Dissertations submitted since 1996
May 2023
- Aaron Kestle (Combined Program of French & Renaissance Studies): “Magical Realism in the Middle Ages: The Marvelous Merlin of Arthurian Legend”
- Hannah Kosman: “Des Tableaux de la Plus Belle Horreur”: Poverty, the Novel, and the Spectacularization of Misery in Nineteenth-Century France”
- Madison Mainwaring: “Reclaiming the Silences of Dance: Women and Ballet in Nineteenth-Century France”
December 2022
- Sophia Helverson: “Novel Erudition: Expertise and Experience in Contemporary French-Language Fiction”
May 2022
- Chandler Abshire: ”Familles, je vous hais !”: The Family in the French Interwar Novel
- Tadas Bugnevicius (combined Program of French and Film & Media Studies): “The Literary Prehistory of Right Bank New Wave Cinema”
- Doyle Calhoun: The Suicide Archive(s): Literary Resistance in the Wake of French Empire”
- Jason Hong: “A Different Worldview: Negritude, Monde, and Cosmopolitanism”
- Richard Riddick: “A Madeleine for Dreyfus: : Mass Politics and Literary Form in Fin-de-Siècle France”
May 2020
- Ian Curtis: “The J3 Affair: Historical Fantasies and Modern Literature in a Postwar Murder” directed by Professor Alice Kaplan
- Carole Delaitre: “Les Derniers Touristes: Jean-Paul Sartre, Violette Leduc, Michel Houellebecq et Marie NDiaye” directed by Professor Morgane Cadieu”
- Pierre Huguet: “La République et la Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes (1792-1804)” directed by Professor Pierre Saint-Amand
- Shanna-Dolores Jean-Baptiste: “Unbelonging: National Identity and Foreign Nationals in the Long Haitian Nineteenth Century” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Jessica Kasje: “Incorrectly Female: French Women Writers, Marginal Identities, and July Monarchy Women’s Movements” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
- Imane Terhmina: “Tales of the Civil Service: Bureaucracy, Democracy, and Justice in Francophone African Literature” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
May 2019
- Jennifer Carr: “Liberating Constraint, Performing Gender: Sophie Calle, Anne Garréta and Wendy Delorme” directed by Professors Cadieu and Kaplan.
May 2018
- Catherine Chiabaut: “Extraordinary Bodies: Writing Hermaphroditism in Eighteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine” directed by Professors Thomas Kavanagh and Morgane Cadieu
- Robyn Pront: “Liberation Fictions: Space and Memory in Representations of Liberation France” directed by Professor Alice Kaplan
- Usha Rungoo: “Textual Territories: Spatial Tropes and Narrative Subversion in the Mascarenes and the Antilles” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
May 2017
- Elizabeth Hebbard: “Manuscripts and the Making of the Troubadour Lyric Tradition ” directed by Professors R. Howard Bloch and Ardis Butterfield
- Laura Jensen: “Writing Race and Universalism in Contemporary France: Marie NDiaye and Bessora” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
May 2016
- Nathalie Batraville: “Révolution poétique et isolement politique : l’avant-garde littéraire haïtienne, 1957-1971” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Annie DeSaussure: “Global Brittany: Breton Literature and the Francophone World” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Colin Foss: “Literature under Siege: Reading and Writing during the Siege of Paris 1870-‐1871” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
- Aaron Schlosser: “The Ethics of Literature: Representations of Exile in the Works of Abdelkébir Khatibi,
Nabile Farès, Hélène Cixous, and Jacques Derrida” directed by Professors Christopher Miller and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
May 2015
- Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche: “”L’air protestant” - André Gide & The Religion of Literary Modernism” directed by Professor Alice Kaplan
- Benjamin Hoffman: “Posthumous America: Literary Recreations of America at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century” directed by Professors Thomas Kavanagh and Christopher Miller
- Dustin Hooten: “Animals and French Realism” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
May 2014
- Annabel Kim: “Against Difference: The Universality That Binds Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta” directed by Professor Alice Kaplan
- Kristin Graves: “Mapping La Belle Créole” directed by Professors Christopher Miller and Hazel Carby
- Julia Elsky: “French and Foreign: Émigré Writers in Occupied France” directed by Professor Alice Kaplan
- Raisa Rexer: “The Art of Exposure: Literature and the Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
- Sasha Santee: “Work(s)-in-Progress: Balzac’s Imperfect Authorial Stand-Ins and the Crafting of the Comédie humaine” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
December 2013
- Tara Golba: “Investigators and Troublemakers: Subversive and Subverted Epistemologies in Post/colonial Francophone Literature” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Mary Anne Lewis: “The Maghreb Goes Abroad: The ‘Worlding’ of Postcolonial Francophone North African Literature and Film in a Global Market” directed by Professors Edwige Tamalet and Christopher Miller
- Maryn Santos: “On Pens and Needles: Writing for Demoiselles (1830-1914)” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
May 2013
- Chapman Wing: “The Future Looks Backward: Projection and the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century France” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
May 2012
- Jonathan Cayer: “Heroic Uncertainties: Representations of the Hero in the French Epic of the Later Middle Ages” directed by Professor Howard Bloch
- Jessica DeVos: “Autobiography, Authorship, and Artifice: Reconsidering Renaissance Women Poets” directed by Professors Edwin Duval and David Quint
- Awendela Grantham: “Messianism in French Caribbean Literature: Césaire, Roumain, Glissant, and Schwarz-Bart” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
December 2011
- Erin Tremblay Ponnou-Delaffon: “The Echoes of Silence: Silence as an Ethical and Textual Problem in Contemporary French Literature” directed by Professor Ora Avni
May 2011
- Anne Linton: “Prescribed Fictions: Literary and Medical Representations of Hermaphrodism in Nineteenth-Century France” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
December 2010
- Susannah Carson: “Les Dangers du Roman: The Evolution of the Dangerous Novel in Early Modern France, 1667-1736” directed by Professors Harold Bloom and Peter Brooks
May 2010
- Claire McMurray: “Beyond Paris: Contemporary French Film and the Countryside” directed by Professors Thomas Kavanagh and Dudley Andrew
December 2009
- Irina Iakounina: “The Dilemma of the Individual in Spiritual Poetry of the French Renaissance: The Example of Marguerite de Navarre and Clément Marot” directed by Professor Edwin Duval
- Rachael Sterner: “Saints Jeanne de Chantal and Louise de Marillac Writing Faith and Independence Outside the Cloister” directed by Professor Julia Prest
May 2009
- Shira Weidenbaum: “Patterns of Persuasion: Religious Literary Dialogue in Renaissance France” directed by Professors Edwin Duval and Julia Prest
December 2008
- Roxanna Curto: “Inter-tech(s) Colonialism and the Question of technology in the Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Literature” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Alexandra Gueydan: “ImagiNation (post) Nationale de l’Algérie: Politique Et Pratique Identitaires de la Littérature Francophone Algérienne” directed by Professors Farid Laroussi and Christopher Miller
- Katherine Lydon: “From Grail Procession to Cortege Infernal: Processions in Classical Poetry and Renaissance and Nineteenth-Century French Literature as Poetic Vision and Structure of Critical Thought” directed by Professor Denis Hollier
May 2008
- Jeffrey Leichman: “Acting Up: Performing Social Mobility in 18th Century Theatre” directed by Professor Thomas Kavanagh
- Laure Marcellesi: “From Noble Savage to Colonial Subject: Tahiti in Eighteenth-century French Literature” directed by Professors Christopher Miller and Thomas Kavanagh
- Brian Reilly: “The Hidden Optics of Medieval French Literature” directed by Professor Howard Bloch
December 2007
- Jeffrey Boyd: “Revolutionary Queerness: Balzac, Baudelaire, Proust” directed by Professor Peter Brooks
- Scott Hiley: “Usury and the Economies of Literature in Medieval France” directed by Professor Howard Bloch
- John Lytle: “Fantastic Literature and Historical Discourse in the French Romantic Period” directed by Professor Ora Avni
- Larysa Smirnova: “Roland Barthes in search of an epic modernity: Barthes’s evaluation of intellectual legacy of Bertolt Brecht and the question of modernity” directed by Professor Peter Brooks
May 2007
- Jessica Nyamugusha: “Fictions of Servitude: Early Modern French Literary Representations of Europeans Enslaved in North Africa” directed by Professors Christopher Miller and Thomas Kavanagh
- Agnieszka Tworek: “Theatricality and Prison” directed by Professors Donia Mounsef and Ora Avni
December 2006
- Michael Call: “The Poet, the Playwright, and the Pirate: Molière and Seventeenth-Century Autorship” directed by Professor Julia Prest
- Brooke Donaldson: “”Les Mortz Qu’en Moy Tu Renovelles”: Eros and Thanatos in Maurice Scève’s Délie” directed by Professors Edwin Duval and Jean-Jacques Poucel
May 2006
- Alexandre Limoges: “L’Immonde décadent” directed by Professor Ora Avni
- John Poynter: “Eroticism in Twentieth Century Francophone Caribbean Literatures” directed by Professors Christopher Miller and Vera Kutzinski
December 2005
- Ronan Chalmin: “Corruption and the Chemistry of the Enlightenment [Lumiéres et Corruption]” directed by Professor Thomas Kavanagh
May 2005
- Jill Davies: “Revoicing the Self: Character Description in Sarraute, Cohen, and Perec” directed by Professor Ora Avni
December 2004
- Richard Keatley: “Enjoying the World: Curiosity and the Voyage d’Italie (1568-1606)” directed by Professor Edwin Duval
May 2004
- Caroline Hatton: “Narrative Lai and Verse Romance: Generations and Intergeneric Play” directed by Professor Howard Bloch
- Bettina Lerner: “An Image of Peuple: Politics, Poetics and Authority in Nineteenth-Century France” directed by Professor Ora Avni
- Joseph Mai: “Lost Order: Repercussions of Secularization on Literary and Film Rhetoric” directed by Professor Ora Avni
December 2003
- Rebecca Ruquist: “Paris, Race and Universalism in the Black Atlantic: Léopold Sedar Senghor, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian and Richard Wright.” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
May 2003
- Joseph Acquisto: “(Mis)Reading Music: Rewriting French Symbolist Poetry.” directed by Professors Edwin Duval and Naomi Schor and Jean-Jacques Poucel
- James Austin: “The Politics of Pastiche from Proust to French Film” directed by Professor Ora Avni
- Karina Krilla: “Spectacle and Performance: Heroines in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel” directed by Professor Charles Porter
December 2002
- Jeremy Sabol: “Fables of Knowledge: Descartes and Seventeenth-Century Epistemological Fiction” directed by Professor Françoise Jaouën
- Leon Sachs: “La Belle Equivoque: Science, Literature and Education Reform in France, 1880-1914” directed by Professor Ora Avni
December 2001
- Lynne Bornstein: “The Poetics of Revolution and Alchemy: Transgression and Transmutation in Rimbaud, Césaire and Glissant” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Patricia Gallagher: “Encounters with the Other: Alterity, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Works of Albert Camus” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
May 2001
- Elden Hayes: “Popular Alchemy: Farce and its Function in Rabelais” directed by Professor Edwin Duval
- Richard Meadows: “From Foreign Wars to Civil Wars to Gender Wars: The Franco-Prussian War, World War II, the Algerian War & The Factual and Fictional Scapegoating of Women” directed by Professors Ora Avni and Susan Blood
- Jennifer Phillips: “Colorist Writing: Color as Pictorial and Literary Principle” directed by Professors Peter Brooks and Susan Blood
- Edward Tilson: “Montaigne et la Modernité: Du Liber Creaturarum à la Création de l’essai” directed by Professor Edwin Duval
December 2000
- Susan Brubaker-Cole: “Decentering Imperial Culture: Colonial Influences on French National Culture in the Literary Works of Cousturier, Soupault, Leblond and A.H Bâ” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Francis Guevremont: “Les Matériaux de l’oeuvre. Marcel Proust et André Breton aux limites de l’autobiographie” directed by Professor Denis Hollier
May 2000
- Patricia Armstrong: “The Textual Strategies of Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)” directed by Professor Françoise Jaouën
- Vicki Toumayan: “Théophile Gautier and Spanish Art: Figuring Duality in Espana, Voyage in Espagne, and Critical Writings” directed by Professor Peter Brooks
December 1999
- Grace Chang: “Border Crossings: Essays on Gender, Spectatorship and Performance in French and Francophone Film and Novel” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Andrea Goulet: “Optiques: The Modern French Novel and Epistemologies of Vision” directed by Professor Ora Avni
- Sophie Queuniet: “Les enjeux de l’intelligence dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust” directed by Professor Ora Avni
May 1999
- Unity Dienes: “Right Readings in the Renaissance: Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, and Bonaventure des Périers” directed by Professor Edwin Duval
- Daryl Lee: “The City in Ruins: Literary Topographies of Twentieth-Century Paris” directed by Professor Denis Hollier
- Susanna Lee: “The Hand of God as a Narratological Instrument in Nineteenth-Century Fiction” directed by Professor Peter Brooks
- Nzunguta Siamundele: “Discours politique et écriture littéraire: V.Y.Mudimbe, Williams Sassine et Sony Labou Tansi” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Allison Tait: “The Gallery of Mirrors: Constructions and Reflections of Sentimental and Political Tyranny in Seventeenth-Century France” directed by Professor Françoise Jaouën
December 1998
- Noah Guynn: “Allegory and Transgressive Desire: The Inscription and Erasure of Non-Normative Desires in Allegorical Discourses of the Middle Ages” directed by Professor Lynne Huffer
- Caroline Weber: “The Limits of “Saying Everything”: Terrorist Suppressions and Unspeakable Difference in Rousseau, Sade, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Desmoulins” directed by Professors Peter Brooks and Denis Hollier
May 1998
- Karl Britto: “Disorientation: Interculturality and Identity in Vietnamese francophone Literature” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Eliza Nichols: “Reinventing the Griot/Writing the Self: Massa Makan Diabate, Francophone Fiction and the Mande Oral Tradition” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
- Richard Watts: “The Politics of Prefaces: Patronage, Self-Promotion, and the Colonial Metropolitan Relationship in Prefaces to Francophone Literary Texts, 1919-1962” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
May 1997
- Jean-Vincent Blanchard: “Optique et rhétorique en France et en Italie XVIIe siècle” directed by Professor Françoise Jaouën
- Christine Cano: “Interpreting The Recherche; Creative Process and Revision in Proust” directed by Professor Peter Brooks
- Peter Hallward: “Writing in the Singular Immediate: Gilles Deleuze, Edouard Glissant, Nathalie Sarraute, Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib, Severo Sarduy” directed by Professors Christopher Miller and Vera Kutzinski
- Le Thuy Hoang: “Les Mille et une nuits à travers l’infini des espaces et des temps: Le conteur Galland, le conte et son public” directed by Professor Catherine Cusset
- Marie-Pierre Pasquini: “Madame de Sévigné, Michel Tournier et la tentation cannibale: les figures parentales de l’incorporation filiale” directed by Professors Denis Hollier and Lynne Huffer
December 1996
- P. Natasha Leof: “Somewhere Between the Impossible and the Forbidden: Surrealist Eroticism Reconsidered” directed by Professor Denis Hollier
- Yasmina Mobarek: “La vérité et ses mises en scène épistolaires; De l’art de persuader à l’art de séduire: Rousseau et Diderot” directed by Professor Peter Brooks
May 1996
- Catherine Dana: “Ecrire de mémoire, écrire pour mémoire: Remémoration et commémoration de la shoah dans “La Peste” d’Albert Camus et “w ou le souvenir d’enfance” de Georges Perec” directed by Professor Denis Hollier
- Benjamin Elwood: “Secret Histories: Narratives of Conspiracy in Balzac and Zola” directed by Professors Denis Hollier and Lynne Huffer
- Karin Harman: “The Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Novel: Parodies’ and Travesties of a Genre” directed by Professor Charles Porter
- Amy Reid: “Entre Elles: Relating Women in Four Naturalist Novels” directed by Professor Denis Hollier
- Dominic Thomas: “New Writings for New Times: Nationalism in Congolese Literature” directed by Professor Christopher Miller