Graduate Students

seminar, professor and students.

Our graduate students are incredibly active in research, in the creative arts, and in the profession. In the past five years, they have received the following awards: a Visiting Artist Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome; a Ralph Emerson Society Dissertation Grant; an AAUW Dissertation Grant, and a Humboldt Foundation Fellowship. They have published critical articles and creative work in major journals and magazines. And they’ve written and translated novels, performed poetry at MoMA, and written an award-winning documentary film.

In doing research for their dissertations, students have taken advantage of the James Joyce Collection here in Buffalo but have also received grants to travel to archives like the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library and the American Library Association Archives.

Below is a list of selected graduate dissertation titles completed since 2013 and a list of current graduate students in the program, first PhD students and then MA and Certificate in Innovative Writing students, with attached CVs.

GSEU

All graduate students at the University at Buffalo are welcome to join the Graduate Student Employees Union (GSEU). The GSEU has been fighting for graduate workers since 1977 and is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), having won recognition in 1991.

https://www.cwa1104gseu.com/

A Selection of Graduate Dissertations Since 2013:

Eli Drabman: “The Art of Saying No: Adorno’s aesthetic Negativity in the Work of Richard Serra, Robert Creeley, and Bob Dylan”

Matthew Garite: “Green Futures: A Cultural history of Ectopa from the Cold War to the Present”

Kenneth James: “Literature and Logic: The Sentence after Boole”

Jacob Bodway: “Making Morals Matter: Moral Beauty, Embodiment, and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics”

Sonya Brockman: “Ravished Voices: Epic Transformations from Ovid to Hutchinson”

Richard Owens: “To Shrink the Confines: Anglophone Poetry, Political Economy and the Space of History, 1947-2007”

Andrew Rippeon: “Lyric Resource: Sound Technologies and Lyric Criticality”

Siobhan Scarry: “We: Intersubjectivity and Visions of Community in American Experimental Poetry (1850-1965)”

Banu Ozel: “From Slavery to Guantanamo: Writing Lives, Seeking Rights”

Hee Jion Choi: “Sound & Silence, about the Complex Monad: Study on John Cage, Myung Mi Kim and Leslie Scalapino”

Ryan Hatch: “Subtracting the Spectator:  Antitheatricality, the Real of Revolution, and the Political Ontology of Avant-Garde Theater”

Prentiss Clark: “Measures of Intimacy: From Skepticism to Ethics in the Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson”

Ronan Crowley: “Gifts of the Gab: Quotation, Copyright, and the Making of Irish Modernism,

1891-1922”

Sean Reynolds: “The Drive to Translate: Dead Language and the Fixation of the Poet-Translator in Postwar America”

Matthew Rigilano: “Mere Prose: Subjectivity, Materiality, and British Writing, 1650-1800”

Joseph Aldinger: “Political Subjectivity from Religious Melancholy to Poetic Agency”

David Squires: “Archives Unbound: Modern Literature and the Rise of Library Science”

Maria Almanza: “Auxiliary Organs: Modernism and the Prosthetic Relation”

Leah Benedict: “Impotence: Passion and Anatomy in the Long 18th Century”