Departmental Distinction Projects
RECIPIENTS & TITLES
2013
Jennifer L Arnspong: The Body in Foreclosure
Kaitlin A Coats: "'Artes that been curious': Questions of Magic and Morallity in Chaucer's 'The Franklin's Tale.'"
McKinley T Green: Sex Ed: Gender and Rhetorical Education in Shakespeare's The Tempest
Robert C Miller: "Beyond the Edge of Light"
Sarah L Moon: "Tales of Martyr County"
Ryan Powley: Unmasking Psychopathology in English Literature: What Reading Such Novels Says About Us
2012
Katherine Nesbit: Rooms of Respite: Redefining Traditionally Female Spaces in Mansfield Park, Middlemarch and Mrs. Dalloway
Julia Ortner: Let me Speak for You: The Narrative Complexities in Salman Rusdie's Midnight's Children
Laura Romeyn: Le Circue Calder
Jacqueline Scott: "The Nearest to the Truth": Interconnections of Music and Spirituality in the novels of Austen, Eliot, and Woolf
Kathryn Wilson: "William Faulkner's Marvelous" Women: The Resilience and Agency of Dewey Dell Bundren, Lena Grove and Caddy Compson
2011
Stina Attebery: "The Development of Companion Species Relationships through Interspecies Dialogues in the Science Fiction of Eleanor Arnason"
Thomas Jorgerson: "An impossible task": Trauma and Fiction in Ian McEwan's Atonement
2010
Sally K. Abell: "Tales of the City on the Hill: The Normalizing Capacity of Armistead Maupin's Series"
Althea R. Allen: "Taking Back the Classroom: Maintaining authority without damaging authorship"
Eric D. Monek Anderson: "Hated for What? The Effects of Linguistic Limits on Transgender Identities in Stone Butch Blues and Boys Don't Cry"
Melanie L. Hornbeck: "Colonization, Violence, and Family Relationships in Pacific Islands Literature"
Emily A. McNee: "Metaphoric Motherhood and the Female Poet: The Relationship between Motherhood and Poethood in Anne Bradstreet's Poetry"
Sarah J. Rinehart: "Parody of Parable in Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale"
Benjamin J. Sims: "Allusion, Imitation, and Originality in Book I of The Faerie Queene"
2009
Peter Moench: "Out of the Common Groove": Language and Power in the "Eumaeus" Episode of James Joyce's Ulysses
2008
Brett DeFries: "Shore"
Adam Lozeau: "Not Recovery: Poems"
2007
Paul Dillon: "The Wounded Healer in Qwo-Li Driskill's Walking With Ghosts"
Emelie Heltsley: "Chivalry's Heart of Darkness: Attempts to Control Violence in Chaucer's Knight's Tale"
Joshua Kalscheur: "The Afterlife and Other Poems"
2006
Lauren Benson: "From Parts to Permanence: The Publications, Formats, and Editions of Charles Dickens"
Peter J. Bodurtha: "The Continuing Story of Lemuel Gulliver: Gulliver's Letter to his Cousin Sympson and the Satire of Gulliver's Travels"
Curtis Frank: "Kamikaze"
Meredith Johnson: "The Bee Lover"
Kristin Levanovich: "Spinning on One Foot" and "The Duke of Cambridge"
Emily Peterson: "The Performance of Transvestism in Contemporary Film"
Nancy Simpson: "'So Faire a Flowre': Passivity and Legacy Management in The Dolefull Lay'"
2005
Bridget Draxler: "The Maternal, the Passionate, and the Sublime: The Intersection of Nature and the French Revolution in Wordsworth's Prelude"
Brent McCafferty: "The Ulm Pishkun and Other Native American Scenescapes"
Brigit McGuire: "The Whole World Becomes a Wilderness: The Natural World and the Christian Conversion in Anglo-Saxon Elegy and Epic"
Dan Sinykin: "Pills and Drills" and "Kenneth"
Sara Ann TerMaat: "Understanding" (Creative Nonfiction)
Janet Toews: "Made for Exceptions: Oscar Wilde and the Homosexual Subculture Vs. the Victorian Bourgeoisie"
Stephanie Walker: "Elegy" (Creative work)
2004
Margaret Anderson: "Now, write." The Emerging Cross-Cultural Sphere of Hmong-American Literature
Elizabeth Bechtel: Creative Work
Sarah Everhart: Robbing the Rich to Give to Himself: The Medieval Robin Hood
Nicole Herther-Spiro: Autolycus the Marxist: Teacher of Clowns
Robyn Johnson: Creative Work
Anna Kendig: "Cinderella" Under the Microscope: Fairy Tale Motifs in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters
Hilary Lehmann: Creative Work
Erin McKee-VanSlooten: A Quest for Fictional Truth
Rachel Mykkanen: Grey Cloaks & Above Ground (Creative Work)
Michael Pursell: The Surface of Birth (Creative Work)
Nathan Soland: What I'm Learning to Face (Creative Work)
Shenandoah Sowash: Looking for No Poison (Creative Work)
Rachel Winter: Stigmatic (Creative Work)
2003
Emily Foss: Doctor Rivers' Ethical Dilemna in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy
Benjamin Frazell: Revolution or Resignation? Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and the Value of Modern Political Fiction
Benjamin Jacobson: The Young Lutheran's Guide to Trippin' Balls (creative writing)
Patrick Thomas: Towards Wildness: A Search for Connection in a Suburban Mind (creative nonfiction)
Sarah Varner: Carpe Librum: A Collection of Writings on Libraries and Literature
2002
Stephanie Gehring: Come In: Collection of Poems
Karalyn Kendall: I Am, I Am, I Am: Unresolved Tensions in the Work of Sylvia Plath
Tara Makinen: Myth and Patriarchy in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Nathaniel Miller: Fictional Suicide, the Modernist Enterprise, and Southern History: The Death of Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury
David Oppegaard: Collection of Short Stories
Katherine Scott: The Message of Reform in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
2001
Mark Bresnan: "A Nicely Polished Looking Glass": Anticipating Criticism in Joyce's "A Little Cloud" and "After the Race"
Sarah Eck: What I Never Knew
Avery Fischer: Shelley and the Idea of Vocation: "Compelled" Poets in A Defence of Poetry and Two Odes
Adrienne Grzenda: The Breaking of the Rib. Sexuality, Protofeminism, and the Discourse of Self in The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
Kelly Hessedal: Where I'm From (Creative Project--poems)
Elise Jones: Acclimation
Katherine Lee: Chaucer's Wife and Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff: Celebrating Life Through Language
Anna Miller: Kids These Days. A collection of new literature for children
Dawn Pankonien: In Defense of Jack London's The Iron Heel
Jill Stoltenburg: Cyclops and Decolonization in James Jocye's Ulysses and Derek Walcott's Omeros
Katherine Storlie: Claude McKay: Without Fear or Shame
2000
Andrea Gronstal: Finding Soil for the "Thousand Seeds that Die:" Locations of Spirituality in The Country of the Pointed Firs
Katherine Larson: The Fall into Consciousness: Reason, Imagination, and Female Identity in Milton's Paradise Lost
Andrew Lees: The Canon of English Literature EXPOSED!
Heidi Oas: Why Did Rosa Burger Choose Revolution?
Jeremy Swanson: Poetry as Performance: From Homer to the Spoken Word Movement
1999
Erin M. Anderson: 10 Poems & "Albino, Pink-Eyed Stallion" (Creative Project)
Katherine E. Hall: Dating the Composition of Beowulf
Kellie M. Hultgren: Silly Virgins & Warlike Damzells, or The Good Knight's Guide to Honorable Ladies: Chastity & the Male Education in Book III of Spenser's The Faerie Queene
Ann-Marie Larson: Henry James's "Plant of Pure American Growth": The American Girl & the Limits of Literary Imagination
David R. Pisa: Beowulf. An Adaptation
Eric R. Strean: The Great Romantic Divorce
Erik B. Vorhes: Reducing the Aeneid: Marlowe's Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage:
1998
John W. Bartlett: Vietnam Ghosts (Creative Project)
Stephen E. Marsh: The Old, White Men of the "American Renaissance": How They Conceptualized Themselves as The Other
Todd D. Perrine: "Things'll Get Better, You Can Count On That," "Five Grocery Store Lanes: Rituals of Unremitting," and "The Table Has Been Set" (Creative Project--short fiction)
Jennifer A. Pletz: Creating Identity: The Work of Contemporary Chicana Writers
Erika L. Taibl: At the Listening Point (Creative Project--poetry)
1997
Aaron Andersen: Women and Men (Creative Project)
Nicole Ervin: Hope and Disappointment on the Frontier: Redefining the American Ideal in Willa Cather's Nebraska Novels
R. Scott Hanrath: Comedy as Hermeneutic Strategy in James Joyce's Ulysses: The Transitional Narration of "Scylla and Charibdis"
Loriann L. Licke: From "Lusty Spring," "To Autumn": The Evolution of the Human "Psyche" in Keats's Poetry
Cathryn M. Meyer: When Chivalry and Courtly Love Meet: A Critique of Chaucer's Feminized Hero
Laura L. Mielke: Women and Material Culture in Mary Wilkins Freeman's Short Stories: A Reading of "Sister Liddy"
Sarah Walker: Tracking Smoke (Creative Project)
1996
Norah C. Piehl: A Waif Amid Forces or a Woman Among Friends: Viewpoints on Women's Possibilities in Chicago in Works by Sherwood Anderson, Alice Gerstenberg, and Elia Peattie
Alexandra C. Pokorny: "A Footin' on this Earth": Women and Place in the Short Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman
Gregory W. Randall: "Thise Subtile Tregetoures Pleye": An Inquiry Into the Illusion of Marriage and Gentilesse in Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale"
Lauren E. Symons: Milton's Spiritual Side of Tragedy: From Aristotle's "Poetics" to "Samson Agonistes"
1995
Anna V. Eilert: The "Other" in Kipling, Forster, Jhabvala, Blixen, and Laurens van der Post
Stephanie K. Franken: Madness in Contemporary American Women Writers
Meredith A. Koester: Communication, Connection, and the Shape of Meaning in the Later Plays of Brian Friel
Sarah K. Solum: Images of Newborn Truth: Blake's "Babies" in Relation to the Nature of Contraries and Progression
Lisa M. Thompson: The Wildwood (a novel-in-progress)
1994
Laura Booth: Toni Morrison's Exploration of Male Struggles for Survival Within Male-Female Relationships
Shannon Gramse: Stumbling into the Day
Michelle Hoover: Fictions
Benjamin Juergens: The Question of Conflict Versus Synthesis: Christian and Germanic Pagan Traditions in The Wanderer
Robert Kuehl: The Amalgamation of Courtly Love and Mystical Love. A Study of La Vita Nuova
Jonathan Stenseth: Inhabiting the Planet: The Re-Creation of Nature in Thoreau's Journal
