Stefan Baums (Dissertator, Asian Languages & Literatures)
A Gandharan Buddhist Verse Commentary
Baums' project consists in the decipherment, edition, and study of a first-century-CE Buddhist birch-bark manuscript containing an anthology of Buddhist canonical verses with a previously unknown philosophical commentary. This manuscript is part of a collection of twenty-nine recently discovered Gandhari scrolls that constitute both the earliest surviving manuscripts from South Asia and the earliest Buddhist manuscripts, and that are providing unprecedented insight into the early development of Buddhist thought and literature on the cusp of their transmission from India to Central Asia and China.
Jennifer Benner (Dissertator, History)
Die Angestellten and the Critique of Rationalization in German Sociology
Benner's project identifies a discourse in twentieth century German sociology running from Max Weber's description of bureaucracy and rationalization through to post-war critical theory. She is especially interested in how broader analyses of these phenomena are manifested in studies (particularly by Siegfried Kracauer) of Weimar-era white-collar workers, or die Angestellten, and argues that studies of this group locate the most troubling aspects of modernity in structures of bureaucracy and rationalization.
Fabrizio Cilento (Dissertator, Comparative Literature)
An Investigative Cinema: Politics and Modernization in Italian, French and American Cinema
Cilento's project traces for the first time the development of "investigative cinema." Characterized by a questioning of the truth proposed by the media and institutions through a reconstruction of real events, "investigative cinema" stylistically blends a documentary approach with the fictional self-reflexive style typical of high modernism. Situating 1960s and 1970s cinema in relationship to the economic and geopolitical changes brought on by massive modernization allows for a retrospective tracing of the emergence of some pressing concerns in contemporary critical theory: the urban and national spaces, post-colonialism, and the validity of the image.
Rachel Devitt (Dissertator, Ethnomusicology)
Girl on Girl: Passing and Ambivalence in Femme Performative Negotiations of Popular Music
Devitt's dissertation examines femme gender performance communities, focusing on the ways popular music is used to explore gender identity, and in turn employ strategies drawn from the experience of "passing" to queerly negotiate popular culture. She argues that a carefully stylized, distinctly femme ambivalence informs these performances, shaping them into a means by which femme performers critically celebrate and perform their consumption of femininity and pop music, reinserting their experiences into ideologies and idioms that don’t make space for them.
Thomas Stuby (Dissertator, English)
The Persistence of Pleasure: Romantic Affect and Embodiment
Stuby's project offers a genealogy of the notion of aesthetic pleasure in English Romantic culture (c. 1780–1830), taking a dialectical 'history of ideas' approach, with an aim to explore how anxious ideas about the importance of pleasure emerged from philosophical, social, and material concerns of writers working through the problem of embodiment. Stuby's hope is to provide new directions to discussions of romantic selfhood and aesthetics that move away from idealism, sublimity, and self-consciousness, while thinking about what sort of altered picture of our aesthetic relation to our own sensibility and our senses of lived sociality emerges from this period, and what has persisted in its wake.
Ted Wayland (Dissertator, English)
High Risk Modernism
Wayland demonstrates the cultural significance of aviation and mountain landscape in shaping conceptions of space and time during the peak years of Anglo-American modernism from 1900 to 1940. Through a study of a diverse body of archival material and literary texts, Wayland argues that current critical studies of modernity and space have overlooked the crucial dimension of altitude, and I seek to restore the conceptual and cultural importance of high spaces to understandings of the intersections of literature, mass culture, technology, fashion, and landscape.
Giorgia Aiello (Communication)
Visions of Europe: The Construction of Collective Identity in Contemporary European Visual Discourse
Aiello's dissertation examines the ways in which a sense of a collective European identity is being constructed in contemporary European visual discourse. Aiello examines visual texts such as public communication materials, photography exhibits, and film in light of European integration and overall processes of globalization; she also highlights how visual imagination has increasingly become cross-culturally strategic and thus also a privileged site for the construction of transnational identities.
Gabriele Eichmanns (Germanics)
The Dialectical Relationship between Heimat and the "Foreign" in the Age of Globalization
Eichmanns argues that the current German discourse on Heimat, up until now a merely national discourse on an allegedly purely German topic, can only be viewed and examined with regard to recent theories on nation and globalization. She posits that the concept of Heimat as an exclusively German discourse needs to be re-evaluated in an age when the local and the global are inseparably intertwined. Thus, scholarship must be informed by and engage with a more extensive cross-disciplinary approach in order to arrive at an accurate picture of Heimat in the 21st century.
Rahul Gairola (English)
Queering Home: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-World War II Diasporic Culture
Gairola's project attempts to comparatively survey cultural texts (literature, film, music) by queer African and Asian diasporas. Gairola argues that these texts evince the ways in which such subjects complicate and re-appropriate the notion of "home." While, on the one hand, the nation-state sets the terms for exclusion of these subjects according to race and sexuality, Asian and African diasporas "queer" the very notion of home in acts of resistance that emerge in diverse cultural sites from the end of Word War II to the present.
Jill Gatlin (English)
Nature, Waste, and the Everyday Landscape of Resistance: A Genealogy of U.S. Literary Environmentalism
Gatlin's dissertation excavates a counter-history of American literary environmentalism, accounting for representations of pollution, waste, and toxics from 1860 to the present. Redeploying and revising traditional literary tropes of the natural landscape—such as the pastoral, the sublime, the frontier, and the wasteland—the texts she examines advance culturally and historically specific understandings of non-human nature and environmental hazard. In doing so, they challenge problematic formulations of nationalist identity and delineate barriers to and catalysts for environmental justice.
Yurie Hong (Classics)
Gendered Conceptions: Reproductions of Birth and the Body in Greek Literature
Hong's dissertation investigates the ways in which culturally influenced notions of the reproducing female body are mobilized in Greek medical, poetic, and historiographical texts of the classical period. It examines how literary constructions and uses of images of pregnancy and childbirth are appropriated in male discourses about elite literary, intellectual, and cultural production.
Ji-Young Um (English)
War without End: 20th Century U.S. Wars in Asia and Empire Structured in Dominance
Um's dissertation project situates and theorizes America’s wars in Asia as a central rubric for understanding racial, national, and imperial formations in the 20th century. Her work explores the ways in which war narratives reveal the contradictions of and contestations over national and imperial formations, as well as the ways in which "war" and "peace" overlap and constitute one another.
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