Alumni Thesis Topics (2005–present)

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Teresa Valentini
“Modernist Impotentiality: James Joyce, Italo Svevo, and Franz Kafka”
May 16, 2024

Corinne Sophia Gerber
“Making a Common Sense of Plural Literacies: Black Feminist Publishing in Toronto, Berlin, and Zurich, ca. 1975-2003″
April 24, 2024

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
March 17, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adleen Carlisle Crapo
Writer-Citizens in Early Modern Europe
April 13^th, 2020

Rachel Freedman Stapleton
Autobiographical Strategies of Petition in Spanish and English Women’s Letters, 1530–1630
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, 10^th, 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 20^th, 2007

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