Below is a selection of dissertations from the English program in Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences that have been voluntarily included in Chapman University Digital Commons. Additional dissertations from years prior to 2019 are available through the Leatherby Libraries' print collection or in Proquest's Dissertations and Theses database.

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Theses from 2024

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Interior Chinatown: Chinatown as a Performative Space, Audrey Fong

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"Old Cod": The Power of Storytelling in Conor McPherson's The Weir, Sarah Johnson

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The Beginning of the End: The Cultivation of Transchronological Perceptuality in Arcadia and “Story of Your Life”, Sawyer Kelly

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“No One to Show Us the Way:” Assessing the Contemporary Relevance of the Gay Male Bildungsroman, Matthew Lemas

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Posthumanism in Literature: Redefining Selfhood, Temporality, and Reality/ies through Fiction, Eileen Kelley Pierce

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Catastrophic Progress: A Queer Materialist Analysis of the 2023 Trans/Bud Light Controversy, Brianna Radke

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Banned Books and Educational Censorship: The Necessity of Keeping Queer Books in Schools, Rebecca Rhodes

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The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism and Gentrification in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina and Corina, Miranda Roberts

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Navigating Identity Through Education in Literature and in the Classroom, Sofia Sakzlyan

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Nobody Inside: Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": An Analysis on Whole/Incomplete Bodies, "The Maggie Thing"and Sick and Dancing Mothers, Emily Velasquez

Theses from 2023

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“Everything and Nothing”: Exhibiting Irishness at the Chicago World Fair of 1893, Jessica Bocinski

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Beyond Allegory: Postcolonial Debates in Science Fiction, Su Chen

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Lovecraftian Queerness: Weird and Queer Temporalities in Lovecraft Country and Detransition, Baby, Eurydice Dye

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The Dictator Novel in YA Latinx Fantasy, Catherine Gallegos

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Humanization of the Refugee as the Modern Subject in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Ani Gazazyan

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“Henrietta and Harriet:” Considering the Marginalized Best Friend in Burney’s Cecilia and Austen’s Emma, Elena Goodenberger

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Rising Costs of Universities and the Impact on Teaching Effectiveness and Student Outcomes, Patrick Hanna

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Failure Facing Pedagogy in First-Year Rhetoric and Composition Classrooms, Karuna Minh Hin

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Steps Toward Healing from the Possessive Other: The Vital Role of Fantastical Literature in Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard

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Mirroring Financial Speculation and Late Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction: Worker Gullibility and Guilt as Re-imagination of Human Value, Ian Koh

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Oceans of Literature - The Little Mermaid, Makena Metz

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What Makes a Woman "Pious and Good": The Function of Several Grimm Brothers' Cautionary Fairy Tales, Hannah Montante

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From the Master’s Maternity to Redemptive Nurturing: Liberating Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, Isabelle Stillman

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“Beauty and the Beast” and the Representation of the Female: How Fairy Tales Reinforce and Influence Our Current Understanding of Gender Roles, Elizabeth N. Tran

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The Significance of Maintaining Character Integrity in Literary Retellings, Sara Turner

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Mrs. Dalloway as a Window for Understanding Life, Kristen Venegas

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The Domestic Worker in Latinx Fiction: The Discursive Formation of Latinidad, Constance von Igel de Mello

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Dorian Gray: The Myth, Peggy Sue Wood

Theses from 2022

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Potential For a Pedagogical Level-Up: Teaching First-Year Composition Through Rhetoric of Gaming, Cayman Beeman

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Personhood and Objecthood: Examining the Speaker’s Interiority and Double Consciousness in Citizen: An American Lyric, Winnie Chak

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Innately American, Black America’s Inheritance: A Rhetorical Analysis of Black Death & Identity, Montéz Jennings

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Examining Wonder Woman through a Feminist Voice: How Patty Jenkins’ 2017 Adaptation Upheaved her Creation, Representation, and 80 Year Legacy, Tatiana Madrid

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“Strumpet,” “Huswife,” “Whore”: Centering Othello’s Bianca, Phoebe Merten

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Lack of Affirmative Consent: Trauma in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”, Ansalee Morrison

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Traumas and Recovery in Takaya Natsuki's Fruits Basket, Vesper North

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Poverty, Social Isolation, Uselessness, and Loneliness: The Fears and Anxieties of 19th-Century British Governesses, Lydia Pejovic

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Speaking Up For Generic Asians in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, Orel Shilon

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The Brain Scan as Ideograph, Paige Welsh

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Changing the Definition of the Orient Through Hollywood, Amanda Yaghmai

Theses from 2021

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The Dystopian Impulse and Media Consumption: Redefining Utopia Via the Narrative Economics of the New Media Age, Turki Alghamdi

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Collaborative Storytelling: Composition Pedagogy and Communal Benefits of Narrative Innovation, Aysel Atamdede

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Feminist Rhetorics: Theory and Practice of Strategic Silence, Paolena Comouche

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Surveillance: The Digital Dark Side, Brittyn Davis

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Fanfiction As: Searching for Significance in the Academic Realm, Megan Friess

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Realism & Language: How Luis Alberto Urrea Uses Bilingualism to Elevate His Works of Realism, Ashley Gomez

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"A Mind of Metal and Wheels": Agrarian Ruralism in Joss Whedon's Firefly and J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings, Christopher Hines

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“Why Are We Still Reading About Rosa Parks?”: Essential Questions for Continuation Schools, Samantha Mbodwam

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Decolonizing the Body, Daniel Miess

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Black Panther Shatters Social Binaries to Explore Postcolonial Themes: How Ancestry, Identity, Revenge, and the Third Space Impact the Ability to Navigate Change and Create New Forms of Cultural Hybridity, Deborah Paquin

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Anti-Racist Pedagogy: A Practical Means of Building Bonds Between Marginalized Students and Instructors in the Composition Classroom, Santa-Victoria Pérez

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Fear Then and Now: The Vampire as a Reflection of Society, Mackenzie Phelps

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Monstrous and Beautiful: Jungian Archetypes in Wilde’s Salomé, Nayana Rajnish

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Journeying to a Third Space of Sovereignty: Explorations of Land, Cultural Hybridity, and Sovereignty in Ceremony and There There, Jillian Eve Sanchez

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Through the Female Perspective: An Analysis of Male Characters in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Natalia Sanchez

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The Tiered Workshop: The Effects of Using a Paced Workshop in a Composition Classroom, Madison Shockley

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Aztlán Potentialities: Queer Male Chicanx Affect and Temporalities, Ethan Trejo

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Partying Like It's 1925: A Comparison and Contrast of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Azuela's The Underdogs, Sarah N. Valadez

Theses from 2020

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Stephen Dedalus and the Mind as Hypertext in Ulysses, Ariel Banayan

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Lessons from Hybridity: A Look into the Coupling of Image and Text in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, Elizabeth Chen

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Dawn of the Undead Classroom: Pop-Culture in the First-Year Composition Classroom, Sierra A. Ellison

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Moving Beyond Grades: A Shift in Assessing First-Year Composition, Matthew Goldman

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Murmurs of Revolution: Mythical Subversion in Dostoevsky, Connor Guetersloh

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The Fallen Woman: An Exploration of the Voiceless Women in Victorian England through Three Plays of Oscar Wilde, Marco Randazzo

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The Ubume Challenge: A Digital Environmental Humanities Project, Sam Risak

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Student Disposition Towards Discussing Race in the Classroom, Natalie Salagean

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Trauma Begetting Trauma: Fukú, Masks, and Implicit Forgiveness in the Works of Junot Díaz, Jacob VanWormer

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‘Amore Captus:’ Turning Bedtricks in the Arthurian Canon, Candice Yacono

Theses from 2019

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The Contradictory Faces of “Sisterhood”: A Case-Study on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Its Theatrical Adaptation by James Willing and Leonard Rae, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Its Miniseries Adaptation on HBO, Lama Alsulaiman

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Terrence McNally’s Universalizing Model: The Role of Disability in Andre’s Mother; Lips Together, Teeth Apart; and Love! Valour! Compassion!, Alexa Burnstine

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A Way to Persist: Storytelling and Its Effect on Trauma in Gábor Schein’s The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus, Duncan Capriotti

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Language: A Bridge or Barrier to Social Groups, Adina Corke

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Haole Like Me: Identity Construction and Politics in Hawaii, Savanah Janssen

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Black Women’s Bodies as the Site of Malignity: Interrogating (Mis)representations of Black Women in 16th and 17th Century British Literature, Tonika Reed

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The Efficacy of Varying Small Group Workshops in the Composition Classroom, Daniel Strasberger

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Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms of Capital” in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

Theses from 2018

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Player-Response: On the Nature of Interactive Narratives as Literature, Lee Feldman

Theses from 2017

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The Rhetoric of Disability: an Analysis of the Language of University Disability Service Centers, Katie Ratermann

Theses from 2016

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The Ritualization of Violence in The Magic Toyshop, Victor Chalfant

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Concrete Reality: The Posthuman Landscapes of J.G. Ballard, Mark Hausmann

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Readers in Pursuit of Popular Justice: Unraveling Conflicting Frameworks in Lolita, Innesa Ranchpar