Our M.A. students continue to have success proceeding on to Ph.D. programs, finding placements at such prestigious institutions as the University of Arizona, the University of California–Berkeley, the University of California-Santa Barbara, University of California–Irvine, the University of Connecticut, Cornell University, the University of Illinois, the University of Kansas, the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of South Carolina, Stanford University, the University of Texas–at Austin, the University of Washington, West Virginia University, and many others.

The following compilation of thesis titles (with committee chairs in parentheses) should provide a sense for the exciting range of research projects undertaken by our M.A. students through the years:

You can find MA in Literature, full theses, at University of Montana, Mansfield Library, online through ScholarWorks.

2023

Madigar, Madalynn L.,  "Monstrous Oil: Theorizing Petromodernity's Monsters" (Economides, Kane)

Hinrichs, Madison R.,  "'How do we carry all these stories on our backs?' an Investigation of Violence in Native American Literature as Seen in the Works of James Welch, Joy Harjo, and Louise Erdrich" (Baker)

DeMond, Sarah M.,  "Blood and Oil: How Vampiric Literature Bolsters Big Oil's Power" (Kane)

Jochem, Miles,  "Old Invisible Presence: Nonhuman Intelligence and Artificial Nature in A Coast of Trees by A. R. Ammons and S*PerRM**K*T by Harryette Mullen" (Baker)

Spero, Mark A.,  "We Are Larger than Ourselves" (Baker, Reimer)

2022

Nicholson, Christopher H., "Ghosts, Hauntings, Kinship, and Contamination: Key Tropes for Narrating Extinction in Jeff VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander and James Bradley's Ghost Species" (Economides)

 

2021

Puc, Reed G.,  "Lifeglows Through the Anthropocene: Development of the Radical Imagination and Response-Ability Within Superhero Comics" (Kane)

2020

Herring, Thomas V.,  "Dark-Night and Nameless: Globalization in Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" (Kane)

Kramer, Henry R.,  "Wonder: A Phenomenological Exploration" (Slicer)

2019

Brookbank, Joseph D.,  "Gendered Melancholy in Lolita: Reading into Humbert Humbert’s Dolorous Haze" (Kane)

Lillquist, Jensen A.,  "The Environmental Imaginations of Moby Dick: Technology and Vulnerability in Human/More-than-Human Relationships" (Kane)

Beavers, Mary Morgan, "Ecological Wonder in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" (Baker, Economides)

Smith, Rachel K.,  "'Out of the mother...and home to the mother': Essays on Medieval Literature and Climate Crisis" (Kinch)

2018

Hastings, Taylor C.,  "Missed Opportunity: The Strategic and Rhetorical Miscalculations of Deep Ecology" (Gilcrest)

Ambrose, Corina S.,  "Breaking Chains of Oppression: Popular Culture and the Plundering of Blackness" (Kane)

2017

Wipf, Briana J.,  "Enclosed from All Sides: Reading contact and Ambivalence in the Imaginary Al-Andalus of Hrotsvit's The Passion of Pelagius and The Song of Roland"(Kinch)

Jardon, Cris,  "Queering Alien: Queer Theory, Gendered Imagery, and Ripley's Female Masculinity"

Cowden, John L.,  "Involvement without Panic: Essays on Shakespeare, Woolf, and Munro" (Baker)

2016

Collins, Sean P., "From Existentialism to Ecology: A Phlosophical Analysis of Crisis in Samuel Beckett" (Baker)

Hissom, Brittani, "Eating the World: Food Production and Consumption and Cultural Resistance in Minority Literature" (Kane)

Jepsen, John W.: "Toward an Ontology of Exhaustion: On The Affective Stuctures of Masculinity in the American Oilfield" (Kane)

Kahn, Sarah, "QUEEN OF KINGS: BEYONCÉ POLITICS AND PEDAGOGY IN THE JUVENILE DETENTION CENTER CLASSROOM" (Kane)

Warwood, James, "What Do You Think I Am?: On Perceiving Unintelligibility in the Nonbinary Gender Experience" (Charles)

2015

Andrews, Tarren, "THE ETHICS OF MOURNING: THE ROLE OF MATERIAL CULTURE AND PUBLIC POLITICS IN THE 'BOOK OF THE DUCHESS' AND THE 'PEARL' POEM" (Kinch)

Henry, Margaret, ""Art Should Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable:" Examining Twenty-First Century Aesthetics Through Banksy's Socially Engaged Art" (Economides)

Lahaderne, Giordano, "Melville's Mardi and the Book of Mormon" (Harrison)

Lane, Sarah Sydney, "The Bioscience-Industrial Complex, Radical Materialist Aesthetics, and Interspecies Political Ecologies: The Unforeseen Posthuman Future in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy" (Economides)

Laskoski, Sara M., "Morphing Myths and Shedding Skins: Interconnectivity and the Subversion of the Isolated Female Self in Angela Carter’s The Tiger’s Bride and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (Economides)

Mindell, Rachel, "WHAT IS A HOLE MADE OF: QUEER IDENTITY AND GRIEF IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED AND RED DOC" (Baker)

Stephens, Lindsay, ""Horses and Oil in His Blood": Mythopoetics and Western Petromelancholia in Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant" (Cook)

Van Haecke, Michele D., "BELLY WRITING: READING THE ALIMENTARY IN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN LITERATURE" (Cook)

2014

Anderson, Jessica, "THE POLITICS OF MELANCHOLY IN ALFONSO CUARÓN’S Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN, CHILDREN OF MEN AND THE POSSIBILITY OF HOPE" (Charles)

Arno, Cathryn Irene, "The Queer Fantasies of Normative Masculinity in Middle English Popular Romance" (Kinch)

Berberat, Cecile Ceuillette, "Mortality to Eternity: Queer Temporality in Three Twentieth-Century Novels" (Baker)

Eilts, Nicholas L., "A Different Kind of Vision: The Critique of Consumerism in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood" (Baker)

Gullickson, Michelle, "“WE ON THE LAND”: COLLECTED ESSAYS IN ECOCRITICISM" (Gilcrest)

Hirst, Kaitlynn Hanna, "WOMEN AND HORSES: THREE CENTURIES OF PATRIARCHAL CONTROL IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE" (Glendening)

Knapp, Robert Nolan, "ORPHIC ECOLOGY: MELANCHOLY AND THE POETICS OF ROBERT DUNCAN" (Economides)

Reed, Jeremy, ""What is Peoria for?": Reading as Spiritual Practice in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King" (Harrison)

Soloy, William John, "Stepping Outside: The Shifting Subjectivities of Post-Romantic Poetry" (Baker)

Sweeney, Benjamin Patrick, "An Anxious State: The Search for Identity and the Struggle for Peace in Irish and Palestinian Literature" (Kane)

Wise, Katherine, "Space, Time, and Dominance in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Women's Gothic Short Stories" (Glendening)

2013

Davie, Torey Elizabeth, "Narrative Reflection and Anatomical Introspection in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Herman Melville's Moby Dick" (Harrison)

DeCelles, Theodore Cecil, "Queer Panic in Native American Literature" (Kane)

Lodine-Chaffey, Jennifer Lillian, "Performing at the Block: Scripting Early Modern Executions" (Hunt)

Nelson, Barbara, "Getting on Nicely in the Dark: The Perils and Rewards of Annotating Ulysses" (Hunt)

Telligman, Megan Kathleen, "Imagining Boundaries: (Post) Humanist Understandings and Ecological Ethics in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood" (Economides)

2012

Adrianna Ely: "The Ecology of Empowerment: Gardens and Machines in Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes and Almanac of the Dead" (Moore)

Kerry Fine: "Community, Body, and Landscape: Construction of Place in Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day and Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home" (Moore)

Meghan Lewis: "Moving Toward Uncertainty: Trauma and Commemoration in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin" (Reimer)

Katy McAlary: "Extremely Visual & Incredibly Communal: Trauma, Multimodality, and 9/11 Literature" (Reimer)

Amanda Peterson: "Orphanhood and the Search for Home in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago" (Charles)

Zach Radford: "The Whale and the World in Melville's Moby Dick: Early American Empire and Globalization" (Kane)

Tom Seiler: "Apples to Apes: Comparative Freedom in Modern Literary Art" (Reimer)

2011

Elizabeth Boeheim: "Writing Next to the West: A Spatial Consideration of Women in the American West" (Moore)

Tim Cook: "Charles Olson and the Aesthetics of Negative Capability: A Drafting of Postmodernity's 'Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul'" (Baker)

Samantha Dwyer: "Literature Meets Biology: An Evolutionary Approach to Literary Studies" (Glendening & Economides)

Nick Myers: "Violence and Rhetoric: Narrative Production in the Wake of Harper's Ferry" (Moore)

Dustin Pace: "Breaking Sound Barriers: Reading the Jazz Novel as a Model for More Flexible Social Interaction in a Globalized World" (Reimer)

Aaron Schneeberger: "Aesthetics of the Brink: Environmental Crisis and the Sublime in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep" (Economides)

2010

Yvonne Hammond: "Taming the Wild: On Womanhood, Nation, and Nature in Ann-Marie Macdonald's Fall on Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies" (Reimer)

Matt Henry: "Salman Rushdie's Fiction in a Global Perspective: Hybridity and Fundamentalism in The Satanic Verses and The Moor's Last Sigh" (Reimer)

A.J. Jackson: "The Meaning of Pain in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy" (Harrison)

Marley McKenna: "Bending Gen(re)der: A Negotiation of Identity through Language in Helene Cixous and the Self" (Charles & Kane)

Kyndra Meusel: "Moments of Being: Beauty in Virginia Woolf's Works" (Knight)

2009

Dean Clement: "'The Last of the True:' The Kid´s Place In Cormac McCarthy´s Blood Meridian" (Harrison)

Mary Painter: "The Study of the Private: Eudora Welty´s Short Stories and Photography" (Knight)

Clare Sigrist–Sutton: "Protest and Proximity: The World Revolution of 1968 in Philip Roth´s American Pastoral and Mahasweta Devi´s Mother of 1084" (Kane, Baker)

Christina Van Roekel: "Homing to Authenticity: Iowa Testimony in Gilead" (Cook)

Kathleen Vickers: "'This Blessed Plot': Negotiating Britishness in Sam Selvon´s The Lonely Londoners, Hanif Kureishi´s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Zadie Smith´s White Teeth" (Reimer)

Veronica Vold: "Dwelling in Ecological Poetry: Emily Dickinson´s Nature Poems and Henry David Thoreau´s Walden" (Baker, Economides)

2008

"Ahlam Abulaila: Woman in Islam: A Stereotyped Westernized Imagee in Nawal Al Saadawi´s 'Woman at Point Zero'" (Kane)

Andrea Armstrong: "The Millennial Garden: A Post–hybrid Reading of Zadie Smith´s White Teeth and On Beauty" (Kane)

Jason Cooper: "The Gospel According to Carey: Christian Hermeneutics in Bliss and Oscar and Lucinda" (Glendening)

Carly Dandrea: "William Apess: Autobiography and the Conversion of Subjectivity" (Moore)

Scott Howard: "Recreating Beowulf´s 'Pregnant Moment of Poise': Pagan Doom and Christian Eucatastrophe Made Incarnate in the Dark Age Setting of The Lord of the Rings" (Hunt, Kinch, Reimer)

Brenda Lamb: "Wallace Stevens´s 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven': A Form of Farewell" (Baker)

Rebecca Lupold: "Dwelling and the Woman Artist in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (Economides)

Erika Mann: "Cinema´s Green is Gold: The Commodification of Irishness in Film" (Kane)

Allison Masters: "'The Sort..of People to Which I Belong': Elizabeth Gaskell and the Middle Class" (Glendening)

Rachel May: "Hauntings: Juliet´s Elegy for Past in Alice Munro´s 'Chance', 'Soon' and 'Silence'" (Charles)

Michael St. Thomas: "'Words Are No Good': The Curse of Signification and the Curse of Faulkner´s South" (Knight)

Paul Vestal: "Remember Gay Victims: An Exploration into the History, Testimony, and Literature of the Persecution of Homosexuals by the Third Reich and Their Effect on a Queer Collective Consciousness" (Charles)

2007

Pandora Andre–Beatty: "Disrupted Conventions: Gender Roles in Mildred Walker´s The Curlew´s Cry and Winter Wheat" (Cook)

Michael Bigley: "Musicality, Subjectivity, and The Canterbury Tales" (Kinch)

Ann Emmons: "'Written on the Rocks': The Mythopoetics of the Almo Massacre" (Reimer, Kane)

Darcy Feder: "Reading Placelessness and Suburbanization in Richard Yates" (Harrison)

Steven Hawley: "Tracking the Trickster Home: The Animal Nature of Words in the Writing of Gerald Vizenor and Barry Lopez" (Moore)

Benjamin Kuntz: "Hunters in the Garden: Yup´ik Subsistence and the Agricultural Myths of Eden" (Moore)

Maria Nissi: "Silent Cowboys and Verbose Detectives: Masculinity as Rhetoric in Wister, Hammett, and Chandler" (Harrison, Kane, Flores)

Agatha Shwayder: "Cracking our Weariness and Contrition: Confronting the Last State of the Heart in Jorge Luis Borges´s 'The Garden of Forking Paths' and Jorge Volpi´s In Search of Kingsor" (Charles)

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter: "Bishopness" (Charles)

Emily Yaksitch: "Considering Connections: Race, Identity and Leadership in Paul Beatty´s The White Boy Shuffle" (Itagaki)

2006

Jill Beauchesne: "How Still the Riddle Lies: Emily Dickinson´s Sense of Naturalness" (Baker)

Brian Grosenbaugh: "Resistance on the Imperial Terrain: Constructing a counter–Empire in Paul Beatty´s The White Boy Shuffle" (Itagaki, Kane)