Recent Masters Theses & Dissertations

2004

Sally H Gray, Ph.D.: Universal Selves in the Face of the Other: Crosssections of Aesthetics and Anthropology in Germany
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

April L Henry, M.A.: The Lament as a Path to Female Subjectivity
Advisor: Kathryn Starkey

Jeannette Norfleet, M.A.: Nine Hundred Years in the Making: The Evolution of a Language Policy for Moravian Missions in Eighteenth Century America
Advisor: Paul Roberge

Elisa Jane Pollack, Ph.D.: The Natural History of the German Verb Sein ‘To Be’ + Participle to 1545
Advisor: Paul Roberge

Edward Potter, Containment or Subversion? Early Enlightenment Comedy and the Alternative to the Idealogy of Marriage
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

Cyrus Shahan, M.A.: “Der Tanzt Beginnt von Neuem”: Expressionism in Georg Kaiser’s Nebeneinander and Ernst Toller’s Hoppla, Wir Leben
Advisor: Siegfried Mews

Wendy Schriever, M.A.: Language Choice in Germany’s Popular Music
Advisor: Paul Roberge

Julie Tomberlin Weber, M.A.: Epistolary Nation: The Construction of German Identity 1530-1874
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

2005

Richard Benson, M.A.:”Bildung Vernichtet Das Bild”: Jakob Wassermann’s Attack on the Bildungsroman in die Juden von Zirndorf
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

Shelley L Hay, M.A.: The Musical Language of the World: Absolute Truth in Schopenhauer and Novalis
Advisor: Alice Kuzniar

Stefanie Hofer, Ph.D.: Terror im Kino: Generationskonflikte im Deutschen Terroristenfilm
Advisor: Alice Kuzniar

Sabine Marina Jones, M.A.: Autobiographical Voyages: The German Black Atlantic
Advisor: Richard Langston

Sabrina Moser, Ph.D.: Enlightened Gastronomy: Discourses on Meals and Mores in the Age of Goethe
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

David Smith, Ph.D.: Inventing Germanness: Language Discourse from Justus Georg Schottelius to Johann Gottfried Herder
Advisor: Christopher Wild

2006

James Brown, Ph.D.: Imagining the Text: Ekphrasis and Envisioning Courtly Identity in Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Wigalois
Advisor: Kathryn Starkey

Rebeccah Dawson, M.A.: The Brothers Grimm and the Pedagogy of Punishment: “Rapunzel,” “Rumpelstilzchen,” and Other Tales
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

Maya Gerig, Ph.D.: Jenseits von Tugend und Empfindsamkeit: Frauenliteratur um 1800 als forum für sozialpolitische Erörterungen
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

David Kleinberg, Ph.D.: Oachkatzlschwoaf: A Study of Language Choice in Ried im Innkreis, Austria
Advisor: Paul Roberge

Catherine Mainland, Ph.D.: Dora and her Sisters: Control and Rebellion in Hermann and Schnitzler
Advisor: Alice Kuzniar

Jeff VanDrimmelen, M.A.: Children All Grown Up: Child Labor, Gender Roles and Pedagogical Function in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

2007

Oliver B Ham, M.A.: Berlin’s Cultural East and West Division: Masochism and the Female Body
Advisor: Richard Langston

Roger D Jones, M.A.: The Incest Taboo and Anti-Family Values in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Ausgesperrten
Advisor: Richard Langston

Silia Kaplan, M.A.: Flights of Memory: Narrating the Past in Wings of Desire
Advisor: Alice Kuzniar

Tobias Mag, M.A.: From Machines to Screens: The Flattening Effect in Christian Kracht’s Faserland
Advisor: Richard Langston

Margaret A Maurer, M.A.: “Waz sol doch si nu riten?”: feminine spaces and subjectivity in Hartmann’s Erec
Advisor: Kathryn Starkey

Derrick Miller, Ph.D.: Heaving and Swelling: Aesthetics, the Body, and Erotic Literature in the Age of Lessing
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

2008

David Andersen, M.A.: Parody as Criticism: The Literary Life of Eulalia Meinau
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

Richard Apgar, Ph.D.: Taming Travel and Disciplining Reason: Enlightenment and Pedagogy in the Work of Joachim Heinrich Campe
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

Kirkland Alexander Fulk, M.A.: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School and the West German Student Movement
Advisor: Richard Langston

April L Henry, Ph.D.: The Female Lament: Agency and Gender in Medieval German Literature
Advisor: Kathryn Starkey

Christina Humphrey, M.A.: Childhood Sexual Fluidity: First Loves in Anton Reiser, Das Marmorbild and Manor
Advisor: Alice Kuzniar

Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers, M.A.: Castrating the female dominant: an analysis of female agency in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im PelzAdvisor: Alice Kuzniar

Cyrus  Shahan, Ph.D.: Punk Poetics and West German Literature of the Eighties
Advisor: Richard Langston

Thomas R. Spencer, Ph.D.: “Was ist Gott?”: The Representation of the Divine in Friedrich Hölderlin
Advisor: Alice Kuzniar

Kai-Uwe  Werbeck, M.A.: The Interface as Door: On the Problem of Access to the Image in Kafka’s Das Schloss and Interactive Media
Advisor: Richard Langston

2009

Richard Benson, Ph.D.: Modernity, Marginality, and Redemption: German and Jewish Identity at the Fin-de Siécle
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

Sara Farner Budarz, M.A.: In the Shadows of the Past: Exploring Moments of Identification with Christ in the Works of Anne Duden, Margarethe von Trotta, and Anne Karpf
Advisor: Anna Parkinson

Susanne Gomoluch, M.A.: Hitting Rock Bottom: Reading Male Synope in Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein, Michael Kohlhaas, and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

Jennifer Orr, M.A.: Diu küneginne rîche streit dâ ritterlîche: Chess as an Impetus for Female Agency
Advisor: Kathryn Starkey

2010

Kevin Eubanks, Ph.D.: A Poetics of Care, or Time and the Dasein of Modernism in Thomas Mann and Martin Heidegger 1924/1947
Advisor: Clayton Koelb

Matthew Feminella, M.A.: At a loss for words: nonverbal communication in Kleist’s Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden, Michael Kohlhaas, and Der Findling
Advisor: Clayton Koelb

Shelley L Hay, Ph.D.: Writing Absolute Music: Modernity’s Linguistic Symphony
Advisor: Clayton Koelb

Charles Hoag, M.A.: Sketching a Little Piece of Home: Frieda von Bülow Imagines German National Identity
Advisor: Clayton Koelb

Tayler Kent, M.A.: The problem of privilege: temperament and diversity in Kant’s Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

2011

Nicolay Ostrau, Ph.D.: Locating Feeling: Emotion, Space, and Place in Middle High German Courtly Literature Around 1200
Advisor: Kathryn Starkey

Robert Blankenship, Ph.D.: Transforming Suicides: Literary Heritage, Intertextuality, and Self-Annihilation in GDR Fiction of the 1970s and 1980s
Advisor: Richard Langston

Rebeccah Dawson, Ph.D., “Sport ist der Nerv der Zeit”: The Politics of Sport in German Literature, 1918-1962
Advisor: Richard Langston

Nicolay Ostrau, Ph.D.: Locating Feeling: Spatial Practices of Emotion in German Romance Narratives around 1200
Advisor: Kathryn Starkey

Anja Wieden, Ph.D.: Female Experiences of Rape and Hunger in Post War German Literature, 1945-1960
Advisor: Richard Langston

2012

Susanne Gomoluch, Ph.D.: Redeeming the Imagination: The Case Study, Literature, and Medical Discourse around 1800
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

Kai-Uwe Werbeck, Ph.D.: From Rubble to Revolutions and Raves: Literary Interrogations of German Media Ecologies
Advisor: Richard Langston

2013

Kirkland Alexander Fulk, Ph.D.: Literature as Utopia: Spaces of Alterity in West German Postcolonial and Science-Fiction Literature after Sixty-Eight
Advisor: Richard Langston

Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers, Ph.D.: Power Play: Beyond the Erotics of Masochism in Nineteenth-Century German Literature and Philosophy
Advisor: Jonathan Hess

William O. Taylor, Ph.D.: Birth of an Artistic Socrates: The Motivations and Form of Nietzsche’s Classicism 1869-1872.
Advisor: Clayton Koelb

2014

Silia Kaplan, Ph.D.: Fragmented Bodies and Exploded Boundaries: Discourses of Trauma in the Visual Media of Early Weimar Germany, 1916-1926
Advisor: Eric Downing

Sara Farner Budarz, Ph.D.: Gender and the Production of Interior Space in Weimar Republic German Literature, 1929-1933
Advisor: Eric Downing

2015

Lindsey J. Brandt, Ph.D.: Tangled up in Truths: German Literary Conceptions of Nature between Romantic Science and Objective Empiricism
Advisor: Eric Downing

Joseph Christian Straubhaar, Ph.D.: Understanding the Visuality of a Medieval Visionary: Fourtheenth-Century Dominican Henry Suso’s Interwoven Concepts of Divine Image, Gendered Identity, and Epistemology
Advisor: Clayton Koelb

Erik Jonathan Grell, Ph.D.: Liberal Affect and Literary Culture: The Politics of Feeling in Mid-Nineteenth Century German Prose Fiction
Advisor: Eric Downing

2016

Annegret Oehme, Ph.D.: Adapting Arthur. The Transformations of Wirnt von Grafenberg Wigalois
Advisor: Ann Marie Rasmussen

Steffen Kaupp, Ph.D.: Transcultural Satire in German Fiction of Turkish Migration: Self-Deprecation, Ethnic Impersonation, Intertextuality
Advisor: Ruth von Bernuth

Heidi Hart, Ph.D.: Contrary Voices: Heine, Hölderlin, and Goethe in the Music of Hanns Eisler
Advisor: Priscilla Layne

Janice Elizabeth Hansen, Ph.D.: Redeeming Faustus: Tracing the Pacts of Mariken and Faust from the 1500s to the Present
Advisor: Thomas Pfau

Matthew West Feminella, Ph.D.: Staging Spontaneity: Corporeal Expression and the Paradox of Acting in the German Theater Discourse around 1800
Advisor: Ruth von Bernuth

Rory Earl Bradley, Ph.D.: The Enlightening Supernatural: Ghost Stories in Late Eighteenth Century Germany
Advisor: Jonathan M. Hess

Melanie Ungar, Ph.D.: Gender and Humor in German Literature of the fin de siècle
Advisor: Eric Downing

Sandra Niehardt, Ph.D.: Narration and Consciousness in the Late Eighteenth-Century German Novel
Advisor: Jonathan M. Hess

2017

Claire Scott, Ph.D.: Murderous Mothers: Feminist Violence in German Literature and Film (1970-2000)
Advisor: Kata Gellen

Christine Kenison, Ph.D.: Bestselling Borders: The Mutual Implications of German and Polish Identity in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Novel
Advisor: Jonathan M. Hess

Richard M. Lambert III, Ph.D.: In Search of Lost Experience: Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, and the Novels of Interwar Vienna
Advisor: Richard Langston

2018

Bethany Bowen-Wefuan, Ph.D.: Reframing Religion: Painting and Secularization in German Realism
Advisor: Eric Downing

2019

Matthew Hambro, Ph.D.: Redrawing Time: Temporality in German-Language Graphic Narratives
Advisor: Ruth von Bernuth

Patrick Lang, Ph.D.: A God in the Mechanism: German Language Theater and the Atomic Bomb 1945-65
Advisor: Jakob Norberg

2020

John Gill, Ph.D.: Wild Politics: Political Imagination in German Romanticism
Advisor: Gabriel Trop

Jeffrey Hertel, Ph.D.: Liberating Laughter: Dramatic Satire and the German Public Sphere, 1790-1848
Advisor: Jakob Norberg

Margaret Reif, Ph.D.: Disruptive Organizers: Wild Children in German Realism (1850-1900)
Advisor: Jakob Norberg

2021

Martin Dawson, Ph.D.: Transports of Imagination: Poetry and the Rehabilitation of Experience, 1830-1860
Advisor: Gabriel Trop

Lea Helena Greenberg, Ph.D.: Curious Daughters: Language, Literacy and Jewish Female Desire in German and Yiddish Literature from 1793 to 1916
Advisor: Ruth von Bernuth

Edana Kleinhans, Ph.D.: Love, Power, and the Sovereign in Female Courtly Biographies of the Habsburg Empire. Venus and Her Scepter: Tu Fexlix Austria
Advisor: Ruth von Bernuth

2022

John Andrew Jolly, Ph.D.: A Transcendent View of Things: The Persistence of Metaphysics in the Modern German Lyric, 1771-1908
Advisor: Thomas Pfau

Amy Jones, Ph.D.: Metamorphoses of the Muse: Rethinking Gender and Creativity in German Poetry from 1800-1850
Advisor: Gabriel Trop

Ian McLean, Ph.D.: Storm, Stress, and Sexual Revolution: Economies of Desire in the German Literary Avant-Garde of the 1770s
Advisor: Stefani Engelstein

Christoph Schmitz, Ph.D.: Chaos and Control: Indexicality and the Human Voice in Contemporary German Fiction
Advisor: Richard Langston

2004

Sean D Flanagan, M.A.: Topology and Function in Spatial Conceptualization
Advisor: Laura Janda

Rimma Garn, Ph.D.: At the Cradle of the Modern Russian Novel: the Case of M.D. Chulkov
Advisor: Christopher Putney

Anne S Keown, Ph.D.: Metaphorical Motivations for Politeness Strategies: Linguistic Evidence from Russian, Polish, and Czech
Advisor: Laura Janda

James Patrick Phillips, M.A.: Investigating Accusative vs. Genitive through the Internet: An Analysis of Timberlake’s “Hierarchies in the Genitive of Negation”
Advisor: Laura Janda

2005

Nicholas Leblanc, M.A.: Iterativity: The Necessary Construal for Delimitative Use in Secondary Homogenized Verbal Predicates in Russian
Advisor: Laura Janda

Melissa Kotacka, M.A.: The Beneficent Witch: Examining Margarita in Bulgakov’s The Master and the Margarita
Advisor: Madeline Levine

2006

Hyug Ahn, Ph.D.: The Semantics of SJA in Russian: Focus on the Action
Advisor: Laura Janda

Jenny C Barrier, M.A.: Egyptian Might, the Broken Staff, and the Thin Reed: Possible Biblical Subtexts in Osip Mandelstam’s “Notre Dame”
Advisor: Ilana Vuletic

Maya J Bringe, M.A.: A Particle on the Edge: A Semantic/Syntactic Analysis of Russian khotʹ
Advisor: Laura Janda

Diane E Caton, M.A.: Recognizing the Face of the Class Enemy: Reassessing the Prospects of the Soviet Experiment in the NEP Literary Contexts of Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog and Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug
Advisor: Beth Holmgren

Maxwell Olszewski Mason, M.A.: Gogolian Spatial Models and Mankind’s Potential for Redemption: A Comparison of “The Carriage” and Dead Souls
Advisor: Christopher Putney

2007

John  Korba, M.A.: The Development of Overt Aspectual Marking among Russian Biaspectual Verbs
Advisor: Laura Janda

2009

Ainsley E Morse, M.A.: Iz nepoznatosti propasti pravo u nepostojanje: A Study of Aleksandar Tišma’s Autobiographical Project
Advisor: Radislav Lapushin

Jenne M Powers, Ph.D.: Novel Histories: Repudiation of Soviet Historiography in the Works of Iurii Trifonov, Vladimir Makanin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia
Advisor: Beth Holmgren

James Slater, M.A.: Chess as a Key to Solving Nabokov’s Korol’, dama, valet
Advisor: Radislav Lapushin

2010

Helen Graves Halva, Ph.D.: Primitivist or Moralist? The Biological Ethos in Boris Pil’niak’s Shorter Prose
Nicholas Leblanc, Ph.D.: The Polysemy of an Empty Prefix: A Corpus-Based Cognitive Semantic Analysis of the Russian Verbal Prefix po-
Advisor: Laura Janda

Scott Andrew Morrison, M.A.: Rehabilitating Cornet Elagin
Advisor: Lapushin

Kevin M Reese, Ph.D.: Immortals Are Not Men: Maiakovskii, the Strugatskii Brothers, and the New Soviet Man
Advisor: Ivana Vuletic

2011

Dominique Gore Hoffman, Ph.D.: Without Nostalgia: Nina Berberova’s Short Fiction of the 1930s
Advisor: Madeline Levine

2012

Elena Pedigo Clark, Sharp Rays of Thought: Psychological Conflict in the Poetry of E.A. Baratynsky
Advisor: Lawrence Feinberg

2013

Jessica Lynn Ginocchio, M.A.: A Cold, White Light: The Defamiliarizing Power of Death in Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace
Advisor: Christopher Putney

William Justin Morgan, M.A.: Machines in Chekhov’s Fiction
Advisor: Lapushin

Yauheniya A Spallino Mironava, M.A.: Kundera’s Artful Exile: The Paradox of Betrayal
Advisor: Hana Pichova

2017

Natalia Chernysheva, Ph.D.: The Haptic in Lev Tolstoi’s ‘Anna Karenina
Advisor: Christopher Putney