2023
In Search of the Political: How Social Movements Enter Liberal Social Change Projects
Timothy Wyman-McCarthy
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
From Campesinos to Indigenous Peoples in Mexico: The Rise of Self-Determination in the Era of Democracy and Human Rights
Bruno Ortiz
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
The Afterlives of Oblivion
Linda Kinstler
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Institutional Life: Ways of Being in Higher Education
Ryan Ikeda
Supervisor: David Bates
Polar Futurism and the Labors of Knowledge Production
Spencer Adams
Supervisor: Nasser Zakariya
2022
Cacophonous Modernism: Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s Indo-American Art
Megan Alvarado Saggese
Supervisor: Mary Ann Doane, Michael Mascuch
Salvage Constellations: Archival Dispossession and Recollection in Indigenous California
Ryan Rhadigan
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Nasser Zakariya
2021
Hard Choices in Artificial Intelligence
Thomas Gilbert
Supervisor: David Bates
Falling through the sky: Self-immolation and the limits of understanding
Tenzin Paldron
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
The Virtual Imagination: Early VR Development and the Construction of Digital Subjectivity
Nicholaus Gutierrez
Supervisor: David Bates
Death Embodied: Racial Violence in 19th and 20th Century Photography
Janice Yu
Supervisor: Michael Mascuch
2020
The Cybernetic Origins of Life
Kathleen Powers
Supervisor: David Bates
Political Spirituality and the Idea of Mexico: From Bourbon New Spain to Mexican Independence (1740-1821)
Richard Grijalva
Supervisor: Samera Esmeir
Disappear, Disappearing: Perceptibilities of Erasure in the Works of Ana Mendieta and Cecilia Vicuña
Suzanne Herrera Li Puma
Supervisor: Trinh T. Minh-ha
Everyday Eloquence and Mediality in Stand-up Performance
Michael Dalebout
Supervisor: Trinh T. Minh-ha
2019
Hunger Artists: Appetite, Desire, and Self-Unmaking in Baudelaire, Colette, and Weil
Katharine Wallerstein
Supervisor: Anthony Cascardi and Judith Butler
Technologies of Incapacitation: US Torture Regimes and the Captive Body
Michelle Christina Potts
Supervisor: Samera Esmeir and Michael Mascuch
2018
Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary
Giancarlo Cornejo Salinas
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
Power of Pretext: Religious Justification in Science Fiction, Scientology, and Society
Lilith Acadia
Supervisor: Daniel Boyarin
Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine
Evyn Espiritu
Supervisor: Trinh T. Minh-ha
2017
Disease and Difference in Three Platonic Diaogues: Gorgias, Phaedo, and Timaeus
Chiara Ricciardone
Supervisor: Ramona Naddaff and GRF Ferrari
The Body in Space: In Search of a Sensuous Dwelling in the Space of Accumulation
Alexandria Wright
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Programming Insight: Human and Machine Intelligence in the Petabyte Age
Osita Udekwu
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Feminist Materials: Quantum Physics and Critical Writing Practices for New Material Feminism
Stacey Moran
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Remittance Fiction: Human Labor Export, Realism, and the Filipino Novel in English
Paul Nadal
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Colleen Lye
The Refugee and Forced Migration Bidungsroman: Coming of Age and Coming into Form through Fictions of Home and Exile (Narrative Studies)
Alexandra Budny
Supervisor: Michael Mascuch
2016
Corporate Personhood(s): The Incorporation of Novel Persons in American Law, Society, and Literature, 1870-1914
Eugene McCarthy
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
After New India: Diasporas, Anglophonisms, Returns
Ragini Srinivasan
Supervisor: Shannon Jackson, Colleen Lye
Combat in “A World Not for Us:” Revolutionary Writing in Aimé Césaire and Ghassan Kanafani
Amirah Silmi
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
Preoccupations with Modernity: Geopolitics of Knowledge in Colombian Reproduction Laws
Alisa Sanchez
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
2015
Mambí Totems and Reconcentrado Taboos: Violence and the Unjust Dead in Cuban Literary and Visual Cultures
Eric Morales-Franceschini
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Trinh Minh-Ha
The construction of the Colombian territory: Images of the Colombian Armed Conflict 2002- 2010
Claudia Salamanca
Supervisor: Samera Esmeir, David W. Bates
If Your World Was Built on Dispossession: Strategies of Conquest by Settlement in America
Teresa K-Sue Park
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Return of the Indian: Bone Games, Transcription, and Other Gestures of Indigeneity
Mark Minch
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
Infrastructures of Injury: Railway Accidents and the Remaking of Class and Gender in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain
Amanda Armstrong-Price
Supervisor: Michael Wintroub, James Vernon
2014
The Biopolitics of Memory: Lifted Tongues and Cloned Dogs
Hyaesin Yoon
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
Monsoon Marketplace: Inscriptions and Trajectories of Consumer Capitalism and Urban Modernity in Singapore and Manila
Fernando Gonzaga
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855
John Garcia
Supervisor: Michael Mascuch
Creative Destruction: Memory, Public Finance, and the State in New York City
Keerthi Potluri
Supervisor: Samera Esmeir, Michael J. Watts
Kenosis and Immanence: Self-Emptying in Eckhart, Hegel and Bataille
Aleksey Dubilet
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Niklaus Largier
Anima Automata: On the Olympian Art of Song
Simon Porzak
Supervisor: Daniel Boyarin, Barbara G. Spackman
Drone Flight and Failure: the United States’ Secret Trials, Experiments and Operations in Unmanning, 1936-1973
Katherine Chandler
Supervisor:David W. Bates
2013
Playing Nature: The Virtual Ecology of Game Environments
Alenda Chang
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Airport Modern: The Space between International Departures and Arrivals in Modern Korean National Imaginings
Alice S. Kim
Dialectic, Desire Discipline: The Formation of the Philosopher on the Scene of the Platonic Dialogue
Vincent Tafolla
Negative Theatrics: Writing the Postdramatic Stage
Julia Jarcho
2012
Bearing Knowledge: Law, Reproduction and the Female Body in Modern Morocco, 1912-Present
Satyel Larson
Up in the Sound: Form and Voice in Jazz and Post-War American Poetry
Benjamin Lempert
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
The Therapeutic Turn in International Humanitarian Law: War Crimes Tribunals as Sites of "Healing"?
Diana Anders
The Bigger Picture: The Panoramic Image and the Global Imagination
Brooke Belisle
The Trouble with "Queerness": Drag and the Making of Two Cultures
Katie Horowitz
Lyric and the Rhetoric of the Serial Mode in Twentieth Century American Poetry: Figuring Voice in the Work of Spicer, Berrigan, and Ashbery
Colin Dingler
2011
Spectral Socialisms: Marxism-Leninism and the Future of Marxist Thought in Post-Socialist Bulgaria
Zhivka Valiavicharska
Supervisor: Wendy L. Brown
Times of the Event: On the Aesthetico-Political in West Germany and Austria circa 1968
Andrew Weiner
From Red Lights to Red Flags: A History of Gender in Colonial and Contemporary Vietnam
Quang-Anh Richard Tran
PreOccupied Territories: Polar Landscapes in the Cinema
Emily Carpenter
Supervisor: Linda Williams
Refiguring the Wordscape: Merleau-Ponty, Beckett and the Body
Amanda Dennis
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Vision in Ruins
Michelle Dizon
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
"This Modern Day Slavery": Sex Trafficking and Moral Panic in the United Kingdom
Angela Hill
2010
Immanent Shakespearing: Politics, Performance, Pedagogy
Todd Barnes
The Limits of the Mind: Cognition and Narrative Form in the Modernist Novel
James Harker
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Life Expectancies: Late Victorian Literature and the Biopolitics of Empire
Jessica Davies
Listening Speaks: Modernism and the Storytelling Voice
Julie Beth Napolin
Dislocations of the Brain: Subjectivity and Cerebral Topology from Descartes to Nineteenth Century Neuroscience
Nima Bassiri
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Integration and the American Musical: From Musical Theatre to Performance Studies
James Bradley Rogers
Supervisor: Shannon Jackson
Tentative Futures: Ethics and Sexuality in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Amy Jamgochian
The Matter of Beauty: Materialism and the Self in Victorian Aesthetic Theory
Benjamin Morgan
2009
Beyond Blood and Coercion: A Study of Violence in Machiavelli and Marx
Yves Winter
Contested Jurisdictions: Legitimacy and Governance at the Special Court for Sierra Leone
Sara Kendall
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Sans Retour: Subjectivity, Ethics and the Question of Survival in the work of Semprun, Levinas and Derrida
Colleen Pearl
Fate, Guilt and Messianic Interruptions: Ethics of Theological Critique in Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin
Yannik Thiem
The General Theatre of Death: Modern Fatality and Modernist Form
Amy Huber
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Real Time over Real Space: Television, Telepresence and Contemporary Art
Kristina Paulsen
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
2008
Beyond Supersessionism: Gillian Rose and the Rhetoric of Transcendence
Vincent Lloyd
Supervisor: Daniel Boyarin
The Ethical Bind in the Writings of Simone Weil
Yoon Sook Cha
Supervisor: Judith Butler
2007
Thou Shalt Not Kill?: Legal Normativity and the Problem with Capital Punishment
Benjamin Yost
Standing Before the Law: Recognition, Power, and the Limits of Identity
Sarah Burgess
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Wendy Brown
Archiving Self: Effacement, Erasure, Disappearance
Litia Perta
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
Masumura Yasuzo and the Cinema of Social Consciousness
Mark Roberts
Supervisor: David J. Cohen
Visionary Machines: A Genealogy of the Digital Image
Elizabeth Patterson
The Question of Ethics for the Metonymically Restless, as posed by Giles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gertrude Stein
Erik Schneider
2006
Ancient Bodies, Contemporary Selves: Reading Gender in Late Antique Christian Asceticism
Kathryn Drabinski
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Reason, Aesthetics and Solidarity: Hegel and Adorno on the Reparation of Modernity
Michael Feola
Supervisor: Judith Butler
The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence: Roland Barthes, Avital Ronell, Roni Horn
John Muse
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Kaja Silverman
Dead Time: Narrative Form and Historical Knowledge in the Era of the Cold War
Mark Pedretti
Supervisor: John Bishop. Anthony J. Cascardi
Pancryptics: Technological Transformations of the Subjects of Privacy
Norman Dale Carrico
Trauma and Ideology in the Soviet Film of 1929-1945
Andrey Shcherbenok
Seeing it Again: Repetition and Exposition in the American Film Flashback
Amy Zilliax
2005
Narrating, Displaying Spectating the Animal: Frank Norris, Jack London and the Urban Zoo
Mark Feldman
Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Warhol, Expanded Cinema, and the Emergence of the Moving Image in American Art, 1963-1965
Andrew Uroskie
2004
The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age American Literature
James Salazar
This Weakness is Needed: An Intervention in Social Contract Theory
Jill Stauffer
The Oriental Obscene: Violence and the Asian Male Body in American Moving Images in the Vietnam Era, 1968-1985
Sylvia Chong
Self-Assertion and Self-Effacement in Modern Political Theory
Julie Cooper
Emerson’s Platonic Dialogue: Negotiating the American Individual
Jennifer Gurley
A Style of Life: Spectral Subjectivity and the Limits of Sacred Life
Stuart Murray
The Concept of the Living
Aaron Nathan
2003
Assuming a Body: Transgenderism and Rhetorics of Materiality
Gayle Salamon
Heidegger’s Tasks: The Many Ways to Being
Forrest Hartman
The Fantastic Subject: On the Role of Images of Matter and Space in Psychic Life, Literature and Psychoanalysis
Jody Lewen
Art After Words: Conceptualism, Structuralism, and the Dream of the Information World
Eve Meltzer
2002
Subject to Debate: Gender, Self and Allegory in the Middle English Poetry of Disputation
Masha Raskolnikov
Vagaries of the Republic: Classical Republicanism and Millennialism in Three Nineteenth-Century Utopian Communities
Ellen Rigsby
Thucydides and the Metaphysical Foundations of History
Darien Shanske
Film on Film: Self-reflexivity and Moving Image Technology
Catherine Zimmer
The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture: Race, Religion, and Representation in the Age of Virtual Orientalism
Jane Iwamura
The Aesthetics of the Worst: Remembering and Forgetting in French, Yiddish, and Architectural Holocaust Representations
Brett Kaplan
Effaced Figure: Authorship and the American Cinema
Homay King
Fields of Recognition: Reading Asian Canadian Literature in Asian America
Meng Yu Marie Lo
Martyrdom in Korean American Literature: Resistance and Paradox in East Goes West, Quiet Odyssey, Comfort Woman and Dictee
Sandra Si Yun Oh
Tropes of Transport: The Work of Emotionality in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Katrin Pahl
Strategies of Indirection in African American and Irish Contemporary Fiction, Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, and Mary Lavin to fil’s Ni’ Dhuibhne
Jacqueline Fulmer
Surviving Figures: Romantic Rhetoric and Post-Holocaust Writing
Sara Guyer
2001
Authentic Reproductions: The Making and Re-making of More Asian Americans in Donald Duk, Bone, and Native Speaker
Vivian Fumiko Chin
Foucault and his Authors
Jacob S. Fisher
Heart Murmurs: Narrating Reliable Work, Enacting a Technical World
Jennifer Miller