Students in the Department of Liberal Studies rethink the modern world by examining the history of ideas, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, anthropology, media theory, and more. Their research combines theoretical foundations with critical engagement, achieving an in-depth understanding of the global community and our place within it. 

Recent Thesis Titles

2020

Kato Trieu: "Cucking Death"

Elvia Wilk: "Death by Landscape: Recomposing Bodies"

Alexander Lanz: "The Lonely Moment: Allegory, Class, and Method in Jameson's Political Unconscious"

2019

Victoria Ortega: "The Story Had Held Us: Dialogue, Narrative Framework, and the Art of Storytelling in Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw'"

Nicole Messina Rodriguez: "Recovering Juana de Ibarbourou"

Jason Marcus: "Necromancy and Nostalgia in the Modern World"

Benjamin Kodres-O'Brien: "Derivative Nature: A Multispecies Extinction Hedge"

Zev Fagin: "Reading Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato's Cave with Joseph Campbell's Monomyth: A Differentiation Between Spiritual and Philosophical Mythology"

Florian Degoo: "Living in L'Atalante"

2018

Stefania Dinu: "The Liminal Gaze: A Collection of Epiphanic Intercultural Encounters"

Leila Taylor: "Darkly through the Veil: An Inquiry Into the (African) American Goth(ic)"

Mariana Flores Lizaola: "The Profits of Suffering: Selling 'the Stories that Matter'"

Aaron Newman: "But Enough about Me: Pessimism and Life Writing in the Work of Eugene Thacker"

2017

Matt Waters: "Children of Consequence"

Katie Rogin: "Work: A Writer's Memoir"

Macushla Robinson Silver: "Sugar and Blood: A Genealogy"

Dilara O'Neil: "Our Own Strange Parts: Autoimmunity, Autofiction, Autonomy, and the Automatic: Immunological Discourse Regarding Self and Other"

Hilary Ilkay: "'For Diotima Lives': Reclaiming the Female Philosopher" 

Andrew Locke: "CRITICISM 'wasteland'// 'frontier' // 'peak'"

Valentina Sarmiento Cruz: "The Unfulfilled Public of Agitprop!"

2016

Katherine Parker-Magyar: "The Bumpy Road Children"

Tolga Yalur: "Not in Her Name: Woman, Truth and Difference in Atif Yilmaz's 'Vasfiye Her Name'"

Aurora Prelevic: "My Country is the Most Beautiful of All: A Eulogy for Yugoslavia"

Juliana Bechara: "Native & Endemic Fruit Species Shifting Social, Historical and Cultural Paradigms: A New Development Pathway for the Brazilian Semi Arid"

Evdoxia Ragkou: "The Unbearable Abstractness of the Absolute"

Fiona Bryson: "Poetology of Trauma: Language as a Space for Female subversion in Artistic Practice"

2015

Stephanie Bedus: "The Traditions that Join Us: Sex, Love and the Institution of Marriage"

John Boland: "Subjectivity, Skepticism, and Relativism in Kant's Epistemology"

Alyea Canada: "The Mechanical Wife: Technology, Patriarchy, and Feminism in 'The Stepford Wives'"

Veronica Cassidy: "Workers Trespass on the Turf: Virginia Woolf's Populist Pedagogy"

Ned Frame: "On Knowing Greek"

Christopher James Grearson: "Becoming Technology: Gestell and DNA Computing"

Synne Borgen: "I Move to Keep Things Whole"

Bureen Ruffin: "Woolf and Kincaid: Writing Personal Identity"

Luz Santodomingo: "The Duke of Burgundy: Mutal Masochism as the Ultimate Expression of Love in Slave/Slave Relationship"

Marie Obegi: "Women: Artistic Creation and Procreation"

Alex Tonetti: "Ethics, Politics and Meta Theater in Seneca's Medea"

Sonia Qadir: "The Antiterrorism Regime in Pakistan: Towards a Deep History of the Present"