As of 2014, all newly submitted Graduate Center dissertations and theses appear in Academic Works shortly after graduation. Some works are immediately available to read and download, and some become available after an embargo period set by the author. Dissertations and theses from before 2014 are generally accessible only to the CUNY community, but some authors have chosen to make theirs open access.
Note: The graduate program in Germanic Languages & Literatures is housed in the Comparative Literature program. Accordingly, Germanic Languages & Literatures dissertations appear here.
Dissertations from 2025
Palimpsests of the Mind: Memory, Anamnesis, Temporality, Selin Kalostyan
Storming the Sky: Literature and Landscape of the Italian Front, Dario Marcucci
Dissertations from 2024
The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino
Henry James and the Act of Speech from Drama to Dictation, Mary Claire Brunelli
Greek Tongues: Tragic Histories in Early Modernity, Nicholas Devlin
The Truth and Other Fictions: The Nuance of Truth in Medieval Literature, Mark-Allan Donaldson
The Animated Cinema of Bruno Bozzetto, Emilia Gambardella
The Divided Self: Internal Conflict in Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman
Antisocial Femininity: Writing the Relational in Isolation, Chelsea K. Largent
Failure to Mourn: Challenges to the Work of Mourning in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature, Mattia Mossali
Contemporary World-Novels and their Collective Protagonists, Leonardo Nolé
Dante’s Volgare and the Pastoral Presence: An Analysis of the Concept of Language in the Divina Commedia, Paola M. Rodriguez
Shaping Art Cinema Canon: The Venice Film Festival's Evolution and Influence (1946–1968), Luca Zamparini
Dissertations from 2023
Genres of Labor: Wageless Work and the Aesthetics of Stagnation, Martin A. Jensen
Storytelling in Modernist Fiction: A “Method of Presence”, Laura Malhotra
Urban Space, Genre and Subjectivity in African and Latin American Cinema, Matthew Marcus
Marriage Stories: Legal Reform and the Novel in France and Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright
doc/u/ment: Affinities in 20th and 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro
Insidious Fibs: Early Stories of Henry James, Katherine Shloznikova
Literature, Development, and the Reaches of Literacy, 1979 to the Present, Stephen Tremaine
Dissertations from 2022
Female Spaces and Exceptional Women Under Fascism: Anna Banti’s Early Writings (1930s–1940s), Matilde Fogliani
Robert Rosen and Relational System Theory: An Overview, James Lennox
The Storytelling Cure: Medicine and Narrative from Galen to Shahrazad and Rousseau, Ryan A. Milov-Cordoba
A House of One’s Own: Challenges and Re-Definitions of Female Subjectivity and Domestic Space in Italian Women Writers from the 1950s to the Early 2000s, Nicole Paronzini
Homotextualité réaliste: Cryptosexualité et subculture homosexuelle masculine chez Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Vincent Sallé
Dissertations from 2021
Quod Inane Vocamus: Lucretius’ Void in Seventeenth-Century Italy, Carlo Bottone
The Surreal Voice in Milan's Itinerant Poetics: Delio Tessa to Franco Loi, Jason Collins
The Master's Voice: Close Readings of James, James Curley-Egan
Prophecy, Emanation, and the Mediterranean Middle Ages, Alberto Gelmi
The Seduction of Pessimism: Eros, Failure, and the Novel, Tom Ribitzky
Critical Climates: Stimmung, Voice and Mythopoesis in German Literature from 1950–1989, Marc Cesar Rickenbach
Nation(s) and Narrative(s) in Forms of Chinese Culture, Angela Chun Ling Wei
Dissertations from 2020
The Twilight of the Absolute: Russian Symbolism and the Romantic Project, Evgeniya A. Koroleva
The Problem of Literary Development in Russian Formalism and Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff
Locke’s Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology and Ethics of Leopardi’s A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia
Narrating Intensity: History and Emotions in Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante, Stefania Porcelli
Failures of Grace: Limits of Tragedy in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland
Dissertations from 2019
Migritude: Migrant Structures of Feeling in a Minor Literature of Globalization, Ashna Ali
Staging English Affairs in Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, Fabio Battista
The Subject of the Novel: Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Beckett, Jin Chang
The Body and Its Signifiers: Bodily Depictions in Niccolò de’ Conti and Odorico da Pordenone, Antonella Dalla Torre
Ang Lee's America: A Study of Adaptation and Transculturation, Yu-Yun Hsieh
Forbidden Attraction: Russian Poets Read T. S. Eliot during the Cold War, Nataliya Karageorgos
Magic Performances: Rituals and Practice in Italian Theatre and Culture, 1520–1650, Erika Mazzer
The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity, Literature, And Culture in 19th and 20th Century New York City, Krystyna Michael
Transfigurations of the News: True Fictions, Strange Thresholds, Jeffrey Peer
Chimeras, Centaurs, and Satyrs: Creating Mixed Genre Texts in Antiquity and the Renaissance, Claire Sommers
The Ends of Plot: Rupture and Entanglement in L’amica geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar
Dissertations from 2018
The Body and the Sacred in Contemporary Italian Women Writers, Laura R Feola
Manifest Density: Decentering the Global Western Film, Michael D. Phillips
Diagnosing the Will to Suffer: Lovesickness in the Medical and Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt
Dostoevsky as a Translator of "Eugénie Grandet", Julia Titus
Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy and Pathology in American Women's Literature, 1866-1900, Nicole Zeftel
Dissertations from 2017
Transferring Paremias. Cultural, Linguistic, and Literary Transitions of Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases by Vincenzo Brusantino, Pompeo Sarnelli, and John Florio, Daniela D'Eugenio
Not My Queer: Queer Representation in Contemporary Italian Serial Television, Julia Heim
Pirandello Proto-Modern: A New Reading of L’Esclusa, Bradford Masoni
The Short Story and the Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts In and Of the Americas, Lucienne Muller
Desire, Curiosity, and the Search for Truth in Proust, Moreno, and Bechdel, Santiago Parga Linares
The Space of Alterity: Language and National Identity in Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald, Agata Szczodrak
Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri
Dissertations from 2016
Waking Dreams: Modernist Intoxications and the Poetics of Altered States, Jason Ciaccio
Dialogic Faiths: Multi-Genre Expression in Religious Narrative, Rosemary L. Demos
Interfictional Identities: Transformation and Dissimulation in the Early Modern Period, Yael Nezer Lavender-Smith
Il dilemma del prigioniero. Luciano Bianciardi e il disincanto del moderno, Ilaria Muzzi
Creating with Anger: Contemplating Vendetta. An Analysis of Anger in Italian and Spanish Women Writers of the Early Modern Era, Luisanna Sardu Castangia
A Passage from Brooklyn to Ithaca: The Sea, the City and the Body in the Poetics of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas
Between Life and Literature: The Influence of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary on Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, Victoria Tomasulo
“Über die Liebe”: Love and Sex According to Eduard Von Keyserling, Caroline Urvater
Dissertations from 2015
The Mystification of Christian Salvation: On the Anxiety of Redemption in Renaissance Poetry and Drama, Kimberly Paige Ambroziak
Cuckolds And Codpieces: Early Modern Anxieties In Male Potency, Doris Barkin
Sisters in Sublime Sanctity: Schiller's Jungfrau, Euripides's Iphigenia Plays, and Joan of Arc on the Stage, John Martin Pendergast
Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature: Mapping New Italian Voices, Anita Pinzi
Modern Era Centaur: the Fusion of Art and Religion, Isabel Sobral Campos
The Labyrinths of Venice: Environment and Identity in Anna Pavignano's Novel "Venezia, un sogno" and Other Works in Literature and Film, Viviana Torrero
Dissertations from 2014
Mapping Italian Women's Filmmaking: Urban Space In The Cinema Of The New Millennium, Laura Di Bianco
Jean Sénac, Poet of the Algerian Revolution, Kai G. Krienke
If You See Something, Say Something: A Look at Experimental Writing on Art, Charlotte Lucy Latham
All At One Point: The New Physics of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Thomas Rinaldi
Kafka's German-Jewish Reception as Mirror of Modernity, Abraham Ariel Rubin
Dissertations from 2012
(Re)Forming Italians: Children's Literature in Italy, 1929-1939, Marisa Giorgi
Dissertations from 2010
A Critical and Cultural Poetics of the End: Self, Space, and Volatility in Los Angeles, Pamela Albanese
Dissertations from 2009
Beyond Observation: Literature and Science in Kafka, Rilke, Mann and Musil, Katya Ilina
"Zum Einsatz des Leben fuer Deutschland": Girls' popular fiction during the Third Reich, Kathryn L. Payne
Dissertations from 2006
Autonomy and subjugation: The dynamics of emancipation and race in the writings of precolonial German women authors, Traci S. O'Brien
Dissertations from 2003
Dissertations from 1999
A Theater of Anxiety: The Irrepresentable in Shelley's "The Cenci" and in Musset's "Lorenzaccio", Remy Joseph Roussetzki
Dissertations from 1995
From Idyll to Exile: The Transformed Self in the Early Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Powers
Dissertations from 1993
The Romance of Narrative: Design and Desire in the Odyssey, the Aithiopika, and Don Quixote, Susan Brockman
Dissertations from 1987
Gestus in the Theaters of Brecht and Beckett, Barry Joseph Batorsky
Eustache Deschamps' "L'art de dictier", Deborah M. Sinnreich
Dissertations from 1977
Montemayor's "Diana": A Translation and Introduction, RoseAnna M. Mueller
