Recent Dissertations in Comparative Literature

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Dissertations in Comparative Literature have taken on vast number of topics and ranged across various languages, literatures, historical periods and theoretical perspectives. The department seeks to help each student craft a unique project and find the resources across the university to support and enrich her chosen field of study. The excellence of student dissertations has been recognized by several prizes, both within Yale and by the American Comparative Literature Association.

2012 – Present

Student Name Dissertation Title Year Advisors
Stern, Lindsay Personhood: Literary Visions of a Legal Fiction 2023

Jesus Velasco

Rudiger Campe

Todorovic, Nebojsa Tragedies of Disintegration: Balkanizing Greco-Roman Antiquity 2023

Emily Greenwood Milne

Moira Fradinger

Abazon, Lital Speaking Sovereignty: The Plight of Multilingual Literature in Independent Israel, Morocco, and Algeria 2023

Hannan Hever

Jill Jarvis

Huang, Honglan Reading as Performance: Theatrical Books From Tristram Shandy to Artists’ Books for Children 2023 Katie Trumpener
Peng, Hsin-Yuan Cinematic Meteorology: Aesthetics and Epistemology of Weather Images 2023

Aaron Gerow

John Peters

Sidorenko, Ksenia Modernity’s Others: Marginality, Mass Culture, and the Early Comic Strip in the US 2023

Katie Trumpener

Marta Figlerowicz

Hamilton, Ted Imagining a Crisis: Human-Environmental Relations in North and South American Law and Literature 2022

Michael Warner

Moira Fradinger

Lee, Xavier Nonhistory: Slavery and the Black Historical Imagination 2022 Marta Figlerowicz
Suther, Jensen Spirit Disfigured: The Persistence of Freedom in the Modernist Novel 2022 Martin Hagglund
Baena, Victoria The Novel’s Lost Illusions: Time, Knowledge, and Narrative in the Provinces, 1800-1933 2021

Katie Trumpener

Maurice Samuels

Brunazzo, Alessandro Conjuring People: Pasolini’s Specters and the Global South 2021

Millicent Marcus

Dudley Andrew

Gubbins, Vanessa The Poem and Social Form: Making a People Out of a Poem in Peru and Germany 2021

Moira Fradinger

Paul North

Hirschfeld-Kroen, Leana Rise of the Modern Mediatrix: The Feminization of Media and Mediating Labor, 1865-1945 2021

Katie Trumpener

Charles Musser

Velez Valencia, Camila Craft and Storytelling: Romance and Reality in Joseph Conrad and Gabriel García Márquez 2021

Moira Fradinger

David Bromwich

Sheidaee, Iraj In Between Dār Al-Islām and the ‘Lands of the Christians’: Three Christian Arabic Travel Narratives From the Early Modern/Ottoman Period (Mid-17th-Early18th Centuries)  2021 Creswell, Robyn
Tolstoy, Andrey Where Do We Go When We Go Off-the-Grid? 2021

Francesco Casetti

Charles Musser

Fox, Catherine Christophe’s Ghost: The Making and Unmaking of Tragedy in Post-Revolutionary Haiti 2020

Marta Figlerowicz

Emily Greenwood

Piňos, Václav Haeckel’s Feral Embryo: Animality and Personal Formation in Western Origin Myths from Milton to Golding 2020

Rüdiger Campe

Marta Figlerowicz

Yovel, Noemi Confession and the German and American Novel: Intimate Talk, Violence and Last Confession 2019

Rüdiger Campe

Katie Trumpener

Mathew, Shaj

Wandering Comparisons: Global Genealogies of Flânerie and Modernity 2019

Marta Figlerowicz

Amy Hungerford

Tartici, Ayten

Adagios of Form 2019

Amy Hungerford

Carol Jacobs

Ruth Yeazell

Kivrak, Pelin Imperfect Cosmopolitans: Representations of Responsibility and Hospitality in Contemporary Middle Eastern Literatures, Film, and Art 2019

Katerina Clark

Martin Hägglund

Shpolberg, Masha Labor in Late Socialism: the Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest 1968-1981 2019

Katie Trumpener

Charles Musser

Powers, Julia Brazil’s Mystical Realists: Hilda Hilst, João Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector in the 1960s 2018

David Quint

K. David Jackson

Eklund, Craig The Imagination in Proust, Joyce, and Beckett 2018 Martin Hägglund
Forsberg, Soren An Alien Point of View: Singular Experience and Literary Form 2018 Amy Hungerford;     Katie Trumpener
Weigel, Moira Animals, Media, and Modernity: Prehistories of the Posthuman 2017

Dudley Andrew;

Katie Trumpener

Carper, David Imagines historiarum: Renaissance Epic and the Development of Historical Thought  2017 David Quint
Fairfax, Daniel Politics, Aesthetics, Ontology: The Theoretical Legacy of Cahiers du cinema (1968-1973)  2017 Dudley Andrew
Li, Yukai Being late and being mistaken in the Homeric tradition 2017 Egbert Bakker;
Moira Fradinger
Nalencz, Leonard The Lives of Astyanax: Romance and Recovery in Ariosto, Spenser, and Milton 2017 David Quint
Chreiteh, Alexandra Fantastice Cohabitations: Magical Realism in Arabic and Hebrew and the Politics of Aesthetics 2016 Robyn Creswell
Harper, Elizabeth The Lost Children of Tragedy from Euripides to Racine 2016 David Quint
Piazza, Sarah Performing the Novel and Reading the Romantic Song: Popular Music and Metafiction in Tres tristes tigres, Sirena Selena vestida de pena, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, Le cahier de romances, and Cien botellas en una pared  2016 David Quint;
Anibal González Pérez
Sinsky, Carolyn The Muse of Influence: Reading Russian Fiction in Britain, 1793 -1941  2016 Katie Trumpener
Sperling, Joshua Realism, Modernism and Commitment in the Work of John Berger: 1952-76  2016 Dudley Andrew
Younger, Neil D’apres le Roman: Cross-Channel Theatrical Adaptations from Richardson to Scott  2016 Thomas Kavanaugh;
Katie Trumpener
Bardi, Ariel Cleansing, Constructing, and Curating the State: India/Pakistan ‘47 and Israel/Palestine ‘48 2015 Hannan Hever
Kelbert, Eugenia Acquiring a Second Language Literature: Patterns in Translingual Writing from Modernism to the Moderns 2015

Vladimir Alexandrov;

Haun Saussy

Pfeifer, Annie To the Collector Belong the Spoils: The Transformation of Modernist Practices of Collecting 2015 Rüdiger Campe;Katie Trumpener
Roszak, Suzanne Triangular Diaspora and Social Resistance in the New American Literature 2015 Wai Chee Dimock;
Katie Trumpener
Dahlberg, Leif “Spacing Law and Politics: The constitution and representation of judicial places and juridicial spaces in law, literature and political philosophy in the works from Greek antiquity to the present” 2014 Carol Jacobs;
Haun Saussy
Weisberg, Margaret “Inventing the Desert and the Jungle: Creating identity through landscape in African and European culture” 2014 Christopher Miller;
Katie Trumpener
Wiedenfeld, Grant “Elastic Esthetics: A Comparative Media Approach to Modernist Literature and Cinema” 2014 Haun Saussy;
Francesco Casetti
Avrekh, Mikhail “Romantic Geographic and the (Re)invention of the Provinces in the Realist Novel” 2013

Katerina Clark

Maurice Samuels

Klemann, Heather “Developing Fictions: Childhood, Children’s Books, and the Novel” 2013 Jill Campbell;
Katie Trumpener
Mcmanus, Ann-Marie “Unfinished Awakenings: Afterlives of the Nahda and Postcolonialism in Arabic Literature 1894–2008” 2013 Haun Saussy;
Edwige Talbayev
Wolff, Spencer “The Darker Sides of Dignity: Freedom of Speech in the Wake of Authoritarian Collapse” 2013 Haun Saussy
Bloch, Elina “ ‘Unconfessed Confessions’: Strategies of (Not) Telling in Nineteenth-Century Narratives” 2012 Margaret Homans;
Katie Trumpener
Devecka, Martin “Athens, Rome, Tenochtitlan: A Historical Sociology of Ruins” 2012 Emily Greenwood
Gal, Noam “Fictional Inhumanities: Wartime Animals and Personification” 2012 Carol Jacobs;
Katie Trumpener
Jackson, Jeanne-Marie “Close to Home: Forms of Isolation in the Postcolonial Province” 2012 Katerina Clark;
Justin Neuman
Odnopozova, Dina “Russian-Argentine Literary Exchanges” 2012 Katerina Clark;
Moira Fradinger
Stevic, Aleksandar “Falling Short: Failure, Passivity, and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning in the European Novel, 1830–1927” 2012 Katie Trumpener;
Maurice Samuels

2005–2011

Student Name Dissertation Title Year Advisors
Cramer, Michael “Blackboard Cinema: Learning from the Pedagogical Art Film” 2011 Dudley Andrew;
John MacKay
Djagalov, Rossen “The People’s Republic of Letters: Twoards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism” 2011 Katerina Clark;
Michael Denning
Esposito, Stefan “The Pathological Revolution: Romanticism and Metaphors of Disease” 2011 Paul Fry;
Carol Jacobs
Feldman, Daniel “Unrepeatable: Fiction After Atrocity” 2011

Katie Trumpener

Benjamin Harshav

Jeong, Seung-hoon “Cinematic Interfaces: Retheorizing Apparatus, Image, Subjectivity” 2011 Thomas Elsaesser;
Dudley Andrew
Lienau, Annette “Comparative Literature in the Spirit of Bandung: Script Change, Language Choice, and Ideology in African and Asian Literatures (Senegal & Indonesia)” 2011 Christopher Miller
Coker, William “Romantic Exteriority: The Construction of Literature in Rousseau, Jean Paul, and P.B. Shelley” 2010 Cyrus Hamlin;
Paul Fry
Fan, Victor “Football Meets Opium: A Topological Study of Political Violence, Sovereignty, and Cinema Archaeology Between ‘England’ and ‘China’ ” 2010 Haun Saussy;
Dudley Andrew
Johnson, Rebecca “A History of the Novel in Translation: Cosmopolitan Tales in English and Arabic, 1729–1859” 2010 Katie Trumpener
Parfitt, Alexandra “Immoral Lessons: Education and Novel in Nineteenth-Century France” 2010 Peter Brooks;
Maurice Samuels
Xie, Wei “Female Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera and Cinema” 2010 Dudley Andrew
Flynn, Catherine “Street Things: Transformations of Experience in the Modern City” 2009 Carol Jacobs;
Katie Trumpener
Lovejoy, Alice “The Army and the Avant-Garde: Art Cinema in the Czechoslovak Military, 1951–1971” 2009 Katie Trumpener
Rhoads, Bonita “Frontiers of Privacy: The Domestic Enterprise of Modern Fiction” 2009 Peter Brooks
Rubini, Rocco “Renaissance Humanism and Postmodernity: A Rhetorical History” 2009 David Quint;
Giuseppe Mazzotta
Chaudhuri, Pramit “Themoacy: Ethical Criticism and the Struggle for Authority in Epic and Tragedy” 2008 Susanna Braund;
David Quint
Lisi, Leonardo “Aesthetics of Dependency: Early Modernism and the Struggle against Idealism in Kierkegaard Ibsen, and Henry James” 2008 Paul Fry;
Pericles Lewis
Weiner, Allison “Refusals of Mastery: Ethical Encounters in Henry James and Maurice Blanchot” 2008 Wai Chee Dimock;
Carol Jacobs
Hafiz, Hiba “The Novel and the Ancien Régime: Britain, France, and the Rise of the Novel in the Seventeenth Century” 2007 Peter Brooks;
Katie Trumpener
Illibruck, Helmut “Figurations of Nostalgia: From the Pre-Enlightenment to Romanticism and Beyond” 2007 Paul Fry
Kern, Anne Marie “The Sacred Made Material: Instances of Game and Play in Interwar Europe” 2007 Dudley Andrew
Boes, Tobias “The Syncopated Self: Crises of Historical Experience in the Modernist Bildungsroman 2006 Carol Jacobs;
Pericles Lewis
Boyer, Patricio “Empire and American Visions of the Humane” 2006 Rolena Adorno;
Roberto Gonález Echevarría
Chang, Eugene “Disaster and Hope: A Study of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot” 2006 Shoshana Felman
Mannheimer, Katherine “ ‘The Scope in Ev’ry Page’: Eighteenth-Century Satire as a Mode of Vision” 2006 Jill Campbell;
Katie Trumpener
Solovieva, Olga “A Discourse Apart: The Body of Christ and the Practice of Cultural Subversion” 2006 Haun Saussy
van den Berg, Christopher “The Social Aesthetics of Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus 2006 Susanna Braund;
David Quint
Anderson, Jerome B. “New World Romance and Authorship” 2005 Vera Kutzinski;
Roberto Gonález Echevarría
Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia “Cities in Ruins in Modern Poetry” 2005 Roberto Gonález Echevarría
Kliger, Ilya “Truth, Time and the Novel: Verdiction in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Balzac” 2005 Peter Brooks;
Michael Holquist
Kolb, Martina “Journeys of Desire: Liguria as Literary Landscape in Eugenio Montale, Ezra Pound, and Gottfried Benn” 2005 Harold Bloom;
Peter Brooks
Matz, Aaron “Satire in the Age of Realism, 1860–1910” 2005 Peter Brooks;
Ruth Bernard Yeazell

1998–2004

Student Name Dissertation Title Year Advisors
Barrenechea, Antonio “Telluric Monstrosity in the Americas: The Encyclopedic Taxonomies of Fuentes, Melville, and Pynchon” 2004 Roberto Gonález Echevarría;
Vera Kutzinski
Buchenau, Stefanie “The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art. Logic, Rhetoric, and Aesthetics in the Early German Enlightenment” 2004 A. Wood;
G. Raulet
Friedman, Daniel “Pedagogies of Resistance” 2004 Shoshana Felman
Raff, Sarah “Erotics of Instruction: Jane Austen and the Generalizing Novel” 2004 Peter Brooks
Steiner, Lina “The Poetics of Maturity: Autonomy and Aesthetic Education in Byron, Pushkin, and Stendhal” 2004 Peter Brooks;
Michael Holquist
Chesney, Duncan “Signs of Aristocracy in A la recherche du temps perdu: Proust and the Salon from Mme de Remouillet to Mme de Guermantes” 2003 Peter Brooks;
Pericles Lewis
Farbman, Herschel “Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Freud, Blanchot, Beckett, and Joyce” 2003 Paul Fry
Fradinger, Moira “Radical Evil: Literary Visions of Political Origins in Sophocles, Sade and Vargas Llosa” 2003 Roberto Gonález Echevarría;
Shoshana Felman
Gsoels-Lorensen, Jutta “Epitaphic Remembrance: Representing a Catastrophic Past in Second Generation Texts” 2003 Vilashini Cooppan;
Benjamin Harshav
Horsman, Yasco “Theatres of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht and Delbo” 2003 Shoshana Felman
Katsaros, Laure “A Kaleidoscope in the Midst of the Crowds: Poetry and the City in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Charles Baudelaire’s Petits Poèms en prose 2003 Shoshana Felman
Reichman, Ravit “Taking Care: Injury and Responsibility in Literature and Law” 2003 Peter Brooks;
Shoshana Felman
Sun, Emily “Literature and Impersonality: Keats, Flaubert, and the Crisis of the Author” 2003 Shoshana Felman;
Paul Fry
Katsaros, George “Tragedy, Catharsis, and Reason: An Essay on the Idea of the Tragic” 2002 Shoshana Felman
Mirabile, Michael “From Inscription to Performance: The Rhetoric of Self-Enclosure in the Modern Novel” 2002 Peter Brooks
Alphandary, Idit “The Subject of Autonomy and Fellowship in: Guy de Maupassant, D.W. Winnicott and Joseph Conrad” 2001 Peter Brooks
Bateman, Chimène “Addresses of Desire: Literary Innivation and the Female Destinataire in Medieval and Renaissance Literature” 2001 Edwin Duval
David Quint
Butler, Henry E. “Writing and Vampires in the Works of Lautréamont, Bram Stoker, Daniel Paul Schreber, and Fritz Lang” 2001 Michael Holquist;
David Quint
Duerfahrd, Lance “The Work of Poverty: the Minimum in Samuel Beckett and Alain Resnais” 2001 Shoshana Felman;
Susan Blood
Hunt, Philippe “Spectres du réel: Déliminations du Réalism Magique” 2001 Paolo Valesio
Liu, Haoming “Transformation of Childhood Experience: Rainer Maria Rilke and Fei Ming” 2001 Cyrus Hamlin
Peretz, Eyal “Literature and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of Moby-Dick” 2001 Shoshana Felman
Pickford, Henry “The Sense of Semblance: Modern German and Russian Literature after Adorno” 2001 Karsten Harries;
Winfried Menninghaus;
William M. Todd III
von Zastrow, Claus “The Ground of Our Beseeching: The Guiding Sense of Place in German and English Elegiac Poetry” 2001 Paul Fry;
Cyrus Hamlin;
Winfried Menninghaus
Wilson, Emily “Why Do I Overlive? Greek, Latin and English Tragic Survival” 2001 Victor Bers;
David Quint
Lintz, Edward M. “A Curie for Poetry? Nuclear Disintegration and Gertrude Stein’s Modernist Reception” 2000 Michael Holquist;
Tyrus Miller
Anderson, Matthew D. “Modernity and the Example of Poetry: Readings in Baudelaire, Verlaine and Ashbery” 1999 Geoffrey Hartman
Bernstein, Jonathan “Parataxis in Heraclitus, Höderlin, Mayakovsky” 1999 Benjamin Harshav;
Winfried Menninghaus
Pollard, Tanya L. “Dangerous Remedies: Poison and Theatre in the English Renaissance” 1999 David Quint
Freeland, Natalka “Trash fiction: The Victorian Novel and the Rise of Disposable Culture” 1998 Peter Brooks;
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Hood, Carra “Reading the News: Activism, Authority, Audience” 1998 Hazel Carby
MacKay, John “Placing the Lyric: An Essay on Poetry and Community 1998 Geoffrey Hartman; Tomas Venclova
Schuller, Mortiz “ ‘Watching the Self’: The Mirror of Self-Knowledge in Ancient Literature” 1998 Heinrich von Staden;
Gordon Williams
Stark, Jared “Beyond Words: Suicide and Modern Narrative” 1998 Cathy Caruth;
Geoffrey Hartman