Dissertations

Completed Dissertations

Student Name Dissertation Title Degree Program Year

Nicholas Forster

“The Period Between Was My Life”:

Self-Adaptation and the Many Lives of Bill Gunn”

with African American Studies 2019

Regina Karl

“Manipulations: The Hand as Symbol and Symptom in the Arts and Literature after 1900”

with German

2019

Viktoria Paranuk

“Soviet Cinema Comes in from the Cold: Realism, the Thaw, and the Aesthetic of Sincerity.”

​with Slavic 2019

Masha Shpolberg

“Labor in Late Socialism: the Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest 1968-1981”

with Comparative Literature 2019
Luca Peretti “Neocapitalist Realism: ENI’s Industrial Films in the Anticolonial Era” with Italian 2018
Alexandra Catrickes “Cinematic Melodrama as Historical Mode: Art, Geography, and Hyper-realism in Italian Melodrama Films” with Italian 2018
Ila Tyagi ”Extending the Eye: The American Oil Industry in Moving Images” with American Studies 2018
Kirsty Dootson “Industrial Color: Chromatic Technologies in Britain (1856-1971)” with History of Art 2018
Mallory Ahern “Flickers, Loops, Dots, Stacks, and Tracings: Cinematic Devices and the Technical Images, 1960-1975” with History of Art 2018
Moira Weigel “Facing Animals in the Age of Celluloid” with Comparative Literature 2017
Mihaela Mihailova “Negotiating Reality: Animated Realism in the Digital Age” with Slavic 2017
Daniel Fairfax “The Theoretical Legacy of Cahiers du cinéma (1968–1973)” with Comparative Literature 2017
Janett Buell “Body, Space, Memory: Mapping Notions of Human Experience in German & American Media Theory” with German 2017
Raisa Sidenova “From Pravda to Vérité: Soviet Documentary on Film and Television, 1953–1982” with Slavic 2017
Zelda Roland “Hollywood Stockyards: People and Places in the Backgrounds of Classical Hollywood” with History of Art 2016
Joshua Sperling “Realism, Modernism and Commitment in the Work of John Berger 1952–76” with Comparative Literature 2016
Jordan Brower “A Literary History of the Studio System, 1911–1950” with English 2016
Anne Berke “ ‘You Just Type’: Women Television Writers in 1950s America” with American Studies 2016
Rea Amit “The Japanese Postwar Golden Age of Cinema: Industry, Reception, Aesthetics, and Demographics” with East Asian 2016
Patrick Reagan “The Contested Community: European Auteur Cinema at the Beginning of the 21st Century”

with German

2016
Takuya Tsunoda “Land of the Dawn: Iwanami Productions and Postwar Japanese Cinema” with East Asian 2015
Claudia Calhoun “ ‘The Story You Are About to Hear Is True’: Dragnet, Transmedia Storytelling, and the Postwar Police Procedural” with American Studies 2015
Joshua Glick “Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977” with American Studies 2014
Grant Wiedenfeld “Elastic Esthetics: Media and Metaphysics in Mallarmé, Griffith, and Flaubert” with Comparative Literature 2014
Ryan Cook “Through the Looking Glass: Flirtations and Nonsense in 1960s Japanese Film Culture” with East Asian 2013
Michael Cramer “The Pedagogical Art Film in European Cinema” with Comparative Literature 2013
Naoki Yamamoto “Realities That Matter: The Development of Realist Film Theory and Practice in Japan, 1985–1945” with East Asian 2012
Jeremi Szaniawski “The Image and the Interstice: Alexander Sokurov’s Poetics of Paradox” with Slavic 2012
Michael J. Anderson The Early Howard Hawks” with History of Art 2012
Nora Gortcheva “Modern Spaces and Cinema: Movie Theaters and City Films in Wilhelmine and Weimar Berlin” with German 2011
Seung-hoon Jeong “Cinematic Interfaces: Retheorizing Apparatus, Image, Subjectivity” with Comparative Literature 2011
Richard Suchenski “Utopian Romanticism and the Poetics of Scale: Modernist Explorations of the Cinematic Long Form” with History of Art 2011
Miriam Posner “Depth Perception: Narrative and the Body in Medical Filmmaking” with American Studies 2011
Victor Fan “Football Meets Opium: Political Violence, Sovereignty, and Cinema Archeaeology between ‘England’ and ‘China’ ” with Comparative Literature 2010
Jennifer Stob “ ‘With and Against Cinema’: The Situationist International and the Cinematic Image”  with History of Art 2010
Alice Lovejoy “A Military Avant-Garde: Art Cinema in the Czechoslovak Army, 1951–1971” with Comparative Literature 2009
Anne Kern “Games and the Sacred in European Literature and Film 1900-1940” with Comparative Literature 2007
Jennifer Smyth American Cavalcade: Hollywood as Historian in the 1930s” with American Studies 2004

Dissertations in Progress

Student Name Dissertation Title Degree Program
     
Ila Tyagi “Seeing the Invisible: The American Oil Industry in Moving Images’ with American Studies
Jamicia Lackey “The Cinematic Registers of Postcolonial Diaspora” with African-American Studies
Cecile Lagesse “France and Chinese Cinema (1980–2010)” with East Asian
 Andrew Vielkind “In Media Res: Experimental Cinema and Technoscience During the Cold War Period” with History of Art
     
Andrey Tolstoy “Going off the Grid in Film and Literature” with Comparative Literature
Luca Peretti “Moving images in a country in motion: Eni’s Cinema at the Crossroads of Modernity and Tradition” with Italian
Malory Ahern “Flickers, Loops, Dots, Stacks, and Tracings: Cinematic Devices and the Technical Image, 1960–1975” with History of Art
Sean Strader “ ‘L’irréel avec l’évidence du réalisme’: Mythology and Technology in the Cinema of Jean Cocteau” with French
     
Kirsty Sinclair-Dootson Industrial Colour: Chromatic Technologies in Britain, 1856–1971 with History of Art
Maria Catrickes Cinematic Melodrama as Historial Mode with Italian