Alumni Thesis Topics (2005–present)


Robert Twiss
“Satirical Sauvages: Indigenous North Americans in Eighteenth-century French and British Prose Satire, 1702–1763″
December 1st, 2023

Talia Isaacson
“Tragic Tomorrows: Classical Reception in Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature”
November 14, 2023

Kristopher Poulin-Thibault
“Selfhood at the Nexus of Word and Image: Memory and Identity in Autobiographical Texts with Photographs”
April 2023

Matthew Stefan Da Mota
Once upon a time in the Oeste: Epic, Narrative and History in the Early Modern Iberian World”
March 13, 2023

Ben Bandosz
“Unreadable Spies: Identity, Media, and Modernism in the Work of Joseph Conrad”
Jan 30, 2023

Joseph Aloysius Klemens
Aural Readings: Performative Monologues as Oppositional Narratives
August 31st, 2022

Yu Wang
The Witness-Scholars of the Holocaust and Their Righteous Rescue Narratives (late 1970s – early 1990s)
August 25th, 2022

Jessica Ruth Copley
Forms of War: Capitalism, Representation and the State in Post-45 Literatures from France, Japan, and the United States
July 20, 2022

Nathaniel Harrington
Reading (in) Speculative Fiction
May 31, 2022

Pushpa Raj Acharya
The Nation-State of Nepal in Nepali and Anglophone Novels
May 4, 2022

Natasha Hay
Walter Benjamin’s Weak Force of Study and Counter-Traditional Education
Defense date: March 17, 2022

Leonard Stein
“My Heart is in Sepharad”: Writing Medieval Spain in the Modern Sephardic Diaspora
Defense date: September 2nd, 2021

Arianne Des Rochers
Translation and Postnational Cartographies in Twenty-First-Century Canadian Literatures
Defense date: April 8, 2021

Sanja Ivanov
The Materiality of Memory: Everyday Objects in Post-Socialist Literatures and Cultures
Defense date: September 1st, 2020

Nefise Kahraman
Nerves on the Loose: Gendering Nervousness in Ottoman and Early Republican Turkish Novels
Defense date: August 5th, 2020

Lauren Beard
“The Aesthetics of Nachträglichkeit: Traumatic Temporality and the First World War in Proust, Joyce, and Mann.”
Defense date: July 3, 2020

Darcy Gauthier
The Aesthetics and Politics of Haunting in 1950s Japan
Defense date: June 18, 2020

Adleen Carlisle Crapo
Writer-Citizens in Early Modern Europe
Defense date: April 13th, 2020

Rachel Freedman Stapleton
Autobiographical Strategies of Petition in Spanish and English Women’s Letters, 1530–1630
Defense date: December 17, 2019

Paula Liliana Karger
Cross-cultural Contact: Teodor’s Journey Across Continents
Defense date: December 13, 2019

Adwoa Atta Opoku-Agyemang
Humour in West African Literature: Four Templates
Defense date: May 6, 2019

Irina Sadovina
The Nonsovereign Subject and Sexual Violence in Contemporary North American and Russian Culture
Defense date: June 26, 2018

Elise Couture-Grondin
Literary Relationships: Settler Feminist Readings of Visions of Justice in Indigenous Women’s First-Person Narratives”.
Defense date: June 19, 2018

Youngjin Park
On Love: Between Lacan and Badiou
Defense date: March 2nd, 2018

 Katherine Lynn Fry
The Aesthetics of Redemption in fin de siècle Literature and the Arts
Defense date: September 29, 2017

Tetiana Soviak
Visions of Labour: Socialist Realism, American Reality TV and the Politics of Documentary
Defense date: September 8, 2017

Veronica Jimenez 
Of Maps and Suitcases, a Study of Time-escapes
Defense date:  August 31, 2017

Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard
Containing Humour: The Humorist as Prisoner in Twentieth-century Literature
Defense date: May 16, 2017

Samuel  Caldwell
Dissolution of the Sentence: the philosophical, theological, and pedagogical strain on syntax in G.W.F Hegel and Gertrude Stein.
Defense date: September 9th, 2016

Karen Yaworski
Camaraderies Thick and Thin: Black Identities in Dialogue
Defense date: August 19, 2016

Catherine Schwartz
Bells and Whistles: The Sounds of Nineteenth-Century French and English Literature.
Defense date: August 15, 2016

Teresa Russo
Memory, Image-Making and Literary Structure in Dante, Chaucer and Christine de Pizan
Defense date: January 14, 2016

Natalie Pendergast
Imitating Life: The Practice of Self-Making in In French and English Autobiographical Graphic Novel
Defense date: September 1st, 2015

Lukasz Wodzynski
Romance as an Experimental Form in Polish and Russian Early Modernism
Defense date: June 26, 2015

Ronald Ng 
The Ethics of Transference in Trauma Discourse
Defense date: May 27, 2015

Yan Lu
E/Motion: The Affective Recognition in Multilingual Chinese Canadian Literature
Defense date: May 4th, 2015

Yi Chen
A Phenomenological Approach To Comparison: The Non-metaphorical Poetics of Paul Celan and Wang Wei
Defense date: December 4, 2014

Jeannine Marie Pitas
Against Ulro: On the creation of poetic space in the work of Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik and Marosa di Giorgio
Defense date: May 23rd, 2014

Julie Parisien
Derrida in Wonderland: The Readability of ‘Postmodern’ Texts Across Genres
Defense date: May 5th, 2014

Joseph Culpepper
Reception and Adaptation: Magic Tricks, Mysteries, Con Games
Defense date: April 2nd, 2014

Myra Bloom
Textual Transgressions: Confessional Discourse in Late Twentieth-Century Canadian and Québécois Writing
Defense date: Friday, Feb. 28th, 2014

Antonio Gordon Viselli
The (Proto-)Modernist Subject in Time: Fugue and the Fourth Dimension
Defense date: December 5th, 2013

Annarita Primier 
“The Concept of Self‐Reflexive Intertextuality in the Works of Umberto Eco”
Defense date: June 24, 2013

Magdalena Corina Ionescu
Retreating Aphaeresis: Michelangelo, the Self-Portrait, and Other Ruins
Defense date: December 7, 2012

Sarah O’Brien
Unnerving Images: Cinematic Representations of Animal Slaughter and the Ethics of Shock
Defense date: June 1, 2012

Jonathan Andrew Allan
The First Time and the Mourning After: A Study of Love, Loss, and Virginity
Defense date: March 26, 2012

Vanessa Robinson
Reflecting the Other: The Thing Poetry of Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge
Defense date: November 15, 2011

Adriana Dragomir
Communication and the Construction of the Ideal in the West
Defense date: August 24, 2011

Paul Pemeja
Modernist Curiosities: Desire, Knowledge, and Literature in Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung and Jorge Luis Borges’ “El Aleph.” 
Defense date: May 16, 2011

Elisa Segnini
The Mask as a Literary Trope between Decadence and Modernism
Defense date: September 17, 2010

Andrés Pérez Simon
The Theatrical Pendulum: Paths of Innovation in the Modernist Stage
Defense date: September 15, 2010

Karen Heather Pike
Theories of the Fantastic: Postmodernism, Game Theory, and Modern Physics
Defense date: June 2nd, 2010

Lauren Lydic
Metaphor and Gender in Conflict: Discourse, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars.
Defense date: April 9, 2010

 Pouneh Saeedi-Tabatabai
Corporeal Configurations of the Heroic and the Monstrous: A Comparative Study of ‘Beowulf’, ‘The Shahnameh’ and ‘Tristan’
Defense date: February 9th, 2010

Scott Marentette
The Language of Real Life: Self-Possession in the Poetry of Paul Celan, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Valéry
Defense date: December 3rd, 2009

Ioana Cosma
Angels In-Between: The Poetics of Excess and the Crisis of Representation
Defense date: September 21st, 2009

Martin Zeilinger
Arts and Politics of Appropriation
Defense date: September 18, 2009

Pamela Coles
Necessary Monsters: A General Theory about the Global Impulse to Monster-make
Defense date: September 12, 2009

Jenna Brook Sunkenberg
Reconfiguring Ricoeur: A Study of Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Self in discourse with Dante’s Commedia
Defense date: August, 10th, 2009

Keavy Martin
Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature in Nunavut
Defense date: June 10, 2009

Nizar Hermes
‘Ifranjalism’: The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture, 9th-12th Century (A.D.)
Defense date: January 29th, 2009

Stephanie Chong
The Anthropomorphization of Law: Fictional Judges and Lawyers in Contemporary North American and European Settings
Defense date: January 21st, 2009

Yves Saint-Cyr
The Glass Bead Game: From Post-Tonal to Most-Modern
Defense date: September 2008

 Sandra Bialystock
The Cuckhold, his Wife and her Lover: A Study of Infidelity in the Cent nouvelles, the Decameron, and the Libro de buen amor
Defense date: April 16, 2008

Suha Kudsieh
Cultural Encounters between East and West: Analyzing Travel and Encounter Accounts from Postcolonial Perspective
Defense date: January 25, 2008

Nadia Bozak
Consumptive Crash: The Aesthetics of Obsolescence at the End of the Age of Oil
Defense date: January 7, 2008

 Ioana Sion
Ontological Journeys of Descent in Dramas of Selfhood: Descensus ad infernos and Individuation in Dante, Claudel, Beckett, Ionesco
Defense date: November 15, 2007

Lisa Fiorindi
”Penelope Speaks: Making the Mythic Specific in the Works of Five Contemporary Italian and Caribbean Writers”
Defense date: October 22, 2007

Barnaby Clunie
Epic Epistles: Scripting the Early Modern Self in Chivalric Romance, the Picaresque and the Conquest Relación
Defense date: October 5th, 2007

Jenna Habbegger-Conti
“Infinity Plus One: The Thousand and One Nights as a Model for Infinite Narrative in Borges, Calvino, Barth and Rushdie”
Defense date: August 31, 2007

Jessica Tsui-Yan Li
“Rewriting the Female Body in Eileen Chang’s Fiction and Self-Translations”
Defense date: July 16, 2007

Heather Carol Macfarlane
“Road Work, Theorizing the Road Trip Narrative in Anglophone, Québécois and Indigenous Literatures in Canada”
Defense date: June 20th, 2007

Sylwia Dominika Chrostowska
Literary-Critical Discourse in Germany, Poland and Russia, 1700-1800: A Genre Perspective
Defense date: November 24, 2006

Eric Liddell
The Heart of the Plot A Study of Autobiographical Literature of the Meditative Type: Augustine, Rousseau and Proust
Defense date: February 28, 2006

Levi Namaseb
Language, Environment and Community in Storytelling of Khoekhoe, Khomani, English and Afrikaans in Southern Africa
Defense date: February 14, 2006

Ian Macrae
American Incunabula: ‘Grotesque Genesis’ and the Genealogical Genre One Strand in the Twentieth-Century American Novel
Defense date: January 27, 2006

Vivian Ralickas
Abjection, Sublimity, and the Question of the Unpresentable in Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft
Defense date: January 20, 2006

 George Gasyna
The ‘Other’ Place of Language: Identity and Heterotopia in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz
Defense date: July 12, 2005

Irene Marques
Four Writers Being Political on Their Own Terms: Feminist, Class and Cultural Identity Discourses Across Continents
Defense date: May 6, 2005