Recent Graduates

Dalhousie M.A. students are highly competitive candidates for places in top Ph.D. programs across Canada and internationally. Recent graduates have been admitted to McGill, York, Alberta, Toronto, Victoria, and Western Ontario, as well as UC Santa Cruz, Cornell, Brown, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, and Cambridge, and to Dalhousie’s own Ph.D. program. Others have gone on to careers in law, publishing, communications, journalism, and education.

Dalhousie Ph.D. students have been very successful in finding academic positions, even in today's uncertain job market. A significant number of our PhD graduates now hold full-time or part-time academic positions; these include tenure-track positions at the University of Victoria, the University of Regina, the University of Toronto, the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, Algoma University College, Mount Saint Vincent University, and Wilfred Laurier University, as well as contract appointments at Harvard, Dalhousie, Dawson College, and Saint Mary's.

Academia is only one of the career paths taken by our graduates; they have gone on to jobs in editing, public service, writing, web site development, freelance writing, and teaching.
 

Recent MA Theses

Medieval

Mirror to the Soul: The Undead in Medieval Romance.  Maggie Gilchrist, 2016.

Morgaine Speaks for Trotula: Women's Medicine in Arthurian Lengend.  Emily Gaudet, 2016.

How to Lose a Queen in Three Comic Poems: A Discussion of Arthur's Kinship and His Loss of Guinevere. Sam Kehman, 2018.

White Knights and the Pentecostal Oath: the Lineage of Alt-right and Incel Masculinities in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur. Griffin King, 2023.

Early Modern

Ideal Rule in Shakespeare's Romances: Politics in Winter's Tale and the Tempest.  Mikala Gallant, 2013.

Rejuvenating the Renaissance Sonnet: Writing in a Woman's Voice.  Michele Taekema, 2014.

Cariola in Context: An Exploration of the Female Servant in The Duchess of Malfi. Sarah Boyle, 2019.

Darke Hidden Vertuous': Deconstructing the Virgin Figure in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and John Fletcher’s the Faithful Shepherdess. Ferron Guerreiro, 2020.

Articulating the Fall: Satan's Instrumental Rhetoric in Paradise Lost. Liam Kennedy-Finnerty, 2023.

Seventeenth Century

Writing to Women: Aemilia Lanyer and the Rhetoric of Equality.  Daniel Bergman, 2015.

Pioneers, Mothers, Virgins, Whores: (Anti)feminist Tropes in the Feminist Reception of Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips.  Sarah Deller, 2017.

Eighteenth Century

“Till Society be Differently Constituted, Much Cannot be Expected from Education”: Feminist Imaginings of Women’s Rights and Education in Wollstonecraft, Hays, Robinson, and Thelwall. Emma Faulkner, 2021.

Nineteenth Century

Refiguring the Sage: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Pluralistic Vision in Aurora Leigh.  Denae Dyck, 2015.

Rank and Power: The Diary's Intersection with Copyright Law in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White.  Candice Albright, 2017.

Gender Non-Conformity Beyond Narrative Prosthesis in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady and Poor Miss Finch. Lauryn Collins, 2021.

Divisive Synecdoche in A.C. Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse. Eva Cranch, 2023

The Horrors of Capital: Violence and Commodities in Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories. Kelsey Morgan, 2023.

Twentieth Century

A Trace of Memory or an Illusion: Identity, Learning and Emotions in J. M. Coetzee's Jesus Novels. Areej AlQowaifly, 2018.

Morlocks and Mudfish: Anthropocentricism and Evolution in the Early H.G. Wells. Michael Cameron, 2018.

The Life and Death of Paul Kalanithi: The Dilemma of Illness Identity in a Physician-Turned-Patient. Daniella Conley, 2018.

Keeping the Piece: Policing by Principle in Terry Pratchett's Night Watch. Helen Pinsent, 2018.

I still felt in the last moment / The unsheathing of the great knife of parting”: Absence, Abandonment, and Maternal Lament as Poetic Theology in Five Poems by Nelly Sachs. Noah VanBrenk, 2020.

“Sea roads”: The Circulatory Poetics of The Song Fishermen's Song Sheet. Marissa L. Carroll, 2022.

You've got to do it just Like the Boys": Agnès Varda and The Birth of The Autrice. Erin Bragg, 2019.

"In the Midst of Black Seas of Infinity": The Undoing of the American Dream of H. P. Lovecraft. Justin Moir, 2019.

"I Shall be Misunderstord if Understood": The Art of not Understanding James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Jenna Pierson, 2020.

Damaged Perspectives: Towards a Visual Reading of Donald Barthelme's Picture Stories. Matthew Rooney, 2020.

“Form and Function in Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast.” . Madeline Edwards, 2021.

Begone, if you be not deathless!: Examining Women as Characterizations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s "Northern Heroic Spirit.". Gavin Foster, 2021.

Sowing Utopia: Feminist Community in Octavia E. Butler's Seed to Harvest Series.. Kimberly Gilson, 2021.

Misdirecting Modernisms: The Gulf Between Rhetoric and Practice in Raymond Souster's Direction. Benjamin Sheppard, 2022.

Transgressive Fathering in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Katia Stapleton, 2022.

Twenty-First Century

'It's All There Right in front of You': Corporate Ideology and Genetic Engineering in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl.  Vanessa Rachael Marsden, 2016.

Risky Business: The Communal Effects of Industrial Disaster in Lisa Moore's February and Leo McKay's Twenty-Six.  Linda Little, 2016.

Secular Decreation: Acts of Undoing in Priscilla Becker's Internal West.  Carrie Deleskie, 2016.

Reading Afghanistan.  Grant Curtis, 2016.

If You Go down in the Woods Today: The Rise of the Monstrous Child and the 'Save the Child' Discourse in The Walking Dead.  Krista Collier-Jarvis, 2016.

Between Disappearances: The Performance of Affective Archiving in Bracha L. Ettinger's Eurydice Series.  Julia McMillan, 2016.

Symbols and the Soul: Hyperreality, Dissensus, and Sacred Humanism in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.  Grace MacDonald, 2017.

Constrained Women in Omkara: Marriage, Mythology, and Movies.  Rebecca D'Mello, 2017.

Aesthetic Scandal and Accessibility: The Subversive Simplicity of Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey. David McQuillan, 2018.

Call them Isobar: Memory, Mythmaking, and the Black Diaspora in Canisia Lubrin's Voodoo Hypothesis. Sarah Byrne, 2019.

The Beautiful Synonym is Violent Re: Creating Black Identity through a Poetics of Re-remembering. Isabel Cox, 2019.

#EvilBoobs: A Case Study of the Evil Queen’s Cleavage in Once Upon a Time and its Female Fans. Jade Nauss, 2019.

Together in the Crowd of Time: Temporal Decentering and Ethical Action in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. Simon Couper, 2020.

Ecopoetic Interventions: Poets Critiquing Canadian Petrocultures and Pipelines. Gabrielle Mills, 2020.

"Walk-On Parts": The Diminished Agency of Grant Morrison's Superhero Celebrities. William Riley, 2020.

The Way Forward: Ecofeminism and the Creation of Society in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction. Noelle Segato, 2021.

'The loveliest lies of all': Death, Banishment, and the Adaptive Process in Patrick McHale's Over the Garden Wall.. Aiden Tait, 2021.

Relating to Elena: Unexpressed and Unrecognized Feeling. Morgan Beck, 2023.

A Severed Sense of Time: Diasporic Double Consciousness and Alternative History in Ling Ma’s Severance. Kassandra Robicheau, 2023.

Recent PhD Theses

Medieval

Simple Readers (Mis)Reading Profound Matter in English: The Lollard Heresy of Reading and its Effects on English Vernacular Theological Writing in the Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Nicole Beare, 2013.

Word, Image, and Vision: Cardiosensory Sight and Cognition in the Work of the Pearl Poet.  Adam Hutka, 2016.

Early Modern

Jonson's and Shakespeare's "Comedy of Affliction". Jonathan Goossen, 2011.

Shakespeare and the Drama of Politic Strategems. Jackie Cameron, 2012.

Will and Love: Shakespeare, Volition, and Theological Romance.  Darren Dyck, 2017.

Blessed be the Paps: Early Modern English Medical Representations of Women’s Breasts, Breast Milk, and Breastfeeding. Shawna Guenther, 2022.

Eighteenth Century

"Spleen Spreads his Dominion": Cultural, Literary, and Medical Representations of Hysteria in the Eighteenth Century.  Heather Meek, 2007.

Their Voice is Music to my Ear”: The Role of Women in the Work of John Thelwall. Mark Diachyshyn, 2019.

Nineteenth Century

"Of Factory Girls and Serving Maids": The Literary Labours of Working-Class Women in Victorian Britain. Meagan Timney, 2010.

British Identity and the Antirevolutionary Novel: Nineteenth-Century British Novels About the French Revolution. Patricia Cove, 2013.

And He Loved Light Rather Than Darkness: Giacomo Leopardi's Poetics and Pessimism in the Work of Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and A. E Houseman. Rose Sneyd, 2019.

Altered States of Consciousness: Gender, Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse, and Gothic Literature. Kala B. Hirtle, 2022.

Twentieth Century

"I am not I": Late Modernism and Metafiction in Canadian Prose. Vanessa Lent, 2012.

Experience, Interpretation, and the Performance of Authorship: A Study of Multiple Perspective in the Work of George Orwell.  Robert Rose, 2014.

How to Be a Man: American Masculinities 1960-1989.  Bradley Congdon, 2015.

Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Shirley Jackson: Crafting Postwar Maternity as Cultural Nightmare.  Lynne Evans, 2016.

An allegory of Value: American Literature within Noeliberalism.  Gordon Miller, 2016.

Canadian Modernist Poetry and the Rise of Personal Religions. Graham Jensen, 2018.

Anglo-Canadian Modernists in Transit[ion]: Collectivity and Identity in Mid-Century Canadian Modernist Travel Writing. Emily Ballantyne, 2019.

Twenty-First Century

When the Messiah Comes: The Postsecular Messianic in Contemporary Literature. Brandi Estey-Burtt, 2019.

Mundane Intimacies and Everyday Violence in Contemporary Canada Comics. Kaarina Mikalson, 2020.

Ireland's New Losers: Contemporary Irish Fiction and the Ethos of Failure. Michael Fontaine, 2020.

Realizing the Refugee in Contemporary Canadian and Art. Brittany Kraus, 2022.