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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beretta, Francesca | The Motionscape of Greek Tragedy: Greek Drama Through the Prism of Movement | 2024 |
Marta Figlerowicz Pauline LeVen |
| Lahiri, Ray | The Violence of the Form: Violence and the Political in Greek and Latin Historical Narrative | 2024 |
Moira Fradinger Christina Kraus |
| Lee-Lenfield, Spencer | This Beauty Born of Parting: Literary Translation Between Korean and English via the Korean Diaspora, 1920–Present | 2024 | Marta Figlerowicz |
| Pabon, Maru | Agitated Layers of Air: Third-Worldism and the “Voice of the People” Across Palestine, Cuba and Algeria | 2024 | Robyn Creswell |
|
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 |