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
2023
David Sánchez García: "Voguing: On Appropriation, The History of Ballroom Culture, and Ballroom Today"
Maria Geenen: "Contemporary Maya Art, An Expression of Resistance: Examining the Work of Three Artists"
2022
Willa Benjamin Blevins: "Commodity-Money and A Frontier Economics of Abundance: Tracing the Monetary Innovations of
Western Pennsylvania, 1780-1800"
Lydia Janis Caldana: "Women in Brazil's Urban Settlements and Dignity: Income and Racial Barriers to Accessing Dignity"
Ilario Colli: "Unity and Illusion: Reflections on Selfhood from Descartes to Heidegger"
Kalin Despain: "Reconciliation: A New Form of Colonial Violence"
Edward Dioguardi: "The Birth of Thinking From the Spirit of Negation"
Chase Kessler: "The Selfie Culture: Examining Impacts on Gen Z and Effects on Society At Large"
Colton Lee: "俺、しのーと思ってさ" A Meditation on the Violence of Attack on Titan"
Nicholas Travaglini: "A Critique of Software Bugs and of 'Error'"
José Rafael Luna Valencia: "Chronopolitics of Sovereignty"
Zachary James Williamson: "Entropy Tango: Sound, Affect, and Techno-Aesthetics of the Contemporary"
2021
James Boyd: "Optimal Contract Design for Anticipating Catastrophic Risks"
Tejas M Devamane: "Naturalism and Dynamic Expressions of Power in Spinoza and Nietzsche"
Miranda Gilbert: "The “Hewoman”: Clytemnestra’s Performances of Gender"
Benjamin J. Titera: "Blacklips Performance Cult: Bloodbags and Beauty at the End of the Millennium"
2020
Alexander Lanz: "The Lonely Moment: Allegory, Class, and Method in Jameson's Political Unconscious"
Kato Trieu: "Cucking Death"
Elvia Wilk: "Death by Landscape: Recomposing Bodies"
2019
Florian Degoo: "Living in L'Atalante"
Zev Fagin: "Reading Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato's 'Cave' with Joseph Campbell's Monomyth: A Differentiation Between Spiritual and Philosophical Mythology"
Jason Marcus: "Necromancy and Nostalgia in the Modern World"
Benjamin Kodres-O'Brien: "Derivative Nature: A Multispecies Extinction Hedge"
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"
2018
Stefania Dinu: "The Liminal Gaze: A Collection of Epiphanic Intercultural Encounters"
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"
Leila Taylor: "Darkly through the Veil: An Inquiry Into the (African) American Goth(ic)"
2017
Valentina Sarmiento Cruz: "The Unfulfilled Public of Agitprop!"
Hilary Ilkay: "'For Diotima Lives': Reclaiming the Female Philosopher"
Andrew Locke: "CRITICISM 'wasteland' // 'frontier' // 'peak'"
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"
Matt Waters: "Children of Consequence"
2016
Juliana Bechara: "Native and Endemic Fruit Species Shifting Social, Historical and Cultural Paradigms: A New Development Pathway for the Brazilian Semi-Arid"
Fiona Bryson: "Poetology of Trauma: Language as a Space for Female subversion in Artistic Practice"
Katherine Parker-Magyar: "The Bumpy Road Children"
Aurora Prelevic: "My Country is the Most Beautiful of All: A Eulogy for Yugoslavia"
Evdoxia Ragkou: "The Unbearable Abstractness of the Absolute"
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"
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"
2014
Drake Logan: "An Epidemiology of Sectarianism: Toxic Violence in Iraq"
Alexis Martinez: "Human Rights: Accountability in the Face of Divergent Narratives"
Nevada Ryan: "Teacher of Doubt: A Survey of the Relationship Between Zamyatin's WE,
Proletarian Culture, and The Role of the Literary Artist"
Andrew Smith: "Voice/Body/Form: On Milton Babbitt’s Phonemena For Soprano and Synthesized Tape"
Mimi Thompson: "Shock Value: The Aesthetics of Violence in the Work of Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden 1970-75"
Samuel Yelton: "Plato, Homer, and Poetry"