• The Medieval Person: Concepts of Self and Personhood in Late Medieval English Literature 

  LaRiviere, Katie Jo (University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)

  In a debate significant for both its stakes and longevity, medievalists and early modernists have engaged the question of selfhood and argued about its ostensible “beginning.” Scholars on both sides have imagined the ...
• Reordering Nature: Romantic Science, Natural History, and Mountaineering 

  Wright, Paula (University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)

  In the modern outdoor recreation community (and the $887 billion annually U.S. outdoor industry), there is the concern that outdoor recreationists are “loving our [crags, trails, rivers, summits] to death.” At the same ...
• Unfenceable Sovereignties: Race, Nature, and the Genres of Possession in American Literature 

  Anson, April (University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)

  This dissertation asserts that climate change is a narrative problem in addition to a scientific one. I show the representational challenges of climate change to be bound to the complexities of race and nature expressed ...
• Make Something Besides a Baby: Race, Gender, and Reproductive Science in 20th Century Black Women's Novels 

  Rovak, Angela (University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)

  <i>Make Something Besides a Baby: Race, Gender, and Reproductive Science in 20th Century Black Women's Novels</i> challenges the opposition between literature and science that has obscured the ways Black women write science ...
• Mapping Human Virtue and the Ethics of Desire: the Ludic(rous) as Umpire 

  Narver, Annie (University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)

  Building on the assumption that society constructs ideology through, according to Louis Althusser, “apparatuses,” this dissertation explores how medieval romances written from the twelfth through fourteenth century exploit ...
• Printing the Other Victorians: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Embodiment and Identity 

  Floyd, Courtney (University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)

  The body was, in many ways, just as imagined as the community in the nineteenth-century. This dissertation bridges the fields of Victorian literature, print culture, and disability studies to demonstrate that print and its ...
• Refiguring the Animal: Race, Posthumanism, and Modernism 

  Curry, Elizabeth (University of Oregon, 2019-04-30)

  This dissertation explores the entanglements of racialized histories and experiences in America with conceptions of animals and animality and examines how African American and Native American writers render these intersections ...
• “Yes! We Have No Bananas”: Cultural Imaginings of the Banana in America, 1880-1945 

  Huang, Yi-lun (University of Oregon, 2019-01-11)

  My dissertation project explores the ways in which the banana exposes Americans’ interconnected imaginings of exotic food, gender, and race. Since the late nineteenth century, The United Fruit Company’s continuous supply ...
• Signifying the Childish Adult of Horus Gilgamesh’s Awkward Moments of the Children’s Bible 

  Omuro, Jonathan (University of Oregon, 2018-09-06)

  This project focuses on Horus Gilgamesh’s Awkward Moments of the Children’s Bible, Vol. 1 (2013), an adult picture book that parodies the Bible by illustrating biblical scriptures with child unfriendly images of gore, sex, ...
• Spatial Justice and Environmental Racism in Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex 

  Machuca, Nicholas (University of Oregon, 2018-09-06)

  I examine Sesshu Foster’s 2005 alternate history speculative fiction narrative Atomik Aztex using geographer Edward Soja’s concept of “spatial (in)justice” as an analytical lens, arguing Foster focuses on mobility and its ...
• Lorelei's Guide to a Lady's Luxury: The Secrets of Social Mobility in Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 

  Saeed, Amanda (University of Oregon, 2018-09-06)

  Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes constantly acknowledges tensions between the intentions and actions of its protagonist, Lorelei Lee. Some literary critics and authors have speculated in depth the reasons and/or effects ...
• Postcolonial Cli-Fi: Advocacy and the Novel Form in the Anthropocene 

  Rochester, Rachel (University of Oregon, 2018-09-06)

  Through the filters of postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and digital humanities, this project considers the capabilities and limitations of novels to galvanize action in response to environmental crises. My ...
• Ring Around the Rosie: Queer Temporality in Narratives of Trauma 

  Muhic, Dina (University of Oregon, 2018-04-10)

  This dissertation employs both traditional and digital tools to analyze fictional texts through the converging lenses of narratology, queer theory, and trauma studies. I am invested specifically in the work fictional ...
• The Making of A Princess: The Role of Ritual in Creating Community and Identity in the Society for Creative Anachronism. 

  Parker, Deborah (University of Oregon, 2018-04-10)

  Every weekend in the Society for Creative Anachronism, people from the far reaches of the globe leave behind the structures of their everyday lives, dress themselves in clothing from the Middle Ages, and construct medieval ...
• Between Us We Can Kill a Fly: Intersubjectivity and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 

  Macrae, Mitchell (University of Oregon, 2018-04-10)

  Using recent scholarship on intersubjectivity and cultural cognitive narratology, this project explores the disruption and reformation of early modern identity in Elizabethan revenge tragedies. The purpose of this dissertation ...
• The Nature of the Secular: Religious Orientations and Environmental Thought in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 

  Zandstra, Robert (University of Oregon, 2018-04-10)

  My dissertation argues that changes in the structures and orientations of religious thought, changes commonly understood as secularization, have provided the intellectual underpinnings for the modern exploitation and ongoing ...
• Mending the Impossible 

  Blade, Kristine Lynn (University of Oregon, 1979-06)
• By the Will of the King: Majestic and Political Rhetoric in Ricardian Poetry 

  Driscoll, William (University of Oregon, 2017-09-27)

  The stories we tell give meaning and coherence to our political situation; they reproduce, interrogate, and, at times, challenge the discourse of authority. Thus, when the political situation changes so do our narratives. ...
• Rhetoric of Resistance: Social Justice in the Work of Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin 

  Crane, Jessica (University of Oregon, 2017-09-27)

  This dissertation examines the rhetoric employed by Wollstonecraft, Cugoano, and Godwin who devise a top-down/bottom-up dialectic of social-justice writing which can be read as grassroots advocacy. The authors write with ...
• Tales of the Hasidim: Martin Buber's Universal Vision of Ecstatic Joy and Spiritual Wholeness 

  Hanna, Charles (University of Oregon, 2017-09-27)

  I will examine Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, and the limits of his concepts of “ecstatic joy” and “spiritual wholeness.” To Buber, Hasidic legends present the possibility of overcoming tensions between the quotidian ...

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