First‐generation, low‐income (FGLI) students attend college at historically high rates in the United States. However, FGLI students continue to struggle in transitioni [...]

The language of networks now describes everything from the Internet to the economy to terrorist organizations. In distinction to a common view of networks as a univers [...]

It is a well-documented fact that women and minorities are currently underrepresented in STEM higher education degree programs and careers. As an outreach measure to thes [...]

This dissertation considers the anthropocene as a crisis of form and formlessness or, in rather Berlantian terms, as a “waning of genre.” I contend that the anthropocene [...]

Unable to perform the perceived demands of his gender—unable to have sex—in 2014 the incel Elliot Rodger devised a performance of ruthless cruelty. His mass murder, a now [...]

This dissertation proposes a set of interpretive possibilities afforded by the privileging of fictional worlds as a site of primary analysis, particularly in 20th and 21s [...]

This dissertation examines how literary genre functioned as a technology of containment and racial regulation during the expansion of the British Empire. It argues that a [...]

“The Gift of Dependence” explores how literary texts reflected and influenced 18th-century Anglophone debates over philanthropy, fears of dependence on aid, and theories [...]

At the intersection of media studies and the environmental humanities, “Seed Media” articulates a theory of seeds as texts, mobilizes this framework to assess seeds in bo [...]

Some stories are written by the dead. The inheritance plot names the narrative form by which literature provides a voice for a past that entails a future. From Thomas [...]

This dissertation is about scenes of learning staged with and within cadavers. The human body is a peculiar pedagogical object: it poses specific challenges, makes partic [...]

The study of the genre of urban fantasy presents a unique opportunity to study how the city is conceptualized. Most critical work, however, has focused on spatial possibi [...]

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Functionalized thin elastic films and membranes frequently feature internal sites of net forces or stresses. These are, for instance, active sites of actuation, or rigid [...]

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In “Genres of the Everyday: Romance, Realism, Romanticism,” I argue that romanticism invents the concept of the everyday as a dialectic: a conflict between genres (romanc [...]

This dissertation argues for an expansive understanding of American academic fiction in the postwar period—specifically as associated with the rise and fall of the “Golde [...]

It has become as common to say that feminism has been resurgent as it is to say it is finished, even impossible. Neither the sense of its new urgency nor the claim that i [...]

A Poetics of Apology theorizes apology as a capacious genre by reading precisely those apologies which are often dismissed as such—defense speeches, off-the-cuff quotidia [...]

In Thomas Middleton’s 1613 city comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, a group of women celebrate their friend’s successful labor and delivery of a baby girl. The [...]

This dissertation project centers upon the organizing theme of maintenance in British novels from the second half of the nineteenth century. Across three chapters, I t [...]

This essay argues that, despite the contempt in which it is normally held, Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear (1681) is worth our attention on a number of grounds: (1) [...]

"Self-Abuse and Sublimation: Masturbatory Aesthetics and Literary Criticism in the Long Nineteenth Century" presents various aspects by which our current pejorative uses [...]

This dissertation traces how male gayness, while conceived of primarily as a sexuality, has provoked a variety of gendered positions, identifications, allegiances, and co [...]

Many accounts of Anglo-American modernist fiction presuppose its postwar termination and the consequent anachronism of its commitment to autonomous artistic form—a commit [...]