Tools for Students
Summa and Hoopes Prize-Winning Theses
All theses that were graded Magna or higher are deposited in the Harvard Library Archives (Pusey Library, 617-495-2461). This list shows Summa theses and those that received the Hoopes Prize.
An asterisk (*) indicates that the writer of the thesis received the Hoopes Prize. Theses below the dotted line in any given year were not Summa theses, but did win a Hoopes Prize.
- Matthew Growdon Ford Madox Ford and the Wartime Mind
- Michael Grynbaum A Joke by Any Other Name
Hoax as a Social Protest: Three Case Studies
- Rachel Nolan "Wrap Th' Green Flag Round Me": Irish Republican Rhetoric in Sean O'Casey's Kathleen Listens In *
- William Payne "American Weimar": German Writers and Transcendentalist Self-Identity
- Katherine Takvorian The Sex Factor: Abolitionist Outsiders, Amalgamation, and the Search for Social Equality in America, 1825-1843
- Thomas Wickman The "Free Dollar": Money and the Imagination of Freedom in Antebellum Fugitive Slave Autobiographies *
- Heather Brink-Roby "Naturally Ordered in Sheaves": George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Taxonomy.*
- Jenny Davis Peter Kalifornsky: Working Dena'Ina Country With Words.*
- Christine DeLucia King Philip's War in Landscape and Memory.*
- Micah Fitzerman-Blue Individualized Justice and Federalism: Uncle-Niece Marriages for Jews in Rhode Island.*
- Kyle Frisina From Montgomery to Meridian: Representations of Space and Place in the Civil Rights Movement.
- Sylvia Houghteling Silk Culture: Visions of American Labor 1880-1893.
- Cara Lewis Blasting Bohemia: A Revaluation of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr.
- Iliana Montauk Moliere for Morocco: Postcolonial Negotiations of French Theater Policy (1950-1994).*
- David Wax Dismantling the Archive: Counter-history in Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el Supremo.
- Brian Distelberg The Making of a "Gay Classic": A Cultural History of Auntie Mame.*
- Katherine O'Neill Making "The Richtersveld People": Legal Personality in South African Land Reform, 1998-2004.
- Claire Pasternack Itineraries of Modern Life at the Paris Exposition of 1900.
- T. Josiah Pertz The Jewgrass Boys: Bluegrass Music's Emergence in New York City's Washington Square Park, 1946-1961.*
- Chloe Schama Sensation in the Court: The Narration of Feminine Virtue in 1861 Yelverton Bigamy Trial and its Aftermath.
-
- Stephanie Safdi How They Wrote America: Anzia Yezierska and the Discourse of Pluralism.
- Laura Schubert Liberty, Equality, Anxiety: Identity and Displacement in Post-Revolutionary France, 1815-1840.
- Shannon Ringvelski 'Buy the truth, and sell it not': The Economic Antichrist in Two Early Modern Contexts.
- Catherine Romatowski Outlining the Playing Field: Title IX, Athletic Bodies and Categories of Sex/Gender in the 1990s.*
- Katherine Stirling The Last Utopia: Aesthetics and Ideology at the 1937 Paris Exposition.
-
- Madiha Sattar Re-Placing the British?: Post-Colonial Elites and Permeable Spaces in Rushdie's South Asia.
- John Bash The Epic Canon: Satan's Guns in Paradise Lost.
- Catherine Buchanan Pointed Panegyric: The Changing Form and Mixed Message of the Caroline Masque.
- Jonathan Darman Killing "Society": Cold War Hollywood's American Upper Class.*
- Nicholas Horbaczewski The Bitter School of Honor and Faith: Forging a New Manhood in the Crucible of Combat.*
- Hayang Kim "Imagining" the Nation: Kathe Kollwitz and Artistic Representation in Wilhelmine Germany, 1895-1910.
- Beatrice Kitzinger "The Forms of Things Unknown": Fourteenth Century Visual Art and the Viewer's Ascent to Heaven.*
- Ana-Maria Lopez "Armed Only with Paintbrushes": The Debates over Art and Modernism in Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center Mural.
- Sue Meng Mapping Daniel Deronda.
- Charisse Padilla Latinidad's Limits: The Shortcomings of a Community-Based Vision of Latino Identity in Junot Diaz's Drown.
- Jonathan Sherman "We're Gonna Be Ready Tonight": Civil Rights and the Race Politics of Postwar Film Noir.
- Matthew Sussman Doing Justice: In Defense of W.H. Auden's Later Poetry.
-
- Miranda Richmond Inkblots and Bloodstains: The Development of Jacobin Ideology in Rural France.
- Anna Weiss (Re)Reading Turgenev's Rudin: Text and Context in 1850s Russia.
- Tobias Berkman Dressing Up America: The Jewish Chameleon in America's Popular Imagination.
- Marijeta Bozovic The Exiled Reflection: Mirrors in Joseph Brodsky's Poetic Ouvre.
- Angus Burgin "Among All These Forces': Fictions of a Changing Academy.
- Alexander Clark "Enigmatique par le Fond et sans Vérité dans le Détail': How the Closet Came to Be Before the Homosexual in Three Mal du Siècle Fictions.
- Trevor Cox Edward Bates, the Civil War, and the Legal Mind of the Lincoln Administration. *
- Dehn Gilmore 'It Is We Who Gnaw Like the Worm': Thomas Hardy's Novels and Victorian Debates About Artistic Permanence.
- Melissa Gniadek Divisions of a Separating World: Community in the Composite Novel -- Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven. *
- Catherine Gowl Complacency, Security, and Pain: James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the 1940s and 1960s.
- Vera Keller Quintessential Machines: Two Seventeenth Century Machines in a Changing World Culture.
- Benjamin Kornell The American Ambulance Experience and World War I Literature.
- Susan Long Foolish Fighting: Dueling, Power and License in Elizabethan and Stuart England.
- Andrew Lynn Reading Bartelby. *
- Megan Anderson McPhie Negotiationg Ideologies: Anti-Shaker Literature, 1780-1820.
- Jayne Rosefield 'What Passing Bells?': Memorializing Benjamin Britten's War Requiem.
- Daniel Rosenthal Walt Whitman's War.
- Abby Schlatter Choked by the Weeds of Domesticity: Inserting Edith Summers Kelly into American Feminist Thought. *
- Avi Steinberg The Heroism of Laughter and the Community of Laughers: The Wabbit and World War I Amewica.
- Kristen Sueoka 'Survival of the Fittest Shall Mean the Triumph of the Good, the Beautiful, the True': The Racial Millenium in A History of the American People, Souls of Black Folk, and The Birth of a Nation.
- Laura Wells Focusing on the Periphery: Anglo-Scottish Border Identity, 1314-1513.
-
- Christopher Cox Declining German America: German-Language Humor Writing and the Dissapearance of an Ethnic Group.
- Ross Douthat The Subversive Reactionary: Rider Haggard's Unimperial Fiction.
- Alexis Loeb Trial and Erreur: The Cases of Robert Brasillach and Ezra Pound in Their National Contexts.
- Lauren Brandt Nursing the Nation: Civil War Women and the Reconstruction of Self, Work and America.
- Chad Denton Öffenlichkeit and the Rhine Crisis 1840: A Study of the Reception of Nicolas Becker's Rheinland.
- Jacqueline Newmyer The Politics of Truth: Simone Weil's Theory of Education and Law. *
- Joanna Peltason The Role of Race and Black Character in Eudora Welty's Fiction, from 1936-1972.
- Jessica Richman Moving South: Northern Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement.
- David Shapiro Stranger Than Fiction: Invented Narrative in Russian Literary Criticism, 1858-1871. *
- Blythe Yee Dryden, Imperialism, and Generic Experiment. *
-
- Rebeca Gogel Mongrel Graffiti: Intertextuality and the Redemption of History in Michael Ondaatjie's In the Skin of the Lion and The English Patient.
- Eleanor Hubbard Radical Pirates: Political Thought on the Margins of Society.
- Vera Keller Imperial Presence: Systems of Representation in an Elizabethan Diplomatic Gift. (Junior Essay)
- Caitlin Anderson Immigration and Informal Empire: The British in Argentina, 1860-1890.
- Christopher Boyd Philosophers and Theologians on the Intellect: The Averroist Controversy at the University of Paris in 1270.
- Andrew Mandel "Once They Wrote Poetry, Now It's the Laundry List': Radcliffe College and Coeducational Contradictions in Postwar America.
- Margot Minardi A Rugged Maze: The Emancipation of Belinda and Chloe Spear. *
- Nora Morrison Grand Operas: Chicagoan and Parisian Interpretations of the Totalizing Art, 1860-1895.*
- Mary Nicklin Mapping the Myth: America's Continent and the Fulfillment of Virginia's Pacific Dream.*
- Nicholas Parrillo Theodore Parker's Condemnation of Daniel Webster: Slavery and the Fractured Paradigms of Political Culture.*
-
- Benjamin Railton Revolt and Reinvention Re-viewed: American Attitudes Toward the Past in History and Historical Fiction.
- Daniel Sussner Methexis: The Politics of Female Allegory and the 1871 Paris Commune.
- Sam Tepperman-Gelfant ëLooked Upon by Many as a Minister' : The Conversion of Samson Occom.
- Hannah Weiss Managing Mutiny: The Removal of Indian and Euroasian Women from Domestic Closure in British Mutiny Novels.
- Emily Wong 'To Serve and Not to Rule': The Missionary Predicament in India Between the Wars
- Dunja Popovic Brodsky vs. Pushkin: Polemical Self-Fashioning. *
- Margaret Schotte Savages, Beasts and 'Honnête Gens': Collapsing Cultural Boundareis in the Work of the Baron de Lahontan. *
-
- Kevin Amer Mirror Images: Community Organizing in Cleveland, Ohio, 1963-1965.
- Rebecca Edwards `When I Am Dead': An Examination of Death and Dying in the Works of Anne Bradstreet and the Dilemma of Legacy in Seventeenth-Century New England.
- Dana Goldblatt Mobility, Identity, and the Problem of Poetry in Piers Plowman.
- Gonzalo Martinez Questioning a Canonical Chicano Experience: Writing Against Prevailing Notions of Chicanismo in Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, and Moraga's Loving in the War Years.
- Abigail Rezneck Desegregating a Canon, a City, and a Country: The Struggles for Membership and Leadership in Washington, D.C., 1944-1954.*
- Jessica Brown The Republican Classroom.
- Victoria Cain So Fleet the Works of Men: Denver and the Tabor Grand Opera House.
- Jessica Freireich Holding a Mirror up to the Victorians: Shakespearean Characters in the Nineteenth Century.*
- Mark Greif The American Transformation of the holocaust, 1945-1965.*
-
- Sarawan Murray Map-Makers and Sea-Discoverers: Images of Cartography in the Poems of John Donne.
- Meredith Alexander The Political Morality of Eating in Eighteenth Century France.
- Annie Decker Learning to Work, and Working to Learn: Thoreau, Harvard and Laborious Reading.
- Hugh Eakin Religious Politics and Civic Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Brancacci Chapel Frescoes and Their Patronage.*
- Chimene Keitner Re-Vamping the Salome Myth: The Femme Fatale and Sexual Power in Rachilde.*á
- Andrew Wilson Writing Under Authoritarian Regimes: Argentina's Silent Discourse of Power From 1976 Until 1983.
-
- Elizabeth Marlantes From the Mud Hut to the Parthenon: Edith Wharton's Search for the Ideal Home.*
- James Miller "Between the Boycotters and the Lift-Givers": Comparative History of the Bus Boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1955-1957.*
- Elizabeth Rhee "Is It Art?": Changing Perceptions of Modernism and the Function of Art By the Public, Critics and Writers in Response to the 1913 Armory Show.*
- Catherine Robe On The World's Stage: Nellie Bly and Nineteenth- Century Stunt Reporting.*
- Andrew Wright "The Seeds of History, The License To Invent": Torquato Tasso Between History and Fiction. **
** Honorable mention, Hoopes.
- Jonathan Caverley The Development of Character: The Gentlemen-Spies of Erskine Childers and John Buchan.
- Catherine Darnton Alienation, Distortion, Artifice: Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and the Unmasking of the Weimar Republic.**
-
- Jamie Wacks Reading Race, Rhetoric, and the Female Body: The Rhinelander Case and 1920s American Culture.*
- Joshua Waxman Simon Dubnov and the Jews of Late Imperial Russia: History, Nationality, and Ideology.*
- Ethan Brackett Erasing Boundaries: Constructions of Gender and Race in Adolfo Caminha's Bom--Crioulo.
- Christopher Brown Per stultitiam praedicationis: Christian Culture and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition in St. Augustine and the Renaissance.*
- Daniel Caplivski The Past and the Novel: Violence and Beauty in Mario Vargas Llosa's La Guerra del Fin del Mundo.
- Nora Connell Writing the Romantic Self: The 1876-1878 Diary of Marie Streeter.*
- David Kurnick When Black was in Vogue: Broadway `Race Plays' from Ridgely Torrence to Langston Hughes.*
- Mary Nicole Nazzaro Kursistki and the Karamazovs: Exploring the Woman Question of Dostoevsky's Last Novel.**
- Katherine Penn Literary Perceptions of Polite Society: Ball Scenes in NineteenthÑ and Early Twentieth-Century Russian Literature.
- Jessica Pisano Constructed Lives: Writer as Saint in the Soviet Literary-Biographical Museum.*
- Daniel Sharfstein In Search of the Color Line: Ferrall v. Ferrall and the Struggle to Define Race in the Turn-of-the-Century American South.*
- Marina Volanakis The Time of Their Life: Anti-Modern Conceptions Time in Rilke, Bergson, and Nietzsche.
- Joanna Weiss Liberating Lady Nicotine: Cigarettes and Social Equality for 1920s Women.
- Veronica Yank "There Has Been No Anesthetic For That Anguish': Women's Health and the Struggle for Redemption in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Critiques of Male Violence.
-
- Christian D'Andrea Millionaires, Palaces, and Civic Vision: The Arts of Money and Memory at the World's Columbian Exposition.*
- Benjamin Hammond Calling Clio a Whore: Reading The Sot--Weed Factor as History and Literature.
- Jennifer Light Henri III: King and Queen of France.*
- Anna More La Mesa Puesta; A Table Set By God: Document, Text, and Historical Narrative in Sor Mar a De greda's Mystical Visions of New Mexico, 1619-1648.*
- Mica Pollock The Survival of the Fairest: The Racialization of American Beauty Culture, 1870-1930.
- Jonathan Taylor British Press and Parliamentary Myth in the Crisis of "Corporate Bias," 1973-1974.
- Adam Goodheart Last Summer of the Republic: The Centennial Exhibition as Experiment and Experience.*
- Jessica Heineman-Pieper The Origins of Social Responses to Child Abuse: A Re-Examination.
- Marie-France Latour A Little Soap Goes a Long Way: Articulations and Subversions of Africanist Discourse in French Advertisements for Hygienic Products.*
- Patricia Lynch The Role of the British Aristocracy in Promoting a Successful Conservative Political Culture, 1886-1906.
- Jessica McBee An examination of Elizabeth Stoddards' The Morgesons in the light of four representative countertexts--Ruth Hall, The Blithedale Romance, Pearl of Orr's Island, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson--to examine Stoddard's innovative use of money and gender, and to establish her as a transition between regional romance and regional realism.
- Ruth McKenzie Whilst We Thy Praise Repeat": The Myth of Elizabeth in the Seventeenth Century.
- Aaron Sachs Reading the American Environment: Clarence King and the Great Frontier Surveys, 1863-1881 ("Geography, Shadows, and Uplifted Isolation").
- Laura Belin Secret Agents 301, 329, and 345: The Introduction of Hybrid Seed Corn in the USSR.
- Ronie-Richele Garcia From Gardens to Darkrooms: An Analysis of the Use of Space in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits.
- Shannon Hill "Free at Last": The Use of the Slave Narrative in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada and Toni Morrison's Beloved.
- Michele Jaffe The Venice of Venus and the Virgin: Cinquecento Courtesans and the Myth of Venice.
- Adam Lifshey The Yellow Power Genesis: Asian American Radicalism in the Sixties.
- Jacob Press Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto: "Both Within and Without the Tribal Limits."*
- Michael Wigotsky Modernizing the Jew in the American Past: Creating Farmers at the Woodbine Agricultural and Industrial School.
- Rebecca Zorach The Open End and the Multi-Faceted Mirror: Incompleteness and Interpretation in the Roman de la Rose.
- Henry Chu Migration and Cross-Cultural Experience in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.*
- Michael Goldhaber Duff Green, Classical Republican, and the Pro-Slavery Argument (1826-36).*
- Elizabeth Pearl The Language of Pravda: How Soviet Journalists Reveal Their Images of Themselves and Their World Through Their Writing.
- Lara Putnam Visions of Change or Visions of Complacency: State, Art, and Social Message in Mexican Muralism.
- Cara Robertson Lizzie Borden and The Construction of Gendered Categories of Normalcy in Late 19th-century America.*
- Ingrid Tagu The Political Ideologies of Restoration Drama, 1664-1674.
- Katherine Andrews The Sensible Word: Jonathan Edwards' Hermeneutics and Homiletics.*
- Ann Dean "There was a Scene Which Angels Witnessed:" The Active Function of Narrative Convention in Antebellum Slave Narratives.*
- Richard Glew The Metaphor of Abuse Suffered by Midwestern American Small Towns.
- George Kent The Bolsheviks and German Communists in the late Weimar Period: The Influence of Realpolitik on Revpolitik in Early Soviet Thought, 1925-33.*
-
- Maureen McLane Elizabeth Bishop: The Psychology of the Poetic Art.*
- Julia Moskin The Novels of Barbara Pym: Social Stagnation and Women in the 1950's, Social Change and the Elderly in the 1970's.
- Grace Park The Amanda Cross Detective Fiction Series: Clues to Feminist Ideology of Carolyn Heilbrun.
- David Saenger "Nightmare From Which You Will Never Awake:" The Chronological Scheme in Ulysses.
- Nathaniel Trumbull A Failed Legislative Revolution: Politicization of the Comites d'Enterprises, 1944-48.
- Sophia van Wingerden Patriotism and Feminism in the Women's Suffrage Movement during World War I.
- Nicholas Brumm The Rise of the Penitentiary in France and America, 1650-1850.
- Marie Henson The British Aviator in the Great War.
- Bradley Miller Poetic Consciousness and Transcendence: Horacio's Search in Julio Cortazar's Rayvela.
- Marilynn Richtarik Art and Life: "South Pacific," the American Musical Theatre, and American Society.
- Mimi Sheller Mimi with an I: Post-Feminism's Autofictography.*
- Ashley Thompson Violence in Representation: A Study of Selected Literary Texts of the Vietnam War.
- Edward Wu Typology and Autobiography in George Herbert's Poetry.
- Edith Ervin Pushing the Pendulum: The Fight for Women's Minimum Wage 1923-1936 in the Context of the Tipaldo Case.
-
- David Fairman Styles of Conflict: Mode of Narration and the Representation of War in L'espoir, La mort dans l'ame and La peste.
- Ariella Gross The Manners of the People: Republican Etiquette in America, 1830-1860.
- Astrid Guttmann The Role of the Kreisauer Kreis in the German Resistance Movement to Hitler.
- Jennifer Hall Robert Herrick and the Miniature Aesthetic.*
- Gail Nelson "Framing" the Woman: Les Diaboliques of Barbey D'Aurevilly.
- Mary Garrison The Topos and Reality of Forced Haircuts (Performed by the Clergy upon the Laity, Especially Aristocratic Youth) in Late 11th and Early 12th Century France and England.
- Susan Grayzel Development of the Ideology of Feminist Pacificism from Olive Schreiner's Woman and Labor to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas.
- Thomas Mueller The Decline and Fall of the Medieval Werewolf, Traced from the Origins of the Werewolf Belief through the Middle Ages.
- Michael Samols An Examination of Jo March's Development through Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys as a Reflection of the Changes Louisa May Alcott Underwent During this Time and the Change of Women's Status in the Latter 19th Century.
- Tamara Whited Historical Origins of the Statue of Liberty and Its Changing Symbolism.
- Elizabeth Young "Gorgeous Fancies:" Louisa May Alcott, the Female Gothic, and Nineteenth-Century Women Readers.*
- Jean-Claude Castelli Nabokov's Structures: A Reflection of his Metaphysical Belief in an Otherworldly Dimension.*
- Katherine Lydon Dr. William Drennen: His Career as a Volunteer, United Irishman, Writer, and Private Citizen.
- Terry Martin Order and Experience in the Poetry of George Herbert.
- Cecil Quillen Race Relations and School Desegregation in Kingsport, Tennessee (1951-1966).*
- Peter O'Driscoll Juxtaposition of "Historical" and "Fictional" Narratives in Sartre's Le Sursis
- Keith Rogal William Beckford and the Picturesque Movement. *
- John Martin The Posture of Commitment: Emerson's Public Projects (1839-1844).
- Amy Remensnyder The New World: The Eleventh Century Cult of Sainte Foy.
- Stephen Szaraz The Spanish American War in American Literature: Twain, Howells, Bierce, Norris, Davis, and Crane.
Department Address and Contact Information
Copyright Information