Dissertations

Akrish Adhikari (January 2024)
Teledrumming (1922-1971)
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Sophie Chopin (September 2024)
Paris, Ville Fantôme : Patrick Modiano et la hantise du Contemporain
Adviser: André Benhaïm

Jackson Smith (March 2024)
Breaking Forms: Ideology in Representations of the Algerian War of Independence
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Chloé Vettier(November 2022)
ÉCRIRE SA HONTE : Augustin, Rousseau, Sachs, Genet
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Renée Altergott (May 2022)
Phonographic Imaginiaries: The Birth of Sound Recording in France and the French Colonial Empire
Adviser: Nick Nesbitt

Irina Markina (May 2022)
Institutionalizing Revolution: The Official Mural Art Campaign of the Third Republic, 1870-1900
Adviser: Effie Rentzou

Austin Hancock (May 2022)
La Boxe Contre L’Ombre: Boxing and The Historical Avant-Garde
Adviser: Effie Rentzou

Brian Ho (May 2022)
Poetic Expressionism: Gilles Deleuze and the French Poets of the 19th and 20th Centuries A Genetic Study
Adviser: Nick Nesbitt

Sonali Ravi (May 2022)
Humoring Pathos: Comedic Discourse and Its Paradoxes In Contemporary Francophone Literature and Culture
Adviser: André Benhaïm

Maureen DeNino (Dec 2021)
Actualité Coloniale: French Colonial Literature and the Press, 1877-1898
Adviser: Göran Blix

Liana Pshevorska (May 2020)
In-Betweenness: Aesthetics and Identity in Contemporary Translingual Francophone Literature.
Adviser: Effie Rentzou

Alexander Baron-Raiffe (May 2020)
Writing Greece: The Platonic Legacy of Melete Thanatou in Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Athenian Thanatographies.
Adviser: Nick Nesbitt

Adeline Heck (Mar 2020)
Under the Spell of Wagner: The “Revue Wagnérienne” and Literary Experimentation in the Belle Epoque (1878-1893)
Adviser: Thomas Trezise 

Robert Decker (Dec 2019)
Topographies of Time: The Spatiohistorical Imagination in Caribbean Narrative.
Adviser: Nick Nesbitt

Sarah Beytelmann (Nov 2018)
L'injure au Dix-Septième Siècle
Adviser: Volker Schröder

Charlotte Werbe (Nov 2018)
After the Fact: Encounters in Holocaust Testimony 
Adviser: Thomas Trezise 

Lindsey Richter (May 2018)
Being Two: The Individual as Response in Surrealism's Partner Collaborations (1919-1935)
Adviser: Effie Rentzou

Chad Cordova (May 2018)
The Being, or Non-Being, of the Self: The Two Moments of French Antihumanism
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Natalie Berkman (May 2018)
The OuLiPo's Mathematical Project (1960-2014)
Adviser: David Bellos

Macs Smith (May 2018)
Paris and the Parasite: The Politics of Noise in the Mediatic City
Adviser: André Benhaïm

Melissa Verhey (January 2018)
Life Writing as Care for the Self: Fictional Autobiographies in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French Literature.
Adviser: Göran Blix

Joshua Rivas (November 2017)
Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Literature/Politics
Adviser: Christy Wampole

Bridget Behrmann (May 2017)
The Parnassian Moment and the Experimental Poem, 1866-1876
Adviser: Göran Blix

Marie Sanquer (October 2016)
Retours à  la Terre dans la Fiction Française et Francophone du XXème Siècle: Traumatismes Territoriaux et Échecs Fertiles: Pierre-Jakez Hélias, Kateb Yacine, Albert Cohen, Samuel Beckett
Adviser: André Benhaïm

Charles Samuelson (May 2016)
Queering Rhetoric in Verse Romances and the Dits, from Chrétien de Troyes to Christine de Pizan
Adviser: Sarah Kay

Nicolas L’Hermitte (May 2016)
The Search in Question: Aporia in "A la recherche du temps perdu"
Adviser: André Benhaïm

Matthew Sandefer (June 2015)
Literary Cruelty in the short prose of Barbey D'Aurevilly, Léon Bloy, and Villiers De L' Isle-Adam
Adviser: Göran Blix

Brian Jacobs (May 2015)
Men in the Middle: Masculinity in North African Francophone Literatures
and Cultures
Adviser: André Benhaïm

Daniel Worden (January 2015)
Tales of Impostors: Exposing Belief in Fiction from the Baroque to the Early Enlightenment
Adviser: Volker Schröder

Charles Rice-Davis (December 2014)
The Point of All Return: Nostalgia and the Dream of Disenlightenment
Adviser: Marie-Hélène Huet

Christine Bourgeois (May 2014)
Saintly Asceticism and the Literary Machine. The Many Lives of Saint Anthony the Great
Adviser: Sarah Kay

Valerie Aguilar ( May 2014)
Literary Representations of Rivalry Between France and Spain in the French Renaissance (1530-1560)
Adviser: François Rigolot

Layla Ashan Roesler (May 2014)
Fragmentation and Unity: Language and its Becoming in the Essays of Yves Bonnefoy
Adviser: Tom Trezise

Carla Caponegro (May 2013)
Roman Censorship and the Shaping of Montaigne's Essays
Adviser: François Rigolot

Benjamin Williams (October 2012)
Public Enemies: French Symbolist Rationales for a Restricted Readership
Adviser: Göran Blix

Eliza Zingesser (September 2012)
French Troubadours: Assimilating Occitan Literature in Northern France (1200-1400)
Adviser: Sarah Kay

Scott Francis ( May 2012)
Authorial Personae, Ideal Readers, and Advertising for the Book in Lemaire, Marot and Rabelais
Adviser: François Rigolot

Daniel Hanna (May 2012)
Poetry in the early French and Flemish Carmel: The Tradition of Teresa of Avila
Adviser: Volker Schröder

Monica Michaud (March 2012)
Thinking Language Politically: Cultural Representation and Alterity in the European Enlightenment
Adviser: Marie-Hélène Huet

John Moreau (December 2011)
Eschatological Subjects: Divine and Literary Judgement in Fourteeth-Century France
Adviser: Sarah Kay

Karen Quandt (October 2011)
Landscapes and the Imagination: Expressive Aesthetics in French Romantic Poetry
Adviser: Göran Blix

Philippe Baillargeon (May 2011)
Altérations, Permutations et Transmutations.  Pour une Poétique du Serio Ludere dans "Le Moyen de Parvenir" de Béroalde de Verville
Adviser:   François Rigolot

Ainsley Robyn Brown (May 2011)
In Praise of the Book:  Expressions of Literary Bibliophily
Adviser:   Göran Blix

Ève Célia Morisi (May 2011)
Literature in extremis.  The Poetics and Ethics of Capital Punishment in the Works of  Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Albert Camus
Adviser:   Göran Blix

Saul Anton (May 2010)
The Vestige of Art:  Aesthetics and History in the French Enlightenment
Adviser:  Marie-Hélène Huet

Yann Robert (May 2010)
Living Theater:  Politics, Justice and the Stage in France (1750-1800)
Adviser: Marie-Hélène Huet

Rebecca Harmon (May 2010)
Witnessing Words: Testimony and Visuality across Genres in Agrippa d’Aubigné 
Adviser: François Rigolot

Laura Asok (April 2010)
Alienated Selves: Portraiture in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France
Adviser: Marie-Hélène Huet

Julie Grenet (January 2010)
The Father Figure in Marcel Proust's "A La Recherche du Temps Perdu"
Adviser: André Benhaïm

Elissa Bell Bayraktar (June 2009)
Beckett’s Closed Space Narratives
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Kathryn Lachman (June 2008)
The Music of Voice. Transnational Encounters between Music, Theory, and Fiction
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Catherine Witt (June 2008)
Tokens of Discontent. The Emergence of the Modern Prose Poem (1822-1869)
Adviser: Suzanne Nash

Valerie Dionne (2008)
De La Nation Divisse a La Confrairie: L’Art de La Conciliation Dans les "Essais" de Montaigne
Adviser: François Rigolot

Katherine Brown (September 2007)
From the Fabliaux to the Decameron: Codicology and Generic Transformation
Adviser: François Rigolot

Marie-Hélène Koffi-Tessio (June 2007)
Voyageurs Franç ais Sur Le Continent Africain
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Peter Eubanks (June 2007)
Literary Self-Assertion and the Limits of Art in the Poetry of Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473-ca. 1516)
Adviser: François Rigolot

Juliet O'Brien (April 2006)
Trobar Cor(s):  Erotics and Poetics in Flamenca
Adviser: Sarah Kay

Lucien Nouis (May 2006)
Politiques de l’hospitalité  (1632-1795)
Adviser: Marie-Hélène Huet

Eva Martin (June 2006)
Port-Royal Aesthetics
Adviser: Marie-Hélène Huet

Éric Trudel (April 2005)
La Terreur à l’œuvre. Théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan
Adviser: Suzanne Nash

Sinda Kalin Vanderpool (April 2005)
Marguerite de Navarre’s Evolving Poetic Personae
Adviser: François Rigolot

Esther Marion (October 2005)
Between Performance and Narration:  Voice, Agency, and Alterity in the Work of Marguerite Duras
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Livia Tutuc (November 2005)
Language and Tropisms: The Verbal Representation of Subjectivity in the Work of Nathalie Sarraute
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Nicole Simek (June 2005)
Altered Exemplarity: Critique and Commitment in Maryse Condé ’s Novels
Adviser: Thomas Trezise

Lynn S. Anderson (April 2004)
The Poetry of Jacques Réda and Philippe Jaccottet:  A Study of Space and Place
Adviser: Suzanne Nash