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English Departmental Honors Archive

The following list includes the names of Dickinsonians who have earned departmental honors, the thesis/project title, and the year of conferral. If there is no thesis or project title, the conferring department only will be listed. Each academic department (or program) has its own criteria for awarding departmental honors. Please see the Advising Guide or elsewhere on the department’s main website for details.


Julia MacRae Kelly (2024)
Ambivalence, Detachment, Abortion: Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays

Long Dinh Ta (2022)
Literary Form and Violence: A Queer Viet(namese) American Poetics of Fragmentation

Gracyn Danielle Bird (2021)
Bodies With (out) Boundaries: Affective Ambiguity in "Boundless"

Caitlin Kayo Kirchberg (2021)
"We Were Japanese Too": The Liminality of the Nisei Identity Told Through Three Memoirs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II

Kira Louise Ousey (2021)
"From A Certain Point of View:" Star Wars, Revision, and Textual Criticism

Audrey Devon Schlimm (2020)
"I must laugh or die": The Satirical Feminism of Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss" and Other Stories

Janel Pineda (2018)
"The War Is or Isn't Over, But Coffee Still Brews": The Salvadoran Civil War, Transnational Migration, and Navigating Legacies of Trauma in Javier Zamora's "Unaccompanied"

Anna Dempsey Robinette (2017)
Bilingual and Bimodal Expression: The Creolization in Edwidge Danticat's Oeuvre

John Anderson Kneisley (2016)
"A Shadow of a Magnitude": The Condition of Artwork in John Keats's Ekphrastic Poetry

Samantha Rae Moyer (2015)
"Fit to govern?" Charismatic and Traditional Kingship in Richard III, Richard II, and Macbeth

Mary Katherine Naydan (2015)
Modernist Mythmaking: A Comparative Study of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ezra Pound

Leah Judith Shafer (2014)
A Day When It Was Dangerous to Play: War and Gender in Stein's Children's Books

Christina Michele Socci (2013)
"Learn My Language": Exploring Translation as a Critique of National Identity in Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy"

Elizabeth Evelyn Campbell (2012)
Finding Austen: The Covert Gender Politics in Emma's Marriage Plots

Julia Grace Feerrar (2012)
H.D., Epistolary Poet: Bridging "Schism(s) in Consciousness" in Trilogy

Rachel Faith Chesley (2011)
"Tainted with the Blood of the Oppressor": Womanism, Black Power, and the Treatment of the Mulatto in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"

Megan Natoli Liberty (2011)
But the Return to the Pictures: The Forgotten Photograph of Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

Eliza Rose Park (2011)
"Become as Little Children": A Study of the Subversion of the Cult of Domesticity in Two Sentimental Texts

Emily Mae Stokes-Hallett (2011)
Steinbeck's Subversive Cultural Capital: The Grapes of Wrath and the Problematic Canonization of the Lower Classes

Caroline Anne Peri (2010)
"The Taint of Effeminacy": Questioning Normative Masculinity in E.M. Forster's "The Other Boat" and Youssef Idris' "Leader of Men"

Jessie Paton Strasbaugh (2010)
What She's "Supposed to Do": The Lunar Erotic Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop and Brenda Shaughnessy

Christopher Michael Gross (2009)
Historicizing Gender: Masculine Dissolution and Female Dominance in Chris Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth"

Amanda Ruth Lagji (2009)
"Willing Liberates": Nietzschean Heroism in Tsitsi Dangarembga's "Nervous Conditions"

Kaitlyn Marie Plummer (2009)
"Who Wants Cocoanut?": The Construction of Desire and the Demise of Empire in E.M. Forster's "The Other Boat"

Marissa Leigh Calfe (2008)
The Over-Passing of the Bound: Analyzing the Influence of Dante's Francesca da Rimini on Milton's Revolutionary Eve

Thomas Bradley Elrod (2008)
"And All the Court Laughed Loud": Colonialism and Satire in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"

Meredith L Smith (2008)
Transexual Memoir: Breaking the Silence in Deirdre N. McCloskey's "Crossing: A Memoir" and Jennifer Finney Boylan's "She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders"

Laura Elizabeth Harbold (2007)
Reconfiguration of the Male Body in British Trench Poetry of the First World War

John Isaac Lingan (2007)
Reanimating the Store of Gold: Reason, Sentiment, and Failure in "Tristram Shandy"

Nathan Eric Fry (2006)
How the Pen Unsheathed the Sword: The Role of Russian and English Conflict Literature in Creating the First World War

Mary Alice Hartsock (2006)
Displacement and Deviance: Female Sexuality and the Double Standard in the Works of Austen, C. Bronte, and Byron

Brian Richard Sylvester (2005)
Pictorial Misunderstanding: W.G. Sebald and Photographic Uncertainty

Katherine Kelly Ginn (2004)
Reproduction in the Slave Economies of Morrison and Acker

M Roger Brubaker (2003)
A Green Barbarism turned Paradigm: Wallace Stevens' "Earthy Anecdote" and "Harmonium"

Susan Audrey Logan (2003)
Genius, Insanity, and Ignorance: Edgar Allan Poe's Aesthetic View of the Human Mind

Elizabeth Jane Rawitsch (2003)
'Saying Something' about Roosevelt's America: An Auteurist Analysis of Frank Capra's "Lost horizon" in the Context of the Great Depression

Rebecca Downey Reeves (2003)
"Because it's Superman's Book, You Moron!": Geeks, Metafiction and Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Abigail Jane Watson-Popescu (2003)
The Metaphor Speaks: Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth's Subversion of Power

Amanda Elizabeth Eveler (2001)
Subjectivity, Control and Transcendence through Passion in Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body"

Eric Frederick Bourassa (2000)
The Constraints that make a Life: The Inversion of Aztlan in Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy"

Michael Marion Meagher (2000)
"All Lies Lead to the truth": Quest and conspiracy in The X-files

Janine Stumb Corbett (1999)
Magic Realism, Post-colonialism, and Hybridity: Gabriel García Márquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and Ben Okri's "The Famished Road"

Christopher Michael Maier (1999)
The Passion to be Masculine: D. H. Lawrence and the Struggle for a Masculine Identity

Nicole M Lehman (1998)
"The Sisters' Vows, the Hours that we have Spent": Renaissance women, Shakespeare's Women, and Homosocial Bonding

Elizabeth Keller (1997)
Absurdly Logical: Mathematics, English and Language in Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno"

Todd Brandon Weaver (1997)
Misreading the Blues: Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a Theory of Vulgar music and its Authorial Powers

Jared Ross Novoseller (1996)
Sentenced to Doing Time: Stoppard Presents Time in Arcadia

Terri Ann Pawelski (1996)
The Politics and Artistic Achievement of John A. Williams and "The Man who Cried I Am"

Karen Pohlman Quill (1996)
Creating a Passion Through the Arts

Emily Ann Wylie (1994)
Eudora Welty: Writing confluence in The Golden Apples

James Calvin Davis (1992)
Departmental Honors in English

Jeffrey Scott Ramsay (1991)
Winds of Change: Shelley--A Self-acknowledged Legislator and his dynamism

Jeffrey Paul Hergan (1990)
Truth and Untruth: Heidegger and the Problematic Nature of Truth in "Heart of Darkness"

Heidi J Hormel (1985)
"Linda," A Short Story

Tracy Patterson Cunningham (1984)
Words as Things: The Diminutive Vision of Jonathan Swift's "A Tale of a Tub"

Martha A Dalrymple (1984)
Nature Imagery and the Poetry of the First World War: From Chivalry to the Machine

Kristina K Groover (1983)
Beyond the Adamic Myth: Harriette Arnow's "Kentucky Trilogy"

Stephen E Klinge (1982)
"An Experienced Eye of Earthly Sharpness": The Poetry of Stevie Smith

Sherry Kravetz Wampler (1982)
The Gavain Canon: Poems and the Poet

Tracey Hoffman (1981)
John Barth: Structure, Myth and Identity

Linda B VandeVrede (1981)
Time and Mutability in Tennyson, Housman and Brooke

Robert Frank (1980)
Crabbe, Cowper, and Johnson: The English tradition from 1780 to 1820

Gail R Huganir (1980)
The Poetry of Sir John Betjeman

John A Macdonald (1979)
Blindman

Alan N Escott (1978)
Patterns of Imagery in the Novels of Thomas Hardy

William W McAllister (1977)
Dos Passos: From Young Radical to Aged Conservative - The Plight of the Individual in Society

Anne S K Turkos (1977)
Robert Browning and the Dramatic Monologue -- An Exploration of his Poetry

Nancy Ferris Engle (1975)
Departmental Honors in English

Susan L Duffield (1974)
D.H. Lawrence and Neoprimitivism: The Literal and Fictional Quest for the Good Life in the Good Place

Timothy Ruth (1974)
The Mystic Poetry of Dylan Thomas

John Daniel Wrigley (1974)
The Novels of William Golding - Thematic Progression

Susan A Stewart (1973)
The Briar Beneath the Rose: Women in American Folklore

Allan R Chavkin (1972)
The Duality Metaphysic: Its Influence on the Theme and Form of the Art of D. H. Lawrence

Mary J Gaskin (1971)
Beyond the Moment

Jane M Hunter (1969)
Liturgy and Drama as a Continual Tradition

Joyce Payne Johnston (1969)
Haiku: The Spirit of Japan

Burton S Weiss (1969)
The Dramatic Expression of Alienation

Ruth Anne Baumgartner (1968)
Dylan Thomas: The Journey to Acceptance: The Situation of Man in the Universe, an Evolving View

John E Hill (1968)
Bernard Shaw: The Dramatist as Critic 1895 - 1989

David B Bedick (1967)
"The Wave of the Future is Blue": A Novel

Leslie Dixon Cook (1967)
The State and the Theatre: Drama in Russia - 1860-1940

Leslie Micklewright Devine (1967)
Technical Innovations in Ezra Pound's Poetry

Susan Johnson Dowds (1966)
The Mirror, the Garden, and Dame Fortuna: A Study of the Emblematic English Renaissance Stage

Patricia Casserly Kelly (1966)
Reportless Measure: A Study of Transcendence in Emily Dickinson's poetry

Mark Moscowitz Moss (1966)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Vision of Love

R Jon Paugh (1966)
Myth and Ritual in the Works of Ernest Hemingway

David Richman (1966)
The Superman Motif in the Nineteenth Century

Elisabeth Rachel Virnstein (1966)
The Progression of Character in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Josie Campbell (1965)
The influence of Greek tragedy upon Eugene O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes Electra"

Jonathan M Cross (1965)
The Wave, the River, and the Sea: Patterns of Symbolic Image in the Novels of Virginia Woolf

Peter W Marshall (1965)
The Problem of the Self in the Novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Carol Nuetzman Weber (1965)
Innocence and Experience: A Study of Children in Modern Literature

Sonia Raysor Carringer (1964)
Wit, Whimsey, Wickedness, and Wisdom: The paradox of Oscar Wilde

Hilma Forsberg Cooper (1964)
Conrad and the Deadly Sin of Pride

Roberta Williams Francis (1964)
A Defense of Shelley

Dona E Houseal (1964)
The Creative Urge in D. H. Lawrence's Fiction

Constance Courtright Rockman (1964)
The Literary Fairy Tale in Nineteenth Century English Literature