#  Recently Completed Dissertations 

 



 ##  

  expand\_more  

 
  

 



###    2025  expand\_more  

**Anthony Derveniadis-Hernández (Portuguese and French)**

"Finding Beauty in Pain: Working through Pigment and Blood in the Works of Caio Fernando Abreu, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Hervé Guibert"

---

**Émile Levesque-Jalbert (French)**

"L'écologie du possible: Les écritures environnementales contemporaines en France et au Québec"

---

**Roberto A. Talavera Pagán (Spanish)**

"Scripts of Shame: *Libro de Apolonio*, *Vida de Santa María Egipçiaca,* and *Libro de Buen Amor*"

---

**Caio Cesar Esteves de Souza (Portuguese)**

“A History Written in Flesh: The Embodied Archive of the Sixteenth-Century Tupinambá”

---

 **Carlos A. González (French and Spanish)**

“Facing the Monster: The Ethical Challenge of Weird Literature”

---

 **Lisa Anne Kostur (French)**

“Choreographic Objects & Kinesis in a Social-Sensual Grand Siècle”

 

 



###    2024  expand\_more  

**Juan Arias (Spanish)**  
"Humanity on Trial: Countering Anthropocentrism in Late Medieval Iberia"

---

**Ignacio Azcueta (Spanish)**  
"Dislocaciones espectrales: Formas de la pesquisa en la literatura y el cine latinoamericano contemporáneo (2004-2018)"

---

**Rachel Combs-Gonzalez (Latinx)**  
"Queering Apocalypse: Queer Latinx Approaches to History and Hope in the Unending End Times of Western Modernity"

---

**Felicia Cucuta (French)**  
"Unsilencing the Past, Unsilencing the Present: Care Ethics in Wajdi Mouawad's Oeuvre"

---

**Valentina Frasisti (Italian)**  
"History Needs to be Rewritten: Italian Feminist Bookstores in the 1980's. Three Case Studies."

---

**Matthew Griffith (Italian)**  
"Video Party: Early Video Art in Italy and the Essence of Network Culture"

---

**Maiara Knihs (Portuguese)**  
"Contradizendo os arquivos da nação: revisões da “mãe preta” na arte brasileira"

---

**Alina Lazar (Portuguese)**  
"Mediated, Mitigated, Liberated: Hélio Oiticica’s Participatory Art and the Reinvention of the Public"

---

**Mauro Lazarovich (Spanish)**  
"Citizens of Nowhere: Stateless and Refugee Literature in Latin America"

---

**José de León González (Spanish)**  
"The Cuban Hypothesis: The Radical 1960s and their Aftermath"

---

**Massiel Torres Ulloa (Latinx)**  
"Perverse Freedoms: Genealogies of Black Resistance in Hispaniola"

 

 



###    2023  expand\_more  

**Therese Banks (French)**  
"(Hi)story-telling and Holy War: Narrating the Crusades from Medieval to Early Modern France"

---

**Rodrigo Del Rio (Spanish)**  
"Running Out of Time: Developmentalism and the Latin American Boom"

---

**Emily Epperson (French)**  
"A New Old World: The Invention of France in Early Modern Encounters"

---

**Maria Gatti (French)**  
"Double Agent: Literature in Cold War Americas"

---

**Aaron Litvin (Portuguese)**  
"Marriage in Contemporary Northeast Brazilian Popular Poetry and Comedy"

---

**Isaac Magana (Spanish)**  
"Disputing the Acoustic Territory: Politics of Sound and Sonic Order in 16th- and 17th-century Mexico City"

---

**Luca Politi (Italian)**  
"The Renewal of the Pastoral in Italy"

---

**Anne Ratnoff (French)**  
"Writing Over the Referent: Autofiction and Subjectivity"

---

**Emma Zitzow-Childs (French)**  
"Resounding Fantasies: Music as a Tool of Social Critique in the 20th- and 21st-century French Novel"

 

 



###    2022  expand\_more  

**Matthew Barfield (French)**  
"A ‘Moraliste Moment’?: Ethics in Eighteenth-Century French Moralist Writing from Vauvenargues to Joubert"

---

**Alberto Castilo Ventura (Spanish)**  
"The (Non)Modern Mesoamerican World: Literature and Politics in Twentieth-Century Mexico and Central America"

---

**Maria Gomez Lara** **(Spanish)**  
"Tocar con las palabras: poéticas de la voz en la poesía latinoamericana contemporánea"

---

**Lucas Mertehikian (Spanish)**  
"Fake Originals: Collecting Latin America"

---

**Nikhita Obeegadoo (French and Spanish)**  
"The Silence of the Seabed: Reimagining Traumatic Water Crossings in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean"

---

**Natalie Ramirez (Spanish)**  
"In the Public Confessional: Empiricism and Truth in Latin American Autobiographical Writing, 1834-1843"

---

**Bahij Tamer (French)**  
"The Crux of Luxury: Manufacturing Dreams Under the Sun King"

---

**Hyun-Kyung Yuh (French)**  
"Maps, Migrants, Markets: International Economic Law and the Structural Violence of Borders"

 

 



###    2021  expand\_more  

**Cristina Garcia (Spanish)**  
"Singing Against the Devil: Literature, Song and Nation in the Borderlands"

---

**Amelia Linsky (Italian)**  
"The Sound of Persuasion: Vocal Enchantments Between Natural Philosophy and the *Gerusalemme liberata*"

---

**Wilnomy Perez Perez (Spanish)**  
"Luces y sombras espirituales: el Mancebo de Arévalo y la tradición sufí"

---

**Matthew Rodriguez (French)**  
"Enduring Images: Mourning and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century French Literature (Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Hervé Guibert)"

---

**Kylie Sago (French)**  
"The Empire of Disgust: France's Colonies in the 18th and 19th Centuries"

---

**Madeleine Wolf (French)**  
"The Noise of the Text: Writing Dissonance and Disruption in Nineteenth-Century French Literature"

 

 



###    2020  expand\_more  

**Kacey Carter (Portuguese)**  
"The Wrong Side of the Wall: Experiencing Urban Exclusion Through Literatura Periférica"

---

**Mariya Chokova (Portuguese)**  
"Colette, Teixeira, Aleramo: Three Philosophies on Female Sexuality"

---

**Ifigenia Gonis (French)**  
"The Aesthetics of the Frontal Stage Dynamic in Relation to and as a Reflection of Sociocultural Urban Politics: A Case-Study of Four Paris-area Theatres"

---

**Martin De La Nuez Thenesoya (Spanish)**  
"Insular Sintaxis: Towards a New Transatlantic Paradigm"

---

**Anna White-Nockleby (Spanish)**  
"Crisis Aesthetics: Community and Critique in 21st-Century Argentine Performance"