Carnegie Mellon University

Ph.D. Literary & Cultural Studies Dissertations

The following table presents the dissertations of our PhD LCS graduates since 2005.

Year

Graduate

Dissertation

2023 Sarah Rose Hancock

The Social Life of Flowers: Women and Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain

2022 Craig Stamm 

Poetry and Natural History in the Joseph Johnson Network

2021 Steven Gotzler

Working Models: Intellectual Work, Postwar Fiction, and the Resources of Cultural Studies

Robert Kilpatrick Postwar Family Fictions: Genres of the Middle-Class American Family, 1950-2000
Nathan Pensky Cartesian Theaters, Shakespearean Minds: Interpreting the Literature of Being and Seeming
Avery Wiscomb

A Humanities-Centered History of Early AI: Herbert A. Simon and His Books

2020 Natalie Suzelis Shakespeare and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: Ecology, Reproduction, and Commodities
Bret Vukoder Filmic Aesthetics and Technologies of War, Policy, and "Truth" in the Motion Pictures of the United States Information Agency
2019 Jacob Goessling  Appalachian Coal Culture and the Residue of Fossil Capital, 1968-Present
2018 Juliann Reineke Three Sheets to the Wind: The Jolly Jack Tar and Eighteenth-Century British Masculinity

Jamie Smith

Rights and Rites: Revolution, Gender, Performance, and Religion in British Novels of the 1790s

Pavithra Tantrigoda

Contesting "Green Imperialism": Rights and Ecology in South Asian Literature

2017

Matthew Lambert

The Green Depression: Landscape, Environmentalism, and Social Justice in the 1930s and 40s

D.J. Schuldt

The Dissenting Academies and the Literary Politics of the 1790s
2016

Kate Hamilton

'The Voice of Fame’: Frances Burney and Eighteenth-Century
British Celebrity

Kate Holterhoff

Speculating Victorians: Romance Fictions and Evolutionary Science, 1859-1914
2015

David Haeselin

Searching...A Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Information Retrieval
Heather Steffen Academic Labor in an Age of Change: Criticism of the U.S. University, 1890-1930
Eric Vázquez Realms of Inconsequence: U.S. Imaginaries of Central America, 1979-2005
2013 Sheila Liming The Natural Woman: Science and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America
2012 Geoffrey Glover Fables of Difference: African American Science Fiction from 1931 Through 2006
Christopher Jeremy Taylor The Fortified Compound: New Journalism and the New Right
2011 Nilak Datta Authentic Fictions in Homely Worlds: The Construction of the Post-Tourist Gaze in Postmodern American Fiction
Bill Blake Soldier Playwrights, Public Honor, and the Making of Liberal Arts Culture, 1660-1737
2010 Emily Klein Constructing the American Activist: Twentieth-Century Political Performances and Discourses of Social Change
2009 Mario Castagnaro Embellishment, Fabrication, and Scandal: Hoaxing and the American Press
Rebecca May Morbid Parts: Dissection and the Gothic in the Long Nineteenth Century
2008 Thora Brylowe Romantic Arts & Letters: British Print, Paint, and Engraving 1760-1830
2007 Srila Nayak Citizens Everywhere: Modernism, Decolonization, and Discourses of Citizenship
2006 Courtney Maloney Images of Steel: Labor, Memory and the Cultural Work of Corporate Photographers
Dana Gilserman-Kopans The English Malady: Egendering Insanity in the Eighteenth Century
2005 Victor Cohen Heroes for Sale: Radical Politics and Genre Formation in Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction