Senior Independent Study Theses from 2021
Code War Savior: A Novella, Wyatt H. Brugge
Department: English
Sunscreen, Zoe Covey
Department: English
Can Climate Fiction Novels Inspire Social Change? A Literary and Empirical Ecocritical Analysis, Claire Davidson
Department: English; Sociology and Anthropology
Sinister Cinema: Depictions of Evil in the WWII and Postwar Thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot, Holly N. Engel
Department: English; French and Francophone Studies
Representation of African Immigration in Short and Long-Form Media, Abigail E. Everidge
Department: English
A Re-evaluation of Texts Taught in High School English Classrooms: Why a Need for a Curriculum Reboot is Necessary, Morgan Paige Fields
Department: English
At the Corner of Two Walls, Sierra A. Foltz
Department: English
Paradoxical Descriptions of Divine Beings, Tiago Garcia
Department: English; Religious Studies
Multilingual Literature of the New World: A Literary and Semantic Study of Spanglish in Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas, Justin Garibotti
Department: English; Spanish
The Music of the People: Appalachian Ballads and the Search for the Authentic in the 1960s American Folk Music Revival, Anna Halgash
Department: English; History
This Boat is Obviously Sinking : The Response of 90s Musicians to Neoliberalism, Andrew T. Kilbride
Department: English
American Dragon: A Story of an Asian American Woman Finding Her Way Home, Hannah Langer
Department: English; Art and Art History
Haunted Households: Adaptation, Genre, and Gender Politics in Horror and the Gothic During Second Wave Feminism, Eliza C. Letteney
Department: English
From the Controller to the Television Screen - Adapting Dragon Age: Origins into a Television Drama, Aaron McAllister
Department: English
Know My Rage: A Novel with Critical Introduction, Alicia Messenger
Department: English
A Protest Analysis: Examining the Effectiveness of Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, and the Civil Rights Movement, Kate Murphy
Department: English; Global Media and Digital Studies
“The Knight and the Demon”: Intersecting Poetry, Demonology, and the Middle Ages, N Praml
Department: English; History
Immerse, Sarah Rapacz
Department: English
Protest or Riot?: The Role of News Media in Characterizing the Unrest in Ferguson, Emma Reiner
Department: English; Political Science
Eat Your Heart Out: Cannibalism, Incorporation, and Transgression in Contemporary and Traditional Fairy Tales, Kathryn S. Scott
Department: English
The Apprentice: With Critical Introduction, James P. Shanahan
Department: English
Is This Music? Poetry, YouTube Memes, and Rap at Commencement, Charlie Smrekar
Department: English; Music
A Thing Is An Essay Without Words: An Essay Collection, Lillie Therese Soukup
Department: English
"The Bliss of Solitude": In Search of Fulfilled Single Characters in Seventeenth through Twentieth Century Anglophone and Francophone Literature, Annabelle Vosmeier
Department: English; French and Francophone Studies
Senior Independent Study Theses from 2020
So Our Children Can Fly Free: Toni Morrison Challenging a Biased American Literary Tradition and Monolithic Portrayals of Blackness Through African American Discourse, Sofia Abdirizak
Department: English
The Timekeeper's Compass, James M. Alltop
Department: English
Descendants of Jori, Emily H. Bernstein
Department: English
East vs. West: A Study of Orientalist Tropes in Sports Journalism, Benjamin R. Blotner
Department: English
The Dream Machine, Amelia Burke
Department: English
"Nothing That I Don't Like:" Gwendolen Harleth's Search for Life Outside the Marriage Plot in Daniel Deronda, Imogen Campbell Hendricks
Department: English
Brew in Advertising: Marketing and the Craft Beer Industry, Ciaran Conway
Department: English
Out of the Vat: A Collection of Poems, Alexander E. Doone
Department: English
In Your Orbit, Sara Fikse
Department: English
Greenbean Comics: An Independent Study!!!, Samantha Green
Department: English
Awake, Waverly Swan Hart
Department: English
Write It Slant: Queerness and Form in The Argonauts and Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, Eleanor Linafelt
Department: English; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
An Exploration of Changes and the Effectiveness of Gendered Marketing in Young Adult Novels, Olivia Maher
Department: Economics; English
Life, Spilled, Gianmarco A. Martignetti
Department: English
Cheap Thrills and Moral Guidance: The Limitations of Subversive Themes in Mid-Nineteenth Century Urban Literature Centered on New York City, Victoria McCaslin
Department: English; History
Almost Heaven: An Aubade to Identity in Central Appalachian Memoir, Emilee McCubbins
Department: English
Witch's Luck, Claire Montgomery
Department: English
“In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”: Victorian Literary Denunciation of the Duties of Motherhood, Ellie Peabody
Department: English
A Grave New World: A Critical and Creative Study Examining Environmental Decline Within Transnational Dystopian Literature, Andrew Newcomb Peacock
Department: English
A House Without Doorknobs: and Other Essays, Kyra Perlmutter
Department: English
The Song of Siros, John-Paul W. Richard
Department: English; Russian Studies
The City of Goblins, Hope K. Siegel
Department: English
Chasing Gold Statues: A Study of Kanye West and the Case for Abstract Minimalism in the Digital Age, Sarah Stutler
Department: Art and Art History; English
Revolutionary Possibilities: Anarchist Philosophy and Its Influence on the Work of Thomas Pynchon, Addison R. Wanner
Department: English
Who are the Savages?: Racialization of Eating and Appetites in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Brown’s Edgar Huntly, and Melville’s Typee, Taylor Wood
Department: English
Senior Independent Study Theses from 2019
Insurrecting Purity: Creativity as Resistance in Somatic Ambiguity, Margy J. Adams
Department: English; Philosophy
The Drum Break: Using the Poetics of Hip Hop as a Lens to Observe the Black Freedom Movement Post-Civil Rights & Black Power, Andrew Aldridge
Department: English; History
Subverting Narratives: Queer Applications of the Comic Form, Emily Anderson
Department: English
Mind the (gender)Gap: Navigating Space and Movement in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, Lydia Barr
Department: English
Liminal Souls, Liminal Bodies: Michelangelo’s Non Finito and the Poetics of Liberation, Mackenzie Clark
Department: Art and Art History; English
In the Act of Witnessing Art, Regan Concannon Clark
Department: Art and Art History; English
Of Sleep and Subversion: Neil Gaiman's Sandman as a Groundbreaking Comic, Will Manning Courtney
Department: English
Empowered Dolls, Empower Girls: An Analysis of the Contradictory Messages in the Literature and Marketing of the Historical American Girl Doll Collection, Mallory I. Crane
Department: English
Psychic or Not: Examining the Effects of Psychic Distance on Implicit Attitudes and Empathetic Connections, Nathaniel C. Davis
Department: English; Psychology
Science Perspectives and Stories: A Journey of Growth and Maturity Through the Multifaceted Machine of Science, Sara Garcia
Department: Biology; English
Sybil's Travels, Maria Sophia T. Giordano-Scott
Department: English
Traces of an Unknowable Past: A Literary Investigation of Intergenerational Guilt and Trauma in Southern Identity, Nathaniel A. Harling
Department: English
“How Do You Make a Body Accountable for Its Language, Its Positioning?”: An Analysis of the Construction of Racial Identity Through Language, Kaitlyn Harrison
Department: English
Darkness? In My Dungeon? It's More Likely Than You Think: Exploring the Lovecraftian Horror Within Darkest Dungeon, Jason Huggler
Department: English
This Fool's Heart: A Collection For the Hell of It, Kristopher Johns
Department: English
‘False Frenchwoman’: William Shakespeare’s Reinterpretation of Powerful Female Historical Figures in the Reign of Elizabeth I, Rebecca Giver Johnston
Department: English; History
Mark: A Novella and Screenplay Adaptation, Alexandra J. Kangas
Department: English; Film Studies
"What's Sex Got to Do with It?": Deconstructing Audre Lorde's Theory of the Erotic in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, Sally Kershner
Department: English
Tremble, Haylee Maude
Department: English
The Waste Land as the Narrative of the Journey to Conversion, Yeeun Min
Department: English
Contents Under Pressure, Megan Murphy
Department: English
Staging the (Anthropos)cene: An Exploration of Climate Change and the Human Through Playwrighting, Daniel L. Myers
Department: English; Theatre and Dance
“She Turned Me Into A Newt!”, an Examination of the Fictionalized Identities of Cunning Folk and Witches During the Witchcraft Trials, Katarina E. Padavick
Department: History; English
On The Ground, James Rankin
Department: English
Letters from Heaven, Dylan M. Reynolds
Department: English; Philosophy
The Knights of Avalon: Origins of the Gateway, Kenzie Rogers
Department: English
Floating Away on a Slice of Pizza Sounds Like a Good Way to Go, Sam Royer
Department: English
Gluing the Feathers off My Fascinator, Anum K. Sattar
Department: English
A Study on the Efficacy of Bacteriophage Therapy and Other Stories, Allison Secard
Department: Biology; English
Beknighted Romance: An Investigation of 14th-Century Chivalrous Romance as Popular Genre, Ryan Secard
Department: English
Introductions to Ecology: How Children's Literature Inspires Environmentalism, Claire J. Smrekar
Department: English
Curious and Courageous Children: Girl Heroism and Spirituality, Sarah Specht
Department: English
Lost in Translation, Found in Culture: An Academic Inquiry on the Efficacy of Translating Culture in Latin American Magic Realist Genres, William Richard Strohmeyer
Department: English; Spanish
“Dumb Brutes” or “Fellow-Critters”: Toward a More Virtuous Characterization of Nonhuman Animals, Daniel Sweat
Department: Philosophy; English
Senior Independent Study Theses from 2018
“Everybody Worships”: Religious and Para-Religious Presences and Interactions in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Nan Denette
Department: Religious Studies; English
Being Sixty: Aging, Agency, and Personal Narrative in Simone de Beauvoir's La Vieillesse and Doris Lessing's The Diary of a Good Neighbour, Ashley R. Ferguson
Department: English; French and Francophone Studies
The Role of Travel Memoir in the Production of Orientalist on Japan, Christopher Fried
Department: English
Folktales From Origin Valley, Elen-Kalliopi Halimou
Department: English; Philosophy
Children of the Empire, Jack Healy
Department: English
Writing the Carceral Divide: Representations of Imprisonment in American Culture, Timothy Herring
Department: English
The Lord of Summer, Bird Jackson
Department: English
Unfair Journalism: An Investigation into Stereotypes That Emerged from Recent College Sports Scandals and Surrounding Media Accounts, Sam Kuhn
Department: English
“Discourse Begins in a Book Club”: An Analysis of Online Book Club Literary Discussion of Race and Gender in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Underground Railroad, Catherine Lockwood
Department: English; Sociology and Anthropology
Walden, Wilderness, and Wrenches: The Radical Environmentalism of Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey, Alex Moore
Department: English; Philosophy
Surface Tension: A Collection of Poetry, Kat Neis
Department: English
"The Kids Are All Right”: Exploring the Therapeutic Potential of the Gothic in Children’s Literature., Sara Noakes
Department: English
2-D Boys, 3-D Desires: A Critical Fan’s Primer to Romance, Sexuality & Gender in Shoujo Manga, Anime & Otome Video Games, Katherine M. Randazzo
Department: Interdepartmental; Comparative Literature; English
The Banned Books Project 2.0: A Study of The Motivations Behind Challenges and Bannings of Children’s and Young Adult Literature in Public Schools, Alice Rietz
Department: English
The Richmondian Invasion of the Late Ordovician of Cincinnati with a Focus on Trepostome Bryozoans, or the Ekphrastic Geologist and Other Essays, Matthew Shearer
Department: English; Geology
An Abridged History of Hip-Hop and Me: A Suburban Account of Urban Art, Jonah Singer
Department: English
The Road Death Traveled: The Representation of Romani Deaths in Nineteenth-Century British and French Literature, Haley Skeens
Department: English; French and Francophone Studies