Past Dissertations

The following is a list of all dissertations that have been written in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures:

2023

Natalia Plagmann
"Human Documents on Screen and Stage: A Contrapuntal Reading of Post-Soviet Documentary"

Alexander Jacobson
Warring Works: The Russian Book of the 1960's and 1970's

Olga Zolotareva
Watching the World: Cinema, Photography, and the Russian Modernist Imagination


2022

Laura Matthews
The Muse of Pedagogy: Metaphors of Education in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

Liza Mankovskaya
Under Construction: Time, Space and Embodied Work in Soviet Narratives About Construction Post-Stalin

Maxwell Parlin
Dostoevsky via Kierkegaard: Interrelations of the Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious

2021

David Hock
From a Space out of Time: Russian Poetry and the Aesthetic Ideology After the Soviet Union

2020

Lev Nikulin
Fear Obscured: The Apophatic Horror of Nikolai Gogol

2019

Massimo Balloni
For an Encyclopedia of the Living: Collective Creativity and the Early Soviet Novel

2018

Philip Gleissner
Through Thick and Thin: The Social Life of Journals under Late Socialism

Victoria Juharyan
The Cognitive Value of Love in Tolstoy: a Study in Aesthetics

2017

Timothy West
Czeslaw Milosz, Milan Kundera, Joseph Brodsky, and the Task of the Émigré Critic

 

2016

Geoff Cebula
Left Flank of the Avant-Garde – The Evolution of Oberiu Poetics

Alisa Ballard
The Actor's Consciousness in Russian Modernist Philosophy of Theater

Emily Wang
Civic Feeling: Pushkin and the Decembrist Emotional Community

Denis Zhernokleyev
Beholden by Love: A Study in the Apophasis of Dostoesky’s Poesis

2015

Lindsay Ceballos
Tragic Thinking in Early Russian Modernism: Minskii, Merezhkovski and Briusov

Elena Susanna Weygandt
Embodiment in Post-Somatic, Postdramtic Russian New Drama

Timothy Portice
The Russian Sublime: Origins, Rhetoric, and Romantic Response

2014

Jason Strudler
Mathematical Rebellion. Zero in the Russian Avant-Garde

Jennifer Wilson
Radical Chastity: The Politics of Abstinence in Late Nineteenth Century

2013

Cori Anderson
Case and event structure in Russian and Lithuanian

Vrinda Chidambaram
On Resumptive Pronouns in Slavic

2012

Anna Berman 
Siblings: The Path to Universal Brotherhood in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

2011

James Tonn 
Between Us and Artistic Appreciation: Nabokov and the Problem of Distortion  

Jesse R. Menefee 
Twisted Mirrors and Merged Polarities in Russia’s Decadent Imagination

2009

Lucie Medova 
Reflexive Clitics in Slavic and Romance Languages. A Comparative View from an Antipassive Perspective  

Mark Pettus 
Dostoevsky’s Closed Threshold in the Construction of the Existential Novel

 

2008

Yuri Corrigan 
Chekhov’s Existentialism: The Ethics of Outsideness  

Ivan Eubanks 
Influence, Discourse and Synthesis in Alexander Pushkin's Dramaturgy, with an Epilogue on Novelistic Discourse in Hordubal, Karel Capek's Adaptation of the Oresteia

Jamie McGavran
Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Poetics of Humor

 

2007

Dunja Popovic 
Sacrifice and Salvation: Twentieth-Century Russian Literature and Soviet Ideology of the Body  

Sarah Valentine (Dunn) 
The Poetry and Thought of Gennady Aigi  

2006

Tania Gordeev 
The Letter as Inserted Genre in the Russian Literary Tradition  

Sarah Beth Mohler-Kube 
A Prosaics of the Mind's Eye: Reader Visualization, Perspective Engagement, and the Visual Ethics of Tolstoy's War and Peace  

2005

Cole M Crittenden 
Theatre in Time: The Meta-Temporal Drama of Chekhov, Vvedensky, and Havel  

Laura Elaine Davies 
A Construction-Grammatical Analysis of Impersonalization in Russian  

2004

Jeanette Koenig 
A Diachronic Analysis of the Interaction of Syllabification and Jer Vocalization  

Sarah Clovis-Bishop 
The Book of Poems in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: Khodasevich, Gippius and Shvarts  

2003

Eva Rottman 
The Mary Stuart Myth in 20th Century Russian Literature  

2002

Brian K. Stimmler 
A Diachronic Analysis of the Russian Short Form Active Participle: the Syntax of Absolutes and Bare Predicate Adjuncts  

Stephanie Harves
Unaccusative Syntax in Russian  

2001

Abigail Wildman Konopasky 
A Syntacto-Morphological Analysis of Dependent Heads in Slavic  

Edit Noemi Jakab 
The Modality of Nonfinite Clauses in Slavic and Finno-Ugric  

Inessa Medzhibovskaya 
Tolstoy's Projects of Transcendence (Reading the Conversion)  

2000

David Freedel 
A Comparative Pedagogical Analysis of Introductory Russian Language Textbooks  

James E. Lavine
Topics in the Syntax of Nonagreeing Predicates in Slavic  

Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine 
From the Lyric to the Epic: Some Trends in the Early Twentieth-Century Russian POEMA  

Nicole M. Monnier 
The Man Who Became a Myth: The Canonization of Vissarion Belinsky in the Russian Literary Tradition  

1999

Thomas Cunningham 
Terrible Visions: The Sublime Image of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Opera  

1998

Anthony Prather 
Platonov's Chevengur and the Soviet Literary World of the 1920s  

Craig Cravens 
Pushkin's Evgenji Onegin, Dostoevsky's Besy, Capek's Hordubal, and Kundera's Zert: The First-Person Novel in Czech and Russian Literature  

Gabriella Safran 
Narratives of Jewish Acculturation in the Russian Empire: Bogrov, Orzeszkowa Leskov, Chekov  

Marjorie J. McShane
Ellipsis in Slavic: The Syntax-Discourse Interface  

1995

Loren Billings 
Approximation in Russian and the Single-Word Constraint  

1974

Emily Klenin 
Russian Reflexive Pronouns and the Semantic Roles of Noun Phrases in Sentences  

1973

Ronald Feldstein
The Prosodic System of Common Slavic

1972

Ellen Chances 
The Ideology of "Pocvennicestvo" in Dostoevskij's Journals Vremja and Epokha  

Nicholas Rzhevsky 
Herzen in Russian Literature  

1971

J.G. Kelso Russell 
Leskov and Folklore  

Priscilla Meyer 
Aksenov and Soviet Prose of the 1950's and 1960's  

Virginia Heron Bennett 
The Russian Tradition of Nineteenth Century Literary Memoirs and Andrej Belyj's Vospominanija o A. A. Bloke  

1970

Lewis Jules Bernhardt 
Chapters in the History of the Hebrew Literary Renaissance in Russia (1892 - 1924): Hebrew Renaissance Poetry in Russian Translation  

Michael K. Launer 
Word-Formation in the Russian Adverb  

1969

Gary Kern 
Lev Lunc, Serapion Brother  

John Earl Malmstad 
The Poetry of Andrej Belyj: A Variorum Edition  

1968

Elizabeth Phelps Sessions 
The Language of Two Versions of the First Six Chapters of the Skazanie Avraamija Palicyna  

Elliott Dunbar Mossman 
The Prose of Boris Pasternak  

1967

Joseph Benjamin Dees 
Content and Expression in the Poetry of Baratynskij  

1966

Henry Robert Hedrick 
The Poetry of Derzavin