Comparative Literature Alumni

Purdue's Comparative Literature Program is very proud of its graduate students. Below are several who have won prestigious awards and grants in previous academic years.

2026

  • Rida Altaf, M.A. “Wonders, Marvels, and Tilisms in South-Asian and Arab Anglophone Speculative Fiction.” 2026 College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award.
  • Andrew Kroninger, Ph.D. “Downfalls and Xenophilia: Dostoevsky and the Reception by European Modernists.” 2026.
  • Ching Jen Sun, Ph.D. “The Mago Generation’s Arduous Stand: Cultural Nationalism After Taiwan’s Democratization.” 2026.

2025

  • Gwénäel Jouin, Ph. D. “Truth in the Novel: Major English, French, and Spanish Novels c. 1550-1900.” 2025.

2024

  • Moini Rajaa., M.A. “Ghosts at the Threshold: Disembodied Memory and Mourning in Post-War Violent Death in Contemporary Middle Eastern and South Asian Literatures.” 2024.

2023

  • Shiyu Zhang, Ph.D. “The Long Shadow: Literary and Cinematic Representation and Re-imagination of Chinese Female Traumas in the Second Sino-Japanese War.” 2023.

2022

  • Jiacheng Fan, Ph.D. “Tracing Shishi in Contemporary Chinese Historical Novels.” 2022.
  • Alejandro Rodriguez de Jesus, Ph.D. “Sharing Dylan’s Euphantasiotos Role in Francoist Spain in the Context of Commodified Culture,” 2022.

2021

  • Muhammad Hassan Qadeer Butt, M.A. “From Partition to Kashmir: A Comparative Study of Borderlands and Borderization in South Asian Literature.” 2021.
  • Rachel Hackett, M.A. “Crime Fiction as a Lens for Political and Social Critique in the Modern Arab World: Elias Khoury’s White Masks and Yasmina Khadra’s Morituri.” 2021
  • Han Hao, M.A. “Milton's Iconoclasm and Homeric Images of Divinity in Paradise Lost.” 2021.
  • Lang Wang, Ph.D. “Aspirations and Ambivalences of the New Woman: French and Chinese Women’s Press and Fiction 1900-1930.” 2021.
  • Meng Wang, Ph.D., “An Annotated Translation of Chapters 21-30 of the Late Ming Dynasty Novel, Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan 醒世姻缘傳 (Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World).” 2021.

2020

  • Ghaleb Alomaish, Ph.D., “‘Double Refraction’: Image Projection and Perception in Saudi American Contexts. A Comparative Study.” 2020.
  • Ricardo Quintana Vallejo, Ph.D. “Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming of Age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States,” 2020.
  • Zihan Wang, Ph.D.  “Fiction Medicine and the Communist Revolution in the People's Republic of China.”2020.

2019

  • B. Whitney Laga. M.A. “The Picturesque Domestication of Iran for an American counter Modern Retreat.” 2019.

2018

  • Malick Coly, Ph.D. “Secular Discourse in Postcolonial West African Narratives: Problems and Perspectives, A Comparative Study.” 2018.
  • Yingying Huang, Ph.D. “The Alien Eye: Chinese Self-images and the External Observer, 1874-1911.” 2018.
  • Yuhan Huang, Ph.D. “Remembrance and Rumination: The 1.5 Generation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” 2018.
  • Riham Ismail, Ph.D. “The Construction and Negotiation of Identity and Place in Muslim Women's Fictional Narrative." 2018.
  • Wei Lu, Ph.D. “Dissolution and Redemption of Self in Shakespeare’s Four Main Tragedies.” 2018.
  • Laura Ramiro Moreno, Ph.D. “Calderón’s Musical Message: The Importance of the Auditory over the Visual.” 2018.
  • Tulin Ece Tosin, Ph.D. “Haremization of Desdemona: A Comparative Study of Shakespeare’s Othello in the Ottoman Context.” 2018.
  • Luyang Wang, Ph.D. “A Comparative Study of Three Interfering Women in Western and Chinese Tales.” 2018.

2017

  • Jiacheng Fan, M.A. “Strategies of Fantasy in E.T.A. Hoffmann and Pu Songling.” 2017.
  • Adam Hancock, Ph.D. “‘New Motherlands’: Nineteenth-Century South American National Personifications.” 2017.
  • Monica O’Neil, Ph.D. “Trickster Geographies in Shakespeare's ‘Comedy of Errors’." 2017.
  • Christina M. Weiler, Ph.D. “The Romantic Roots of Cognitive Poetics: A Study of Poetic Metaphor in the Works of Herder, Novalis, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley.” 2017.

2016

  • Joanna Beskin, Ph.D. “Perceval’s Sister and Juliet Capulet as Disruptive Guides in Spiritual Quests.” 2016.

2015

  • Christiane Fontinha de Alcantara, Ph.D. “The Beauty of Impertinence in World Literature.” 2015.
  • Natália Fontes de Olivera, Ph.D. “Three Traveling Women Writers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives of Brazil, Patagonia, and the US, 1859-79.” 2015.
  • Kate Christine Moore Koppy, Ph.D. “Cinderella and Other Fairy Tales as Secular Scripture in Contemporary America and Russia.” 2015.
  • Slaney Chadwick Ross, Ph.D. “The Secret History of the English Spy: 1674-1800.” 2015.
  • Runlei Zhai, Ph.D. “Chinese Eco Films and their Pastoral Myth.” 2015.

2014

  • Jason Lotz, Ph.D. “Against Babel: A Comparative Model of Tragedy.” 2014.
  • Buffy Ann Turner, Ph.D. “Force and affliction in Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and George Herbert.” 2014.
  • Sijian Yao, Ph.D. “Twentieth-century Ideas of Love in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang.” 2014.

2012

  • Simone Caroti, Ph.D. “The Generation Starship in Science Fiction, 1934-1977.” 2012.
  • Teresa Joyce Nunes, Ph.D. “Zines in Three Contemporary Grassroots' Movements in Brazil and the United States.” 2012.
  • Yuhan Huang, Ph,D. “A Pedagogical Survey of Western and Chinese Traditions of Reality from Plato to Baudrillard.” 2012.
  • Bing Yan, Ph.D. “Fathers and Sons in World Literature.” 2012.

2011

  • Tatjana Babic-Williams, Ph.D. “‘La storia conta e pesa’: The Ghosts of Colonial Past in Igiaba Scego’s Writings.”
  • Cong Yi, Ph.D. “The Literary Reputations of Eileen Chang and Vladimir Nabokov.” 2011
  • Roberto Ferreira Junior, Ph.D.  “Oppressed Voices: Fighting for Freedom in Slums in Contemporary Caribbean and Brazilian Fiction and Film.” 2011.
  • Jinhua Li, Ph.D. “Transnational Remakes: Gender and Politics in Chinese Cinemas and Hollywood: 1990-2009.” 2011.
  • Liang L. Miller, Ph.D. “Western Myths and Construction of Cao Yu's Two Tragedies.” 2011.
  • J. Spangenberg, Ph.D. “Civil Death in Early Modern Europe from Jack Cade to Luther, Hamlt, and Raleigh.” 2011.

2010

  • †José Newton de Seixas Pereira Filho, Ph.D. “The Non-Violent and Violent Mimetic desires of Street Orphan Characters in Anglo-American and Luso-Brazilian Literatures.” 2010.
  • Martina Ulrike Jauch, Ph.D. “Gothic villains and criminal detectives in Theodor Fontane, Anna Katharine Green and Arthur Conan Doyle.” 2010.
  • Yilin Liao, Ph.D. “Who is Digging the Well and What is in the Well: An Analysis of Well Images in Chinese Fiction and Cinema.” 2010.
  • Yoshiko Marsuura, Ph.D. “Behind the Mask: Rereading Tachihara Masaaki's Literary Works from Postcolonial Perspectives.” 2010.
  • Stephen Pierson, Ph.D. “Monologism and Dialogism in Hölderlin and Whitman.” 2010.
  • Peiru Su, PhD. “’And the Darkness Comprehended it Not’— Epiphany in Joyce and Fei Ming.” 2010.
  • Shaojing Rita Wu, Ph.D.  “A Verbal Paradise Visualized: An Ekphrastic Study of the "Daguanyuan" in Cao Xueqin's Hongloumeng.” 2010.

2009

  • Lei Jin, Ph.D. “Pu Songling, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Garden of Good and Evil in Chinese and American Literature.” 2009.
  • Tetyana Lyaskovets, Ph.D. “Temporal and Visual Structures in Bely, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, and Resnais.” 2009.
  • Xianfang Mou, Ph.D.. “One Hundred Years of Solitary Light: Rites of Passage for Modern American and Chinese Women Writers, 1899-1996.” 2009.

2008

  • Liang Ying, Ph.D. “A Comparative Study of Eighteenth to Twentieth Century Chinese and American Country-of-Women Utopian Fictions.” 2008.
  • Dongmei Xu, Ph.D. “Entitled Heroines in the Everlasting Tales: A Comparative Study.”  2008.

2007

  • Catalina-Florina Florescu, Ph.D. “Transacting Sites of the Liminal Bodily Spaces.” 2007.
  • Mahmoud Mohamed Gewaily, Ph.D. “Explication and Implication in the English Translation of Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone: Linguistic and Pragmatic Losses.” 2007.
  • Yuwen Hsiung, Ph.D. “Expressionism and its Deformation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre.” 2007.

2005

  • Mahmoud Mohammed Gewaily, M.A. “Ethnology of Acts of Repetition in the Translation of Nawal El Saadawi’s Imra’a ‘ind Nuqtat al-Sifr.” 2005.
  • Sibel Sayili, Ph.D. “Falling out of Paradise and Cascading into an Amorphous Space: Processual Self, Truth, and Meaning.” 2005.

2000

  • Soheila Ghaussy, Ph.D. “Les Autres Voleuses: Writing the Feminine in Diasporic Space.” 2000.
  • Patrick D. Kiley, Ph.D. “Making Sense of Pain: Reading the Sensible Body of Late Eighteenth-Century and Early Nineteenth-Century France.” 2000.

1999

  • Özlem Ögüt Yazicioglu, Ph.D. “The Gesture in Narrative, Art, and Theory: Diderot, Jean Paul, and Sterne in the Context of the Debate between Verbalists and Visualists.” 1999.