Alumni

View alumni and their published dissertations organized by decade from 1960s to the current day. 

2020s

Caroline Lemak Brickman, Ph.D., 2020 – Dissertation: The Modernist Russian Lyric Thinks Through Classical Myth

Brian Egdorf, Ph.D., 2021 – Dissertation: The Psychological Novel and Science of the Brain: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the Narrative of Consciousness

Helena Kernan, M.A., 2021

David Parker, Ph.D., 2021 – Dissertation: Writing Living People: The Promise and Inadequacy of Mimetic Characterization in Late Soviet Literature

Emma Santelmann, M.A., 2021

Emily Laskin, Ph.D., 2021

Dominick Lawton, Ph.D., 2022 – Dissertation: Revolts of Things: The Poetics of Materialism in Russian Revolutionary Literature

Kathryn Pribble, Ph.D., 2022 – Dissertation: Multiplicity and Metaform: Late Russian Romanticism as Literary Laboratory

Christina Schwartz, Ph.D. Candidate, 2023

Lily Scott, Ph.D., 2023 – Dissertation: The Struggle with Nature: Socialist Realism in the Soviet Countryside

Jane Shamaeva, M.A., 2023

2010s

Polina Dimova, Ph.D., 2010

Lucas (Luke) Stratton, Ph.D. Candidate, 2010

Christine Trychin (neé Schick), 2010

Katya Balter, Ph.D. Candidate, 2011

Traci Lindsey, Ph.D., 2011 – Dissertation: Bulgarian Verbs of Motion: Slavic Verbs in a Balkan Context

Julia McAnallen, Ph.D., 2011 – Dissertation: The History of Predicative Possession in Slavic: Internal Development vs. Language Contact

Elena Nelson, Ph.D., 2011 – Dissertation: Tradition and Innovation in Russian Church Slavonic Hymnography

Jillian Porter, Ph.D., 2011 – Dissertation: Money and Mad Ambition: Economies of Russian Literature 1830-1850

Kathryn Schild, Ph.D., 2011 – Dissertation: Between Moscow and Baku: National Literatures at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers

Alyson Tapp, Ph.D., 2011 – Dissertation: From the Elegy to the End of the Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion

Cameron Wiggins, Ph.D., 2011 – Dissertation: The Drama in Disguise: Dramatic Modes of Narration and Textual Structure in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel

Laura Mieka Erley, Ph.D., 2012 – Dissertation: Reclaiming Native Soil: Cultural Mythologies of Soil in Russia and Its Eastern Borderlands from the 1840s to the 1930s

Anastasia Kayiatos, Ph.D., 2012 – Dissertation: Silence and Alterity in Russia after Stalin, 1955-1975

Sarah Ruth Lorenz, Ph.D., 2012 – Dissertation: Visionary Mimesis: Imitation and Transformation in the German Enlightenment and Russian Realism

Jessica Merrill, Ph.D., 2012 – Dissertation: The Role of Folkloristics in the Development of Russian Formalist and Czech Structuralist Literary Theory

Susanna Merrill, M.A., 2012

Irina Kogel, Ph.D. Candidate, 2013

Katy Sosnak, Ph.D., 2013 – Dissertation: Unmasking the Invisible: Russian and Japanese Cultural Exchanges from 1890 to 1917

Piper Wheeler, M.A., 2013

Daniel Brooks, Ph.D., 2014 – Dissertation: Russian Literary Portraiture in the Twentieth Century: Collecting and Re-Collecting Lichnosti in Criticism and Memoir

Erin Coyne, Ph.D., 2014 – Dissertation: Coming Down From the Mountain: Dialect Contact and Convergence in Contemporary Hutsulshchyna

Ian David, M.A., 2014

Tony H. Lin, Ph.D., 2014 – Dissertation: Myth and Appropriation: Fryderyk Chopin in the Context of Russian and Polish Literature and Culture

Malgorzata Szajbel-Keck, Ph.D., 2015 – Dissertation: Secondary Predication in Polish

Megan Barickman, M.A., 2015

Cammeron Girvin, Ph.D., 2016 – Dissertation: How to Build a 'Folk' Song: Socialist Song Texts and Folkloric Language in Bulgarian and South Slavic

Zachary Johnson, Ph.D., 2016 – Dissertation: Desire, Event, Vision: Forms of Intersubjectivity in the 19th-Century Russian Novel

Chloe Kitzinger, Ph.D., 2016 – Dissertation: Illusion and Instrument: Problems of Mimetic Characterization in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy

Josefina Lundblad-Janjic, Ph.D., 2017 – Dissertation: Writer or Witness: Problems of Varlam Shalamov’s Late Prose and Dramaturgy

Isobel Palmer, Ph.D., 2018 – Dissertation: Vital Signs: Rhythm, Image, and Voice in Russian Modernist Poetry and Theory 1905-1924

Thomas H.J. Dyne, Ph.D., 2019 – Dissertation: Bog znaet: The Ethics of Omniscience in Russian Narrative, 1845-1870

Jennifer Flaherty, Ph.D., 2019 – Dissertation: Forms of the Peasant: Aesthetics and Social Thought in Russian Realism, 1847-1877

Brendan Hamilton, M.A., 2019

Matthew Kendall, Ph.D., 2019 – Dissertation: Sound Works: Model Listeners in Soviet Art, 1929-1941

2000s

Lilya Kaganovsky, Ph.D., 2000

Ann Elizabeth McDevitt Miller, Ph.D., 2000 – Dissertation: The Struggle to Create the New Man: The Literary Criticism and Career of Vladimir Friche

Sarah Shull, Ph.D., 2000 – Dissertation: The Experience of Space: The Privileged Role of Spatial Prefixation in Czech and Russian

Anne Hruska, Ph.D., 2001 – Dissertation: Infected Families: Outsider Figures in the Works of Leo Tolstoy

Ellen Langer, Ph.D., 2001 – Dissertation: Individuality and Grammar: Instrumental Singular Variation in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literary Prose

Sabine Stoll, Ph.D., 2001 – Dissertation: The Acquisition of Russian Aspect

Konstantine Klioutchkine, Ph.D., 2002 – Dissertation: Russian Literature and the Press, 1860-1914

Karin Larsen, Ph.D., 2002 – Dissertation: The Evolution of the System of Long and Short Adjectives in Medieval Slavic and Old Russian

José Alaniz, Ph.D., 2003

Christopher Caes, Ph.D., 2004 – Dissertation: Historical Contingency and Conceptions of the Self in Stalinist-era and Post-Stalinist Polish Literature and Film, 1950-1960

Ingrid Kleespies, Ph.D., 2004 – Dissertation: Nomad Nation, Wandering Writer: Writing, Travel, and National Identity in Russian and Polish Literature (From the Late Eighteenth Century to the End of the Nineteenth Century)

Ann Marsh-Flores, Ph.D., 2004 – Dissertation: Literary Collaboration and the Rise of the Russian Woman Writer: Or, How Zinaida Volkonskaia Learned To Write in Tsarist Russia

Lillian Vallee, Ph.D., 2004 – Dissertation: Bear with a Cross: Primordial Tradition in the Work of Czeslaw Milosz

Boris Wolfson, Ph.D., 2004 – Dissertation: Staging the Soviet Self: Literature, Theater, and Stalinist Culture, 1929-1939

Patrick Henry, Ph.D., 2006 – Dissertation: Metarealism and the Question of Russian Postmodernism

Polina Barskova, Ph.D., 2006 – Dissertation: Enchanted by the Spectacle of Death: Forms of the End in Leningrad Culture (1917-1934)

Michelle Viise, Ph.D., 2006 – Dissertation: The Culture of the Christian Orthodox Printing House in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania

Anne Dwyer, Ph.D., 2007 – Dissertation: Improvising Empire: Literary Accounts from the Russian and Austrian Borderlands, 1862-1923

Magdalena Kay, Ph.D., 2007 – Dissertation: Knowing One’s Place: Negotiating Belonging and Identity in the Poetry of Adam Zagajewski, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Julia Hartwig

Michael Kunichika, Ph.D., 2007 – Dissertation: The Penchant for the Primitive: Archaeology, Ethnography, and the Aesthetics of Russian Modernism

Stiliana Milkova, Ph.D., 2007 – Dissertation: Sightseeing: Writing Vision in Slavic Travel Narratives

Victoria Somoff, Ph.D., 2007 – Dissertation: From Authority to Author: Russian Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820-1850

Jonathan Craig Stone, Ph.D., 2007 – Dissertation: Conceptualizing “Symbolism”: Institutions, Publications, Readers, and the Russian Propagation of an Idea

Renee Perelmutter, Ph.D., 2008 – Dissertation: Referential Negation: Syntax/Semantics of Negative Constructions and Their Interaction with Narrative Structures in Modern Russian

Roy Chan, Ph.D., 2009 – Dissertation: The Edge of Knowing: Dreams and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature

Boris Maslov, Ph.D., 2009 – Dissertation: Pindaric Epinikion and the Evolution of Poetic Genres in Archaic Greece

1990s

Alexis Eugene Emerson, Ph.D., 1990 – Dissertation: Alexandr Blok and the Mother-Figure

Jennifer Irene Hudin, Ph.D., 1990 – Dissertation: Passive Constructions in Russian

Anthony Vanchu, Ph.D., 1990 – Dissertation: Yurii Olesha’s Artistic Prose and Utopian Mythologies of the 1920s

Francis Butler, Ph.D., 1991 – Dissertation: Images of Missionaries and Innovative Rulers in East Slavic Literature from Early Times Through the Reign of Peter the Great

Conor Anthony Daly, Ph.D., 1991 – Dissertation: Linguistic Change and Cultural Paradigms: The Development of Russian Scholarly Prose (18th-20th Centuries)

Allen James Kuharski, Ph.D., 1991 – Dissertation: The Theatre of Witold Gombrowicz

Eric Naiman, Ph.D., 1991 – Dissertation: Sexuality and Utopia: The Debate in the Soviet 1920s

Mary Foster Peabody, Ph.D., 1991 – Dissertation: Traditional and Individualistic Aspects of the Petitions of the Archpriest Avvakum

Paul Eric Carlson, Ph.D., 1992 – Dissertation: Some Functions of Poetic Diction in A. K. Tolstoy’s “Smert’ Ioanna Groznogo”

William J. Comer, Ph.D., 1992 – Dissertation: The Russian Religious Dissenters and the Literary Culture of the Symbolist Generation

Celia Leckey, Ph.D., 1992 – Dissertation: Relative Clauses in Medieval Russian Texts

Anne Nesbet, Ph.D., 1992 – Dissertation: The Aesthetics of Violence in Russian and East German Literature

Brian Horowitz, Ph.D., 1993 – Dissertation: M. O. Gershenzon and Intellectual Life of Russia’s Silver Age

Margaret Kabalin Leckey, Ph.D., 1993 – Dissertation: Vjekoslav Babukic: His Role as Linguist During the Illyrian Movement

Torsten Martin Gustaf Lofstedt, Ph.D., 1993 – Dissertation: Russian Legends About Forest Spirits in the Context of Northern European Mythology

Ruth Rischin, Ph.D., 1993 – Dissertation: Semën Iushkevich (1868-1927): The Man and His Art

David Mohammed Benjamin Lyle Herman, Ph.D., 1993 – Dissertation: Representing Otherness: Urban Poverty in Russian Literature from Karamzin to Nekrasov

Neil Bermel, Ph.D., 1994 – Dissertation: Context and the Lexicon in the Development of Russian Aspect

Susan C. Kresin, Ph.D., 1994 – Dissertation: Third Person Reference in Russian and Czech

David Powelstock, Ph.D., 1994 – Dissertation: Poet as Officer and Oracle: Mikhail Lermontov’s Aesthetic Mythology

Mary Rees, Ph.D., 1994 – Dissertation: Introductions of New Characters in Russian Memoirs: Discourse Constraints on Word Order

Melissa Frazier, Ph.D., 1995 – Dissertation: Frames of the Imagination: Gogol’s “Arabeski” and the Romantic Question of Genre

David Montgomery, Ph.D., 1995 – Dissertation: Ivan Bunin and the Persistence of Memory: Recurrence, Mutability, and Desire in Three Major Texts

Shawn Kate Elliott, Ph.D., 1997 – Dissertation: The Aesthetics of Russian Folk Religion and The Brothers Karamazov

David Matthews, Ph.D., 1997 – Dissertation: Case Variation in Contemporary Standard Russian

Grace Morsberger, Ph.D., 1997 – Dissertation: The Russian Woman Writer in the Salon: Issues of Gender and Literary Space

Evgenii Bernshtein, Ph.D., 1998 – Dissertation: Western Models of Sexuality in Russian Modernism

Avram Brown, Ph.D., 1998 – Dissertation: Modernist Apocrypha: Contexts of the Gospel Plot in Russian Modernism

Keith Goeringer, Ph.D., 1998 – Dissertation: The Syntax and Semantics of Adverbs in Russian: Scope, Orientation, and Word Order

William Nickell, Ph.D., 1998 – Dissertation: Tolstoy in the Public Domain: His Death as a National Narrative

Molly W. Wesling, Ph.D., 1998 – Dissertation: The Russian Representation of Napoleon: A Cultural Mythology

Matthew Baerman, Ph.D., 1999 – Dissertation: Free to Fixed Stress in Slavic

Margherita DiCeglie, Ph.D., 1999 – Dissertation: The Fate of Humanism in Fin-de-siècle Russia: Viacheslav Ivanov’s Philosophical Speculations and Poetic Vision. The Dialogue of Poetry and Philosophy

Rob Wessling, Ph.D., 1999 – Dissertation: Semyon Nadson and the Cult of the Tubercular Poet

1980s

Anthony Anemone, Ph.D., 1985 – Dissertation: Konstantin Vaginov and the Leningrad Avant-Garde: 1921-1934

Lenore Grenoble, Ph.D., 1986

Peter Scotto, Ph.D., 1987 – Dissertation: The Image of Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva

Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Ph.D., 1987 – Dissertation: The Russian Pseudo-autobiography and the Creation of Russian Childhood

Irina Gutkin, Ph.D., 1989 – Dissertation: The Novel of Socialist Realism as a Phenomenon of Literary Evolution

1970s

William Craft Brumfield, Ph.D., 1973

Johanna Nichols, Ph.D., 1973 – Dissertation: The Balto-Slavic Predicate Instrumental: A Problem in Diachronic Syntax

1960s

Robert P. Hughes, Ph.D., 1969

Michael S. Flier, Ph.D., 1968

Helen S. Schulak, Ph.D., 1967