Departmental Distinction Projects

RECIPIENTS & TITLES

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