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MA in English Theses

Theses/dissertations from 2018 2018.

Implementing Critical Analysis in the Classroom to Negate Southern Stereotypes in Multi-Media , Julie Broyhill

Fan Fiction in the English Language Arts Classroom , Kristen Finucan

Transferring the Mantle: The Voice of the Poet Prophet in the Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson , Heidi Brown Hyde

The Effects of Social Media as Low-Stakes Writing Tasks , Roxanne Loving

Student and Teacher Perceptions of Multiliterate Assignments Utilizing 21st Century Skills , Jessica Kennedy Miller

The Storytellers’ Trauma: A Place to Call Home in Caribbean Literature , Ilari Pass

Post Title IX Representations of Professional Female Athletes , Emily Shaw

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

“Not as She is” but as She is Expected to Be: Representations, Limitations, and Implications of the “Woman” and Womanhood in Selected Victorian Literature and Contemporary Chick Lit. , Amanda Ellen Bridgers

The Intrinsic Factors that Influence Successful College Writing , Kenneth Dean Carlstrom

"Where nature was most plain and pure": The Sacred Locus Amoenus and its Profane Threat in Andrew Marvell's Pastoral Poetry , James Brent King

Colorblind: How Cable News and the “Cult of Objectivity” Normalized Racism in Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign , Amanda Leeann Shoaf

Gaming The Comic Book: Turning The Page on How Comics and Videogames Intersect as Interactive, Digital Experiences , Joseph Austin Thurmond

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

The Nature, Function, and Value of Emojis as Contemporary Tools of Digital Interpersonal Communication , Nicole L. Bliss-Carroll

Exile and Identity: Chaim Potok's Contribution to Jewish-American Literature , Sarah Anne Hamner

A Woman's Voice and Identity: Narrative Métissage as a Solution to Voicelessness in American Literature , Kali Lauren Oldacre

Pop, Hip Hop, and Empire, Study of a New Pedagogical Approach in a Developmental Reading and English Class , Karen Denise Taylor

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Abandoning the Shadows and Seizing the Stage: A Perspective on a Feminine Discourse of Resistance Theatre as Informed by the Work of Susanna Centlivre, Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan, Hannah Cowley, and the Sistren Theatre Collective , Brianna A. Bleymaier

Mexican Immigrants as "Other": An Interdisciplinary Analysis of U.S. Immigration Legislation and Political Cartoons , Olivia Teague Morgan

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

"I Am a Living Enigma - And You Want To Know the Right Reading of Me": Gender Anxiety in Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel and The Guilty River , Hannah Allford

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Gender Performance and the Reclamation of Masculinity in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns , John William Salyers Jr.

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

"That's a Lotta Faith We're Putting in a Word": Language, Religion, and Heteroglossia as Oppression and Resistance in Comtemporary British Dystopian Fiction , Haley Cassandra Gambrell

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Mirroring the Madness: Caribbean Female Development in the Works of Elizabeth Nunez , Lauren Delli Santi

"Atlas Shrugged" and third-wave feminism: An unlikely alliance , Paul McMahan

"Sit back down where you belong, in the corner of my bar with your high heels on": The use of cross-dressing in order to achieve female agency in Shakespeare's transvestite comedies , Heather Lynn Wright

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Between the Way to the Cross and Emmaus: Deconstructing Identity in the 325 CE Council of Nicaea and "The Shack" , Trevar Simmons

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Graduate Thesis Examples

The subjects of MA theses have included studies of individual poets or dramatists, novelists or autobiographers, as well as explorations of literary movements, themes or periods. View our more recent titles below.

Our Recent Titles:

• “The Bottom and the Orchard: Where Space and Place are Created, Controlled, and Maintained in  Sula  and  Recitatif ” (2024 Anyabwile)
• “The Great (Genre) Escape” (2024 Perrin)
• “Modality and Sociality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s  Cranford ” (2024 Perry)
• “‘Don’t Question the Experts’: Autistic Autobiographies, Expert Paratexts, and Epistemic Injustice” (2024 Thompson)
• “Preracial Panem: Understanding Racial Identity in Suzanne Collins’s  The Hunger Games  Trilogy and Prequel  The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ” (2024 Wooten)
• “Parts of the Story: An Illustrated Short Story Collection” (2023 Beal)
• “‘What lady wouldn’t wish to join causes with women who stood up for other women?’: Heroines’ Rivalries and Friendships in Popular Romance Novels” (2023 Bradford)
• “Breaking Away: Some Essays on Influence” (2023 Ferrer)
• “Posting to Engage: A Study of the Effects of Recovery-Oriented Rhetoric on Community Building for Individuals with Eating Disorders and Associated Symptoms on Instagram” (2023 Horton)
• “Being Born: A Memoir of Self-Making in Four Parts” (2023 Langford)
• “‘Widen the Lens and See’: Poetry, Photography, and the Act of Witness in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Book of the Dead’” (2023 Marlow)
• “Engaging Secondary Students Through Secondary Worlds: An Approach to Teaching Tolkien at the High School Level” (2022 Casey)
• “The Religious and the Secular Mythology in  Idylls of the King ” (2022 Kirkendall)
• “‘…A Hideous Monster’: Social Repression and Rebellion in Gregory Corso’s ‘The American Way’” (2022 LeBey)
• “Individualism, Materialism, and Sacrifice in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale’” (2022 Nalbandian)
• “Burying the Carnival” (2022 Overdurf)
• “Attending to Time in Narratives of Enslavement: Temporal Alterities and Lived Experiences of Time in Toni Morrison’s  Beloved ” (2021 Bischoff)
• “‘Beasts who walk alone’: Narrating Queer Abjection in Djuna Barnes’s  Nightwood  and Jordy Rosenberg’s  Confessions of the Fox ” (2021 McGuirk)
• “Reach Out and Touch Faith: Haptic Reciprocity in Milton’s  Paradise Lost ” (2021 Ricks)
• “Gender Matters: Amante’s Gender Construction in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Grey Woman’” (2021 Willis)
• “Braddon’s Body of Bigamy: A Corpus Stylistics Analysis” (2021 Waxman)
• “‘Memory is all that Matters;’ Queer Latinx Temporality and the Memory-Making Process” (2020 Caicedo)
• “Old Wives’ Tales: Mothers & Daughters, Wives & Witches (Stories)” (2020 Champagne)
• “‘Numbed and Mortified’: Labor, Empathy, and Acquired Disability in  King Lear  and  Titus Andronicus : (2020 Harrington)
• “‘More Forms and Stranger’: Queer Feminism and the Aesthetic of Sapphic Camp (2020 Kennedy)
• “A Discourse and Statistical Approach to Intersections of Gender and Race in Melville’s  Typee ” (2020 Post)
• “Prophetic Un-speaking: The Language of Inheritance and Original Sin in  Paradise Lost  and S alve Deus Rex Judaeorum ” (2019 Darrow)
• “‘The Frame of her Eternal Dream’: From  Thel  to Dreamscapes of Influence” (2019 Gallo)
• “‘The Murmure and the Cherles Rebellying’: Poetic and Economic Interpretations of the Great Revolt of 1381” (2019 Noell)
• “Dialogic Convergences of Spatiality, Racial Identity, and the American Cultural Imagination” (2019 Humphrey)
• “Troubling Vice: Stigma and Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Ambitious Villains” (2019 Simonson)
• “Beyond Mourning: Afro-Pessimism in Contemporary African American Fiction” (2018 Huggins)
• “‘Harmonized by the earth’: Land, Landscape, and Place in Emily Brontë’s  Wuthering Heights ” (2018 Bevin)
• “(Re)membering the Subject: Nomadic Becoming in Contemporary Chicano/a Literature” (2018 Voelkner)
• “Werewolves: The Outsider on the Inside in Icelandic and French Medieval Literature” (2018 Modugno)
• “Towards Self-Defined Expressions of Black Anger in Claudia Rankine’s  Citizen  and Percival Everett’s  Erasure ” (2018 Razak)
• “Echoes Inhabit the Garden: The Music of Poetry and Place in T.S. Eliot” (2018 Goldsmith)
• “‘Is this what motherhood is?’: Ambivalent Representations of Motherhood in Black Women’s Novels, 1953-2011” (2018 Gotfredson)
• “Movements of Hunters and Pilgrims: Forms of Motion and Thought in  Moby-Dick ,  The Confidence Man , and  Clarel ” (2018 Marcy)
• “Speaking of the Body: The Maternal Body, Race, and Language in the Plays of Cherrie Moraga, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Tony Kushner” (2018 King)
• “Passing as Jewish: The Material Consequences of Race and the Property of Whiteness in Late Twentieth-Century Passing Novels” (2017 Mullis)
• “Eliot through Tolkien: Estrangement, Verse Drama, and the Christian Path in the Modern Era” (2017 Reynolds)
• “Aesthetics, Politics, and the Urban Space in Postcolonial British Literature” (2017 Rahmat)
• “Models of Claim, Resistance, and Activism in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Frances Burney” (2017 Smith)
• “English Literature’s Father of Authorial Androgyny: The Innovative Perspective of Chaucer and the Wife of Bath” (2017 Ingold)
•  “’Verbal Hygiene’ on the Radio: An Exploration into Perceptions of Female Voices on Public Radio and How They Reflect Language and Gender Ideologies within American Culture” (2017 Barrett)
• “Divided Bodies: Nation Formation and the Literary Marketplace in Salman Rushdie’s  Shame  and Bapsi Sidhwa’s  Cracking India”  (2016 Mellon)
• “Metaformal Trends in Contemporary American Poetry” (2016 Muller)
• “Power Through Privilege: Surveying Perspectives on the Humanities in Higher Education in the Contemporary American Campus Novel” (2016 Klein)
• “‘I always cure you when I come’: The Caregiver Figure in the Novels of Jane Austen” (2016 McKenzie)
• “English Imperial Selfhood and Semiperipheral Witchcraft in  The Faerie Queene, Daemonologie,  and  The Tempest”  (2016 Davis)
• “With Slabs, Bones, and Poles: De/Constructing Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Jesmyn Ward’s  Salvage the Bones , Natasha Trethewey’s  Beyond Katrina , and Selah Saterstrom’s  Slab”  (2016 Lang)
• “The Ghost of That Ineluctable Past”: Trauma and Memory in John Banville’s Frames Trilogy” (2016 Berry)
• “Breaking Through Walls and Pages: Female Reading and Education in the 18th Century British Novel” (2015 Majewski)
• “The Economics of Gender Relations in London City Comedy” (2015 Weisse)
• “Objects, People, and Landscapes of Terror: Considering the Sublime through the Gothic Mode in Late 19th Century Novels” (2015 Porter)
• “Placing the Body: A Study of Postcolonialism and Environment in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid” (2015 Hutcherson)
• “Wandering Bodies: The Disruption of Identities in Jamaica Kincaid’s  Lucy  and Edwidge Danticat’s  The Farming of Bones ” (2015 Martin)
• “Mythogenesis as a Reconfiguration of Space in an ‘Alternate World’: The Legacy of Origin and Diaspora in Experimental Writing” (2015 Pittenger)
• “Cunning Authors and Bad Readers: Gendered Authorship in ‘Love in Excess’” (2015 Bruening)
• “‘The Thing Became Real’: New Materialisms and Race in the Fiction of Nella Larsen” (2015 Parkinson)
• “‘Projections of the Not-Me’: Redemptive Possibilities of the Gothic within Wuthering Heights and Beloved” (2015 Glasser)
• “Distortions, Collections, and Mobility: South Asian Poets and the Space for Female Subjectivity” (2015 Wilkey)
• “From Text to Tech: Theorizing Changing Experimental Narrative Structures” (2015 Ortega)
• “A Moral Being in an Aesthetic World: Being in the Early Novels of Kurt Vonnegut” (2015 Hubbard)

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Find Dissertations & Theses

Use the following sources to find doctoral dissertations and master's theses.  Copies of dissertations and theses from other universities can be requested via Interlibrary Loan: borrowing . For more resources for finding theses and dissertations, see the Research Guide Dissertations .

• Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window Full text (PDF) of most US dissertations from 1997 on, many earlier works and some from outside the US plus some master's theses. Also lists all dissertations and theses from 1861 on from US universities and some works from Europe and Asia from 1637 on. Abstracts included after July, 1980.
• Virgo Virgo provides discovery of all theses and dissertations originating at the University of Virginia as well as many others. Newer theses and dissertations are accessible online. From the advanced search screen, you can limit your search to Thesis/Dissertation under the Format heading.
• Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations Contains more than one million records of electronic theses and dissertations.
• American Doctoral Dissertations This freely accessible database includes nearly 100,000 dissertations from 1933 through 1955, which represents the only comprehensive record of dissertations accepted by U.S. universities during that period.

Recent UVA English Dissertations & M.A. Theses

Dissertations and theses offer the latest research from graduate students, identifying trends in the field. As research tools, they are invaluable for their extensive bibliographies. The following are examples of recent dissertations and MA theses written by UVA English graduate students that can be found through Virgo and are available online through the LibraETD repository:

• "Corporate Voice": Poetic Personation and Political Theology in Early Modern England, Dissertation, 2022, Evan Cheney
• "Homo sapiens, Americanus": Exploiting the New Logic of Capitalism in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Sarah O'Connor
• "The Story That Takes You Somewhere New": Form, Fiction, and Authority in Three English-Language Narratives of Gender Transition from 1928 to 2016, M.A. Thesis, 2021, Patrick Ahern
• All Y'All: Queering Southernness in Recent US Fiction, Dissertation, 2022, Heidi Siegrist
• The Beard Show that Grows on You: The Role of the Beard in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Kelsey Nason
• Between Self and Society: An Invitation to Openness in Frances Burney's Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla, M.A. Thesis, 2021, John Jane
• Beyond Subversion: Raising Doubt Through Ancient Scripture in Contemporary Novels, Dissertation, 2022, Nathan Frank
• Black Boyhood and the Queer Practices of Impossibility in African American Literary and Cultural Productions, Dissertation, 2022, Dionte Harris
• A Cloister of Remembered Sounds: A Defense of Memorization as a Pedagogical Practice, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Wyatt McNamara
• Deciphering an Enigma: The Dual Function of Black Nationalism in Clarence Thomas's Judicial Opinions, M.A. Thesis, 2022, John Shimazaki
• Divergent Portrayals of the Other in Titus Andronicus and Othello, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Jasmin Whitehead
• Epistemic Uncertainties: Contemporary Narratives of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, Dissertation, 2021, Samantha Wallace
• Exploring the Southern Vampiresses of Southern Gothic Literature Through Kristeva's Abject Theory, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Stirling Smith
• Family Men: Constructing the gentleman in the eighteenth-century British novel, Dissertation, 2021, Sarah Berkowitz
• Ghostly Encounters: Transnational Gothic and the Twenty-First Century Global Novel, Dissertation, 2022,Dipsikha Thakur
• Inspiration or Invention: Against Romantic Models of Composing, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Kaelin Foody
• Intimate Editing: Toward a Relational Philological Poetics, Dissertation, 2022, Anne Marie Thompson
• Into the Woods: Nature and the Divine in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, M.A. Thesis, 2021, Renu Linberg
• Leading Basic Writing Students to Success Through Empowerment and Care, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Nehali Patel
• Monarchs and the Many-Headed Multitude: Political Relationships in Early Modern English and Scottish Literature, Dissertation, 2021, Emily Keyser
• Poetry for Identity: A Phenomenological Pedagogy of Poetry to Support Students' Self-Concept Clarity, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Janet Murray
• Radical Media, Radical Culture: Technology and Social Change in 20th and 21st Century America, Dissertation, 2022, Grace Alvino
• Reading "The Writing on the Wall": Neo-Victorian Reimaginings and the Potential of Popular Genres, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Austin Rhea
• Reading for Enlightenment in the Beginning of Philosophical Transactions, Dissertation, 2021, James Ascher
• Refracting the Past in Post-Reformation Romance, Dissertation, 2022, Valerie Voight
• Traveling Elegy: Expansive Approaches to Loss in the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, M.A. Thesis, 2022, Maria Rossini
• Unbecoming Behavior: Insurgent Violent-Erotic Fantasies in Kate Zambereno's Green Girl and Other Contemporary Works, M.A. Thesis, 2021, Giuliana Eggleston
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Chapman University Digital Commons

Home > Dissertations and Theses > English (MA) Theses

English (MA) Theses

Below is a selection of dissertations from the English program in Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences that have been voluntarily included in Chapman University Digital Commons. Additional dissertations from years prior to 2019 are available through the Leatherby Libraries' print collection or in Proquest's Dissertations and Theses database.

Theses from 2024 2024

Interior Chinatown: Chinatown as a Performative Space , Audrey Fong

"Old Cod": The Power of Storytelling in Conor McPherson's The Weir , Sarah Johnson

The Beginning of the End: The Cultivation of Transchronological Perceptuality in Arcadia and “Story of Your Life” , Sawyer Kelly

“No One to Show Us the Way:” Assessing the Contemporary Relevance of the Gay Male Bildungsroman , Matthew Lemas

Posthumanism in Literature: Redefining Selfhood, Temporality, and Reality/ies through Fiction , Eileen Kelley Pierce

Catastrophic Progress: A Queer Materialist Analysis of the 2023 Trans/Bud Light Controversy , Brianna Radke

Banned Books and Educational Censorship: The Necessity of Keeping Queer Books in Schools , Rebecca Rhodes

The New Westward Expansion: Settler Colonialism and Gentrification in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina and Corina , Miranda Roberts

Navigating Identity Through Education in Literature and in the Classroom , Sofia Sakzlyan

Nobody Inside: Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": An Analysis on Whole/Incomplete Bodies, "The Maggie Thing"and Sick and Dancing Mothers , Emily Velasquez

Theses from 2023 2023

“Everything and Nothing”: Exhibiting Irishness at the Chicago World Fair of 1893 , Jessica Bocinski

Beyond Allegory: Postcolonial Debates in Science Fiction , Su Chen

Lovecraftian Queerness: Weird and Queer Temporalities in Lovecraft Country and Detransition, Baby , Eurydice Dye

The Dictator Novel in YA Latinx Fantasy , Catherine Gallegos

Humanization of the Refugee as the Modern Subject in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West , Ani Gazazyan

“Henrietta and Harriet:” Considering the Marginalized Best Friend in Burney’s Cecilia and Austen’s Emma , Elena Goodenberger

Rising Costs of Universities and the Impact on Teaching Effectiveness and Student Outcomes , Patrick Hanna

Failure Facing Pedagogy in First-Year Rhetoric and Composition Classrooms , Karuna Minh Hin

Steps Toward Healing from the Possessive Other: The Vital Role of Fantastical Literature in Trauma Theory , Rebekah Izard

Mirroring Financial Speculation and Late Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction: Worker Gullibility and Guilt as Re-imagination of Human Value , Ian Koh

Oceans of Literature - The Little Mermaid , Makena Metz

What Makes a Woman "Pious and Good": The Function of Several Grimm Brothers' Cautionary Fairy Tales , Hannah Montante

From the Master’s Maternity to Redemptive Nurturing: Liberating Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy , Isabelle Stillman

“Beauty and the Beast” and the Representation of the Female: How Fairy Tales Reinforce and Influence Our Current Understanding of Gender Roles , Elizabeth N. Tran

The Significance of Maintaining Character Integrity in Literary Retellings , Sara Turner

Mrs. Dalloway as a Window for Understanding Life , Kristen Venegas

The Domestic Worker in Latinx Fiction: The Discursive Formation of Latinidad , Constance von Igel de Mello

Dorian Gray: The Myth , Peggy Sue Wood

Theses from 2022 2022

Potential For a Pedagogical Level-Up: Teaching First-Year Composition Through Rhetoric of Gaming , Cayman Beeman

Personhood and Objecthood: Examining the Speaker’s Interiority and Double Consciousness in Citizen: An American Lyric , Winnie Chak

Innately American, Black America’s Inheritance: A Rhetorical Analysis of Black Death & Identity , Montéz Jennings

Examining Wonder Woman through a Feminist Voice: How Patty Jenkins’ 2017 Adaptation Upheaved her Creation, Representation, and 80 Year Legacy , Tatiana Madrid

“Strumpet,” “Huswife,” “Whore”: Centering Othello ’s Bianca , Phoebe Merten

Lack of Affirmative Consent: Trauma in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” , Ansalee Morrison

Traumas and Recovery in Takaya Natsuki's Fruits Basket , Vesper North

Poverty, Social Isolation, Uselessness, and Loneliness: The Fears and Anxieties of 19th-Century British Governesses , Lydia Pejovic

Speaking Up For Generic Asians in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown , Orel Shilon

The Brain Scan as Ideograph , Paige Welsh

Changing the Definition of the Orient Through Hollywood , Amanda Yaghmai

Theses from 2021 2021

The Dystopian Impulse and Media Consumption: Redefining Utopia Via the Narrative Economics of the New Media Age , Turki Alghamdi

Collaborative Storytelling: Composition Pedagogy and Communal Benefits of Narrative Innovation , Aysel Atamdede

Feminist Rhetorics: Theory and Practice of Strategic Silence , Paolena Comouche

Surveillance: The Digital Dark Side , Brittyn Davis

Fanfiction As: Searching for Significance in the Academic Realm , Megan Friess

Realism & Language: How Luis Alberto Urrea Uses Bilingualism to Elevate His Works of Realism , Ashley Gomez

"A Mind of Metal and Wheels": Agrarian Ruralism in Joss Whedon's Firefly and J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings , Christopher Hines

“Why Are We Still Reading About Rosa Parks?”: Essential Questions for Continuation Schools , Samantha Mbodwam

Decolonizing the Body , Daniel Miess

Black Panther Shatters Social Binaries to Explore Postcolonial Themes: How Ancestry, Identity, Revenge, and the Third Space Impact the Ability to Navigate Change and Create New Forms of Cultural Hybridity , Deborah Paquin

Anti-Racist Pedagogy: A Practical Means of Building Bonds Between Marginalized Students and Instructors in the Composition Classroom , Santa-Victoria Pérez

Fear Then and Now: The Vampire as a Reflection of Society , Mackenzie Phelps

Monstrous and Beautiful: Jungian Archetypes in Wilde’s Salomé , Nayana Rajnish

Journeying to a Third Space of Sovereignty: Explorations of Land, Cultural Hybridity, and Sovereignty in Ceremony and There There , Jillian Eve Sanchez

Through the Female Perspective: An Analysis of Male Characters in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey , Natalia Sanchez

The Tiered Workshop: The Effects of Using a Paced Workshop in a Composition Classroom , Madison Shockley

Aztlán Potentialities: Queer Male Chicanx Affect and Temporalities , Ethan Trejo

Partying Like It's 1925: A Comparison and Contrast of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Azuela's The Underdogs , Sarah N. Valadez

Theses from 2020 2020

Stephen Dedalus and the Mind as Hypertext in Ulysses , Ariel Banayan

Lessons from Hybridity: A Look into the Coupling of Image and Text in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory , Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric , and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic , Elizabeth Chen

Dawn of the Undead Classroom: Pop-Culture in the First-Year Composition Classroom , Sierra A. Ellison

Moving Beyond Grades: A Shift in Assessing First-Year Composition , Matthew Goldman

Murmurs of Revolution: Mythical Subversion in Dostoevsky , Connor Guetersloh

The Fallen Woman: An Exploration of the Voiceless Women in Victorian England through Three Plays of Oscar Wilde , Marco Randazzo

The Ubume Challenge: A Digital Environmental Humanities Project , Sam Risak

Student Disposition Towards Discussing Race in the Classroom , Natalie Salagean

Trauma Begetting Trauma: Fukú, Masks, and Implicit Forgiveness in the Works of Junot Díaz , Jacob VanWormer

‘Amore Captus:’ Turning Bedtricks in the Arthurian Canon , Candice Yacono

Theses from 2019 2019

The Contradictory Faces of “Sisterhood”: A Case-Study on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Its Theatrical Adaptation by James Willing and Leonard Rae, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Its Miniseries Adaptation on HBO , Lama Alsulaiman

Terrence McNally’s Universalizing Model: The Role of Disability in Andre’s Mother; Lips Together, Teeth Apart ; and Love! Valour! Compassion! , Alexa Burnstine

A Way to Persist: Storytelling and Its Effect on Trauma in Gábor Schein’s The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus , Duncan Capriotti

Language: A Bridge or Barrier to Social Groups , Adina Corke

Haole Like Me: Identity Construction and Politics in Hawaii , Savanah Janssen

Black Women’s Bodies as the Site of Malignity: Interrogating (Mis)representations of Black Women in 16th and 17th Century British Literature , Tonika Reed

The Efficacy of Varying Small Group Workshops in the Composition Classroom , Daniel Strasberger

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms of Capital” in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us , Allie Harrison Vernon

Theses from 2018 2018

Player-Response: On the Nature of Interactive Narratives as Literature , Lee Feldman

Theses from 2017 2017

The Rhetoric of Disability: an Analysis of the Language of University Disability Service Centers , Katie Ratermann

Theses from 2016 2016

The Ritualization of Violence in The Magic Toyshop , Victor Chalfant

Concrete Reality: The Posthuman Landscapes of J.G. Ballard , Mark Hausmann

Readers in Pursuit of Popular Justice: Unraveling Conflicting Frameworks in Lolita , Innesa Ranchpar

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English Dissertations and Theses

The English Department Dissertations and Theses Series is comprised of dissertations and thesis authored by Marquette University's English Department doctoral and master's students.

Theses/Dissertations from 2024 2024

Speculative Escapism in Contemporary Fantasy: Labor, Utility, Affect , Liamog Seamus Drislane

Disillusionment and Domesticity in Mid-20th-Century British Catholic Literature , Catherine Simmerer

A LIBERATED WEST?: FEMALE AUTHORS’ REPRESENTATIONS OF THE "REAL AND THE FANTASIZED" ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER , Amanda Diane Zastrow

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Lifting the Postmodern Veil: Cosmopolitanism, Humanism, and Decolonization in Global Fictions of the 21st Century , Matthew Burchanoski

Gothic Transformations and Remediations in Cheap Nineteenth-Century Fiction , Wendy Fall

Milton’s Learning: Complementarity and Difference in Paradise Lost , Peter Spaulding

“The Development of the Conceptive Plot Through Early 19th-Century English Novels” , Jannea R. Thomason

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Gonzo Eternal , John Francis Brick

Intertextuality and Sociopolitical Engagement in Contemporary Anglophone Women’s Writing , Jackielee Derks

Innovation, Genre, and Authenticity in the Nineteenth-Century Irish Novel , David Aiden Kenney II

Reluctant Sons: The Irish Matrilineal Tradition of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien , Jessie Wirkus Haynes

Britain's Extraterrestrial Empire: Colonial Ambition, Anxiety, and Ambivalence in Early Modern Literature , Mark Edward Wisniewski

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Re-Reading the “Culture Clash”: Alternative Ways of Reading in Indian Horse , Hailey Whetten

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

When the Foreign Became Familiar: Modernism, Expatriation, and Spatial Identities in the Twentieth Century , Danielle Kristene Clapham

Reforming Victorian Sense/Abilities: Disabilities in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Social Problem Novels , Hunter Nicole Duncan

Genre and Loss: The Impossibility of Restoration in 20th Century Detective Fiction , Kathryn Hendrickson

A Productive Failure: Existentialism in Fin de Siècle England , Maxwell Patchet

Inquiry and Provocation: The Use of Ambiguity in Sixteenth-Century English Political Satire , Jason James Zirbel

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

No Home but the World: Forced Migration and Transnational Identity , Justice Hagan

The City As a Trap: 20th and 21st Century American Literature and the American Myth of Mobility , Andrew Joseph Hoffmann

The Fantastic and the First World War , Brian Kenna

Insane in the Brain, Blood, and Lungs: Gender-Specific Manifestations of Hysteria, Chlorosis, & Consumption in 19th-Century Literature , Anna P. Scanlon

Reading Multicultural Novels Melancholically: Racial Grief and Grievance in the Joy Luck Club, Beloved, and Anil's Ghost , Jennifer Arias Sweeney

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

The Ethos of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric and the Democratic Function of American Protest and Countercultural Literature , Jeffrey Lorino Jr

Literary Cosmopolitanisms of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy , Sunil Samuel Macwan

The View from Here: Toward a Sissy Critique , Tyler Monson

The Forbidden Zone Writers: Femininity and Anglophone Women War Writers of the Great War , Sareene Proodian

Theatrical Weddings and Pious Frauds: Performance and Law in Victorian Marriage Plots , Adrianne A. Wojcik

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Changing the Victorian Habit Loop: The Body in the Poetry and Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris , Bryan Gast

Gendering Scientific Discourse from 1790-1830: Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Marcet , Bridget E. Kapler

Discarding Dreams and Legends: The Short Fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty , Katy L. Leedy

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Saving the Grotesque: The Grotesque System of Liberation in British Modernism (1922-1932) , Matthew Henningsen

The Pulpit's Muse: Conversive Poetics in the American Renaissance , Michael William Keller

A Single Man of Good Fortune: Postmodern Identities and Consumerism in the New Novel of Manners , Bonnie McLean

Julian of Norwich: Voicing the Vernacular , Therese Elaine Novotny

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Homecomings: Victorian British Women Travel Writers And Revisions Of Domesticity , Emily Paige Blaser

From Pastorals to Paterson: Ecology in the Poetry and Poetics of William Carlos WIlliams , Daniel Edmund Burke

Argument in Poetry: (Re)Defining the Middle English Debate in Academic, Popular, and Physical Contexts , Kathleen R. Burt

Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England , Steven A. Hackbarth

The Creation of Heaven in the Middle Ages , William Storm

(re)making The Gentleman: Genteel Masculinities And The Country Estate In The Novels Of Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, And Elizabeth Gaskell , Shaunna Kay Wilkinson

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Brides, Department Stores, Westerns, and Scrapbooks--The Everyday Lives of Teenage Girls in the 1940s , Carly Anger

Placed People: Rootedness in G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry , David Harden

Rhetorics Of Girlhood Trauma In Writing By Holly Goddard Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Cisneros, And Jamaica Kincaid , Stephanie Marie Stella

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital , Brandon Chitwood

"Be-Holde the First Acte of this Tragedy" : Generic Symbiosis and Cross-Pollination in Jacobean Drama and the Early Modern Prose Novella , Karen Ann Zyck Galbraith

Pamela: Or, Virtue Reworded: The Texts, Paratexts, and Revisions that Redefine Samuel Richardson's Pamela , Jarrod Hurlbert

Violence and Masculinity in American Fiction, 1950-1975 , Magdalen McKinley

Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood , Susan Muse

Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, and Postnational Identity in Four Novels by Irish Women, 1960-2000 , Sarah Nestor

Truth Telling: Testimony and Evidence in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell , Rebecca Parker Fedewa

Spirit of the Psyche: Carl Jung's and Victor White's Influence on Flannery O'Connor's Fiction , Paul Wakeman

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Performing the Audience: Constructing Playgoing in Early Modern Drama , Eric Dunnum

Paule Marshall's Critique of Contemporary Neo-Imperialisms Through the Trope of Travel , Michelle Miesen Felix

Hermeneutics, Poetry, and Spenser: Augustinian Exegesis and the Renaissance Epic , Denna Iammarino-Falhamer

Encompassing the Intolerable: Laughter, Memory, and Inscription in the Fiction of John McGahern , John Keegan Malloy

Regional Consciousness in American Literature, 1860-1930 , Kelsey Louise Squire

The Ethics of Ekphrasis: The Turn to Responsible Rhetoric in Mid-Twentieth Century American Poetry , Joshua Scott Steffey

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Cognitive Architectures: Structures of Passion in Joanna Baillie's Dramas , Daniel James Bergen

On Trial: Restorative Justice in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley Family Fictions , Colleen M. Fenno

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

What's the point to eschatology : multiple religions and terminality in James Joyce's Finnegans wake , Martin R. Brick

Economizing Characters: Harriet Martineau and the Problems of Poverty in Victorian Literature, Culture and Law , Mary Colleen Willenbring

Submissions from 2008 2008

"An improbable fiction": The marriage of history and romance in Shakespeare's Henriad , Marcia Eppich-Harris

Bearing the Mark of the Social: Notes Towards a Cosmopolitan Bildungsroman , Megan M. Muthupandiyan

The Gothic Novel and the Invention of the Middle-Class Reader: Northanger Abbey As Case Study , Tenille Nowak

Not Just a Novel of Epic Proportions: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man As Modern American Epic , Dana Edwards Prodoehl

Recovering the Radicals: Women Writers, Reform, and Nationalist Modes of Revolutionary Discourse , Mark J. Zunac

Theses/Dissertations from 2007 2007

"The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , Amy M. Amendt-Raduege

The Games Men Play: Madness and Masculinity in Post-World War II American Fiction, 1946-1964 , Thomas P. Durkin

Denise Levertov: Through An Ecofeminist Lens , Katherine A. Hanson

The Wit of Wrestling: Devotional-Aesthetic Tradition in Christina Rossetti's Poetry , Maria M.E. Keaton

Genderless Bodies: Stigma and the Myth of Womanhood , Ellen M. Letizia

Envy and Jealousy in the Novels of the Brontës: A Synoptic Discernment , Margaret Ann McCann

Technologies of the Late Medieval Self: Ineffability, Distance, and Subjectivity in the Book of Margery Kempe , Crystal L. Mueller

"Finding-- a Map-- to That Place Called Home": The Journey from Silence to Recovery in Patrick McCabe's Carn and Breakfast on Pluto , Valerie A. Murrenus Pilmaier

Emily Dickinson's Ecocentric Pastoralism , Moon-ju Shin

The American Jeremiad in Civil War Literature , Jacob Hadley Stratman

Theses/Dissertations from 2006 2006

Literary Art in Times of Crisis: The Proto-Totalitarian Anxiety of Melville, James, and Twain , Matthew J. Darling

(Re) Writing Genre: Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison , Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert

"Amsolookly Kersse": Clothing in Finnegan's Wake , Catherine Simpson Kalish

"Do Your Will": Shakespeare's Use of the Rhetoric of Seduction in Four Plays , Jason James Nado

Woman in Emblem: Locating Authority in the Work and Identity of Katherine Philips (1632-1664) , Susan L. Stafinbil

When the Bough Breaks: Poetry on Abortion , Wendy A. Weaver

Theses/Dissertations from 2005 2005

Heroic Destruction: Shame and Guilt Cultures in Medieval Heroic Poetry , Karl E. Boehler

Poe and Early (Un)American Drama , Amy C. Branam

Grammars of Assent: Constructing Poetic Authority in An Age of Science , William Myles Carroll III

This Place is Not a Place: The Constructed Scene in the Works of Sir Walter Scott , Colin J. Marlaire

Cognitive Narratology: A Practical Approach to the Reader-Writer Relationship , Debra Ann Ripley

Theses/Dissertations from 2004 2004

Defoe and the Pirates: Function of Genre Conventions in Raiding Narratives , William J. Dezoma

Creative Discourse in the Eighteenth-Century Courtship Novel , Michelle Ruggaber Dougherty

Exclusionary Politics: Mourning and Modernism in the Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Amy Levy, and Charlotte Mew , Donna Decker Schuster

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Toward a Re-Formed Confession: Johann Gerhard's Sacred Meditations and "Repining Restlessnesse" in the Poetry of George Herbert , Erik P. Ankerberg

Idiographic Spaces: Representation, Ideology and Realism in the Postmodern British Novel , Gordon B. McConnell

Theses/Dissertations from 2002 2002

Reading into It: Wallace Stegner's Novelistic Sense of Time and Place , Colin C. Irvine

Brisbane and Beyond: Revising Social Capitalism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America , Michael C. Mattek

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

Christians and Mimics in W. B. Yeats' Collected Poems , Patrick Mulrooney

Renaissance Roles and the Process of Social Change , John Wieland

'Straunge Disguize': Allegory and Its Discontents in Spenser's Faerie Queene , Galina Ivanovna Yermolenko

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

Reading American Women's Autobiography: Spheres of Identity, Spheres of Influence , Amy C. Getty

"Making Strange": The Art and Science of Selfhood in the Works of John Banville , Heather Maureen Moran

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MA English literature part 2

Vocational relevance.

You will have the option to learn and develop vocational writing skills, specifically how to write for different kinds of non-academic audiences.  

Qualifications

A894 is a compulsory module in our:

• MA in English Literature (F88)
• Credits measure the student workload required for the successful completion of a module or qualification.
• One credit represents about 10 hours of study over the duration of the course.
• You are awarded credits after you have successfully completed a module.
• For example, if you study a 60-credit module and successfully pass it, you will be awarded 60 credits.

OU	Postgraduate
SCQF	11
FHEQ	7

Find out more about entry requirements .

What you will study

This module requires you to research and write a dissertation on a subject in English Literature of your own choice. The module opens with a taught block focused on the writing of a detailed research proposal. Beginning with guidance in choosing a dissertation subject, you then follow these essential steps for assembling a research proposal:

• identify the primary texts for your study
• generate the research questions driving your inquiry
• undertake literature searches for relevant secondary material
• formulate a preliminary chapter structure.

The second element in the opening block is an opportunity to discover ways in which you can communicate your research to audiences beyond those in academia – such as in public lectures or podcasts; in book reviews for broad readerships; or in catalogue entries for museums and galleries.

The remaining three blocks are dedicated to independent study. Working closely with your personal tutor, you'll produce first-draft versions of two chapters of your dissertation in blocks 2 and 3.

Drawing together all your research and your tutor’s feedback, in the fourth block you'll write up the final draft of your dissertation.

Teaching and assessment

Support from your tutor.

You'll have a personal tutor, who provides advice and guidance, and marks and comments on your written work. In the first block, tutors facilitate discussions between you and your fellow students in the online tutor-group and module-wide tutorials. Attendance at the online tutorials is encouraged, but not obligatory, and recordings of the tutorials are made available. In the three independent learning blocks, one-to-one supervision meeting between you and your tutor are scheduled at the key moments in the module: at the outset, to discuss/confirm your dissertation topic, and after the submission of each of the two draft chapters, to provide detailed feedback and guidance.  

The assessment details can be found in the facts box.

Course work includes

Tutor-marked assignments (TMAs)

Future availability

MA English literature part 2  starts once a year – in September. This page describes the module that will start in September 2024. We expect it to start for the last time in September 2034. 

Regulations

Entry requirements.

The expectation is that you will have completed either  MA in English literature part 1 (A893) or the discontinued module A815 before you take this module. In exceptional circumstances, you can apply to study A894 if you have completed the course-work component of an MA in English Literature or a closely related discipline. If you’re in any doubt about the suitability of your qualifications or previous experience, please contact us before you enrol.

Preparatory work

We strongly recommend that you read the study material in advance of starting the module.

Start	End	England fee	Register
07 Sep 2024	Jun 2025	£3715.00	Registration closes 15/08/24 (places subject to availability)
06 Sep 2025	Jun 2026	Not yet available	Registration opens on 15/03/25
This module is expected to start for the last time in September 2034.

Additional costs

Study costs.

There may be extra costs on top of the tuition fee, such as set books, a computer and internet access.

Ways to pay for this module

We know there’s a lot to think about when choosing to study, not least how much it’s going to cost and how you can pay.

That’s why we keep our fees as low as possible and offer a range of flexible payment and funding options, including a postgraduate loan, if you study this module as part of an eligible qualification. To find out more, see Fees and funding .

Study materials

What's included.

You'll have access to a module website, which includes:

• a week-by-week study planner with integrated option pathways
• module materials: each week has a reading guide, online activities, and further study suggestions
• visual and audio resources
• an assessment guide
• access to online forums and linked digital resources
• access to the OU library and its research resources

Computing requirements

You’ll need broadband internet access and a desktop or laptop computer with an up-to-date version of Windows (10 or 11) or macOS Ventura or higher.

Any additional software will be provided or is generally freely available.

To join in spoken conversations in tutorials, we recommend a wired headset (headphones/earphones with a built-in microphone).

Our module websites comply with web standards, and any modern browser is suitable for most activities.

Our OU Study mobile app will operate on all current, supported versions of Android and iOS. It’s not available on Kindle.

It’s also possible to access some module materials on a mobile phone, tablet device or Chromebook. However, as you may be asked to install additional software or use certain applications, you’ll also require a desktop or laptop, as described above.

If you have a disability

Written transcripts of any audio components are available on the module website. 

To find out more about what kind of support and adjustments might be available, contact us or visit our disability support pages .

Request your prospectus

Our prospectuses help you choose your course, understand what it's like to be an OU student and register for study.

Request prospectus    

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MA/PhD in English Language and Literature

Program Overview

Our MA/PhD in English Language and Literature is an integrated program that allows students to earn an MA on the way to the PhD. We do not admit students for a terminal MA degree. The program receives over 250 applications of admission each year and typically enrolls an entering class of 10-14 students, all of whom receive funding.   

The MA/PhD program offers two tracks: one in Literature and Culture, the other in Language and Rhetoric. Within each track, students will develop individualized programs of study in close consultation with faculty mentors. Intellectually, there is substantial connection between work in these areas of the department: faculty teaching in the Language and Rhetoric track are certainly thinking about matters of culture, just as faculty teaching in Literature and Culture clearly attend to the nature and politics of language. Students in either track can and do take courses in the other.

However, these two tracks offer distinct forms of professional training and accreditation: students in the Literature and Culture track are trained to conduct research and to teach in literary and cultural studies (e.g., in fields such as Victorian literature, ecocritism, or contemporary speculative fiction). Students in the Language and Rhetoric track are trained to conduct research and to teach in areas broadly related to language-in-use (e.g., in fields such as composition studies, rhetoric, history of English, applied linguistics, literacy, and writing pedagogy). Their research might study practices in the composition classroom or might address topics in discourse analysis, language policy, and translingualism. On completion of the PhD, Literature and Culture students are qualified to apply for jobs teaching in their area of literary or cultural study; students in Language and Rhetoric are qualified to apply for jobs in rhetoric and composition studies, applied linguistics, or writing program administration. When applying to the program, applicants must choose between these two tracks and may not apply to both simultaneously.

Department faculty work across a range of historical periods (Medieval, Early Modern, 19 th , 20 th , and 21 st centuries) and methodological frameworks with a focus on the study of discourse, literacy, textuality, genre (including speculative fiction and SF), gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, postcoloniality, indigeneity, disability, environment, media, and public culture. For a fuller snapshot of the work we do, please consult our faculty profiles . 

Application Information

Application materials are due December 1. (If December 1 falls on a Saturday or Sunday, then the deadline is the following Monday.)  Offers of admission are usually made by mid-March.  

• How to Apply
• Application Checklist

For frequently asked questions, please see our  MA/PhD FAQ  page. 

Funding Opportunities

We offer a funding package to all admitted MA/PhD students. The funding package includes a tuition waiver, health insurance, and a monthly stipend during the academic year through an Academic Student Employee position. In general, duties include teaching one English class, assisting in a large lecture and leading quiz sections, or assisting in program administration.

PhD students also have opportunities to compete for fellowships and scholarships offered through the Department of English.

• Check out our other Funding Opportunities

MA/PhD Degree Requirements

MA/PhD degree requirements can be found here: PhD Degree Requirements .

Students who enter our PhD program without a related master’s degree will be required to complete an MA in the first two years. More information can be found here:  MA/PhD Degree Requirements: Master's Degree .

Placement & Alumni

A recent survey of our graduates from 2008-2018 showed the following employment rates:

• 43% in tenure-track positions
• 43% in other academic positions (not tenure-track)
• 8% in professional careers

Dissertation abstracts from recent graduates can be found here: Graduate Research .

Check out our  PhD Alumni Spotlight page where recent alumni have shared their current job placements, highlights from their time at UW, and advice for current and prospective students. 

Contact an advisor

• We welcome questions and correspondence from prospective graduate students at  [email protected]
• Meet our Graduate Staff
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ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Home > HFA > ENGLISH > English Department Masters Theses Collection

English Department Masters Theses Collection

Theses from 2023 2023.

A New Language: Apophatic Discourse in John Donne's "Devotions" , Jessica M. Farris, English

Theses from 2022 2022

An Economy of Care: George Eliot's Middlemarch and Feminist Care Ethics , Madison V. Newman, English

Marked at Sea: Race, Class, and Tattoo Culture in Melville's Early Sea Fiction , Connell D. Swenson, English

Theses from 2020 2020

A Stylometric Analysis of Climate Change Fiction , Nina Lorenz, English

Theses from 2018 2018

The Publication and Initial Reception of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights: Victorian Gender Norms and Intertextual Modern Interpretation , Juliana Ohrenberger, English

Theses from 2017 2017

The Unreliable Narrator: Simplifying the Device and Exploring its Role in Autobiography , James Ferry, English

Theses from 2016 2016

The Ladies and the Women , Caroline V. Jauch, English

Theses from 2014 2014

Studies in the Production of Historical Fiction: Considering Prestructure in The Red Badge of Courage , Janie Gray, English

Soft Spot , Joanna Novak, English

Theses from 2013 2013

That Map Feeling , Kimberly Abruzzo, English

The Montaigne Result , Hannah Brooks-motl, English

The Grave Keepers , Elizabeth A. Byrne, English

Hotel Warren , Matthew D. Charlton, English

Out Here , Michele Christle, English

No Fear Here , Bryan T. Comer, English

Mammal Room , Kristen A. Evans, English

The Constitution , Brian j. Foley, English

The Riots , Leora S. Fridman, English

Out of Season , Aaron E. Frigard, English

Six Stories , Lech Harris, English

Ava, A Novel , Jacqueline Blair Holt, English

Rough Belief , Emily R. Hunt, English

Still Fires , Rachael E. Katz, English

I Came To in Conflagration , Katelyn S. Litterer, English

"i am on the Coloured Side": The Roles of the White Suitor and the Black Mother in the Tragic Mulatta Narrative , Shannon D. Luders Manuel, English

Bay of Fundy , Carlin Mackie, English

Cities I've Never Lived In , Sara Majka, English

Union Square , Sarah K. Malone, English

The Atlanta Motor Speedway is on Fire , Gregory Carl Purcell, English

Theses from 2012 2012

A Rose Has No Teeth When You Hold It So , David R. Bartone, English

Of Zebra , Sarah W. Boyer, English

Creatures Are Kind , Angela M. Buck, English

Flood Bloom , Caroline Cabrera, English

The Human Error , Ngoc Doan, English

A Heart, Beating, Hard , Lauren F. Goodman, English

Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing , Dana Green, English

All the Good in the World Starts Now , Anne C. Holmes, English

A Daytime Moon , Anne Kleeman, English

In Between Days , Andrea Lawlor, English

Hipster , Mark Leidner, English

A Ceiling of Sky , Su-yee Lin, English

Gloria Fama , Kelin E. Loe, English

Occasionally Disparate Stories , Ryan A. Macdonald, English

Rules for an Old Children's Game: After the Paintings of Egon Schiele , Jenny Mar, English

The Closest Thing , Jessica Miele, English

Shiva's Dance , Abha E. Phoboo, English

We Are Alive and Know What To Be Scared of , Michael S. Rosenberg, English

In the Colonies , Nicolas A. Sansone, English

Soldier On , Gale Marie Thompson, English

Falling Rock , Heather S. Varnadore, English

Solid Gold October , Christopher S. Ward, English

The Book of Hats , Dov S. Zeller, English

Theses from 2011 2011

Everything Could Be Different , Joel Anderson, English

The Winter War , Jensen Beach, English

We Came and We Brought Our Own Furniture , Luke J. Bloomfield, English

Throw Yourself into the Prairie , Francesca Chabrier, English

New Revised Standard , Jack Christian, English

Forgive Everyone Everything , Adam P. Cogbill, English

How to Catch a Coyote , Christine Crutchfield, English

The Gun at Kamurgersky , Emily F. Culliton, English

Deer Jump Fences, Antelope Thread , Jeffrey A. Downey, English

Escape from the Haunted City of Fright and Doom! , Kyle Flak, English

Skin , Kim Hagerich, English

Victory , Benjamin J. Kopel, English

My Favorite Ice Cream Shop Has Been Leveled to the Ground , John Maradik, English

Reptile House , Rosalyn H. Mclean, English

Three Act Drama , Luke Phelan, English

When Grass on a Mountain Takes Fire, There Is Great Light , A'dora Phillips, English

Bad Blood: The Southern Family in the Work of William Faulkner , Neil T. Phillips, English

The Mounting Evidence of our Decline , Roger (boomer) Pinches, English

They Dragged Them through the Streets , Hilary Plum, English

At the Checkpoint to Sleep , Henk Rossouw, English

The Orchard Green And Every Color , Zachary Savich, English

Trumpet , Matthew Suss, English

50% , Jonathan Tosch, English

Theses from 2010 2010

Mama's Boy , Jamie t. Berger, English

The Legend of Hugo el Maximo , Alejandro E. Cuellar, English

Every Mostly Great Man in the State , Gabe Durham, English

Valparaiso, Round the Horn , Madeline S. Ffitch, English

Open Season , Jessica L. Fjeld, English

Breaking News , Matthew M. Gagnon, English

Pee On Water and Other Stories , Rachel B. Glaser, English

The Adventures of Eagle Feather: A Collection of Stories , Luke B. Goebel, English

The Out of Way , Katie F. Hoffman, English

Good Time Park , Mark M. Koyama, English

The Silhouettes , Lily Ladewig, English

The Burts , Jason Larson, English

Show of Wonders , Brian Mihok, English

Frog City , Ata Moharreri, English

(Evol)ution Is Love Spelled Backwards , Erica Monteiro, English

Garbage and Marble , Emily Rae, English

Things Are Looking Up , Ian Wang, English

Float the River, Sink the Sea , Matthew P. Weingast, English

Look! Look! Feathers , Michael A. Young, English

Theses from 2009 2009

This This Here , Sara Jaffe, English

Crosslands , James C. Schlatter, English

The Rediscovery of South African Cultural Identity in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying , Kiren M. Valjee, English

Theses from 2008 2008

Head Heart Hand , Lyndsey Kara Cohen, English

The Confessions , Christopher N. Deweese, English

The Things a Body Does When It Thinks It's Going to Die , Aaron M. Hellem, English

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English and Comparative Literary Studies

Sample dissertation proposal.

Below is an example of a successful MA dissertation proposal. Note particularly the robust referencing, and the way in which the author has already done preparatory work in the field so that clear areas of critical enquiry have already been formulated.

Modernist Poetics and the Acquisition of the Other Tongue

I will reconsider the role that multilingualism plays in modernist poetry, and particularly Ezra Pound’s, by moving away from a text-based model – in which the poem is understood primarily as translation, appropriation or montage of another language’s representative texts – and towards a more author-centric one, in which the poem documents the lived experience of knowing multiple languages, each of which transcends the finite set of words and texts that its author knows. I hope that my work will extend Robert Stark’s recent assertion that Pound acquired poetic style as if it were a foreign language, but by paying attention to the more literal encounters with foreign languages that make this simile possible. However, in contrast to Stark’s model of ‘apprenticeship’, Steven Yao has argued that modernism marked the point at which mastering the source language stopped being a prerequisite for a literary translator: thus, the different ways in which Pound translated or incorporated Chinese texts into English works over the course of his career, or used original ‘handy language’ in Italian alongside quotations, may represent different heuristic approaches to a code that still remained somehow impenetrable. ‘Barbarism and onomatopoeia’, rather than forming the comfortable pair of terms sometimes used by Stark, might define a driving tension in Pound’s verse practice, between seeing another language as pure sound and as the product of another culture incompletely understood.

Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s Lyric Poetry will be an important source: although she focuses almost exclusively on the role of the mother tongue, and uses it to justify lyric’s untranslatability, many of the phenomena which she associates with first language acquisition, such as the delay in recognising phonemes, are also relevant to second language acquisition. I also hope to move beyond Blasing’s cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches, to position Pound within a broader cultural history of language acquisition theory: texts to investigate may include the prose treatises by Dante that he admired, and contemporary reflections on language-learning by Leo Spitzer. I expect to offer a reading of Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (perhaps alongside T S Eliot’s early French poems) in light of this investigation, as possible oversights in Blasing’s argument.

Both Blasing’s and Stark’s monographs are bound up in questions of genre definition which deserve further consideration. I intend to develop the arguments of those critics, such as Simon Jarvis, who have questioned whether Blasing’s arguments define lyric poetry alone. How might language acquisition also be important for a definition of epic, especially in light of its traditional association with nation-building and Wai Chee Dimock’s recent vision of the genre as a carrier of foreign lexis? If, for Blasing, lyric ‘dramatises’ the struggle to enter a language-speaking community, is it more fully dramatised in a text such as Pound’s Elektra, where traumatic experience is manifested in a conflation of American vernacular and untranslated Greek?

Here, it may be fruitful to compare Pound’s choral dramas to Eliot’s: Murder in the Cathedral, for example, updates English vernacular drama, but by incorporating a ‘babbling’ chorus who imitate classical tragedy. While I expect the changes in Pound’s practice over the course of his career to provide the structure for my final project, I look forward to paying attention to points of comparison with other, less canonical modernists. These could include Hope Mirrlees’s use of montage to search for a ‘holophrase’ in Paris; Basil Bunting’s insistence on a regional vernacular, but against a backdrop of international cultural references; and the artificial languages of Futurist and Dada sound art, which work both to reject subjectivity and forge international communities.

Critical Bibliography

Arrowsmith, Richard Rupert, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

(ed.) Bates, Catherine, The Cambridge Companion to the Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) [essays by Freccero, Whittier-Ferguson and Merchant].

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, Lyric Poetry: The Pleasure and the Pain of Words (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Dimock, Wai Chee, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Ellis, Rod, Second Language Acquisition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Hart, Matthew, Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Jarvis, Simon, ‘The melodics of long poems’, Textual Practice 24.4 (2010).

Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).

Moody, A David, Ezra Pound: Poet, I: The Young Genius, 1885-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

North, Michael, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Patterson, Ian, ‘Time, Free Verse, and the Gods of Modernism’ in Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern, eds. Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) [and other essays in this volume].

Scott, Clive, Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) [and earlier works by Scott].

Spitzer, Leo, ‘Learning Turkish’, tr. Tülay Atak, PMLA 126.3 (2011).

Stark, Robert, Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jongleur’s Apprenticeship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

Department of English

Recent Theses and Dissertations

Recent ph.d. dissertations.

• Mohammed Alhamili, The Emergence of Arab Nation-State Nationalism as an Alternative to the Supranational Concept of Ummah
• Anthony Buenning, Shakespeare and Early Modern Trauma
• Jay Gentry, The World We Want to Leave Behind: White Supremacy in the Apocalyptic Genres Past, Present, and Future
• Jonathan Duckworth, The Sometime Joy
• Maricruz Gomez, Chicana Decolonial Feminism: An Interconnectedness of Being
• Cassia Hameline, Stay for the Heron: Essays
• Kat Moore, Have You Ever Had a Broken Heart?
• Aza Pace, Her Terrible Splendor
• Travis Scott Ray, Stories and "Burning Man"
• Megan Arlett, Louisiana Saturday Nights
• Anum Aziz, Mapping the Feminist Movement in Pakistani Literature: Towards a Feminist Future
• Joshua Jones, Somehow Holier
• Minadora Macheret, Dear Bone Mother
• Takuya Matsuda, This Man is Your Friend: Knowing "Us" and "Them" in Ethnic American Literature of the Pacific Theater
• Lauren Rogener, Cultures of Elite Theatre in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Masque: Four Incarnations
• Andrew Smith, The Construction of the Fringe Extraterrestrial of Postmodernity
• Carly Susser, Molt
• Kevin West, Portal
• Brett Armes, The Ends of Smaller Worlds
• Rebecca Bernard, In the Way of Family
• Natalie Clark, Defining and Teaching Courtliness with Animals and Clothing in the Lais of Marie de France
• Brian Clifton, Wrong Feast
• Andrew Koch, Some Names for Empty Space
• Shannon Sawyer, True War Stories: Lies, Truth, and Recovery in the Non/Fiction of Vietnam
• Katherine Schneider, Body Doubles: Materiality and Gender Non-Binarism in Victorian Supernatural Fiction
• Stephanie Vastine, Queerness, Futurity, and Desire in American Literature: Improvising Identity in the Shadow of Empire
• Aurelia von Tress, Revolutionaries and Prophets: Post-Oppositionality in Kathleen Alcalá's Sonoran Desert Trilogy
• Sarah Warren, Oklahoma History
• Ruby Al-Qasem, Resurrection Attempts: Essays
• Stevie Edwards, Still House
• Sanderia Faye, Eleven
• Natalie Foster, Winter
• Allyson Jones, Just Ask: A Memoir of My Father
• Matthew Morton, Improvisation without Accompaniment and What Passes Here for Mountains
• Sebastian Paramo, Where We Split
• James Redmond, Because You Previously Liked or Played
• Iqra Shagufta, Postmodernity and Pakistani Postmodern Literature
• Daniel Stuart, Stalking Dickens: Predatory Disturbances in the Novels of Charles Dickens
• Virginia Wood, Tigers Born in the Same Year
• Conor Burke, Given That the Body Was Made
• Justin Carter, Brazos
• Cheri Paris Edwards, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine:Voices from the Other Side of the Color Line
• Kimberly Garza, The Last Karankawas: Stories
• Meghan Taylor Johnson, Poor Things: Objects, Ownership, and the Underclasses in American Literature, 1868-1935
• Ross Wilcox, Union: A Novel
• Spencer Hyde, Let It Run
• Nick Lu, Constructing Taiwan: Taiwanese Literature and National Identity
• Jessica Murray, Notes for the Manual Assembly
• Clint Peters, The Divine Coming of the Light
• Jeff Pickell, Jeff Pickell: New and Selected
• Timothy Regetz, Lollardy and Eschatology: English Literature c. 1380-1430
• Charlie Ricciardelli, The Hoboken War Bride: A Novel
• Brian Tatum, Rearranging an Infinite Universe: Literary Misprision and Manipulations of Space and Time, 1750-1850
• Heidi Cephus, Corporeal Judgment in Sheakpeare's Plays
• Trista Edwards, Spectral Evidence
• Anthony Cole Jeffrey, The Aesthetics of Sin: Beauty in Early Modern English Literature
• Tana Juko, Misrecognized and Misplaced: Race Performed in African American Literature, 1900-2015
• Darcy Lewis, Xenotopia: Death and Displacement in the Landscape of Nineteenth-Century American Authorship
• Nick McRae, Inscrutable House
• Amber Pagel, "How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?": Cognitive Poetics and the Poetry of William Butler Yeats
• Timothy Ponce, The Hybrid Hero of Early Modern English Literature: A Synthesis of Classical and Contemplative Heroism
• Karl Zuehlke, Momentarium

Recent MA Theses

• Xaviera Hernandez, Mexican Goodbye
• Caleb Kunasek, The Colonial Subject in the Early British Novel: Revisiting Colonial Captivity in Robinson Crusoe
• John Brandt, "Before This Memory Makes Sense": Essays
• Joel Najera, Beyond the Hold: The Evolution of the Ship in African American Literature
• Andrea Perez, Death Date
• Sara Ulery, Rein of Renegades
• Kaitlyn Brown, Exploitation, Justification and Overcoming through Voice: Exploring American Slavery and the Slave Narrative in "The Handmaid's Tale"
• Cade Mason, "Engine Running": Essays
• Martin Ramirez, "The Sandbox" and Other Short Stories
• Olivia Trotter, Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy: How Society of Spectacle Bred the Mockingjay
• Conor Flannery, Collected Stories
• Zachary Kusch, A Century of Ash
• Garrett Vesely, Mortal Ghosts
• Laura Allen, Driving Lessons and Other Stories
• WIlliam Ross Irvin, Life Holders
• Hunter Jernigan, Running from My Youth: Essays
• Benjamin Smith, "A Very Fine Piece of Writing": Parnell and the Joycean Text, 1905-1922
• Morgan Inigo Smith, Flotsam: Men in Isolation
• Leah Tieger, Animals Alive and Dead
• Jaya Wagle, Homeland/Split
• Jessica Beattie, Second Life, Second Chance
• Caleb Braun, Developer
• Lauren Pilcher, "A Kind of Ghost"
• Sarah Ridley , That Every Christian May be Suited: Isaac Watts's Hymns in the Writings of Early Mohegan Writers, Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson
• Cary Siegfried, "Failure to Yield": Essays
• Amanda Yanowski , Off Main Street: Stories

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| Steps to follow | Mémoire Supervisors | The Proposal | Practical Matters | Submission and Discussion de Mémoire (viva) | Cake T-Days  

Past mémoires

Past MA SPEC projects 

Steps to follow

• Discuss your chosen topic with the appropriate member of staff. Check the file below that contains a list of all supervisors and their interests that will help you to choose the staff member you want to work with.
• To write a mémoire you should have attended at least one, preferably two seminars in your chosen area (i.e. Linguistics, Medieval, Modern/American/Comparative Literature) during your studies (or see your intended supervisor).
• Formulate a thesis and produce a proposal (see below) and have it accepted by the member of staff concerned.
• You are welcome to discuss your project with any member of staff although the final proposal must be approved by the member of staff who will direct your mémoire .
• In cooperation with your mémoire director, you should submit a draft version of either the whole mémoire or of individual chapters as you go along for comments.
• Submit the final version at least six weeks before the discussion de mémoire (viva).

Mémoire Supervisors

Read this before approaching a potential supervisor to make sure you have considered all possible options.

MA-SupervisionStatements 2023-24.pdf  (225 Ko)

The Proposal

The proposal is a brief statement covering the following points:

1. Area and scope of study

• Identification of subject-matter: period, author(s), work(s), theme, field of research in linguistics, etc.
• Identification, for literature, of primary texts (including editions), or, for linguistics, of data collection or computer corpora, etc.
• Brief annotated list of relevant secondary works (critical, historical,theoretical, methodological).

2. Critical intent

• Statement of the argument or thesis, i.e. what is your point of view?
• Statement of the method of argument, the kind of critical or theoretical approach.
• As far as possible, a rough plan, chapter outline, list of subtopics and draft schedule.
• The contribution your argument will make to the reader's knowledge or appreciation of the subject.

Practical Matters

Règlement d'études de la MA (Lettres)

Mémoires in the Faculté des lettres should be circa 100,000 signs long (i.e. approximately 50 pages medium spaced).

Be sure to check the Faculty deadlines for mémoires submissions.

Front page style

Submission and Discussion de Mémoire (viva)

You should submit two copies of your mémoire to the Secrétariat des étudiants and one each to your director and expert. You should also submit the Discussion de mémoire form and the "formulaire de déontologie" along with your mémoire to the Secrétariat . The date of the discussion will be agreed upon between you and your director. The discussion is public. Please, contact the Secrétariat des étudiants regarding the two forms to be submitted.

Cake T-Days

Cake T-Days are organised as more informal form of support with mémoires. See more here .

Masters in English

The MA programme offered by the English Department constitutes its oldest and most extensive academic activity. On an average about 400 students are given admission to this program every year. These students are spread across the Main and the South Campuses and the Non Collegiate Women’s Educational Board.

The syllabus of MA English programme is designed to enhance a variety of literary, analyti cal, research, and theoretical skills among postgraduate students. The core, electives, and open electives courses in the syllabus are created to encourage students to think deeply and to reflect on what they have learned across the spatio-temporal, the socio-cultural and the eco nomic-political transitions from ancient times to the present. It also aims to advance the do- main of literary studies through an inter-disciplinary pedagogical framework.

The course is  divided into four-semesters. A student is required to complete 88 credits (i.e. 12 Core, 04 Elective and 02 Open Elective Courses in the entire four semesters) for the completion of course and the award of degree.

• M.A (English) syllabus applicable till 2018 admission batch
• M.A (English) syllabus applicable till 2020 admission batch
• Revised-MA-English-Syllabus-effective-from-the-academic-session-2021-22

MA Semester II

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How to write a masters dissertation or thesis: top tips.

It is completely normal to find the idea of writing a masters thesis or dissertation slightly daunting, even for students who have written one before at undergraduate level. Though, don’t feel put off by the idea. You’ll have plenty of time to complete it, and plenty of support from your supervisor and peers.

One of the main challenges that students face is putting their ideas and findings into words. Writing is a skill in itself, but with the right advice, you’ll find it much easier to get into the flow of writing your masters thesis or dissertation.

We’ve put together a step-by-step guide on how to write a dissertation or thesis for your masters degree, with top tips to consider at each stage in the process.

1. Understand your dissertation or thesis topic

There are slight differences between theses and dissertations , although both require a high standard of writing skill and knowledge in your topic. They are also formatted very similarly.

At first, writing a masters thesis can feel like running a 100m race – the course feels very quick and like there is not as much time for thinking! However, you’ll usually have a summer semester dedicated to completing your dissertation – giving plenty of time and space to write a strong academic piece.

By comparison, writing a PhD thesis can feel like running a marathon, working on the same topic for 3-4 years can be laborious. But in many ways, the approach to both of these tasks is quite similar.

Before writing your masters dissertation, get to know your research topic inside out. Not only will understanding your topic help you conduct better research, it will also help you write better dissertation content.

Also consider the main purpose of your dissertation. You are writing to put forward a theory or unique research angle – so make your purpose clear in your writing.

Top writing tip: when researching your topic, look out for specific terms and writing patterns used by other academics. It is likely that there will be a lot of jargon and important themes across research papers in your chosen dissertation topic. 

2. Structure your dissertation or thesis

Writing a thesis is a unique experience and there is no general consensus on what the best way to structure it is. 

As a postgraduate student , you’ll probably decide what kind of structure suits your research project best after consultation with your supervisor. You’ll also have a chance to look at previous masters students’ theses in your university library.

To some extent, all postgraduate dissertations are unique. Though they almost always consist of chapters. The number of chapters you cover will vary depending on the research. 

A masters dissertation or thesis organised into chapters would typically look like this: 

Section	Description
Title page	The opening page includes all relevant information about the project.
Abstract	A brief project summary including background, methodology and findings.
Contents	A list of chapters and figures from your project.
Chapter 1 – Background	A description of the rationale behind your project.
Chapter 2 – Literature Review	A summary and evaluation of the literature supporting your project.
Chapter 3 – Methodology	A description of the specific methodology used in your project.
Chapter 4-6 – Data analysis and Findings	An overview of the key findings and data from your research.
Chapter 7 - Discussion and Evaluation	A description of what the data means and what you can draw from the findings.
Chapter 8 - Conclusion	Main summary of your overall project and key findings.
Bibliography	A list of the references cited in your dissertation or thesis.
Appendices	Additional materials used in your research.

Write down your structure and use these as headings that you’ll write for later on.

Top writing tip : ease each chapter together with a paragraph that links the end of a chapter to the start of a new chapter. For example, you could say something along the lines of “in the next section, these findings are evaluated in more detail”. This makes it easier for the reader to understand each chapter and helps your writing flow better.

3. Write up your literature review

One of the best places to start when writing your masters dissertation is with the literature review. This involves researching and evaluating existing academic literature in order to identify any gaps for your own research.

Many students prefer to write the literature review chapter first, as this is where several of the underpinning theories and concepts exist. This section helps set the stage for the rest of your dissertation, and will help inform the writing of your other dissertation chapters.

What to include in your literature review

The literature review chapter is more than just a summary of existing research, it is an evaluation of how this research has informed your own unique research.

Demonstrate how the different pieces of research fit together. Are there overlapping theories? Are there disagreements between researchers?

Highlight the gap in the research. This is key, as a dissertation is mostly about developing your own unique research. Is there an unexplored avenue of research? Has existing research failed to disprove a particular theory?

Back up your methodology. Demonstrate why your methodology is appropriate by discussing where it has been used successfully in other research.

4. Write up your research

For instance, a more theoretical-based research topic might encompass more writing from a philosophical perspective. Qualitative data might require a lot more evaluation and discussion than quantitative research. 

Methodology chapter

The methodology chapter is all about how you carried out your research and which specific techniques you used to gather data. You should write about broader methodological approaches (e.g. qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods), and then go into more detail about your chosen data collection strategy. 

Data collection strategies include things like interviews, questionnaires, surveys, content analyses, discourse analyses and many more.

Data analysis and findings chapters

The data analysis or findings chapter should cover what you actually discovered during your research project. It should be detailed, specific and objective (don’t worry, you’ll have time for evaluation later on in your dissertation)

Write up your findings in a way that is easy to understand. For example, if you have a lot of numerical data, this could be easier to digest in tables.

This will make it easier for you to dive into some deeper analysis in later chapters. Remember, the reader will refer back to your data analysis section to cross-reference your later evaluations against your actual findings – so presenting your data in a simple manner is beneficial.

Think about how you can segment your data into categories. For instance, it can be useful to segment interview transcripts by interviewee. 

Top writing tip : write up notes on how you might phrase a certain part of the research. This will help bring the best out of your writing. There is nothing worse than when you think of the perfect way to phrase something and then you completely forget it.

5. Discuss and evaluate

Once you’ve presented your findings, it’s time to evaluate and discuss them.

It might feel difficult to differentiate between your findings and discussion sections, because you are essentially talking about the same data. The easiest way to remember the difference is that your findings simply present the data, whereas your discussion tells the story of this data.

Your evaluation breaks the story down, explaining the key findings, what went well and what didn’t go so well.

In your discussion chapter, you’ll have chance to expand on the results from your findings section. For example, explain what certain numbers mean and draw relationships between different pieces of data.

Top writing tip: don’t be afraid to point out the shortcomings of your research. You will receive higher marks for writing objectively. For example, if you didn’t receive as many interview responses as expected, evaluate how this has impacted your research and findings. Don’t let your ego get in the way!

6. Write your introduction

Your introduction sets the scene for the rest of your masters dissertation. You might be wondering why writing an introduction isn't at the start of our step-by-step list, and that’s because many students write this chapter last.

Here’s what your introduction chapter should cover:

Problem statement

Research question

Significance of your research

This tells the reader what you’ll be researching as well as its importance. You’ll have a good idea of what to include here from your original dissertation proposal , though it’s fairly common for research to change once it gets started.

Writing or at least revisiting this section last can be really helpful, since you’ll have a more well-rounded view of what your research actually covers once it has been completed and written up.

Masters dissertation writing tips

When to start writing your thesis or dissertation.

When you should start writing your masters thesis or dissertation depends on the scope of the research project and the duration of your course. In some cases, your research project may be relatively short and you may not be able to write much of your thesis before completing the project. 

But regardless of the nature of your research project and of the scope of your course, you should start writing your thesis or at least some of its sections as early as possible, and there are a number of good reasons for this:

Academic writing is about practice, not talent. The first steps of writing your dissertation will help you get into the swing of your project. Write early to help you prepare in good time.

Write things as you do them. This is a good way to keep your dissertation full of fresh ideas and ensure that you don’t forget valuable information.

The first draft is never perfect. Give yourself time to edit and improve your dissertation. It’s likely that you’ll need to make at least one or two more drafts before your final submission.

Writing early on will help you stay motivated when writing all subsequent drafts.

Thinking and writing are very connected. As you write, new ideas and concepts will come to mind. So writing early on is a great way to generate new ideas.

How to improve your writing skills

The best way of improving your dissertation or thesis writing skills is to:

 Finish the first draft of your masters thesis as early as possible and send it to your supervisor for revision. Your supervisor will correct your draft and point out any writing errors. This process will be repeated a few times which will help you recognise and correct writing mistakes yourself as time progresses.

If you are not a native English speaker, it may be useful to ask your English friends to read a part of your thesis and warn you about any recurring writing mistakes. Read our section on English language support for more advice. 

Most universities have writing centres that offer writing courses and other kinds of support for postgraduate students. Attending these courses may help you improve your writing and meet other postgraduate students with whom you will be able to discuss what constitutes a well-written thesis.

Read academic articles and search for writing resources on the internet. This will help you adopt an academic writing style, which will eventually become effortless with practice.

Keep track of your bibliography 

The easiest way to keep the track of all the articles you have read for your research is to create a database where you can summarise each article/chapter into a few most important bullet points to help you remember their content. 

Another useful tool for doing this effectively is to learn how to use specific reference management software (RMS) such as EndNote. RMS is relatively simple to use and saves a lot of time when it comes to organising your bibliography. This may come in very handy, especially if your reference section is suspiciously missing two hours before you need to submit your dissertation! 

Avoid accidental plagiarism

Plagiarism may cost you your postgraduate degree and it is important that you consciously avoid it when writing your thesis or dissertation. 

Occasionally, postgraduate students commit plagiarism unintentionally. This can happen when sections are copy and pasted from journal articles they are citing instead of simply rephrasing them. Whenever you are presenting information from another academic source, make sure you reference the source and avoid writing the statement exactly as it is written in the original paper.

What kind of format should your thesis have?

Read your university’s guidelines before you actually start writing your thesis so you don’t have to waste time changing the format further down the line. However in general, most universities will require you to use 1.5-2 line spacing, font size 12 for text, and to print your thesis on A4 paper. These formatting guidelines may not necessarily result in the most aesthetically appealing thesis, however beauty is not always practical, and a nice looking thesis can be a more tiring reading experience for your postgrad examiner .

When should I submit my thesis?

The length of time it takes to complete your MSc or MA thesis will vary from student to student. This is because people work at different speeds, projects vary in difficulty, and some projects encounter more problems than others. 

Obviously, you should submit your MSc thesis or MA thesis when it is finished! Every university will say in its regulations that it is the student who must decide when it is ready to submit. 

However, your supervisor will advise you whether your work is ready and you should take their advice on this. If your supervisor says that your work is not ready, then it is probably unwise to submit it. Usually your supervisor will read your final thesis or dissertation draft and will let you know what’s required before submitting your final draft.

Set yourself a target for completion. This will help you stay on track and avoid falling behind. You may also only have funding for the year, so it is important to ensure you submit your dissertation before the deadline – and also ensure you don’t miss out on your graduation ceremony ! 

To set your target date, work backwards from the final completion and submission date, and aim to have your final draft completed at least three months before that final date.

Don’t leave your submission until the last minute – submit your work in good time before the final deadline. Consider what else you’ll have going on around that time. Are you moving back home? Do you have a holiday? Do you have other plans?

If you need to have finished by the end of June to be able to go to a graduation ceremony in July, then you should leave a suitable amount of time for this. You can build this into your dissertation project planning at the start of your research.

It is important to remember that handing in your thesis or dissertation is not the end of your masters program . There will be a period of time of one to three months between the time you submit and your final day. Some courses may even require a viva to discuss your research project, though this is more common at PhD level . 

If you have passed, you will need to make arrangements for the thesis to be properly bound and resubmitted, which will take a week or two. You may also have minor corrections to make to the work, which could take up to a month or so. This means that you need to allow a period of at least three months between submitting your thesis and the time when your program will be completely finished. Of course, it is also possible you may be asked after the viva to do more work on your thesis and resubmit it before the examiners will agree to award the degree – so there may be an even longer time period before you have finished.

How do I submit the MA or MSc dissertation?

Most universities will have a clear procedure for submitting a masters dissertation. Some universities require your ‘intention to submit’. This notifies them that you are ready to submit and allows the university to appoint an external examiner.

This normally has to be completed at least three months before the date on which you think you will be ready to submit.

When your MA or MSc dissertation is ready, you will have to print several copies and have them bound. The number of copies varies between universities, but the university usually requires three – one for each of the examiners and one for your supervisor.

However, you will need one more copy – for yourself! These copies must be softbound, not hardbound. The theses you see on the library shelves will be bound in an impressive hardback cover, but you can only get your work bound like this once you have passed. 

You should submit your dissertation or thesis for examination in soft paper or card covers, and your university will give you detailed guidance on how it should be bound. They will also recommend places where you can get the work done.

The next stage is to hand in your work, in the way and to the place that is indicated in your university’s regulations. All you can do then is sit and wait for the examination – but submitting your thesis is often a time of great relief and celebration!

Some universities only require a digital submission, where you upload your dissertation as a file through their online submission system.

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Dissertation Structure & Layout 101: How to structure your dissertation, thesis or research project.

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) Reviewed By: David Phair (PhD) | July 2019

So, you’ve got a decent understanding of what a dissertation is , you’ve chosen your topic and hopefully you’ve received approval for your research proposal . Awesome! Now its time to start the actual dissertation or thesis writing journey.

To craft a high-quality document, the very first thing you need to understand is dissertation structure . In this post, we’ll walk you through the generic dissertation structure and layout, step by step. We’ll start with the big picture, and then zoom into each chapter to briefly discuss the core contents. If you’re just starting out on your research journey, you should start with this post, which covers the big-picture process of how to write a dissertation or thesis .

*The Caveat *

In this post, we’ll be discussing a traditional dissertation/thesis structure and layout, which is generally used for social science research across universities, whether in the US, UK, Europe or Australia. However, some universities may have small variations on this structure (extra chapters, merged chapters, slightly different ordering, etc).

So, always check with your university if they have a prescribed structure or layout that they expect you to work with. If not, it’s safe to assume the structure we’ll discuss here is suitable. And even if they do have a prescribed structure, you’ll still get value from this post as we’ll explain the core contents of each section.  

Overview: S tructuring a dissertation or thesis

• Acknowledgements page
• Abstract (or executive summary)
• Table of contents , list of figures and tables
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Literature review
• Chapter 3: Methodology
• Chapter 4: Results
• Chapter 5: Discussion
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Reference list

As I mentioned, some universities will have slight variations on this structure. For example, they want an additional “personal reflection chapter”, or they might prefer the results and discussion chapter to be merged into one. Regardless, the overarching flow will always be the same, as this flow reflects the research process , which we discussed here – i.e.:

• The introduction chapter presents the core research question and aims .
• The literature review chapter assesses what the current research says about this question.
• The methodology, results and discussion chapters go about undertaking new research about this question.
• The conclusion chapter (attempts to) answer the core research question .

In other words, the dissertation structure and layout reflect the research process of asking a well-defined question(s), investigating, and then answering the question – see below.

To restate that – the structure and layout of a dissertation reflect the flow of the overall research process . This is essential to understand, as each chapter will make a lot more sense if you “get” this concept. If you’re not familiar with the research process, read this post before going further.

Right. Now that we’ve covered the big picture, let’s dive a little deeper into the details of each section and chapter. Oh and by the way, you can also grab our free dissertation/thesis template here to help speed things up.

The title page of your dissertation is the very first impression the marker will get of your work, so it pays to invest some time thinking about your title. But what makes for a good title? A strong title needs to be 3 things:

• Succinct (not overly lengthy or verbose)
• Specific (not vague or ambiguous)
• Representative of the research you’re undertaking (clearly linked to your research questions)

Typically, a good title includes mention of the following:

• The broader area of the research (i.e. the overarching topic)
• The specific focus of your research (i.e. your specific context)
• Indication of research design (e.g. quantitative , qualitative , or  mixed methods ).

For example:

A quantitative investigation [research design] into the antecedents of organisational trust [broader area] in the UK retail forex trading market [specific context/area of focus].

Again, some universities may have specific requirements regarding the format and structure of the title, so it’s worth double-checking expectations with your institution (if there’s no mention in the brief or study material).

Acknowledgements

This page provides you with an opportunity to say thank you to those who helped you along your research journey. Generally, it’s optional (and won’t count towards your marks), but it is academic best practice to include this.

So, who do you say thanks to? Well, there’s no prescribed requirements, but it’s common to mention the following people:

• Your dissertation supervisor or committee.
• Any professors, lecturers or academics that helped you understand the topic or methodologies.
• Any tutors, mentors or advisors.
• Your family and friends, especially spouse (for adult learners studying part-time).

There’s no need for lengthy rambling. Just state who you’re thankful to and for what (e.g. thank you to my supervisor, John Doe, for his endless patience and attentiveness) – be sincere. In terms of length, you should keep this to a page or less.

Abstract or executive summary

The dissertation abstract (or executive summary for some degrees) serves to provide the first-time reader (and marker or moderator) with a big-picture view of your research project. It should give them an understanding of the key insights and findings from the research, without them needing to read the rest of the report – in other words, it should be able to stand alone .

For it to stand alone, your abstract should cover the following key points (at a minimum):

• Your research questions and aims – what key question(s) did your research aim to answer?
• Your methodology – how did you go about investigating the topic and finding answers to your research question(s)?
• Your findings – following your own research, what did do you discover?
• Your conclusions – based on your findings, what conclusions did you draw? What answers did you find to your research question(s)?

So, in much the same way the dissertation structure mimics the research process, your abstract or executive summary should reflect the research process, from the initial stage of asking the original question to the final stage of answering that question.

In practical terms, it’s a good idea to write this section up last , once all your core chapters are complete. Otherwise, you’ll end up writing and rewriting this section multiple times (just wasting time). For a step by step guide on how to write a strong executive summary, check out this post .

Need a helping hand?

Table of contents

This section is straightforward. You’ll typically present your table of contents (TOC) first, followed by the two lists – figures and tables. I recommend that you use Microsoft Word’s automatic table of contents generator to generate your TOC. If you’re not familiar with this functionality, the video below explains it simply:

If you find that your table of contents is overly lengthy, consider removing one level of depth. Oftentimes, this can be done without detracting from the usefulness of the TOC.

Right, now that the “admin” sections are out of the way, its time to move on to your core chapters. These chapters are the heart of your dissertation and are where you’ll earn the marks. The first chapter is the introduction chapter – as you would expect, this is the time to introduce your research…

It’s important to understand that even though you’ve provided an overview of your research in your abstract, your introduction needs to be written as if the reader has not read that (remember, the abstract is essentially a standalone document). So, your introduction chapter needs to start from the very beginning, and should address the following questions:

• What will you be investigating (in plain-language, big picture-level)?
• Why is that worth investigating? How is it important to academia or business? How is it sufficiently original?
• What are your research aims and research question(s)? Note that the research questions can sometimes be presented at the end of the literature review (next chapter).
• What is the scope of your study? In other words, what will and won’t you cover ?
• How will you approach your research? In other words, what methodology will you adopt?
• How will you structure your dissertation? What are the core chapters and what will you do in each of them?

These are just the bare basic requirements for your intro chapter. Some universities will want additional bells and whistles in the intro chapter, so be sure to carefully read your brief or consult your research supervisor.

If done right, your introduction chapter will set a clear direction for the rest of your dissertation. Specifically, it will make it clear to the reader (and marker) exactly what you’ll be investigating, why that’s important, and how you’ll be going about the investigation. Conversely, if your introduction chapter leaves a first-time reader wondering what exactly you’ll be researching, you’ve still got some work to do.

Now that you’ve set a clear direction with your introduction chapter, the next step is the literature review . In this section, you will analyse the existing research (typically academic journal articles and high-quality industry publications), with a view to understanding the following questions:

• What does the literature currently say about the topic you’re investigating?
• Is the literature lacking or well established? Is it divided or in disagreement?
• How does your research fit into the bigger picture?
• How does your research contribute something original?
• How does the methodology of previous studies help you develop your own?

Depending on the nature of your study, you may also present a conceptual framework towards the end of your literature review, which you will then test in your actual research.

Again, some universities will want you to focus on some of these areas more than others, some will have additional or fewer requirements, and so on. Therefore, as always, its important to review your brief and/or discuss with your supervisor, so that you know exactly what’s expected of your literature review chapter.

Now that you’ve investigated the current state of knowledge in your literature review chapter and are familiar with the existing key theories, models and frameworks, its time to design your own research. Enter the methodology chapter – the most “science-ey” of the chapters…

In this chapter, you need to address two critical questions:

• Exactly HOW will you carry out your research (i.e. what is your intended research design)?
• Exactly WHY have you chosen to do things this way (i.e. how do you justify your design)?

Remember, the dissertation part of your degree is first and foremost about developing and demonstrating research skills . Therefore, the markers want to see that you know which methods to use, can clearly articulate why you’ve chosen then, and know how to deploy them effectively.

Importantly, this chapter requires detail – don’t hold back on the specifics. State exactly what you’ll be doing, with who, when, for how long, etc. Moreover, for every design choice you make, make sure you justify it.

In practice, you will likely end up coming back to this chapter once you’ve undertaken all your data collection and analysis, and revise it based on changes you made during the analysis phase. This is perfectly fine. Its natural for you to add an additional analysis technique, scrap an old one, etc based on where your data lead you. Of course, I’m talking about small changes here – not a fundamental switch from qualitative to quantitative, which will likely send your supervisor in a spin!

You’ve now collected your data and undertaken your analysis, whether qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. In this chapter, you’ll present the raw results of your analysis . For example, in the case of a quant study, you’ll present the demographic data, descriptive statistics, inferential statistics , etc.

Typically, Chapter 4 is simply a presentation and description of the data, not a discussion of the meaning of the data. In other words, it’s descriptive, rather than analytical – the meaning is discussed in Chapter 5. However, some universities will want you to combine chapters 4 and 5, so that you both present and interpret the meaning of the data at the same time. Check with your institution what their preference is.

Now that you’ve presented the data analysis results, its time to interpret and analyse them. In other words, its time to discuss what they mean, especially in relation to your research question(s).

What you discuss here will depend largely on your chosen methodology. For example, if you’ve gone the quantitative route, you might discuss the relationships between variables . If you’ve gone the qualitative route, you might discuss key themes and the meanings thereof. It all depends on what your research design choices were.

Most importantly, you need to discuss your results in relation to your research questions and aims, as well as the existing literature. What do the results tell you about your research questions? Are they aligned with the existing research or at odds? If so, why might this be? Dig deep into your findings and explain what the findings suggest, in plain English.

The final chapter – you’ve made it! Now that you’ve discussed your interpretation of the results, its time to bring it back to the beginning with the conclusion chapter . In other words, its time to (attempt to) answer your original research question s (from way back in chapter 1). Clearly state what your conclusions are in terms of your research questions. This might feel a bit repetitive, as you would have touched on this in the previous chapter, but its important to bring the discussion full circle and explicitly state your answer(s) to the research question(s).

Next, you’ll typically discuss the implications of your findings . In other words, you’ve answered your research questions – but what does this mean for the real world (or even for academia)? What should now be done differently, given the new insight you’ve generated?

Lastly, you should discuss the limitations of your research, as well as what this means for future research in the area. No study is perfect, especially not a Masters-level. Discuss the shortcomings of your research. Perhaps your methodology was limited, perhaps your sample size was small or not representative, etc, etc. Don’t be afraid to critique your work – the markers want to see that you can identify the limitations of your work. This is a strength, not a weakness. Be brutal!

This marks the end of your core chapters – woohoo! From here on out, it’s pretty smooth sailing.

The reference list is straightforward. It should contain a list of all resources cited in your dissertation, in the required format, e.g. APA , Harvard, etc.

It’s essential that you use reference management software for your dissertation. Do NOT try handle your referencing manually – its far too error prone. On a reference list of multiple pages, you’re going to make mistake. To this end, I suggest considering either Mendeley or Zotero. Both are free and provide a very straightforward interface to ensure that your referencing is 100% on point. I’ve included a simple how-to video for the Mendeley software (my personal favourite) below:

Some universities may ask you to include a bibliography, as opposed to a reference list. These two things are not the same . A bibliography is similar to a reference list, except that it also includes resources which informed your thinking but were not directly cited in your dissertation. So, double-check your brief and make sure you use the right one.

The very last piece of the puzzle is the appendix or set of appendices. This is where you’ll include any supporting data and evidence. Importantly, supporting is the keyword here.

Your appendices should provide additional “nice to know”, depth-adding information, which is not critical to the core analysis. Appendices should not be used as a way to cut down word count (see this post which covers how to reduce word count ). In other words, don’t place content that is critical to the core analysis here, just to save word count. You will not earn marks on any content in the appendices, so don’t try to play the system!

Time to recap…

And there you have it – the traditional dissertation structure and layout, from A-Z. To recap, the core structure for a dissertation or thesis is (typically) as follows:

• Acknowledgments page

Most importantly, the core chapters should reflect the research process (asking, investigating and answering your research question). Moreover, the research question(s) should form the golden thread throughout your dissertation structure. Everything should revolve around the research questions, and as you’ve seen, they should form both the start point (i.e. introduction chapter) and the endpoint (i.e. conclusion chapter).

I hope this post has provided you with clarity about the traditional dissertation/thesis structure and layout. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below, or feel free to get in touch with us. Also, be sure to check out the rest of the  Grad Coach Blog .

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

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36 Comments

many thanks i found it very useful

Glad to hear that, Arun. Good luck writing your dissertation.

Such clear practical logical advice. I very much needed to read this to keep me focused in stead of fretting.. Perfect now ready to start my research!

what about scientific fields like computer or engineering thesis what is the difference in the structure? thank you very much

Thanks so much this helped me a lot!

Very helpful and accessible. What I like most is how practical the advice is along with helpful tools/ links.

Thanks Ade!

Thank you so much sir.. It was really helpful..

You’re welcome!

Hi! How many words maximum should contain the abstract?

Thank you so much 😊 Find this at the right moment

You’re most welcome. Good luck with your dissertation.

best ever benefit i got on right time thank you

Many times Clarity and vision of destination of dissertation is what makes the difference between good ,average and great researchers the same way a great automobile driver is fast with clarity of address and Clear weather conditions .

I guess Great researcher = great ideas + knowledge + great and fast data collection and modeling + great writing + high clarity on all these

You have given immense clarity from start to end.

Morning. Where will I write the definitions of what I’m referring to in my report?

Thank you so much Derek, I was almost lost! Thanks a tonnnn! Have a great day!

Thanks ! so concise and valuable

This was very helpful. Clear and concise. I know exactly what to do now.

Thank you for allowing me to go through briefly. I hope to find time to continue.

Really useful to me. Thanks a thousand times

Very interesting! It will definitely set me and many more for success. highly recommended.

Thank you soo much sir, for the opportunity to express my skills

Usefull, thanks a lot. Really clear

Very nice and easy to understand. Thank you .

That was incredibly useful. Thanks Grad Coach Crew!

My stress level just dropped at least 15 points after watching this. Just starting my thesis for my grad program and I feel a lot more capable now! Thanks for such a clear and helpful video, Emma and the GradCoach team!

Do we need to mention the number of words the dissertation contains in the main document?

It depends on your university’s requirements, so it would be best to check with them 🙂

Such a helpful post to help me get started with structuring my masters dissertation, thank you!

Great video; I appreciate that helpful information

It is so necessary or avital course

This blog is very informative for my research. Thank you

Doctoral students are required to fill out the National Research Council’s Survey of Earned Doctorates

wow this is an amazing gain in my life

This is so good

How can i arrange my specific objectives in my dissertation?

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Dissertation examples

Listed below are some of the best examples of research projects and dissertations from undergraduate and taught postgraduate students at the University of Leeds We have not been able to gather examples from all schools. The module requirements for research projects may have changed since these examples were written. Refer to your module guidelines to make sure that you address all of the current assessment criteria. Some of the examples below are only available to access on campus.

• Undergraduate examples
• Taught Masters examples

These dissertations achieved a mark of 80 or higher:
The following two examples have been annotated with academic comments. This is to help you understand why they achieved a good 2:1 mark but also, more importantly, how the marks could have been improved. Please read to help you make the most of the two examples. (Mark 68) (Mark 66) These final year projects achieved a mark of a high first: For students undertaking a New Venture Creation (NVC) approach, please see the following Masters level examples:
Projects which attained grades of over 70 or between 60 and 69 are indicated on the lists (accessible only by students and staff registered with School of Computer Science, when on campus).
These are good quality reports but they are not perfect. You may be able to identify areas for improvement (for example, structure, content, clarity, standard of written English, referencing or presentation quality).
The following examples have their marks and feedback included at the end of of each document.         The following examples have their feedback provided in a separate document.
School of Media and Communication .
The following outstanding dissertation example PDFs have their marks denoted in brackets. (Mark 78) (Mark 72) (Mark 75) (Mark 91) (Mark 85) (Mark 85) (Mark 85) (Mark 91) (Mark 85) (Mark 75)
This dissertation achieved a mark of 84: .

LUBS5530 Enterprise
MSc Sustainability
.
The following outstanding dissertation example PDFs have their marks denoted in brackets. (Mark 70) (Mark 78)

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MA TESOL dissertations

• * Examining a Male Teacher's Attention in a Mixed-sex EFL Japanese High School Classroom Based on the Sinclair-Coulthard Model : Mohammad Umar Farooq
• * A Review of the Lexical Content and Its Treatment in Ministry-Approved Level-One EFL Textbooks Usend in Japanese Public Lower-Secondary Schools : Michael Bowles
• Order from Chaos: Using Tasks in an EFL Classroom :   Mike Reda
• * Discourse Approach to Turn-taking from the Perspective of Tone Choice Between Speakers :   Fuyuko Kato
• * Focusing on Lexis in English Classrooms in Japan: Analyses of Textbook Exercises and Proposals for Consciousness-raising Activities : Michiko Kasuya
• Bridging the cross-cultural gap with personal construct repertory grids : Gregory Stuart Hadley 
• Fossilization: A chronic condition or is consciousness-raising the cure?   Paul Butler-Tanaka
• Evaluation of the foreign language high school language programme in South Korea : Yvette Murdoch (Appendices)
• Team teaching: Who should really be in charge?  A look at reverse versus traditional team teaching : Alan Macedo
• * Validation of the test of English conversation proficiency : Timothy Paul Moritoshi
• The application of exchange theory to internet relay chat : Jeffrey Mark Hatter
• * The TOEIC test and communicative competence: Do test score gains correlate with increased competence? A preliminary study : Cynthia R. Cunningham
• * A system for analyzing conversation textbooks : Takashi Miura (Abridged version, rewritten as an article for JALT journal)
• Developing an approach to the management of innovation through in-service teacher training : Christoph Suter 
• * Above and below the clause: a microlinguistic investigation into the context of a television interview :  Andrew Atkins
• A study of English intonation in high school textbooks in Japan : Koichi Kumaki
• * The treatment of key vocabulary learning strategies in current ELT coursebooks : James M. Ranalli
• * What is meant by communicativeness in EFL teaching? : Sean Banville
• * A contrastive analysis of argumentative discourse in English and German : Melanie Girdlestone
• * ENGLISH AND KOREAN SPEAKERS’ CATEGORIZATION OF SPATIAL ACTIONS: A TEST OF THE WHORF HYPOTHESIS David Doms
• *The influence of situation on languages of co-operation: how movie language coding influences audience co-operation in Japan: Theron Muller (note - this has now been published online in the Thesis section of the Asian EFL Journal, with a new Foreword.)
• * A comparison of the effects of two approaches towards pronunciation instruction involving two groups of beginning learners of English as a foreign language : Nilton Varela Hitotuzi
• Evaluating the use of L1 in the English language classroom :  Richard Miles
• Using Learner Education to Increase Students' Expectancy of, and Motivation to Learn English H. Douglas Sewell
• * To What Degree are my Courses Relevant to my Students? A Case-study Using the Principles of Exploratory Practice Jane Rose
• * An Evaluation of Vocabulary Teaching in an Intensive Study Programme Phillip Bennett
• Learner Attitudes Toward Learner-Centered Education and English as a Foreign Language in the Korean University Classroom Zoltan Paul Jambor 
• * Electronic Dictionaries, Printed Dictionaries and No Dictionaries: the Effects on Vocabulary Knowledge and Reading Comprehension Michael H. Flynn
• * How is a 'Good Teacher' defined in a Communicative, Learner-Centered ELT Classroom? Sandee Thompson
• * Implementing Global Village at the Kyoto British Council School   Varela Wynnpaul
• * Opening a Heavy Door: A Sociocultural Case Study of a Learner's L2 in a One-to-one Learning Environment , Michael Iwane-Salovaara
• * Models for EFL theory and methodology derived from an SIR based pilot study on Japanese cognitive development , Robert Murphy
• * Comparing Perception of Oral Fluency to Objective Measures in the EFL Classroom , D Ashley Stockdale
• * Integrating a Vocabulary Learning Strategies Program into a First-year Medical English Course , Philip Shigeo Brown
• * The Involvement Load Hypothesis Applied to High School Learners in Japan: Measuring the Effects of 'Evaluation' , Matthew Walsh
• * Controlling for Polysemy in Word Association Tests: a Study Exploring the Mental Lexicon of Japanese EFL Learners , Dax Thomas
• * Collocation and textual cohesion: A comparative corpus study between a genre of Written Sports Reports and a large reference corpus , Brett Laybutt
• * From the Classroom to the Bar-room: Expressions of Disagreement by Japanese Speakers of English , Andrew J Lawson
• * Changing Association: the Effect of Direct Vocabulary Instruction on the Word associations of Japanese College Students , Christopher Patrick Wharton
• * A Study of Cognitive strategy Use by Successful and Unsuccessful Learners in Switzerland  Deborah Grossmann
• * How far do ELT coursebooks realise key principles of Communicative Language teaching (CLT) and enable effective teaching-learning? Jonathan Crewe
• Is Humor a Useful Tool to Motivate and Help Young Korean Learners to Remember? Terrence O'Donnell Faulkner 
• Lexical Development and Word Association: Can Japanese L2 language development b e observed through the results of word association tests? Timmy LeRoy Edwards
• * Exploring Film as EFL Coursebook Supplements and Motivational Stimulus: a German Second ary School Study Isabella Seeger
• Investigating the F-move in teacher talk: a South Korean study on teachers' beliefs and classro om practices Sarah Lindsay Jones
• Incidental Learnin g of Vocabulary Through Subtitled Authentic Videos   Paul Raine
• An Analys is of the Subjective Needs of Japanese High School Learners Alex Small
• * The Effects of TOEIC Edu cation in South Korean Universities Stephan Thomson
• The Use of Blogs and Teacher Electronic Response to Enhance the Revision Stage of EFL Stude nts' Writing Processes Elsa Fernanda Gonzalez
• * A Sem iotic Analysis of the Iconic Representation of Women in the Middle Eastern Med ia Sarah Ahmed Adham
• * The Utilization and Efficacy of the Use of Recasts in a Children's English Language Classro om Mario Passalacqua
• The Impact of Media in Education: The Influence of Media in English Language Teachers' Identity and its Implications for Language Education in Japa n Staci-Anne Ali
• *  Analysing Korean Popular Music for Global Audiences: A Social Semiotic Approach Jonas Robertson
• *  Using CLT with Large Classes in University-Level EFL Teaching : A Case Study  Marija Stojkovic
• * Experimenting with NeuroELT Maxims in a Japanese Tertiary CLIL Context   Takashi Uemura
• * Native English Speaking Teachers at Hagwons in South Korea: An Investigation into Their Expectations, Motivations, Beliefs and Realities Michael Craig Alpaugh
• Action Research: Supportive Teacher Talk and Interactional Strategies in an Elementary School EFL Teaching Context in Japan Daniel G.C. Hougham
• *  Student Retention in the Context of Language Schools Paulo Pita
• Reality in the Eye of the Beholder: Representation, Relationship and Composition Patterns on the Coversof Korean Language Textbooks   Anthony Kaschor
• *  A Female Rohingya Refugee's Journey of Integration into Australian Society  Dalia Alkhyari

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Methodology

• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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See an example

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

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Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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	Jun 09, 2024   2024-2025 Graduate Bulletin     2024-2025 Graduate Bulletin Program Code: MA_232F CIP Code: 23.0101 Program of Study for the Master of Arts in English Admission Requirements: Baccalaureate degree* from an accredited college or university; complete application to the Graduate School   ; statement of intent; writing sample. *An applicant who does not have an undergraduate degree in English but who has exceptional qualifications should contact the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English. To be considered for admission, applicants must meet the criteria for admission to the Graduate School   . Meeting this condition does not guarantee admission. Location: Boone Campus Accelerated Master’s Program This program offers an Accelerated Master’s     option for undergraduate students with a 3.2 or higher currently enrolled at Appalachian State University. Course Requirements for the Master of Arts in English Total required (minimum 36 hours), required courses (6 hours). ENG 5000 - Bibliography and Research (3) R_C 5100 - Composition Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy (3) Concentration Requirements (18 Hours) British literature (6 hours). 3 hours in early (pre-1789) literature 3 hours in later (post-1789) literature American Literature (6 Hours) 3 hours in early (pre-1900) literature 3 hours in later (post-1900) literature World Literature (3 Hours) Choose One from the Following: ENG 5910 - World Literature (3) ENG 5930 - Transnational Literature (3) Theory (3 Hours) ENG 5600 - Literary Criticism and Theory (3) ENG 5640 - Cultural Studies (3) ENG 5650 - Gender Studies (3) Electives (6 Hours) 6 hours of additional graduate electives chosen with approval of the graduate director; courses from other disciplines must be approved in advance. Culminating Project: Thesis or Capstone (6 Hours) Thesis option:. ENG 5998 - Thesis Preparation (3) ENG 5999 - Thesis (3-6) (3 Hours) Capstone Option: ENG 5990 - Capstone in English (3) 3 additional hours of graduate electives with approval of the graduate director; courses from other disciplines must be approved in advance. Other Requirements for the MA in English Thesis: Optional Proficiency: Required for the Literary Studies Concentration; reading knowledge of a foreign language demonstrated by transcript evidence of two years undergraduate study of a foreign language or by examination arranged in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Candidacy: Not required The Literary Studies Concentration requires a Thesis (ENG 5998 and 5999) OR an MA Capstone which will be satisfied with the successful completion of three additional hours of graduate electives and ENG 5990. See the program director regarding Capstone requirements. The Rhetoric and Composition Concentration requires a Thesis (ENG 5998 and 5999) OR an MA Capstone which will be satisfied with the successful completion of three additional hours of graduate electives and R_C 5990. See the program director regarding Capstone requirements. The Teaching Literature and Writing Concentration requires a presentation of a teaching portfolio which will be satisfied with the successful completion of ENG 5995. See the program director regarding portfolio requirements. Product of Learning: Not required 367 IMAGES MA Dissertation (PDF) MA Thesis What are the Top 10 English Dissertation Ideas? by Max Fitzgerald MA Dissertation MA Dissertation MA Dissertation VIDEO Can Our Cities Escape Climate Change? 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Science Fiction's Enactment of the Encouragement, Process, and End Result of Revolutionary Transformation, Katharine Blanchard, English. LITERARY NEGATION AND MATERIALISM IN CHAUCER, Michelle Brooks, English. MA Thesis Examples Recent Graduate Theses. The subjects of MA theses have included studies of individual poets or dramatists, novelists or autobiographers, as well as explorations of literary movements, themes or periods. Some of our more recent titles are: "The Bottom and the Orchard: Where Space and Place are Created, Controlled, and Maintained in Sula and ... Prize-Winning Thesis and Dissertation Examples Prize-Winning Thesis and Dissertation Examples. Published on September 9, 2022 by Tegan George.Revised on July 18, 2023. It can be difficult to know where to start when writing your thesis or dissertation.One way to come up with some ideas or maybe even combat writer's block is to check out previous work done by other students on a similar thesis or dissertation topic to yours. Dissertations & Theses Dissertations & Theses Global. Full text (PDF) of most US dissertations from 1997 on, many earlier works and some from outside the US plus some master's theses. Also lists all dissertations and theses from 1861 on from US universities and some works from Europe and Asia from 1637 on. Abstracts included after July, 1980. English (MA) Theses English (MA) Theses. Below is a selection of dissertations from the English program in Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences that have been voluntarily included in Chapman University Digital Commons. Additional dissertations from years prior to 2019 are available through the Leatherby Libraries' print collection or in ... English Dissertations and Theses Theses/Dissertations from 2019. PDF. No Home but the World: Forced Migration and Transnational Identity, Justice Hagan. PDF. The City As a Trap: 20th and 21st Century American Literature and the American Myth of Mobility, Andrew Joseph Hoffmann. PDF. The Fantastic and the First World War, Brian Kenna. PDF. MA in English Literature Dissertation The MA dissertation requires students to undertake and complete a sustained research project of 16,000 words on a topic of special interest. TERM 1: Writing your proposal Dissertation proposals - of 500-words in length - must be submitted to the department by noon on Friday 30th December 2018 (week 9 of term 1). A894 MA English literature part 2. This module requires you to produce a dissertation on a subject in Literary Studies of your own choice. The opening block guides you in drafting a detailed research proposal, and also introduces strategies for communicating your research to non-university audiences. The remainder of the module is dedicated to ... English MA Thesis Proposals. MA in English thesis proposals are the last step to the initial planning and developing of your MA thesis. While it may seem like the first step, it is actually the last step before registration for ENGH 799 (thesis study). So, where do you start? Your first step toward submitting your thesis proposal is talking to your ... MA/PhD in English Language and Literature Program Overview Our MA/PhD in English Language and Literature is an integrated program that allows students to earn an MA on the way to the PhD. We do not admit students for a terminal MA degree. The program receives over 250 applications of admission each year and typically enrolls an entering class of 10-14 students, all of whom receive funding. English Department Masters Theses Collection An Economy of Care: George Eliot's Middlemarch and Feminist Care Ethics, Madison V. Newman, English. PDF. Marked at Sea: Race, Class, and Tattoo Culture in Melville's Early Sea Fiction, Connell D. Swenson, English. Theses from 2020 PDF. A Stylometric Analysis of Climate Change Fiction, Nina Lorenz, English. Sample dissertation proposal Sample dissertation proposal. Below is an example of a successful MA dissertation proposal. Note particularly the robust referencing, and the way in which the author has already done preparatory work in the field so that clear areas of critical enquiry have already been formulated. Modernist Poetics and the Acquisition of the Other Tongue. Recent Theses and Dissertations Recent Ph.D. Dissertations. 2023. Mohammed Alhamili, The Emergence of Arab Nation-State Nationalism as an Alternative to the Supranational Concept of Ummah. Anthony Buenning, Shakespeare and Early Modern Trauma. Jay Gentry, The World We Want to Leave Behind: White Supremacy in the Apocalyptic Genres Past, Present, and Future. MA dissertation in English (mémoire) The Proposal. The proposal is a brief statement covering the following points: 1. Area and scope of study. Identification of subject-matter: period, author (s), work (s), theme, field of research in linguistics, etc. Identification, for literature, of primary texts (including editions), or, for linguistics, of data collection or computer ... Dissertation & Thesis Outline Dissertation & Thesis Outline | Example & Free Templates. Published on June 7, 2022 by Tegan George.Revised on November 21, 2023. A thesis or dissertation outline is one of the most critical early steps in your writing process.It helps you to lay out and organize your ideas and can provide you with a roadmap for deciding the specifics of your dissertation topic and showcasing its relevance to ... M.A. NOTICE - MA (PREVIOUS) - COMMENCEMENT OF CLASSES. Notice - Anti-Ragging Committee (2021-22) Datesheet_M.A. English Sem. I and III. Allotment for Dissertation — MA English Semester IV of 2020-21. IDC offered by other Departments. Notification for MA 1st semester students. Notice for IDC English registration Semester IV of 2020-21 What Is a Dissertation? A dissertation is a long-form piece of academic writing based on original research conducted by you. It is usually submitted as the final step in order to finish a PhD program. Your dissertation is probably the longest piece of writing you've ever completed. It requires solid research, writing, and analysis skills, and it can be intimidating ... How to Write a Dissertation or Masters Thesis Writing a masters dissertation or thesis is a sizable task. It takes a considerable amount of research, studying and writing. Usually, students need to write around 10,000 to 15,000 words. It is completely normal to find the idea of writing a masters thesis or dissertation slightly daunting, even for students who have written one before at ... Dissertation Structure & Layout 101 (+ Examples) Time to recap…. And there you have it - the traditional dissertation structure and layout, from A-Z. To recap, the core structure for a dissertation or thesis is (typically) as follows: Title page. Acknowledgments page. Abstract (or executive summary) Table of contents, list of figures and tables. Dissertation examples Dissertation examples. Listed below are some of the best examples of research projects and dissertations from undergraduate and taught postgraduate students at the University of Leeds We have not been able to gather examples from all schools. The module requirements for research projects may have changed since these examples were written. How to Write a Dissertation: Step-by-Step Guide Most dissertations run a minimum of 100-200 pages, with some hitting 300 pages or more. When editing your dissertation, break it down chapter by chapter. Go beyond grammar and spelling to make sure you communicate clearly and efficiently. Identify repetitive areas and shore up weaknesses in your argument. MA TEFL/TESL dissertations Reality in the Eye of the Beholder: Representation, Relationship and Composition Patterns on the Coversof Korean Language Textbooks Anthony Kaschor. * A Female Rohingya Refugee's Journey of Integration into Australian Society Dalia Alkhyari. A list of links to essays by former TEFL/TESL MA students in the Department of English Language and ... How to Write a Literature Review What is the purpose of a literature review? Examples of literature reviews. Step 1 - Search for relevant literature. Step 2 - Evaluate and select sources. Step 3 - Identify themes, debates, and gaps. Step 4 - Outline your literature review's structure. Step 5 - Write your literature review. Program: English *An applicant who does not have an undergraduate degree in English but who has exceptional qualifications should contact the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English. ... The Literary Studies Concentration requires a Thesis (ENG 5998 and 5999) OR an MA Capstone which will be satisfied with the successful completion of three ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis