2024
Listening in Black and Blue: Disorienting Whiteness in Sound and Color
Katie Brown
Supervisor: Michael Mascuch
Writing on the Land: Form, Ecology, and Agrarian Development in Mid-Twentieth Century Bengal
Devin Choudhury
Supervisor: Pheng Cheah
Recovering the pain
Liza Michaeli
Supervisor: Jim Porter, Charles Blanton
The Secular Undone: Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and the Question of Time
Kyra Sutton
Supervisor: Daniel Boyarin
2023
Polar Futurism and the Labors of Knowledge Production
Spencer Adams
Supervisor: Nasser Zakariya
‘Her’oics: Contemporary Women’s War Poetry
Yael Hacohen
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Institutional Life: Ways of Being in Higher Education
Ryan Ikeda
Supervisor: David Bates
The Afterlives of Oblivion
Linda Kinstler
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
From Campesinos to Indigenous Peoples in Mexico: The Rise of Self-Determination in the Era of Democracy and Human Rights
Bruno Anaya Ortiz
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
In Search of the Political: How Social Movements Enter Liberal Social Change Projects
Timothy Wyman-McCarthy
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
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
The Virtual Imagination: Early VR Development and the Construction of Digital Subjectivity
Nicholaus Gutierrez
Supervisor: David Bates
Falling through the sky: Self-immolation and the limits of understanding
Tenzin Paldron
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
Death Embodied: Racial Violence in 19th and 20th Century Photography
Janice Yu
Supervisor: Michael Mascuch
2020
Everyday Eloquence and Mediality in Stand-up Performance
Michael Dalebout
Supervisor: Trinh T. Minh-ha
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
Humanity in Ruins? Liberal Disillusion and the Left Critique of Human Rights at the End of the Twentieth Century
Zachary Manfredi
Supervisor: Wendy Brown, Pheng Cheah
The Cybernetic Origins of Life
Kathleen Powers
Supervisor: David Bates
2019
The Ware Course: Architecture as a Useful, Liberal, and Fine Art
Kevin Block
Supervisor: Pheng Cheah, Andy Shanken
The Rest of All Possible Worlds: Making Space in the Age of Virtual Reality
Adam Hutz
Supervisor: Michael Mascuch
Economizing the Self: Mindfulness Therapeutics and Neoliberalism
Kel Montalvo-Quinones
Supervisor: Wendy Brown
Custodians of Value: Meritocracy, Classlessness, and Other Late Modernist Dreams
Emily O'rourke
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Technologies of Incapacitation: US Torture Regimes and the Captive Body
Michelle Christina Potts
Supervisor: Samera Esmeir and Michael Mascuch
Hunger Artists: Appetite, Desire, and Self-Unmaking in Baudelaire, Colette, and Weil
Katharine Wallerstein
Supervisor: Anthony Cascardi and Judith Butler
2018
Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary
Giancarlo Cornejo Salinas
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine
Evyn Espiritu
Supervisor: Trinh T. Minh-ha
Futures of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Disease and the Lively Politics of Anticipation
Jennifer Lum
Supervisor: Trinh T. Minh-haMichael Wintroub, Lawrence Cohen
Sympathetic Materialism: Allan Sekula’s Photo-Works, 1971–2000
Benjamin Young
Supervisor: Judith Butler
2017
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
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
Disease and Difference in Three Platonic Diaogues: Gorgias, Phaedo, and Timaeus
Chiara Ricciardone
Supervisor: Ramona Naddaff, Giovanni Ferrari
Our Fanatics: Figurations of Religious Fanaticism in Ian McEwan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Marilynne Robinson
Jerilyn Sambrooke
Supervisor: Ramona Naddaff, Colleen Lye
Jubilee of the Heart: How Monastic Song Became Mystical Poetics
Kris Trujillo
Supervisor: Daniel Boyarin, Amy Hollywood
Programming Insight: Human and Machine Intelligence in the Petabyte Age
Osita Udekwu
Supervisor: David W. Bates
The Body in Space: In Search of a Sensuous Dwelling in the Space of Accumulation
Alexandria Wright
Supervisor: Judith Butler
2016
Corporate Personhood(s): The Incorporation of Novel Persons in American Law, Society, and Literature, 1870-1914
Eugene McCarthy
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Preoccupations with Modernity: Geopolitics of Knowledge in Colombian Reproduction Laws
Alisa Sanchez
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Combat in “A World Not for Us:” Revolutionary Writing in Aimé Césaire and Ghassan Kanafani
Amirah Silmi
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
After New India: Diasporas, Anglophonisms, Returns
Ragini Srinivasan
Supervisor: Shannon Jackson, Colleen Lye
2015
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
Return of the Indian: Bone Games, Transcription, and Other Gestures of Indigeneity
Mark Minch
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
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
If Your World Was Built on Dispossession: Strategies of Conquest by Settlement in America
Teresa K-Sue Park
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
The Making of the Subject of the Leviathan
Milos Petrovic
Supervisor: Michael Wintroub
The construction of the Colombian territory: Images of the Colombian Armed Conflict 2002- 2010
Claudia Salamanca
Supervisor: Samera Esmeir, David W. Bates
2014
Katherine Chandler
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Kenosis and Immanence: Self-Emptying in Eckhart, Hegel and Bataille
Aleksey Dubilet
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Niklaus Largier
American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855
John Garcia
Supervisor: Michael Mascuch
Monsoon Marketplace: Inscriptions and Trajectories of Consumer Capitalism and Urban Modernity in Singapore and Manila
Fernando Gonzaga
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-haThe Photographic World Picture
Andrew Moisey
Supervisor: Timothy Clark, Kaja Silverman
Anima Automata: On the Olympian Art of Song
Simon Porzak
Supervisor: Daniel Boyarin, Barbara G. Spackman
Creative Destruction: Memory, Public Finance, and the State in New York City
Keerthi Potluri
Supervisor: Samera Esmeir, Michael J. Watts
The Biopolitics of Memory: Lifted Tongues and Cloned Dogs
Hyaesin Yoon
Supervisor: Trinh Minh-ha
2013
Playing Nature: The Virtual Ecology of Game Environments
Alenda Chang
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Negative Theatrics: Writing the Postdramatic Stage
Julia Jarcho
Supervisor: Shannon Jackson
Airport Modern: The Space between International Departures and Arrivals in Modern Korean National Imaginings
Alice S. Kim
Supervisor: Pheng Cheah
Dialectic, Desire Discipline: The Formation of the Philosopher on the Scene of the Platonic Dialogue
Vincent Tafolla
Supervisor: Daniel Boyarin
2012
The Therapeutic Turn in International Humanitarian Law: War Crimes Tribunals as Sites of "Healing"?
Diana Anders
Supervisor: Judith Butler, David Cohen
The Bigger Picture: The Panoramic Image and the Global Imagination
Brooke Belisle
Supervisor: Linda Williams
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
Supervisor: Carolyn Hejinian, Michael Mascuch
The Trouble with "Queerness": Drag and the Making of Two Cultures
Katie Horowitz
Supervisor: Linda Williams
Bearing Knowledge: Law, Reproduction and the Female Body in Modern Morocco, 1912-Present
Satyel Larson
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Up in the Sound: Form and Voice in Jazz and Post-War American Poetry
Benjamin Lempert
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
2011
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
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
From Red Lights to Red Flags: A History of Gender in Colonial and Contemporary Vietnam
Quang-Anh Richard Tran
Supervisor: Peter Zinoman, Judith Butler
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
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
PreOccupied Territories: Polar Landscapes in the Cinema
Emily West
Supervisor: Linda Williams
2010
Immanent Shakespearing: Politics, Performance, Pedagogy
Todd Barnes
Supervisor: Shannon Jackson
Dislocations of the Brain: Subjectivity and Cerebral Topology from Descartes to Nineteenth Century Neuroscience
Nima Bassiri
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Life Expectancies: Late Victorian Literature and the Biopolitics of Empire
Jessica Davies
Supervisor: Barbara Spackman, Charis Thompson
The Limits of the Mind: Cognition and Narrative Form in the Modernist Novel
James Harker
Supervisor: David W. Bates
Digital Familiar: Fascination, Becoming, and the Production of Knowledge in Digital Art and Culture
Meredith Hoy
Supervisor: Jeffrey Skoller, Whitney Davis
Tentative Futures: Ethics and Sexuality in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Amy Jamgochian
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Dorothy Hale
The Matter of Beauty: Materialism and the Self in Victorian Aesthetic Theory
Benjamin Morgan
Supervisor: Anthony Cascardi, Barbara Spackman
Listening Speaks: Modernism and the Storytelling Voice
Julie Beth Napolin
Supervisor: Ramona Naddaff
Integration and the American Musical: From Musical Theatre to Performance Studies
James Bradley Rogers
Supervisor: Shannon Jackson
"Passionate Detachment": Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 - 1974
Amy Rust
Supervisor: Linda Williams
2009
Traveling Spectators: Cinema, Geography, and Multiculturalism in Late Twentieth-Century America
Amy Corbin
Supervisor: Linda Williams
Imagining Air Force Identity: Maxculinity, Aeriality, and the Films of the U.S. Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit
Douglas Cunningham
Supervisor: Kristen Whissel
Recapitulation in Close-Up: Ontogeny, Phylogeny, and the Face of Evolutionary Time
Scott Ferguson
Supervisor: Whitney Davis, Linda Williams
Seeing Emptiness: Berlin, Nevada, and the Space of New Media
Tung-Hui Hu
Supervisor: Linda Williams
The General Theatre of Death: Modern Fatality and Modernist Form
Amy Huber
Supervisor: Judith ButlerContested Jurisdictions: Legitimacy and Governance at the Special Court for Sierra Leone
Sara Kendall
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Real Time over Real Space: Television, Telepresence and Contemporary Art
Kristina Paulsen
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
Sans Retour: Subjectivity, Ethics and the Question of Survival in the work of Semprun, Levinas and Derrida
Colleen Pearl
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Fate, Guilt and Messianic Interruptions: Ethics of Theological Critique in Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin
Yannik Thiem
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Beyond Blood and Coercion: A Study of Violence in Machiavelli and Marx
Yves Winter
Supervisor: Wendy Brown, Judith Butler
2008
The Ethical Bind in the Writings of Simone Weil
Yoon Sook Cha
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Life and Death in the Cinema of Weimar Germany, 1919-1924
Steve Choe
Supervisor: Anton Kaes, Kaja Silverman
Beyond Supersessionism: Gillian Rose and the Rhetoric of Transcendence
Vincent Lloyd
Supervisor: Daniel Boyarin
A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation
Hoang Tan Nguyen
Supervisor: Linda Williams
2007
Standing Before the Law: Recognition, Power, and the Limits of Identity
Sarah Burgess
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Wendy Brown
Visionary Machines: A Genealogy of the Digital Image
Elizabeth Patterson
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman, Shannon Jackson
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
The Question of Ethics for the Metonymically Restless, as posed by Giles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gertrude Stein
Erik Schneider
Supervisor: Carolyn Hejinian, Judith Butler
Thou Shalt Not Kill?: Legal Normativity and the Problem with Capital Punishment
Benjamin Yost
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Marianne Constable
2006
Final Touches: Registering Death in American Cinema
Charles Combs
Supervisor: Carol Clover
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
Making Home: Film and the Modern American Everyday
Minette Hillyer
Supervisor: Linda Williams, Mark Sandberg
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
Trauma and Ideology in the Soviet Film of 1929-1945
Andrey Shcherbenok
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
2005
Pancryptics: Technological Transformations of the Subjects of Privacy
Norman Dale Carrico
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Narrating, Displaying Spectating the Animal: Frank Norris, Jack London and the Urban Zoo
Mark Feldman
Supervisor: Shannon Jackson
Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959-1979
Ara Osterweil
Supervisor: Linda Williams
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
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
Seeing it Again: Repetition and Exposition in the American Film Flashback
Amy Zilliax
2004
The Oriental Obscene: Violence and the Asian Male Body in American Moving Images in the Vietnam Era, 1968-1985
Sylvia Chong
Cinematograph of History: Post/Colonial Modernity in 1930s Shanghai and New Taiwanese Cinema since 1982
Guo-Juin Hong
Supervisor: Christopher Berry, Linda Williams
A Style of Life: Spectral Subjectivity and the Limits of Sacred Life
Stuart Murray
Supervisor: Judith Butler
The Mammy Fantasy: Pyschoanalysis, Race, and the Ideology of Absolute Maternity
Maria St John
Supervisor: Linda Williams
Settle, "Savage" Slave: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
Frank Wilderson
Supervisor: Christopher Berry
2003
Self-Assertion and Self-Effacement in Modern Political Theory
Julie Cooper
Supervisor: Frederick Dolan, Marianne Constable
Emerson’s Platonic Dialogue: Negotiating the American Individual
Jennifer Gurley
Heidegger’s Tasks: The Many Ways to Being
Forrest Hartman
Art After Words: Conceptualism, Structuralism, and the Dream of the Information World
Eve Meltzer
Supervisor: Anne Wagner, Kaja Silverman
The Concept of the Living
Aaron Nathan
Supervisor: David Cohen
Acoustic Graffiti: The Rock Soundtrack in Contemporary American Cinema
Jonah Ross
Supervisor: Carol Clover
The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age American Literature
James Salazar
Supervisor: Donald Mc Quade, Judith ButlerThis Weakness is Needed: An Intervention in Social Contract Theory
Jill Stauffer
Supervisor: Marianne Constable
Undoing the Scene of the Crime: Time and Vision in Italian Cinema
Domietta Torlasco
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
Beowulf in Hollywood: Popular Film as Folktake and Legend
Donald Vallis
Supervisor: Carol Clover
2002
Strategies of Indirection in African American and Irish Contemporary Fiction - Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison, and Mary Lavin to Elilis Ni Dhuibhne
Jacqueline Fulmer
Supervisor: Daniel Melia
The Aesthetics of the Worst: Remembering and Forgetting in French, Yiddish, and Architectural Holocaust Representations
Brett Kaplan
Supervisor: Miryam Sas, David Cohen
Effaced Figure: Authorship and the American Cinema
Homay King
Supervisor: Kaja Silverman
The Fantastic Subject: On the Role of Images of Matter and Space in Psychic Life, Literature and Psychoanalysis
Jody Lewen
Subject to Debate: Gender, Self and Allegory in the Middle English Poetry of Disputation
Masha Raskolnikov
Supervisor: Judith Butler, Anne Middleton
Assuming a Body: Transgenderism and Rhetorics of Materiality
Gayle Salamon
Supervisor: Judith Butler
Film on Film: Self-reflexivity and Moving Image Technology
Catherine Zimmer
Supervisor: Linda Williams
2001
Authentic Reproductions: The Making and Re-making of More Asian Americans in Donald Duk, Bone, and Native Speaker
Vivian Chin
Foucault and his Authors
Jacob Fisher
Surviving Figures: Romantic Rhetoric and Post-Holocaust Writing
Sara Guyer
Supervisor: Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller
The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture: Race, Religion, and Representation in the Age of Virtual Orientalism
Jane Iwamura
Fields of Recognition: Reading Asian Canadian Literature in Asian America
Mengyu Lu
Heart Murmurs: Narrating Reliable Work, Enacting a Technical World
Jennifer Miller
Martyrdom in Korean American Literature: Resistance and Paradox in East Goes West, Quiet Odyssey, Comfort Woman and Dictee
Sandra Oh
Tropes of Transport: The Work of Emotionality in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Katrin Pahl
Supervisor: Judith Butler
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
Supervisor: David Cohen