEMALE AUTHORS’ REPRESENTATIONS OF THE "REAL AND THE FANTASIZED" ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER , Amanda Diane Zastrow

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Lifting the Postmodern Veil: Cosmopolitanism, Humanism, and Decolonization in Global Fictions of the 21st Century , Matthew Burchanoski

Gothic Transformations and Remediations in Cheap Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Wendy Fall

Milton’s Learning: Complementarity and Difference in Paradise Lost , Peter Spaulding

“The Development of the Conceptive Plot Through Early 19th-Century English Novels” , Jannea R. Thomason

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Gonzo Eternal , John Francis Brick

Intertextuality and Sociopolitical Engagement in Contemporary Anglophone Women’s Writing , Jackielee Derks

Innovation, Genre, and Authenticity in the Nineteenth-Century Irish Novel , David Aiden Kenney II

Reluctant Sons: The Irish Matrilineal Tradition of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien , Jessie Wirkus Haynes

Britain's Extraterrestrial Empire: Colonial Ambition, Anxiety, and Ambivalence in Early Modern Literature , Mark Edward Wisniewski

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Re-Reading the “Culture Clash”: Alternative Ways of Reading in Indian Horse , Hailey Whetten

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the Twentieth Century , Danielle Kristene Clapham

Reforming Victorian Sense/Abilities: Disabilities in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Social Problem Novels , Hunter Nicole Duncan

Genre and Loss: The Impossibility of Restoration in 20th Century Detective Fiction , Kathryn Hendrickson

A Productive Failure: Existentialism in Fin de Siècle England , Maxwell Patchet

Inquiry and Provocation: The Use of Ambiguity in Sixteenth-Century English Political Satire , Jason James Zirbel

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

No Home but the World: Forced Migration and Transnational Identity , Justice Hagan

The City As a Trap: 20th and 21st Century American Literature and the American Myth of Mobility , Andrew Joseph Hoffmann

The Fantastic and the First World War , Brian Kenna

Insane in the Brain, Blood, and Lungs: Gender-Specific Manifestations of Hysteria, Chlorosis, & Consumption in 19th-Century Literature , Anna P. Scanlon

Reading Multicultural Novels Melancholically: Racial Grief and Grievance in the Joy Luck Club, Beloved, and Anil's Ghost , Jennifer Arias Sweeney

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

The Ethos of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric and the Democratic Function of American Protest and Countercultural Literature , Jeffrey Lorino Jr

Literary Cosmopolitanisms of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy , Sunil Samuel Macwan

The View from Here: Toward a Sissy Critique , Tyler Monson

The Forbidden Zone Writers: Femininity and Anglophone Women War Writers of the Great War , Sareene Proodian

Theatrical Weddings and Pious Frauds: Performance and Law in Victorian Marriage Plots , Adrianne A. Wojcik

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Changing the Victorian Habit Loop: The Body in the Poetry and Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris , Bryan Gast

Gendering Scientific Discourse from 1790-1830: Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Marcet , Bridget E. Kapler

Discarding Dreams and Legends: The Short Fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty , Katy L. Leedy

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Saving the Grotesque: The Grotesque System of Liberation in British Modernism (1922-1932) , Matthew Henningsen

The Pulpit's Muse: Conversive Poetics in the American Renaissance , Michael William Keller

A Single Man of Good Fortune: Postmodern Identities and Consumerism in the New Novel of Manners , Bonnie McLean

Julian of Norwich: Voicing the Vernacular , Therese Elaine Novotny

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Homecomings: Victorian British Women Travel Writers And Revisions Of Domesticity , Emily Paige Blaser

From Pastorals to Paterson: Ecology in the Poetry and Poetics of William Carlos WIlliams , Daniel Edmund Burke

Argument in Poetry: (Re)Defining the Middle English Debate in Academic, Popular, and Physical Contexts , Kathleen R. Burt

Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England , Steven A. Hackbarth

The Creation of Heaven in the Middle Ages , William Storm

(re)making The Gentleman: Genteel Masculinities And The Country Estate In The Novels Of Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, And Elizabeth Gaskell , Shaunna Kay Wilkinson

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Brides, Department Stores, Westerns, and Scrapbooks--The Everyday Lives of Teenage Girls in the 1940s , Carly Anger

Placed People: Rootedness in G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry , David Harden

Rhetorics Of Girlhood Trauma In Writing By Holly Goddard Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Cisneros, And Jamaica Kincaid , Stephanie Marie Stella

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital , Brandon Chitwood

"Be-Holde the First Acte of this Tragedy" : Generic Symbiosis and Cross-Pollination in Jacobean Drama and the Early Modern Prose Novella , Karen Ann Zyck Galbraith

Pamela: Or, Virtue Reworded: The Texts, Paratexts, and Revisions that Redefine Samuel Richardson's Pamela , Jarrod Hurlbert

Violence and Masculinity in American Fiction, 1950-1975 , Magdalen McKinley

Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood , Susan Muse

Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, and Postnational Identity in Four Novels by Irish Women, 1960-2000 , Sarah Nestor

Truth Telling: Testimony and Evidence in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell , Rebecca Parker Fedewa

Spirit of the Psyche: Carl Jung's and Victor White's Influence on Flannery O'Connor's Fiction , Paul Wakeman

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Performing the Audience: Constructing Playgoing in Early Modern Drama , Eric Dunnum

Paule Marshall's Critique of Contemporary Neo-Imperialisms Through the Trope of Travel , Michelle Miesen Felix

Hermeneutics, Poetry, and Spenser: Augustinian Exegesis and the Renaissance Epic , Denna Iammarino-Falhamer

Encompassing the Intolerable: Laughter, Memory, and Inscription in the Fiction of John McGahern , John Keegan Malloy

Regional Consciousness in American Literature, 1860-1930 , Kelsey Louise Squire

The Ethics of Ekphrasis: The Turn to Responsible Rhetoric in Mid-Twentieth Century American Poetry , Joshua Scott Steffey

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Cognitive Architectures: Structures of Passion in Joanna Baillie's Dramas , Daniel James Bergen

On Trial: Restorative Justice in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley Family Fictions , Colleen M. Fenno

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

What's the point to eschatology : multiple religions and terminality in James Joyce's Finnegans wake , Martin R. Brick

Economizing Characters: Harriet Martineau and the Problems of Poverty in Victorian Literature, Culture and Law , Mary Colleen Willenbring

Submissions from 2008 2008

"An improbable fiction": The marriage of history and romance in Shakespeare's Henriad , Marcia Eppich-Harris

Bearing the Mark of the Social: Notes Towards a Cosmopolitan Bildungsroman , Megan M. Muthupandiyan

The Gothic Novel and the Invention of the Middle-Class Reader: Northanger Abbey As Case Study , Tenille Nowak

Not Just a Novel of Epic Proportions: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man As Modern American Epic , Dana Edwards Prodoehl

Recovering the Radicals: Women Writers, Reform, and Nationalist Modes of Revolutionary Discourse , Mark J. Zunac

Theses/Dissertations from 2007 2007

"The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , Amy M. Amendt-Raduege

The Games Men Play: Madness and Masculinity in Post-World War II American Fiction, 1946-1964 , Thomas P. Durkin

Denise Levertov: Through An Ecofeminist Lens , Katherine A. Hanson

The Wit of Wrestling: Devotional-Aesthetic Tradition in Christina Rossetti's Poetry , Maria M.E. Keaton

Genderless Bodies: Stigma and the Myth of Womanhood , Ellen M. Letizia

Envy and Jealousy in the Novels of the Brontës: A Synoptic Discernment , Margaret Ann McCann

Technologies of the Late Medieval Self: Ineffability, Distance, and Subjectivity in the Book of Margery Kempe , Crystal L. Mueller

"Finding-- a Map-- to That Place Called Home": The Journey from Silence to Recovery in Patrick McCabe's Carn and Breakfast on Pluto , Valerie A. Murrenus Pilmaier

Emily Dickinson's Ecocentric Pastoralism , Moon-ju Shin

The American Jeremiad in Civil War Literature , Jacob Hadley Stratman

Theses/Dissertations from 2006 2006

Literary Art in Times of Crisis: The Proto-Totalitarian Anxiety of Melville, James, and Twain , Matthew J. Darling

(Re) Writing Genre: Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison , Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert

"Amsolookly Kersse": Clothing in Finnegan's Wake , Catherine Simpson Kalish

"Do Your Will": Shakespeare's Use of the Rhetoric of Seduction in Four Plays , Jason James Nado

Woman in Emblem: Locating Authority in the Work and Identity of Katherine Philips (1632-1664) , Susan L. Stafinbil

When the Bough Breaks: Poetry on Abortion , Wendy A. Weaver

Theses/Dissertations from 2005 2005

Heroic Destruction: Shame and Guilt Cultures in Medieval Heroic Poetry , Karl E. Boehler

Poe and Early (Un)American Drama , Amy C. Branam

Grammars of Assent: Constructing Poetic Authority in An Age of Science , William Myles Carroll III

This Place is Not a Place: The Constructed Scene in the Works of Sir Walter Scott , Colin J. Marlaire

Cognitive Narratology: A Practical Approach to the Reader-Writer Relationship , Debra Ann Ripley

Theses/Dissertations from 2004 2004

Defoe and the Pirates: Function of Genre Conventions in Raiding Narratives , William J. Dezoma

Creative Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novel , Michelle Ruggaber Dougherty

Exclusionary Politics: Mourning and Modernism in the Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Amy Levy, and Charlotte Mew , Donna Decker Schuster

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Toward a Re-Formed Confession: Johann Gerhard's Sacred Meditations and "Repining Restlessnesse" in the Poetry of George Herbert , Erik P. Ankerberg

Idiographic Spaces: Representation, Ideology and Realism in the Postmodern British Novel , Gordon B. McConnell

Theses/Dissertations from 2002 2002

Reading into It: Wallace Stegner's Novelistic Sense of Time and Place , Colin C. Irvine

Brisbane and Beyond: Revising Social Capitalism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America , Michael C. Mattek

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

Christians and Mimics in W. B. Yeats' Collected Poems , Patrick Mulrooney

Renaissance Roles and the Process of Social Change , John Wieland

'Straunge Disguize': Allegory and Its Discontents in Spenser's Faerie Queene , Galina Ivanovna Yermolenko

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

Reading American Women's Autobiography: Spheres of Identity, Spheres of Influence , Amy C. Getty

"Making Strange": The Art and Science of Selfhood in the Works of John Banville , Heather Maureen Moran

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Digital Commons @ USF > College of Arts and Sciences > English > Theses and Dissertations

English Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.

Of Mētis and Cuttlefish: Employing Collective Mētis as a Theoretical Framework for Marginalized Communities , Justiss Wilder Burry

What on earth are we doing (?): A Field-Wide Exploration of Design Courses in TPC , Jessica L. Griffith

Organizations Ensuring Resilience: A Case Study of Cortez, Florida , Karla Ariel Maddox

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Using Movie Clips to Understand Vivid-Phrasal Idioms’ Meanings , Rasha Salem S. Alghamdi

An Exercise in Exceptions: Personhood, Divergency, and Ableism in the STAR TREK Franchise , Jessica A. Blackman

Vulnerable Resistance in Victorian Women’s Writing , Stephanie A. Harper

Curricular Assemblages: Understanding Student Writing Knowledge (Re)circulation Across Genres , Adam Phillips

PAD Beyond the Classroom: Integrating PAD in the Scrum Workplace , Jade S. Weiss

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Social Cues in Animated Pedagogical Agents for Second Language Learners: the Application of The Embodiment Principle in Video Design , Sahar M. Alyahya

A Field-Wide Examination of Cross-Listed Courses in Technical Professional Communication , Carolyn M. Gubala

Labor-Based Grading Contracts in the Multilingual FYC Classroom: Unpacking the Variables , Kara Kristina Larson

Land Goddesses, Divine Pigs, and Royal Tricksters: Subversive Mythologies and Imperialist Land Ownership Dispossession in Twentieth Century Irish and American Literature , Elizabeth Ricketts

Oppression, Resistance, and Empowerment: The Power Dynamics of Naming and Un-naming in African American Literature, 1794 to 2019 , Melissa "Maggie" Romigh

Generic Expectations in First Year Writing: Teaching Metadiscoursal Reflection and Revision Strategies for Increased Generic Uptake of Academic Writing , Kaelah Rose Scheff

Reframing the Gothic: Race, Gender, & Disability in Multiethnic Literature , Ashely B. Tisdale

Intersections of Race and Place in Short Fiction by New Orleans Gens de Couleur Libres , Adrienne D. Vivian

Mental Illness Diagnosis and the Construction of Stigma , Katie Lynn Walkup

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Rhetorical Roundhouse Kicks: Tae Kwon Do Pumsae Practice and Non-Western Embodied Topoi , Spencer Todd Bennington

9/11 Then and Now: How the Performance of Memorial Rhetoric by Presidents Changes to Construct Heroes , Kristen M. Grafton

Kinesthetically Speaking: Human and Animal Communication in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century , Dana Jolene Laitinen

Exploring Refugee Students’ Second Language (L2) Motivational Selves through Digital Visual Representations , Nhu Le

Glamour in Contemporary American Cinema , Shauna A. Maragh

Instrumentalization Theory: An Analytical Heuristic for a Heightened Social Awareness of Machine Learning Algorithms in Social Media , Andrew R. Miller

Intercessory Power: A Literary Analysis of Ethics and Care in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon , Alice Walker’s Meridian , and Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child , Kelly Mills

The Power of Non-Compliant Logos: A New Materialist Approach to Comic Studies , Stephanie N. Phillips

Female Identity and Sexuality in Contemporary Indonesian Novels , Zita Rarastesa

"The Fiery Furnaces of Hell": Rhetorical Dynamism in Youngstown, OH , Joshua M. Rea

“We developed solidarity”: Family, Race, Identity, and Space-Time in Recent Multiethnic U.S. American Fiction , Kimber L. Wiggs

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Remembrance of a Wound: Ethical Mourning in the Works of Ana Menéndez, Elías Miguel Muñoz, and Junot Díaz , José Aparicio

Taking an “Ecological Turn” in the Evaluation of Rhetorical Interventions , Peter Cannon

New GTA’s and the Pre-Semester Orientation: The Need for Informed Refinement , Jessica L. Griffith

Reading Rape and Answering with Empathy: A New Approach to Sexual Assault Education for College Students , Brianna Jerman

The Karoo , The Veld , and the Co-Op: The Farm as Microcosm and Place for Change in Schreiner, Lessing, and Head , Elana D. Karshmer

"The weak are meat, and the strong do eat"; Representations of the Slaughterhouse in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature , Stephanie Lance

Language of Carnival: How Language and the Carnivalesque Challenge Hegemony , Yulia O. Nekrashevich

Queer Authority in Old and Middle English Literature , Elan J. Pavlinich

Because My Garmin Told Me To: A New Materialist Study of Agency and Wearable Technology , Michael Repici

No One Wants to Read What You Write: A Contextualized Analysis of Service Course Assignments , Tanya P. Zarlengo

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida , Haili A. Alcorn

The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature , Timothy M. Curran

Seeing Trauma: The Known and the Hidden in Nineteenth-Century Literature , Alisa M. DeBorde

Analysis of User Interfaces in the Sharing Economy , Taylor B. Johnson

Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization , Scott Neumeister

The Spectacle of The Bomb: Rhetorical Analysis of Risk of The Nevada Test Site in Technical Communication, Popular Press, and Pop Culture , Tiffany Wilgar

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals , Cassie Patricia Childs

“The Nations of the Field and Wood”: The Uncertain Ontology of Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Literature , J. Kevin Jordan

Modern Mythologies: The Epic Imagination in Contemporary Indian Literature , Sucheta Kanjilal

Science in the Sun: How Science is Performed as a Spatial Practice , Natalie Kass

Body as Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage , Curtis Le Van

Tensions Between Democracy and Expertise in the Florida Keys , Elizabeth A. Loyer

Institutional Review Boards and Writing Studies Research: A Justice-Oriented Study , Johanna Phelps-Hillen

The Spirit of Friendship: Girlfriends in Contemporary African American Literature , Tangela La'Chelle Serls

Aphra Behn on the Contemporary Stage: Behn's Feminist Legacy and Woman-Directed Revivals of The Rover , Nicole Elizabeth Stodard

(Age)ncy in Composition Studies , Alaina Tackitt

Constructing Health Narratives: Patient Feedback in Online Communities , Katie Lynn Walkup

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Rupturing the World of Elite Athletics: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the Suspension of the 2011 IAAF Regulations on Hyperandrogenism , Ella Browning

Shaping Climate Citizenship: The Ethics of Inclusion in Climate Change Communication and Policy , Lauren E. Cagle

Drop, Cover, and Hold On: Analyzing FEMA's Risk Communication through Visual Rhetoric , Samantha Jo Cosgrove

Material Expertise: Applying Object-oriented Rhetoric in Marine Policy , Zachary Parke Dixon

The Non-Identical Anglophone Bildungsroman : From the Categorical to the De-Centering Literary Subject in the Black Atlantic , Jarad Heath Fennell

Instattack: Instagram and Visual Ad Hominem Political Arguments , Sophia Evangeline Gourgiotis

Hospitable Climates: Representations of the West Indies in Eighteenth-Century British Literature , Marisa Carmen Iglesias

Chosen Champions: Medieval and Early Modern Heroes as Postcolonial Reactions to Tensions between England and Europe , Jessica Trant Labossiere

Science, Policy, and Decision Making: A Case Study of Deliberative Rhetoric and Policymaking for Coastal Adaptation in Southeast Florida , Karen Patricia Langbehn

A New Materialist Approach to Visual Rhetoric in PhotoShopBattles , Jonathan Paul Ray

Tracing the Material: Spaces and Objects in British and Irish Modernist Novels , Mary Allison Wise

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Representations of Gatsby: Ninety Years of Retrospective , Christine Anne Auger

Robust, Low Power, Discrete Gate Sizing , Anthony Joseph Casagrande

Wrestling with Angels: Postsecular Contemporary American Poetry , Paul T. Corrigan

#networkedglobe: Making the Connection between Social Media and Intercultural Technical Communication , Laura Anne Ewing

Evidence of Things Not Seen: A Semi-Automated Descriptive Phrase and Frame Analysis of Texts about the Herbicide Agent Orange , Sarah Beth Hopton

'She Shall Not Be Moved': Black Women's Spiritual Practice in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, and Home , Rondrea Danielle Mathis

Relational Agency, Networked Technology, and the Social Media Aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing , Megan M. Mcintyre

Now, We Hear Through a Voice Darkly: New Media and Narratology in Cinematic Art , James Anthony Ricci

Navigating Collective Activity Systems: An Approach Towards Rhetorical Inquiry , Katherine Jesse Royce

Women's Narratives of Confinement: Domestic Chores as Threads of Resistance and Healing , Jacqueline Marie Smith

Domestic Spaces in Transition: Modern Representations of Dwelling in the Texts of Elizabeth Bowen , Shannon Tivnan

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Paradise Always Already Lost: Myth, Memory, and Matter in English Literature , Elizabeth Stuart Angello

Overcoming the 5th-Century BCE Epistemological Tragedy: A Productive Reading of Protagoras of Abdera , Ryan Alan Blank

Acts of Rebellion: The Rhetoric of Rogue Cinema , Adam Breckenridge

Material and Textual Spaces in the Poetry of Montagu, Leapor, Barbauld, and Robinson , Jessica Lauren Cook

Decolonizing Shakespeare: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Three Adaptations of Three Plays by William Shakespeare , Angela Eward-Mangione

Risk of Compliance: Tracing Safety and Efficacy in Mef-Lariam's Licensure , Julie Marie Gerdes

Beyond Performance: Rhetoric, Collective Memory, and the Motive of Imprinting Identity , Brenda M. Grau

Subversive Beauty - Victorian Bodies of Expression , Lisa Michelle Hoffman-Reyes

Integrating Reading and Writing For Florida's ESOL Program , George Douglas Mcarthur

Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley , Katherine Marie McGee

Ghosts, Orphans, and Outlaws: History, Family, and the Law in Toni Morrison's Fiction , Jessica Mckee

The "Defective" Generation: Disability in Modernist Literature , Deborah Susan Mcleod

Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity , Joy Ann Sanchez-Taylor

Hermes, Technical Communicator of the Gods: The Theory, Design, and Creation of a Persuasive Game for Technical Communication , Eric Walsh

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Rhetorical Spirits: Spirituality as Rhetorical Device in New Age Womanist of Color Texts , Ronisha Witlee Browdy

Disciplinarity, Crisis, and Opportunity in Technical Communication , Jason Robert Carabelli

The Terror of Possibility: A Re-evaluation and Reconception of the Sublime Aesthetic , Kurt Fawver

Unbearable Weight, Unbearable Witness: The (Im)possibility of Witnessing Eating Disorders in Cyberspace , Kristen Nicole Gay

the post- 9/11 aesthetic: repositioning the zombie film in the horror genre , Alan Edward Green, Jr.

An(other) Rhetoric: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Rhetorical Tradition , Kathleen Sandell Hardesty

Mapping Dissertation Genre Ecology , Kate Lisbeth Pantelides

Dead Man's Switch: Disaster Rhetorics in a Posthuman Age , Daniel Patrick Richards

"Of That Transfigured World" : Realism and Fantasy in Victorian Literature , Benjamin Jude Wright

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• Schools & departments

English Literature PhD

Awards: PhD

Study modes: Full-time, Part-time

Funding opportunities

Programme website: English Literature

Upcoming Introduction to Postgraduate Study and Research events

Join us online on the 19th June or 26th June to learn more about studying and researching at Edinburgh.

Choose your event and register

Research profile

Doctorate-level study is an opportunity to expand upon your interests and expertise in a community that really values research; and to make an original, positive contribution to learning in literature and related fields.

As the oldest department of English Literature in the UK, based in one of the largest and most diverse Schools in the University of Edinburgh, we are the ideal place for PhD study.

Our interdisciplinary environment brings together specialists in all periods and genres of literature and literary analysis.

Research excellence

Based on our performance in the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF), over 90 per cent of our research and impact is classed as world-leading and internationally excellent by Research Professional. 69 per cent is graded at the world-leading level – the highest of REF’s four categories.

In Times Higher Education's REF analysis, English at Edinburgh is ranked fifth in the UK (out of more than 90 institutions) for:

• the overall quality of our publications and other outputs
• the impact of our research on people’s lives
• our supportive research environment

Given the breadth and depth of our expertise, we are able to support students wishing to develop research projects in any field of Anglophone literary studies. These include American studies, literary and critical theory, the history of the book, gender and sexuality studies, and global Anglophone literatures - where our specialisms include Pacific, African, South Asian, and African-American writing.

We have particular strengths in each of the main periods of English and Scottish Literature:

• Renaissance/early modern
• Enlightenment
• 21st century
• Contemporary

Emergent research themes in the department include the digital humanities, the economic humanities, the environmental humanities and literature and medicine.

• Explore our range of research centres, networks and projects in English and Scottish Literature

Working with colleagues elsewhere in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and across the wider University, we are able to support PhD theses crossing boundaries between disciplines and/or languages.

• Be inspired by the range of PhD research in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

Over the course of your PhD, you’ll be expected to complete an original body of work under the expert guidance of your supervisors leading to a dissertation of usually between 80,000 and 100,000 words.

You will be awarded your doctorate if your thesis is judged to be of an appropriate standard, and your research makes a definite contribution to knowledge.

• Read our pre-application guidance on writing a PhD research proposal

Go beyond the books

Beyond the Books is a podcast from the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at research and the people who make it happen.

Listen to a mix of PhD, early career and established researchers talk about their journey to and through academia and about their current and recent research.

• Browse Beyond the Books episodes and hear our research community talk about their work

Training and support

Between the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC), the Careers Service, and the Institute for Academic Development (IAD), you’ll find a range of programmes and resources to help you develop your postgraduate skills.

You will also have access to the University’s fantastic libraries, collections and worldwide strategic partnerships.

Part of a community

As part of our research community, you will be immersed in a world of knowledge exchange, with lots of opportunities to share ideas, learning and creative work.

Activities range from talks by visiting speakers and work-in-progress seminars, to reading groups, conferences, workshops, performances, online journals and forums, many of which are led by PhD candidates.

Highlights include student reading for the James Tait Black Prizes, Britain's oldest literary awards which typically involve reading submissions across fiction and biography and advising the judges on the shortlists.

• Read an interview with 2022 James Tait Black reader, Céleste Callen

Our graduates tell us that they value the friendliness of the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC), the connections they make here and the in-depth guidance they receive from our staff, who are published experts in their field.

A UNESCO World City of Literature, Edinburgh is a remarkable place to study, write, publish, discuss and perform prose, poetry and drama.

Take a PhD with us and you will be based in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) in the historic centre of this world-leading festival city.

You will have access to the University’s many literary treasures. These include the libraries of:

• William Drummond
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon
• Hugh MacDiarmid
• Norman MacCaig

The Centre for Research Collections holds the W.H. Auden collection; the Corson Collection of works by and about Sir Walter Scott; and the Ramage collection of poetry pamphlets.

It also holds a truly exceptional collection of early Shakespeare quartos and other early modern printed plays put together by the 19th century Shakespearean James Halliwell-Phillipps, the correspondence of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (the focus of one of the major editorial projects in Victorian studies of the last half-century), and the extensive Laing collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts, as well as letters and papers by - and relating to - authors including:

• Christopher Isherwood
• Rudyard Kipling
• John Middleton Murry
• Walter de la Mare
• George Mackay Brown
• Compton Mackenzie

Many of the University's Special Collections are digitised and available online from our excellent Resource Centre, Computing Labs, and dedicated PhD study space in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC).

Look inside the PhD study space in LLC

In the city

Our buildings are close to the National Library of Scotland (where collections include the Bute Collection of early modern English drama and the John Murray Archive), Edinburgh Central Library, Scottish Poetry Library, Scottish Storytelling Centre, Writers’ Museum and a fantastic range of publishing houses, bookshops, and theatres.

We have strong links with the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which annually welcomes around 1,000 authors to our literary city.

Entry requirements

These entry requirements are for the 2024/25 academic year and requirements for future academic years may differ. Entry requirements for the 2025/26 academic year will be published on 1 Oct 2024.

A UK masters, or its international equivalent, with a mark of at least 65% in your English literature dissertation of at least 10,000 words.

If your masters programme did not include a dissertation or included a dissertation that was unmarked or less than 10,000 words, you will be expected to produce an exceptional research proposal and personal statement to show your ability to undertake research at the level required by this programme.

International qualifications

Check whether your international qualifications meet our general entry requirements:

• Entry requirements by country
• English language requirements

Regardless of your nationality or country of residence, you must demonstrate a level of English language competency at a level that will enable you to succeed in your studies.

English language tests

We accept the following English language qualifications at the grades specified:

• IELTS Academic: total 7.0 with at least 6.5 in each component. We do not accept IELTS One Skill Retake to meet our English language requirements.
• TOEFL-iBT (including Home Edition): total 100 with at least 23 in each component. We do not accept TOEFL MyBest Score to meet our English language requirements.
• C1 Advanced ( CAE ) / C2 Proficiency ( CPE ): total 185 with at least 176 in each component.
• Trinity ISE : ISE III with passes in all four components.
• PTE Academic: total 70 with at least 62 in each component.

Your English language qualification must be no more than three and a half years old from the start date of the programme you are applying to study, unless you are using IELTS , TOEFL, Trinity ISE or PTE , in which case it must be no more than two years old.

Degrees taught and assessed in English

We also accept an undergraduate or postgraduate degree that has been taught and assessed in English in a majority English speaking country, as defined by UK Visas and Immigration:

• UKVI list of majority English speaking countries

We also accept a degree that has been taught and assessed in English from a university on our list of approved universities in non-majority English speaking countries (non-MESC).

• Approved universities in non-MESC

If you are not a national of a majority English speaking country, then your degree must be no more than five years old* at the beginning of your programme of study. (*Revised 05 March 2024 to extend degree validity to five years.)

Find out more about our language requirements:

• Fees and costs

Read our general information on tuition fees and studying costs:

Scholarships and funding

Featured funding.

There are a number of scholarship schemes available to eligible candidates on this PhD programme, including awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Please be advised that many scholarships have more than one application stage, and early deadlines.

• Find out more about scholarships in literatures, languages and cultures

Other funding opportunities

Search for scholarships and funding opportunities:

• Search for funding

Further information

• Phone: +44 (0)131 650 4086
• Contact: [email protected]
• School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures
• 50 George Square
• Central Campus
• Programme: English Literature
• School: Literatures, Languages & Cultures
• College: Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

This programme is not currently accepting applications. Applications for the next intake usually open in October.

Start date: September 2024

Awards: PhD (36 mth FT, 72 mth PT)

Application deadlines

Due to high demand, the school operates a number of selection deadlines. We will make a small number of offers to the most outstanding candidates on an ongoing basis, but hold the majority of applications until the next published selection deadline when we will offer a proportion of the places available to applicants selected through a competitive process.

Deadlines for applicants applying to study in 2024/25:

• How to apply

The online application process involves the completion of a web form and the submission of supporting documents.

For a PhD programme, you should include:

• a sample of written work of about 3,000 words (this can be a previous piece of work from an undergraduate or masters degree)
• a research proposal - a detailed description of what you hope to achieve and how
• Pre-application guidance

Before you formally apply for this PhD, you should look at the pre-application information and guidance on the programme website.

This will help you decide if this programme is right for you, and help us gain a clearer picture of what you hope to achieve.

The guidance will also give you practical advice for writing your research proposal – one of the most important parts of your application.

Find out more about the general application process for postgraduate programmes:

• English Language & Literature

Fields include English language and literature from Old English to the present, American literature, and Anglophone world literature.

• Programs of Study
• PhD - Doctor of Philosophy
• Combined PhD
• MA - Master of Arts

Jonathan Kramnick

Director of Graduate Studies

• [email protected]

Erica Sayers

Departmental Registrar

• [email protected]
• 203-432-2226

Admission Requirements

Standardized testing requirements.

GRE is not accepted.

Program-Specific Application Requirements

A writing sample is required by this program. 

English Language Requirement

TOEFL iBT or IELTS Academic is required of most applicants whose native language is not English.

You may be exempt from this requirement if you have received (or will receive) an undergraduate degree from a college or university where English is the primary language of instruction, and if you have studied in residence at that institution for at least three years.

Combined Degree Program Application Deadline

*The deadline to submit an application to a combined program is always the earlier deadline of the two individual programs, or December 15, whichever comes first.

Academic Information

Combined phd information.

English Language & Literature offers a combined PhD in conjunction with several other departments and programs including: African American Studies , Film and Media Studies , History of Art , and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies .

Program Advising Guidelines

GSAS Advising Guidelines

Academic Resources

Academic calendar.

The Graduate School's academic calendar lists important dates and deadlines related to coursework, registration, financial processes, and milestone events such as graduation.

Featured Resource

Registration Information and Dates

https://registration.yale.edu/

Students must register every term in which they are enrolled in the Graduate School. Registration for a given term takes place the semester prior, and so it's important to stay on top of your academic plan. The University Registrar's Office oversees the systems that students use to register. Instructions about how to use those systems and the dates during which registration occurs can be found on their registration website.

Financial Information

Phd stipend & funding.

PhD students at Yale are normally full-funded for a minimum of five years. During that time, our students receive a twelve-month stipend to cover living expenses and a fellowship that covers the full cost of tuition and student healthcare.

• PhD Student Funding Overview
• Graduate Financial Aid Office
• PhD Stipends
• Health Award
• Tuition and Fees

Master's Funding

While Master's programs are not generally funded, there are resources available to students to help navigate financial responsibilities during graduate school.

• Master's Student Funding Overview
• Yale Student Grants Database
• Student Employment
• Loans for US Citizens
• Loans for Non-US Citizens

Alumni Insights

Below you will find alumni placement data for our departments and programs.