Recent Dissertations

2021

Hard Choices in Artificial Intelligence
Thomas Gilbert
Supervisor: David Bates

The Virtual Imagination: Early VR Development and the Construction of Digital Subjectivity
Nicholaus Gutierrez
Supervisor: David Bates

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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

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