​no one belongs here
more than miranda july
for now anyway
​
Kathryn Shepherd
Manchester Metropolitan University

​My dissertation explores the birth of a new genre of writing, focussing on the everyday emotions and family life. Starting from the McSweeney’s publication to a more specific look at how Miranda July fits into and has contributed to this movement.

​Short Story Sequence
Genre of community;
Together, alone
​
Jeff Birkenstein
University of Kentucky, 2003

​By jettisoning and adapting traditional narrative strategies—such as plot or temporal continuity—that tend to maintain their integrity only within the confines of a single story, James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson (and many authors since) use the genre of the short story sequence to present community in ways different from either the novel or the short story. Whether or not the characters in the stories understand these connections, they are connected through community even as they often remain isolated and alone.

​Romance, between words,
Has e’er dazed souls – brains – bodies.
You, reader, aren’t safe.
​
Hannah K. H. Kirby
University of Oxford

I’m researching the physical, gendered effects of romantic desire in characters and readers of prose fiction throughout time, drawing on the neurobiological consistencies of the love concept. I address histories of authorship and readership, and find that authors tend both to favour ambiguities and to locate the power of their work in the fissures surrounding language and its participants – meaning that much of the interpretive onus (as well as its effects) remains with the reader.

​I once was a girl
said the gentleman sadly
but now no longer
​
Catherine Robson
University of California, Davis

​My dissertation (1995) considered middle-class male fantasies of original femininity in the cultural productions of Victorian Britain.

​Our bodies are rot,
Dead meat with a difference.
Skin breaks; flesh fights back.
​
Jesse Stommel
University of Colorado at Boulder

​Dissertation Title: “Pity Poor Flesh”
My dissertation is about the evaporation of our physical bodies in the postmodern era. I look to the zombie as a figurative solution, a powerful opportunity for revolt, a reclaiming of flesh in the wake of rapid technological advancement.

​movement never lies
all (loss) being satellite
this body dances
​
Holly Masturzo
University of Houston

​Dissertation Title: “Deep Skin: Essays on the Body, Dance, Movement and Culture” (1999).
My dissertation was a collection of creative nonfiction prose and prose poems with a critical apparatus on the body in language.

​Steamboats, railroads, cars:
To embrace or to reject?
Reading novels helps.
​
Frank Ridgway
University of Illinois
Dissertation Title: “Injurious Distances: Mobility, Space, Realism.”
This dissertation discusses the ways in which white middle-class authors of the American Gilded Age and Progressive Era struggled to make sense of emergent technosocial systems of mobility. It argues that for Mark Twain, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, physical mobility and the continual remaking of the built environment both enabled new kinds of subjectivity and evoked the limits of such subjectivities.

​Gender roles gone wrong
Undermine society,
Vampire stories show.
​
Amanda DeWees
University of Georgia

​Dissertation Title: “Blood Lines: Domestic and Family Anxieties in 19th-Century Vampire Literature”
In my dissertation I explored how vampire stories and poems of the 19th century revealed fears that men and women who did not conform to the gender and family roles expected of them were putting the family unit, and by extension society as a whole, in peril.

​On your knees and write.
All poets fear death and love,
some God’s saving grace.
​
Mary Ann Koory
University of California, Berkeley

​My dissertation (1995) considered the parallels between secular (courtly) and religious devotional poetry in the Renaissance, and how three poets (Petrarch, Sidney, Donne) used this overtly submissive, fearful and passive self-representation as a means of asserting themselves and refusing to change the way they defined themselves

​Why are all these men
dying? It’s not just the war.
Blame Hardy and Freud.
​
Ariela Freedman
New York University

​My dissertation, Death, Men, and Modernism (published with Routledge, 2003), analyzed the significance of a series of modernist English novels which conclude with the death of a male character between 1910 and 1930. It was followed by this haiku:
Let’s have a drink now!
No, it’s not much too early.
Don’t mind if I do.

​Sacrificial death
abounds in fantasy books
for children–my word!
​
Melody Green
Illinois State University

​Dissertation Title: “The Sacrifice of Sacrifice: the Motif of Sacrificial Death in Children’s and Adolescent Fantasy.”

​we take and make sense
from logos, pathos, ethos
shouldn’t it all count?
​
Aimée Knight
Michigan State University
Dissertation Title: A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Engagement

​A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Engagement (2009) examines the diverse ways people make meaning through their aesthetic experience—their sensory based perception. My findings support an accommodating theory for designing communication in digital environments, where people produce and consume media convergent texts that include multiple modalities, including sound, image, and user-interaction.

​Nature or culture?
We love to debate this
In cyborg stories
​
Susana Martins
Boston College

​Title: “Unnatural Futures: Imagining the High-Tech in Contemporary American Culture” (2003)
My dissertation examines narratives about technology and the ways in which they activates familiar oppositions between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the cultural. Technology provokes reiterations of particular norms in an uneven process that seeks both to reinforce existing categories of meaning and to accommodate newness. This study examines how conceptions of the human, the natural, and the social are defended, re-articulated, or challenged in the discourse of technology, through a reading of the media response to the artificial heart implantations conducted in the 1908s and in 2001; the films “Blade Runner” and “AI: Artificial Intelligence”; Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and Joanna Russ’s “The Female Man.”

​In-situ dias-
Po-or us, both here and yet there!
Standing in two worlds.
​
Constance (Connie) Bracewell
University of Arizona

​I am creating a literary theory for a term I have inaugurated as in-situ diaspora (copyrighted!), in which the area of dispersal is arguably still the same general geographical space as the homeland. In particular, I am arguing for American Indian literature as a literature of diaspora. My dissertation is a forthcoming publication with Edwin Mellon Press.

​Modernist thoughts of
Midwestern love and hatred
Where is home to me?
​
Sara Kosiba
Kent State

​My dissertation (2007) was titled “A Successful Revolt?: The Redefinition of Midwestern Literary Culture in the 1920’s and 1930’s” and contrasted how many writers from the Midwest went off to become successful members of the American modernist movement, often trying to distance themselves from their Midwestern roots, while others stayed behind in the Midwest and wrote from their point of view there.

​New Zealand is far:
Explorers, Emigrants, Tourists
Write the distance.
​
Jacob Broderick
King’s College London

​My dissertation (King’s College London) concerns travel writing on New Zealand in the long nineteenth century. As one can infer from the haiku, I examine the writings of explorers, emigrants/settlers, and tourists to tease out the ways these figures spatialized the distance to the far-flung colony within the context of the ‘British World’.

textured plays display
the tangled web of women
adored and traded
​
Caroline Lockett Cherry
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

​Title: The Most Unvalued’st Purchase: Women in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (1963).
Middleton was a contemporary of Shakespeare. The dissertation focused on literary representation of the condition of women as highly valued objects of exchange between men in the Early Modern period (a hot topic back in the 60s).

​Please don’t sit so close
to me, madam: I might start
to read myself in you.
​
Danielle Bobker
Rutgers University

​Dissertation title: “The Shape of Intimacy: Private Space and the British Social Imagination, 1650-1770” (2007).
My dissertation argues that literary representations of closets and carriages served as vehicles through which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors grappled with an array of new charged and unstable social relationships, not least the strangely virtual relationships produced by the burgeoning market for print.

​Basil Bunting was
A Northumbrian poet
These are his poems
​
Don Share
Boston University

​The Poems of Basil Bunting: A Critical Edition
The poems of Basil Bunting (1900-1985), admired by Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky among others, are increasingly regarded with great interest, particularly his challenging long poem, Briggflatts. Bunting’s work was published haphazardly throughout most of his life, and in many cases publication was not overseen by him. Editions issued by small and large presses alike were afflicted with printing errors and editorial interventions. A critical edition of Bunting’s work is necessary to examine and rectify these and to annotate his complex, allusive verse.

EXAMINE TEXT GAMES
their art springs from frustration.
PUT ART INTO THEORY
​
Jeremy Douglass
University of California, Santa Barbara

​Title: Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media
My dissertation surveyed text-based narrative games called interactive fiction (IF), 1975-2005. I developed two methods for their interpretation — “implied code,” or the interactor’s mental model of an interactive work; and “frustration aesthetics”, or how constraints shape interactive experiences.

​The letter’s the thing
Wherein we’ll catch their playing
With speech and poetry
Lauren Neefe
Stony Brook University

​My dissertation title is “Romantic Relays: Epistolary Play and Chimerical Form in Childe Herold’s Pilgrimage and Moby Dick”

​Medieval markets
Sunder selves and create ties;
Gifts do it better.

Elizabeth Harper
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Dissertation title: Gifts and Economic Exchange in Late Medieval Religious Writing