Zeba Imam, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication, will be studying the relationship between citizenship and women’s identity in India. Relying on the frameworks of citizenship literature and discourse theory, she hopes to articulate the subject positions Hindu and Muslim religious nationalist discourses are offering women. In doing so, she will then be able to assess how the identities inherent in these subject positions are affecting women’s citizenship within the Indian state.

Kiyoon Jang, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, is examining American gothic authors and texts in order to trace the pre-modern shift from the autonomous author to the reader-dependent author. In her dissertation, she proposes “ghost writer” as a new critical term to describe nineteenth-century gothic writers from Charles Brockden Brown to Henry James. She considers these writers’ re-configuration of the author as a ghost that comes into being because readers believe in it.

Sudina Paungpetch, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, will be exploring U.S.-Thai relations during the Vietnam War. Specifically, her dissertation will focus on the extent to which the influence of American democratic ideas helped bring about positive changes in Thai society. By connecting the U.S. presence in Thailand to the spread of democratic ideas throughout Thai culture, her work will contribute to the new historiographical trend of cultural diplomatic history. Sudina has also been named as one of the winners of the department’s Charles C. Keeble (’48) Dissertation Fellowship Award.

Sook Hyun, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, will be exploring the relationship of storytelling to identity formation. Particularly focusing on three 19th century British novels – Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) an examination of how the narrating subjects actively engage in dynamic identity formation through the storytelling process will be undertaken. This research will focus on various storytelling activities in the novels under consideration, prompting discussion of how different storytelling acts create different processes of identity formation. By examining various storytelling processes and the dynamic effects that these processes have on the narrators’ identity formation, the research will contribute to the “after” poststructuralist discussions of identity and narrative.

Sara Jordan, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, attempt to articulate, via the language of deliberative theories of democracy, an ideal-typical form of bureaucratic interaction with “ordinary” and marginalized citizens for the creation of a defensibly democratic public interest standard. Within this work, she takes as a starting point the assumption that the practice of democracy in constitutional democracies today is flawed in a fundamental way. Specifically, the institutional mechanisms designed to represent and express in the law the interests of the whole public consistently fail to account for the input of those citizens with the least means available to them to effect genuine political change.

Amy Montz, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, will examine the impact fashion and dress have on discussions of nationalism in several Victorian novels. Her research is concerned with how fictional characters, particularly female characters, are defined as English or non-English through their clothing. The sheer volume of fashionable writing and attention to details of dress suggest that fashion does real work in literature; it connects women’s clothing to larger concerns of nation, identity, and production, and articulates the impact of these concerns on the Victorian middle class.

Niles S. Illich, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, will be conducting research on German "informal imperialism" primarily in the Ottoman Empire but also in Latin America and China. He examines how the German government and various political parties reported, explained and championed these territories to the German people. The most important example is the Pergamon Altar, which was appropriated from the Ottoman Empire and displayed in Berlin. He will research the program that paid for teachers to visit the altar so they could explain its significance to their students. By looking at this and other such displays, he proposes to expand the understanding of German colonialism both chronologically and geographically.

Yogita Sharma, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication, will investigate how one Indian organization, the All India Democratic Women’s Association, mobilizes social, economic, and cultural capital to constitute a woman’s public sphere. Her work addresses the ways in which these individuals organize themselves to mobilize the many forms of capital and, in so doing, attempt to achieve their goals as a feminist organization. The AIDWA, a group with a membership of six million that has been working towards increasing civic awareness and participation among Indian women since the 1980s, is a rewarding site to study this phenomenon.

Dongshin Yi, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, will be conducting research on "A Genealogy of Cybergothic: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Age of Posthumanism," which will consider the future convergence between gothic studies and humanism in the age of posthumanism and which proposes "cyborgothic" as a new literary genre that heralds that future. This study will emphasize, in an encounter between human and non-human beings, the importance of non-anthropocentric gestures that can be made by aesthetic and ethical approaches to the encounter.

Laura Barker (English) will be conducting research on "Symptomatic Identities: Lovesickness and Femininity in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel," which will explore the ways in which writers used the convention of lovesickness to free their novels from the conventions and expectations that confronted them. This work is expected to be a ground-breaking work that will illuminate some of the nineteenth century novel's most telling social arguments.

Ilan Mitchell-Smith (English) will be focusing on "Between Mars and Venus: Balance and Excess in the Chivalry of the Late-Medieval English Romance," which will investigate the way knighthood was understood and depicted in late-medieval chivalric romances. This study promises to be an accomplished dissertation which examines the connection between chivalry and gender and the nature of masculinity as it flourished in the late middle ages.

Kevin C. Motl (History) will explore "Against the Grain: Women and Progressive Reform in Rural Texas, 1910-1920," which will look at the role middle-class women in rural Texas played in transmitting the ideology of progressive reform. This study of the evolution of rural political culture in early twentieth-century will serve as a model for further exploration of women's role in reform throughout the South.

Boris H.J. M. Brummans (Communication) will explore "The Staging of Selves through Textwork in Organizational Communication Studies," which will investigate the ways scholars craft their identities in and through textual practices. This work will provide new understanding of the roles subjectivities play in academic research and publishing.

Yvonne Davis Frear (History) will be focusing on "Battling to End Segregation in Dallas, Texas, 1945-1965: Race, Gender, and Social Mobilization in a Local Civil Rights Movement," which will provide an urban case study of the interaction between African-American women leaders at the grass roots level and elite white males during the civil rights struggle.

Phillip M. Smith (History) will be conducting research on "Freedom and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Florida," which will trace the social and cultural changes occurring during Florida's transition from Spanish and English colony to an American state.