• Emergent Arguments: Digital Media and Social Argumentation 

  Kelly, Kristy (University of Oregon, 2017-05-01)

  This dissertation proposes a new framework for understanding how argumentation and rhetorical action unfold in digital space. While studies in the field of rhetorical theory often address new discursive practices in spaces ...

• Nature Industries: U.S. Environmental Fictions after Fordism, 1971-2011 

  Krieg, Charles (University of Oregon, 2016-11-21)

  This dissertation recontextualizes literary, critical, and popular models of nature in contemporary American fiction, and argues that the transformations in the post-Fordist economy reframe environmental concepts and their ...

• Affect, Abuse, Transgression: Orienting Ambiguity in Early Modern Texts 

  Myers, Katie (University of Oregon, 2016-11-21)

  This dissertation seeks to articulate how early modern texts formalize their affective qualities in instances of ambiguity. Positioned within the recent turn away from humoral theories of the passions and toward the ...

• Speaking to Crisis: Intellectuals, Literacy, and Public Discourse 

  Gentile, Francesca (University of Oregon, 2016-11-21)

  This dissertation analyzes public-intellectual work that deploys crisis tropes in its treatment of literacy, arguing that such work provides insight into the influence that intellectual engagement might exert on discourse ...

• "I'm Not a Rapper, I'm an Activist Who Rhymes": Native American Hip Hop, Activism, and Twenty-First Century Identities 

  England, Megan (University of Oregon, 2016-10-27)

  In this thesis, I examine the ways in which a growing number of Indigenous artists in the United States and Canada are using hip hop not only as a form of artistic expression, but also to vent frustration about and to draw ...

• Climate Change in Literature and Culture: Conversion, Speculation, Education 

  Siperstein, Stephen (University of Oregon, 2016-10-27)

  This dissertation examines an emergent archive of contemporary literary and cultural texts that engage with the wicked problem of anthropogenic climate change. Following cultural geographer Michael Hulme, this project ...

• Wasteful Words: Visions and Failures of Literary Efficiency in American Fiction, 1885-1910 

  Gazaille, Brian (University of Oregon, 2016-10-27)

  This dissertation examines how writers helped scientists and engineers transform “efficiency” from a mathematical tool for assessing machine performance to an organizing principle for society. Historians and literary ...

• Going Commercial: Agency in 17th Century Drama 

  McKimpson, Karl (University of Oregon, 2016-10-27)

  This dissertation’s aim is to reveal how essential economic mechanics were to playwrights when it came to depicting agency. Rising commercialization in the seventeenth century prompted playwrights to appropriate market ...

• THOSE WHO WILL HAVE US 

  Wadley, Meredith Lynne (University of Oregon, 1989-06)

  Short stories and selections of a novel in progress.

• Holy Ghosts: Romantic Asceticism and Its Figural Phantoms 

  Carroll, Anna (University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)

  This dissertation reconsiders sacred tropes in the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats within the context of ascetic performances and written saints’ lives. I argue that reading these poets ...

• Being a Thing Immortal: Shakespeare, Young Adult Culture, and the Motifs of the Undead 

  Harper, Gavin (University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)

  In the early decades of the twenty-first century William Shakespeare’s works and figure began to arise in Young Adult adaptations and transnarratives focusing upon the undead. These works of werewolf, vampire, and zombie ...

• The "Mourning Child": Divine and Mortal Absence in George Herbert's English and Classical Verse 

  Morton-Starner, Erica (University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)

  The period of tumultuous religious reformation during which George Herbert lived demanded of people a strict adherence to the paradigmatic structures that prescribed the ways in which public displays of religious conviction ...

• Primitivism and Contemporary Popular Cinema 

  Norton, Steven (University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)

  This dissertation is a postcolonial analysis of four films: The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), Dances with Wolves (1990), The Last Samurai (2003), and Avatar (2009). While previous scholarship has identified the Eurocentric ...

• Crafting Radical Fictions: Late-Nineteenth Century American Literary Regionalism and Arts and Crafts Ideals 

  Roberts, Rosalie (University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)

  This dissertation demonstrates that Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1906), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and Mary Wilkins Freemans The Portion ...

• Radical Epistemologies in Twenty-First Century Trans* Life Narratives 

  Rondot, Sarah Ray (University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)

  This dissertation explores how life narratives created by trans*-identified people (transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, and other non-binary identities included in the term’s asterisk) imagine new categories by re-working ...

• Networks of Modernism: Toward a Theory of Cultural Production 

  Hannah, Matthew (University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)

  In “Patria Mia,” his 1913 series of essays in New Age magazine, Ezra Pound uses a metaphor for modernist cultural production that informs and structures this dissertation. “If it lie within your desire to promote the arts,” ...

• Local Languages: The Forms of Speech in Contemporary Poetry 

  Fogarty, William (University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)

  Robert Frost’s legendary description of “the sound of sense” to define his poetics has for decades sounded like little more than common sense. His idea is now taken to be fairly straightforward: the inflections of an ...

• The Changing Face of Property: Land and Bodies in Early Modern English Literature and Contemporary Legal Trends 

  Saint Marie, Katina (University of Oregon, 2015-08-18)

  Early Modern drama, particularly that of Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Ben Jonson, reveal the importance of property law in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Their treatment of property ...

• “Art Hurts”: Intimacy, Difficulty, and Distance in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Two Dedications” 

  Mueller, Andrew (University of Oregon, 2015-08-18)

  In this thesis, I examine Gwendolyn Brooks’s diptych poems “Two Dedications” from her 1968 collection In the Mecca. Critical accounts of “Two Dedications” cast the poems as fixed oppositions between “frivolous” Western art ...

• Speculative Fictions, Bisexual Lives: Changing Frameworks of Sexual Desire 

  Wilde, Jenee (University of Oregon, 2015-08-18)

  While studies of lesbian, gay, and transgender communities and cultural production have dramatically increased, research on bisexuality remains highly undervalued in humanities and social science disciplines. To challenge ...

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