Congratulations to this year’s Senior Honors Thesis students! Honors theses are year long projects and typically result in a 35-80 page product of original research on a topic of the student’s choosing. This year’s thirteen theses range from everything from monsters in classical culture to studies in queer performance and community in ballroom culture.
Below is the list of students, their theses, and their directors:
Leo Bautista, “Queer Aesthetics: Oscar Wilde and the Development of the “Queer Artist,” Professor Kim Stern.
Alex Benedict, “litany of the green lion: returning the concrete to the concrete and the concrete to the grass, or how grass conquers the necropolis in d.a.levy’s Cleveland undercovers,” Professor Hassan Melehy.
Mary-Elisabeth Combs, “Bitches, Bastards, and Book Bans: Finding Space for William Faulkner in The Face of False Canonization,” Professor Henry Veggian.
Ben Foster, “The Big Sky over Fair Land: The Influence of 20th Century American Environmental Discourse in A.B. Guthrie’s ‘Dick Summers’ Western Trilogy,” Professor Marc Cohen.
Sophie Hass, “‘It Sucks Here’: The Absence of Gen Z Ideals in Southern Young Adult Fiction,” Professor Søren Palmer.
Elsa Karche, “Looking Medusa in the Eyes: The Monster Who Shaped Classical Culture,” Professor Jessica Wolfe.
Olivia Kersten, “Reader, I Broke the Formula: A Study of Bertha Mason’s Intersectional Identity and the Gothic Double Formula,” Professor Jeanne Moskal.
Elizabeth Leonard, “The Joke Is on Us: An Analysis of the Purpose and Techniques of Eighteenth- and Twenty-First Century Western Satire,” Professor Joe Fletcher.
Benjamin Linford, “IMAGE EMPIRE: The Chaos of the Images in INLAND EMPIRE,” Professor Gregg Flaxman.
Ash Radtke, “THIS PLACE IS HAUNTED: ON THE DEPICTION OF TRAUMA IN HORROR LITERATURE, PARTICULARLY THROUGH HAUNTED HOUSES,” Professor Gabriel Bump.
Nicole Rafferty, “Beyond the Home: An Analysis of Women in Work in the Domestic Noir,” Professor Sarah Boyd.
Xochi-Dante Eros Ramos-Lara, “Queering Performance and Community: Ballroom Culture as the Subversion of Hegemonic Gender, Race, and Sexuality in ‘Queer’ Identity Formation,” Professor Tyree Daye.
Danielle Richmond, “Jane Austen’s ‘Simpleton:’ What Studying a Single Word Can Teach Us About Austen’s Writing,” Professor Inger Brodey.
