Graduate Students

Our graduate students are incredibly active in research, in the creative arts, and in the profession. In the past five years, they have received the following awards: a Visiting Artist Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome; a Ralph Emerson Society Dissertation Grant; an AAUW Dissertation Grant, and a Humboldt Foundation Fellowship. They have published critical articles and creative work in major journals and magazines. And they’ve written and translated novels, performed poetry at MoMA, and written an award-winning documentary film.

In doing research for their dissertations, students have taken advantage of the James Joyce Collection here in Buffalo but have also received grants to travel to archives like the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library and the American Library Association Archives.

Below is a list of selected graduate dissertation titles completed since 2017 and a list of current graduate students in the program, first PhD students and then MA and Certificate in Innovative Writing students, with attached CVs.

All graduate students at the University at Buffalo are welcome to join the Graduate Student Employees Union (GSEU). The GSEU has been fighting for graduate workers since 1977 and is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), having won recognition in 1991.

https://www.cwa1104gseu.com/

2023

Brandon Boudreault
“In the American Garden: Environmental Influence from Thoreau to Anne Spencer”
Chair: Cristanne Miller

Brent Cox
“Infrastructuralist Writing”
Chair: Judith Goldman

Nathaniel Dickson
“Postmodern Genre Fiction”
Chair: David Schmid

Joshua Flaccavento
“A Lost and Precious Place: Ecology, elegy, and Erasure in the Central Appalachian Coalfields”
Chair: James Holstun

Alexandra French
“Manly Martyrs and the Mother Martyred: Gendered Sacrifice in 20^th Century Ireland”
Chair: Joseph Valente

Hyoseol Ha
“Empowerment from the Margins: Kinship, Care Work, and disability Justice in Black America, 1850–1990”
Chair: Miriam Thaggert

Jocelyn Marshall
“Complicating Borders: Experimental Art and Writing of U.S.-based Diasporic Feminists, 1970s-80s”
Chair: Myung Mi Kim

Jiwon Ohm
“Recycling the Middle Ages: Inventing the Roots through Fantasy Literature”
Chair: David Schmid

Cheryl (Chambers) Weaver
“‘You know it is customary’: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Practice”
Chair: Cristanne Miller

2022

Sarah Goldbort
“Masquerade and Authenticity: Women’s Ambiguous Subjectivity in British Literature, 1720–1860”
Chair: Carine Mardorossian

Laura Hensch
“Invisible Gaps in Elliptical Forms: Multilevel Formal Experimentation in Novels by Joyce, Richardson, and Beckett”
Chair: Damien Keane

George Life
“Graveyard of Languages: Neologism and American Identity in Contemporary Experimental Writing”
Chair: Myung Mi Kim

Nicole Lowman
“A Poetics of Inversion: Resignifying Racial Common Sense in the 20^th and 21^st Century United States”
Chair: David Schmid

Dipanjan Maitra
“‘Built with Glue and Clippings’: Modernist Collaboration and the Press-Cutting Bureau”
Chair: Damien Keane

Adam Mitts
“The Work of Illness: Queer Aesthetics and Politics After the AIDS Crisis”
Chair: Judith Goldman

Yuji Otani
“Modern Sentimental Fiction”
Chair: Stacy Hubbard

Morgan Pulver
“Reading On: Derrida, Beckett, and the Unreadable Text”
Chair: Joseph Valente

Kezia Whiting
“Modernist Intimacy: Free Indirect Style from Austen to Coetzee”
Chair: Joseph Valente

Meagan Wilson
“Breaking Down and Rising Up: Remediating Grasses in American Poetics”
Chair: Judith Goldman

2021

Allison Cardon
“Writing Wrong: Outsider Injury, Rights, and Senses of Injustice in Eighteenth-Century British
Literature”
Chair: Ruth Mack

Matthew Connolly
“Heroes of the Professional-Managerial Class: Race, Pop, and the Paraliterary on the New Left”
Chair: Damien Keane

Adam Drury
“Imagine There’s No Human: Postcolonial Poetics and the Caribbean Psychoanalytic”
Chair: Carine Mardorossian

Shao-Wei Huang
“Fear of the Enlightenment: A Study of the Experience and Perception in the Gothic”
Chair: Ruth Mack

Daae Jung
“The Remnant: Agamben and the Problem of Universality in Contemporary American Literature”
Chair: Steven Miller

Caitlin McIntyre
“Modernism’s Plantations, from James Joyce to Derek Walcott”
Chair: Damien Keane

Cassandra Scherr
“Human Pain, Monstrous Pleasure: Black Feminine Monstrosity and Its Potential for Black Pleasure Through Uses of the Speculative”
Chair: James Holstun

Travis Sharp
“Poetry’s Mattering: Material Semiosis and Semiotic Materiality in 20^th and 21^st Century Poetics”
Chair: Judith Goldman

Ryan Smith
“Shaping Absurdity in Medieval Romance: Reductio ad Absurdum as Narrative Structure”
Chair: Randy Schiff

Kinga Winnicki
“Imagined Cityscapes: New Perspectives on Future Urbanization in Contemporary Speculative Fiction”
Chair: Joseph Conte

2020

Hiroshi Aiki
“Spectatorship and Modernity in American Literature”
Chair: William Solomon

Woodrow Brown
“‘Finding is the first Act’: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Science”
Chair: Cristanne Miller

Andrew Dorkin
“‘The Mind Sneezing’: Modernist Poetry and the Para Mediation of Humor”
Chair: Cristanne Miller

H Fogarty
“Tactile Values: Touch in Victorian literature and Psychology”
Chair: Rachel Ablow

Martin Goffeney
“In Case of Emergency: Science Fiction and Survival in the Age of Climate Change”
Chair: William Solomon

Adam Katz
“Ostinatic Doxgraphy: Parallel Inquiries to Metaphysical Content-Structures of Modernist-Adjacent American Poetry”
Chair: Myung Mi Kim

Ajitpaul Mangat
“Forms of Disability: Sensation, Narrative, and Care in the Modernist Novel”
Chair: Joseph Valente

Amanda McLaughlin
“Beauty’s Loss: Aesthetics and Ethics in Eighteenth-Century British Literature”
Chair: Ruth Mack

Claire Nashar
“Bad Translator: Experimental Translation in New North American Poetry”
Chair: Myung Mi Kim

Charles (Michael) Pawluk
“Laughing Upward: Comic Violence in Eighteenth-Century British Literature”
Chair: Ruth Mack

Sean Pears
“Militant Optimists: How Anti-Slavery Poets Reconstructed Citizenship after Appomattox”
Chair: Cristanne Miller

Jacob Reber
“The Fabrication of Fluidity: Glitch, Remediation, and the Protocols of Reading”
Chair: Myung Mi Kim

Angela (Veronica) Wong
“The Production of Literary Value: Women’s Cultural Activism in the U.S., U.K., and Caribbean, 1910–1970”
Director: Carine Mardorossian

2019

Christopher Bomba
“The Antinomies of Decentralization and Scale for North American Anarchist Thought”
Chair: Chad Lavin

Patricia Chaudron
“William Dean Howells and the Making of a Realist Poetics: Literary Form and Social Responsibility in Late Nineteenth-Century America”
Chair: Carrie Bramen

Seth Cosimini
“Imagined Cemeteries: Mortuary Rituals, Racial Terror, and the American Literary Canon”
Chair: Hershini Young

Michael Flatt
“Post-Digital Poetics”
Chair: Judith Goldman

Min Young Kim Godley
“Globalizing Emerson: The Emersonian Event in Literature, Philosophy, and Translation”
Chair: Robert Daly

Declan Gould
“Radical Accessibility: Disability in American Poetry after 1960”
Chair: Judith Goldman

Sunjae Jun
“Crossing Borders and Shadow Tag in William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich”
Chair: Bruce Jackson

Jeremy Lakoff
“Intermediation: Technology, Immediacy, and Noise in Modern Literature”
Chair: Damien Keane

Hye Jin Lee
“Trauma, Dilemma, Language, and the Crisis of Narrative in the Works of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don DeLillo”
Chair: David Schmid

Shubhangi Garg Mehrotra
“Transgressing Disability: Embodied Contamination in Postcolonial Parsi Anglophone Fiction”
Chair: Carine Mardorossian

Todd Miller
“Heteronomies of the Senses: The Empirical in Late American Modernism”
Chair: David Schmid

Amanda Montei
“Home-bodies: Language, Genre, & Work in Postwar Feminist Writing & Performance”
Chair: Myung Mi Kim

Eon Joo Park
“The Art of Anger: Reimagining Emotion, Gender, and Class in Early Modern English Literature”
Chair: Graham Hammill

Kyungran (Kayla) Park
“Beyond Us and Them: Empathy, Justice, Gender in Renaissance All”
Chair: Graham Hammill

Hannah Ryan
“‘A Paradise Within’: Spiritual Responses to Modernity in the Global South”
Chair: William Solomon

Kellie Sharp
“Experimental Intimacies and Biopolitics: 20^th Century Women’s Writing and the Politics of Bodily (Ex)change”
Chair: Ewa Ziarek

Yu Ching (Louis) Wu
“Alle Schall Be Wele?: In Search of Unhappy Emotions in Middle English Metrical Romances”
Chair: Randy Schiff

2018

Amanda (Andi) Coulter
“Urban Circuitry: Community Building through Noise in Downtown New York City, 1973–1981”
Chair: Bruce Jackson

Soma Feldmar
“Self, Language, and the Other: A Blasserian Poetics”
Chair: Ewa Ziarek

Jonathan Fernandez
“Foundations and Techniques for Computational analysis: Working with the 16^th- and 17^th-Century English Prose Fiction Corpus”
Chair: Steve McCaffery

James Godley
“Against Infinite Grief: Morning and Speculative Invention in Postbellum American Literature”
Chair: Carrie Bramen

Eleanor Gold
“Creature Discomforts: Bodies, Trans-Corporeality, and Literature in the Anthropocene”
Chair: Christina Milletti

Joseph Hall
“‘The Spring of Life, The Poisonous Spring’: Water, Property, and Waste in Restoration Literature”
Chair: Ruth Mack

Lara Hubel
“Female Capitalists in the Gilded Age”
Chair: Carrie Bramen

Chung Hwan Joe
“Representing 9/11: Intermediality, Plurality and Temporality”
Chair: David Schmid

Patrick McDonald
“Aristocratic Capital: Democratic Ideology and Capitalist Practice from Charles Brockden Brown to Herman Melville”
Chair: Kenneth Dauber

Holly Melgard
“Poetics of Ubiquitization: Textual Conditions of and for the Ubiquitous Age”
Chair: Myung Mi Kim

Naila Sahar
“Reimagining the Muslim Women: Gendered Religious Life and resistance in the Age of Islamophobia”
Chair: Carine Mardorossian

Jung Eun Seo
“(Re)Embodying the Self”
Chair: Kari Winter

Joseph Yearous-Algozin
“Object Refuse: Contemporary Poetics of Impoverishment”
Chair: Steve McCaffery

Henrikus Yulianto
“East Meets West: Spontaneity in Beat Poetry as Buddha-Dharma and Visions of Spiritual Ecology”
Chair: Ming Qian Ma

2017

Emily Anderson
“Surviving Little House: Adaptations of Wilder’s Transnational Prairie”
Chair: Carrie Bramen

Shayani Bhattacharya
“Memory in Absentia: the (Im)Possibility of Representing Memory in Post-1945 Anglophone Fiction”
Chair: David Schmid

Jeremiah Bowen
“The Aestheticization of Production”
Chair: Kalliopi Nikolopoulou

Kristina Darling
“‘An Imagist Turned Philosopher’: Formal Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry”
Chair: Steve McCaffery

Alison Fraser
“Homemade (Post)Modernisms: Ephemeral Objects in the Twentieth-Century American Poetry Archive”
Chair: Myung Mi Kim

Joel Goldbach
“Not without Literature: Joyce with Lacan in the Reinvention of Psychoanalysis”
Chair: Joan Copjec

Daniel Gomes
“Songs of the People: Ballads, Media, and the Irish Left, 1922–1972”
Chair: Damien Keane

Ana Grujic
“Treading the Invisible: Contemporary Performances of Black Freedom”
Chair: Hershini Young

Joao Guimaraes
“Life Lines: Post-Sixties American Poetry and the Concept of Living Form”
Chair: Ming Qian Ma

Morani Kornberg
“Poetics of Protest: Trans-Nationalism in Israeli Anglophone and Hebrew Lyric Poetry”
Chair: James Holstun

Travis Matteson
“Less Metaphorical: Medium Neutrality and Contemporary Poetry”
Chair: Judith Goldman

Jesse Miller
“The Birth of the Literary Clinic: Modernism, Bibliotherapy, and the Aesthetics of Health”
Chair: William Solomon

Yoon Ha Shin
“Reimagining the Body: Corporeal Practices and Female Subjectivity in Contemporary American Women’s Fiction”
Chair: Kari Winter

Allison Siehnel
“Gothic Guilt in American Literature, 1798–1865”
Chair: Carrie Bramen