The dissertation is the centerpiece of the PhD and serves as the foundation of a scholarly and intellectual career. The Department does not prescribe a single approach or format, but rather encourages each candidate to design and carry out original research that permits them to establish a claim to expertise. The scope of the dissertation may be interdisciplinary, reaching into areas such as art, music, philosophy, history, film, and literatures beyond French. Below you can browse titles of the dissertations completed by our graduates over the past three decades.
2025
Abigail Fields
“The Literary Field: Agriculture and the Ecological Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel,” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
2024
Mohamed Walid Bouchakour
“Beyond Emergency: Aesthetics and Politics of the Contemporary Algerian Novel” directed by Professors Jill Jarvis and Alice Kaplan
2023
Aaron Kestle (Combined Program of French & Renaissance Studies)
“Magical Realism in the Middle Ages: The Marvelous Merlin of Arthurian Legend” directed by Professor Howard Bloch
Hannah Kosman
“Des Tableaux de la Plus Belle Horreur”: Poverty, the Novel, and the Spectacularization of Misery in Nineteenth-Century France” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
Madison Mainwaring
“Reclaiming the Silences of Dance: Women and Ballet in Nineteenth-Century France” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
2022
Chandler Abshire
’Familles, je vous hais !’: The Family in the French Interwar Novel” directed by Professor Alice Kaplan
Tadas Bugnevicius
(combined Program of French and Film & Media Studies): “The Literary Prehistory of Right Bank New Wave Cinema” directed by Professor Dudley Andrew and Maurice Samuels
Doyle Calhoun
“The Suicide Archive(s): Literary Resistance in the Wake of French Empire” directed by Professor Jill Jarvis
Sophia Helverson
“Novel Erudition: Expertise and Experience in Contemporary French-Language Fiction” directed by Professor Morgane Cadieu
Jason Hong
“A Different Worldview: Negritude, Monde, and Cosmopolitanism” directed by Professor Christopher Miller
Richard Riddick
“A Madeleine for Dreyfus: Mass Politics and Literary Form in Fin-de-Siècle France” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
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 Professors Jill Jarvis and Christopher Miller
2019
Jennifer Carr
“Liberating Constraint, Performing Gender: Sophie Calle, Anne Garréta and Wendy Delorme” directed by Professors Morgane Cadieu and Alice Kaplan.
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
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
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
2015-1996
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
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
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
Chapman Wing
“The Future Looks Backward: Projection and the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century France” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
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
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
Anne Linton: “Prescribed Fictions: Literary and Medical Representations of Hermaphrodism in Nineteenth-Century France” directed by Professor Maurice Samuels
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
Claire McMurray
“Beyond Paris: Contemporary French Film and the Countryside” directed by Professors Thomas Kavanagh and Dudley Andrew
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
Shira Weidenbaum
“Patterns of Persuasion: Religious Literary Dialogue in Renaissance France” directed by Professors Edwin Duval and Julia Prest
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
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
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
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
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
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
2005
Ronan Chalmin
“Corruption and the Chemistry of the Enlightenment [Lumiéres et Corruption]” directed by Professor Thomas Kavanagh
Jill Davies
“Revoicing the Self: Character Description in Sarraute, Cohen, and Perec” directed by Professor Ora Avni
2004
Richard Keatley
“Enjoying the World: Curiosity and the Voyage d’Italie (1568-1606)” directed by Professor Edwin Duval
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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