This thesis examines Latinx poetry in relation to the September 11th attacks and the reconfigurations of racial structures and the American empire that followed, most notably through the Department of Homeland Security and their agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE politically characterizes immigrants as anti-American to perpetuate stereotypes against...
The present study considers the mid-nineteenth century origins of the term “sexual inversion,” as it became applied to a variety of nonnormative subjects and sexual practices. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) has long been recognized as a discursive space wherein socially constructed notions of sexuality and gender are interrogated. A key...
Women being elected into public office, a recent occurrence, raises questions and concerns about what it means to have women in office. Concerns include: policy differences women in office might produce, changing the image of what it means to be a leader, and ultimately the fear of a shifting society....
This thesis explores the gendered histories of slavery through the concept of haunting in two neo-slave narrative novels: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I offer readings of these texts through slavery’s geographic and temporal implications, in order to argue that the logics of antiblackness remain a fundamental...
The question of deep time has been widely debated in the field of American Literature, with scholar Wai Chee Dimock arguing that a deep time perspective puts the chronology of different nations against one another. However, this argument has not adequately addressed the issue of how deep time theories would...
In this thesis, I read the teachers in four mid-century Victorian novels--Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1850) and Hard Times (1854), Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Charlotte Brontё's Villette (1853)-- within the context of mid-century English educational debate in an effort to explicate the ways in which these characters...
This thesis examines two cultural productions of the Harlem Renaissance: Aaron Douglas's mural series, Aspects of Negro Life, and Nella Larsen's novel Passing. I read these works together because, more than their shared time period, they showcase an attention to the visual. Both Larsen and Douglas's works are concerned with...
This thesis examines a range of generic influences in William Shakespeare's Richard II. By exploring the play's references to conflicting interpretations of history from different generic perspectives, I hope to advance a more nuanced reading of the play's dynamic staging of history. In Chapter One, I suggest that Richard II...
This research examines the literary and philosophical dimensions of the African American Harlem Renaissance, beginning with the historical milieu of the early twentieth century. A social movement that became known as Uplift and the so-called Cabaret Movement emerged as important, competing literary and social ideologies within the Renaissance. W.E.B. Du...
This thesis examines notions of social unintelligibility produced within queer spaces in two primary texts: Justin Torres' We the Animals and Mario Bellatín's Beauty Salon. Chapter One discusses the racial and queer marginalization of the unnamed narrator and explores his turn towards an "animal language" in his moment of exposure...