Graduate Thesis Examples

The subjects of MA theses have included studies of individual poets or dramatists, novelists or autobiographers, as well as explorations of literary movements, themes or periods. View our more recent titles below.

Our Recent Titles:

  • “The Bottom and the Orchard: Where Space and Place are Created, Controlled, and Maintained in Sula and Recitatif” (2024 Anyabwile)
  • “The Great (Genre) Escape” (2024 Perrin)
  • “Modality and Sociality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford” (2024 Perry)
  • “‘Don’t Question the Experts’: Autistic Autobiographies, Expert Paratexts, and Epistemic Injustice” (2024 Thompson)
  • “Preracial Panem: Understanding Racial Identity in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy and Prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” (2024 Wooten)
  • “Parts of the Story: An Illustrated Short Story Collection” (2023 Beal)
  • “‘What lady wouldn’t wish to join causes with women who stood up for other women?’: Heroines’ Rivalries and Friendships in Popular Romance Novels” (2023 Bradford)
  • “Breaking Away: Some Essays on Influence” (2023 Ferrer)
  • “Posting to Engage: A Study of the Effects of Recovery-Oriented Rhetoric on Community Building for Individuals with Eating Disorders and Associated Symptoms on Instagram” (2023 Horton)
  • “Being Born: A Memoir of Self-Making in Four Parts” (2023 Langford)
  • “‘Widen the Lens and See’: Poetry, Photography, and the Act of Witness in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’” (2023 Marlow)
  • “Engaging Secondary Students Through Secondary Worlds: An Approach to Teaching Tolkien at the High School Level” (2022 Casey)
  • “The Religious and the Secular Mythology in Idylls of the King” (2022 Kirkendall)
  • “‘…A Hideous Monster’: Social Repression and Rebellion in Gregory Corso’s ‘The American Way’” (2022 LeBey)
  • “Individualism, Materialism, and Sacrifice in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale’” (2022 Nalbandian)
  • “Burying the Carnival” (2022 Overdurf)
  • “Attending to Time in Narratives of Enslavement: Temporal Alterities and Lived Experiences of Time in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (2021 Bischoff)
  • “‘Beasts who walk alone’: Narrating Queer Abjection in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox” (2021 McGuirk)
  • “Reach Out and Touch Faith: Haptic Reciprocity in Milton’s Paradise Lost” (2021 Ricks)
  • “Gender Matters: Amante’s Gender Construction in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Grey Woman’” (2021 Willis)
  • “Braddon’s Body of Bigamy: A Corpus Stylistics Analysis” (2021 Waxman)
  • “‘Memory is all that Matters;’ Queer Latinx Temporality and the Memory-Making Process” (2020 Caicedo)
  • “Old Wives’ Tales: Mothers & Daughters, Wives & Witches (Stories)” (2020 Champagne)
  • “‘Numbed and Mortified’: Labor, Empathy, and Acquired Disability in King Lear and Titus Andronicus: (2020 Harrington)
  • “‘More Forms and Stranger’: Queer Feminism and the Aesthetic of Sapphic Camp (2020 Kennedy)
  • “A Discourse and Statistical Approach to Intersections of Gender and Race in Melville’s Typee” (2020 Post)
  • “Prophetic Un-speaking: The Language of Inheritance and Original Sin in Paradise Lost and Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” (2019 Darrow)
  • “‘The Frame of her Eternal Dream’: From Thel to Dreamscapes of Influence” (2019 Gallo)
  • “‘The Murmure and the Cherles Rebellying’: Poetic and Economic Interpretations of the Great Revolt of 1381” (2019 Noell)
  • “Dialogic Convergences of Spatiality, Racial Identity, and the American Cultural Imagination” (2019 Humphrey)
  • “Troubling Vice: Stigma and Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Ambitious Villains” (2019 Simonson)
  • “Beyond Mourning: Afro-Pessimism in Contemporary African American Fiction” (2018 Huggins)
  • “‘Harmonized by the earth’: Land, Landscape, and Place in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights” (2018 Bevin)
  • “(Re)membering the Subject: Nomadic Becoming in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature” (2018 Voelkner)
  • “Werewolves: The Outsider on the Inside in Icelandic and French Medieval Literature” (2018 Modugno)
  • “Towards Self-Defined Expressions of Black Anger in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Percival Everett’s Erasure” (2018 Razak)
  • “Echoes Inhabit the Garden: The Music of Poetry and Place in T.S. Eliot” (2018 Goldsmith)
  • “‘Is this what motherhood is?’: Ambivalent Representations of Motherhood in Black Women’s Novels, 1953-2011” (2018 Gotfredson)
  • “Movements of Hunters and Pilgrims: Forms of Motion and Thought in Moby-Dick, The Confidence Man, and Clarel” (2018 Marcy)
  • “Speaking of the Body: The Maternal Body, Race, and Language in the Plays of Cherrie Moraga, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tony Kushner” (2018 King)
  • “Passing as Jewish: The Material Consequences of Race and the Property of Whiteness in Late Twentieth-Century Passing Novels” (2017 Mullis)
  • “Eliot through Tolkien: Estrangement, Verse Drama, and the Christian Path in the Modern Era” (2017 Reynolds)
  • “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Urban Space in Postcolonial British Literature” (2017 Rahmat)
  • “Models of Claim, Resistance, and Activism in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Frances Burney” (2017 Smith)
  • “English Literature’s Father of Authorial Androgyny: The Innovative Perspective of Chaucer and the Wife of Bath” (2017 Ingold)
  •  “’Verbal Hygiene’ on the Radio: An Exploration into Perceptions of Female Voices on Public Radio and How They Reflect Language and Gender Ideologies within American Culture” (2017 Barrett)
  • “Divided Bodies: Nation Formation and the Literary Marketplace in Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India” (2016 Mellon)
  • “Metaformal Trends in Contemporary American Poetry” (2016 Muller)
  • “Power Through Privilege: Surveying Perspectives on the Humanities in Higher Education in the Contemporary American Campus Novel” (2016 Klein)
  • “‘I always cure you when I come’: The Caregiver Figure in the Novels of Jane Austen” (2016 McKenzie)
  • “English Imperial Selfhood and Semiperipheral Witchcraft in The Faerie Queene, Daemonologie, and The Tempest” (2016 Davis)
  • “With Slabs, Bones, and Poles: De/Constructing Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, Natasha Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina, and Selah Saterstrom’s Slab” (2016 Lang)
  • “The Ghost of That Ineluctable Past”: Trauma and Memory in John Banville’s Frames Trilogy” (2016 Berry)
  • “Breaking Through Walls and Pages: Female Reading and Education in the 18th Century British Novel” (2015 Majewski)
  • “The Economics of Gender Relations in London City Comedy” (2015 Weisse)
  • “Objects, People, and Landscapes of Terror: Considering the Sublime through the Gothic Mode in Late 19th Century Novels” (2015 Porter)
  • “Placing the Body: A Study of Postcolonialism and Environment in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid” (2015 Hutcherson)
  • “Wandering Bodies: The Disruption of Identities in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones” (2015 Martin)
  • “Mythogenesis as a Reconfiguration of Space in an ‘Alternate World’: The Legacy of Origin and Diaspora in Experimental Writing” (2015 Pittenger)
  • “Cunning Authors and Bad Readers: Gendered Authorship in ‘Love in Excess’” (2015 Bruening)
  • “‘The Thing Became Real’: New Materialisms and Race in the Fiction of Nella Larsen” (2015 Parkinson)
  • “‘Projections of the Not-Me’: Redemptive Possibilities of the Gothic within Wuthering Heights and Beloved” (2015 Glasser)
  • “Distortions, Collections, and Mobility: South Asian Poets and the Space for Female Subjectivity” (2015 Wilkey)
  • “From Text to Tech: Theorizing Changing Experimental Narrative Structures” (2015 Ortega)
  • “A Moral Being in an Aesthetic World: Being in the Early Novels of Kurt Vonnegut” (2015 Hubbard)