Dissertations: October 2025

ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Whitney Kite
The lay of the land: Armenian monasteries in their local landscapes
Advisor: Holger Klein

Charlotte Gorant
Coins, tree shrines, and the monastic institution: Bharhut and the artistic beginnings of the world's first Buddhist monasteries (ca. 200 BCE–100 CE)
Advisor: Vidya Dehejia

CHEMISTRY

Jiaming Qi
Engineering living yeast as a low-cost and scalable oral vaccine platform
Advisor: Virginia Cornish

CLASSICS

Olivier Bordeleau-Lavoie
Towards a reinterpretation of the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem
Advisor: Carmela Franklin

EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Claire Jasper
The Evolution of the Antarctic ice sheet over the Plio-Pleistocene inferred from Scotia Sea sediments
Advisor: Maureen Raymo

EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Liu Xuan
Strategizing kinship: Elites, lineage practices, and the political changes in early China (c. 1045–453 BCE)
Advisor: Feng Li

Maho Miyazaki
Aged to perfection: Performing old age and the elderly actor in Noh theater
Advisor: Haruo Shirane

ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Kaagni Harekal
Intimate contracts: Genre and family planning in postcolonial India
Advisor: Gauri Viswanathan

Leo Amino
Dead lecturer / distant relative: The obscurity of comparison and the transparent analogy of race in postwar Black and Asian American poetic and visual nonperformance
Advisor: Saidiya Hartman

GERMANIC LANGUAGES

Laura Tedford
Illusion beyond the fourth wall: The unstageable theater of Ludwig Tieck
Advisor: Claudia Breger

LATIN AMERICAN AND IBERIAN CULTURES

Tulio Bucchioni
The reinvention of the sexual: Radical sexual cultures, politics, and queer Marxism in cold war Brazil and Cuba
Advisor: Bruno Bosteels

María Agustina Battezzati
Neoliberalismo global: Arte, tiempo y feminismos en Argentina. 1990s–2000s
Advisor: Graciela Montaldo

MIDDLE EASTERN, SOUTH ASIAN, AND AFRICAN STUDIES

Ali Ugurlu
Captives of freedom: The paradoxical world of critique, political economy, and emancipation in the Ottoman age of capital
Advisor: Timothy Mitchell

MUSIC (DMA)

Diana Rodriguez
Matter, structure, and code in Marek Poliks’ Interdictor
Advisor: Seth Cluett

RELIGION

Ilona Gerbakher
The abyss of the dream: Interpretation and authority in medieval Sufism
Advisor: Katherine Ewing

SLAVIC LANGUAGES

Max Lawton
Forms of phenomenology in twentieth-century prose: A typology
Advisor: Mark Lipovetsky

SOCIOLOGY

Jongsun Chae
Space in time: Three essays on the daytime experience of space by race, class, and political party
Advisor: Thomas DiPrete

THEATRE

Geoffrey Lokke
The film poem: Lyric poetry and the origins of documentary film
Advisor: Edward Mendelson