Honors

Departmental Honors will be awarded to seniors who produce an outstanding honors thesis. Students who have produced exceptional work in the senior seminar and who in most cases have earned a major GPA of 3.50 or above may be invited by their seminar professor to submit a detailed honors-thesis proposal, due near the start of spring semester. If the department approves an honors proposal, it selects a three-member committee to guide the writing and research. Each candidate for honors then enrolls in English 499 (4 credits, non-major elective), and in early April submits the finished thesis to the department for approval. If the honors thesis is approved, the student presents a summary at a departmental forum.

 

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Past Honors Thesis Projects:

2012

Karla DeChamps, “Implications of Identity: The Green Knight of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Molly Dickinson, “Redefining the Lay-Mystic: Pearl and Vernacular Theology”

Casey Newbegin, “‘These Frail Vessels’: Three Heroines in George Eliot and Henry James”

2011 

Andrew Lyle, “Customs and Customers in Two Novels by Hawthorne”

2010

Asher Katz, “Models of Art and Love in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne”

Kit Shields, “Misguided Lovers and Ghost Writers: Submission and Authorship in Hawthorne”

2009

Alyssa Perkins, “To Play on my Bones: Anorexia in the Life and Stories of Katherine Mansfield”

Jessica Cartwright, “Less to Lose, Less to Gain: Exploring Marriage and Fantasy in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘At the Bay’”

2005

Stasia Honnold, “Sentimental Values: Narratives of Identity and Objects of the Past in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ and The Years; Rushdie’s Midnight’s Chlidren”

2004

Ariel Homan, “Rough-Hewing Hamlet’s Heart of Heart: The Problematics of Individual Self-Fashioning”

2003

Emma Weinberg, “Vertigo”

Jonas Lerman, “Second Person”

2002

Andrew Zahler, “Building a Better Bird’s Nest: Poetic Language and Dwelling in the Poetry of John Clare”

Rose Masterangelo, “‘So Much of Gratitude and Verity’: Jane Austen’s Vision of Erotic Love”