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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/4916

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“A Resource for Metaphor”: A Genealogy of the Flesh in Contemporary Prison Literature (1960-2018)
(2026-04-20) Fisher, Alec; Harkins, Gillian
Scholarship on twentieth and twenty-first-century prison literature has often argued that the genre bears a genealogical relationship to the institution of plantation slavery. This scholarship has often commended the genre’s ability to notice isomorphic similarities between mass incarceration and slavery—while disparaging the genre’s tendency to essentialize patriarchal family formations. The accusation that prison is a form of undoing binary gender and sexed identities underwrote the genre’s critique of prison as slavery. Prison literature often imagined the violence of slavery as an interruption of patriarchal family formations and freedom from slavery’s carceral aftermath as this formation’s restoration. This dissertation adds to this discussion by arguing that Prison Literature might have contained forms of resistance to incarceration which operated outside of these patriarchal formations. Chapter 1 considers how Assata Shakur in her eponymous autobiography (1987) reframes Black Nationalism through divergence from binary gender and sex. Chapter 2 examines the how certain works of white gay prison literature have promulgated the cultural trope of “reverse racism” against white men in prison. In T.J. Parsell’s Fish (2003), the text both reproduces this cultural trope but also engages in a practice of queer repair. Chapter 3 close reads a work of Prison Literature – Donna Hylton’s A Little Piece of Light (2018) – produced in a feminist creative writing workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Center by Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monologues (1996). The writing group frames confessional narrative as humanizing the participants through mutual recognition of a binary, universalized womanhood; and yet, there are moments where unresolved trauma resolves instead into redress divergent from gender and sexed binaries.
Minoritized Teacher Identity Construction within Instances of Racialization
(2025-10-02) Baerzae, Fatema; Moore, Colette; Kerschbaum, Stephanie
My study examines English language teacher identity (LTI) construction through qualitative research analysis of group and individual interviews. I focus on the oral narratives told within these interviews on interactions and experiences in the workplace and the classroom. The focus of this study is specifically on teachers who identify as Muslim, and the context is higher education institutes in the United States. My study leans on findings from other studies that have drawn conclusions from interviews and historical events to show that people who "embody an imagined Muslim look" are targeted with anti-Islamic rhetoric and policies (e.g., Ahluwalia & Pellettiere, 2010; Bayoumi, 2006; Joshi, 2006; Kaufman & Niner, 2019, p. 1). My study invests in understanding racialization's impact on professional identity development and the tools the participants use to navigate society in a time strife with anti Muslim rhetoric. My interest lies in how the participants view their sense of self as they articulate navigating the workspace. My research hopes to add to the growing scholarship on the impact of racialization on those perceived to be Muslim.
Brain Poetics: Temporal Perception and Reading 19th Century Poetry
(2025-10-02) Colonnese, Francesca; LaPorte, Charles
Combining current cognitive science on time perception with Victorian poetry, this dissertation investigates how poetry alters the subjective time of a reader. Since poetry is a durational art form, with poems unfolding in time as the reader moves through the words within the poem, the time encoded in the language of the poem is transmitted to the reader as modulation in their own temporal perceptions. This power is enacted primarily through the formal structures of poetry that underlie the content of the poem itself: meter, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, anaphora, and other methods of turning words into temporal patterns. These formalist considerations reinscribe understandings of what poetry is expected to do to a reader by carrying meaning, emotion, and, now, time. Three models are developed for the implications of time perception: (1) entrainment and how the real time processing of language allows formalisms to be felt in the reader's body, (2) the psychological present and how a more robust understanding of "now" enables explanations about the poetic language feeling alive, and (3) neuro-genre as an application of the brain's own genre schema for recognizing poems and how this complicates debates about the nature of the lyric genre. This final intervention tests definitions of the lyric poetry genre by placing it under the real-world conditions of nineteenth-century newspaper reprinting to demonstrate how print culture gives additional evidence for these methods of understanding reading. While Victorian Studies has considered how the history of science impacted literature, this dissertation allows for the current science of temporal perception to add to understandings of why poetry captures readerly attention and generates meaning for so many readers.
Surface Impressions: Drama and Book Buying in Early Modern England
(2025-08-01) Bassett, Andreas Patrick; Knight, Jeffrey Todd
This dissertation contends that readers in Shakespeare’s time literally judged books by their covers, and that minimal reading strategies had a surprising impact on the production and reception of early modern drama. Despite their recent invention in the late-fifteenth century, title-pages quickly became a subject of widespread fascination among both general and scholarly readers, evolving from sixteenth-century criticism of superficial title-page perusers to seventeenth-century praise of experts in “Title Page Learning.” I posit that this surface-level reading practice extended to the bookshop’s frontage—stall, window, shop sign—where title-pages were advertised to passersby, cultivating a perception of the shopfront as interpretable textual architecture, and of book shopping as sense-making. In analyses of works by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Kyd, and others, I recover the ways in which early moderns formed impressions of print drama through the purchasing experience: encountering castoff quartos collaged on the backsides of shop doors, browsing stalls checkered with play and sermon title-pages that served as makeshift chessboards, bidding for Ben Jonson portraits at art auctions near the former site of the Ben Jonson’s Head bookshop. Ultimately, I argue that the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries assume new interpretive valences when we attend to their material surfaces in their original retail contexts, as did early modern book buyers.
Navigating Global Colonialities: Epistemic Translation and Transcoloniality in Knowledge Production Across Borders
(2025-08-01) Prihandita, Anselma Widha; Bou Ayash, Nancy
This dissertation looks into how writing and knowledge-making practices are embroiled in colonial structures that are transnational in nature. To probe the workings of global knowledge networks, it presents ethnographic case studies on the research and writing processes of transnational Indonesian graduate students at an R1 U.S. university. Of particular interest was how these non-Western student-scholars engaged with feedback given on their research and writing, as they were often positioned as “incomprehensible” by the readers and audiences of their work. Seeing how such feedback sometimes was given despite their fluency in standard academic English and disciplinary discourse, this dissertation problematizes this construction of “incomprehensibility” and views such kind of feedback as a mechanism of Othering that draws geopolitical power relations and epistemic inequality into sharp relief, putting a disproportionate burden of translation—both linguistic and epistemic translations—onto multilingual non-Western scholars. The ethnographic case studies presented in the chapters show the consequences of this disproportionate burden of translation. One case study highlights the double bind that transnational scholars face in communicating knowledge from a less privileged context: the strategies used to render these knowledges comprehensible are also ones that negate such attempts at comprehensibility. In order to make themselves comprehensible, the scholar must transmute their Indonesian knowledge into the terms of the English language and Western-centric academic communication, which may require them to minimize or leave out elements particular to their Indonesian research context. Another case study shows how a scholar’s epistemic translation efforts were hindered by both American and Indonesian discourse conventions, each of which acting as a distinct configuration of epistemic colonial structures that then work together and compound each other, showing how transnational composition is ultimately also transcolonial composition: it involves movements across not only geographical borders, but also colonial structures. This calls for literacy practices, writing pedagogies, and graduate mentorship that are both transnational and decolonial, as well as a rethinking of what it means to be “comprehensible.”
Minor Democracies: Reimagining Collectivity in Multiethnic Speculative Fiction
(2025-08-01) He, Jianfeng; Cherniavsky, Eva
This dissertation examines how contemporary speculative fiction by multiethnic writers in the United States reimagines questions of collectivity and possibilities of democratic social relations and collective belonging on small scales. Amid the ongoing institutional crisis of democracy in the United States, this project argues that recent speculative literature has undertaken the task of reimagining collective subject formations rooted in personal and intimate relationships, familial and kinship bonds, and practices of community-building, while gesturing toward transformative social and political possibilities. Chapter one reads Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and argues that the protagonist’s struggles at building a symbiotic collective demonstrates the profound mutual dependency and vulnerability between the vampire Ina and the humans. Chapter two looks at Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and considers how the collective narrator’s communal retelling of experiences of the mystical protagonist enables the subaltern community to reclaim an ambivalent yet subversive collective agency. Chapter three focuses on Nisi Shawl’s Kinning and demonstrates how embodied forms of collectivity across the personal, the global, and the molecular become inextricably entangled with material agency, individual autonomy and desire, as well as global revolutionary struggles.
On Finding Home: Fractures and Dislocations In Memory Through War, Rebirth, and the Ghostly in Trauma
(2025-08-01) Vereshko, Elizabeth; Crouse, Nikki David
This essay critically examines memory and trauma through my experiences in war and motherhood. I consider violence in war stories and the role of memory and imagination in my work. I question what is possible in finding home and making a life when the past cannot be erased and yet has been forgotten. Within this past, I wonder about grace within what is absent as well as within creation and destruction. This essay creates testimony on the importance of craft as my path to question both what my past means to me now as a new mother and about how my past might create meaning beyond my personal experience? This paper discusses works such as Venus In Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Home by Toni Morrison, and other works related to war, memory, and the speculative. This paper discusses Korean American identity and generational trauma through Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, The Magical Language Of Others by E.J Koh, and other works.
Uncovering the Face of Nature: Autopoietic Enactivism and a Systems View of Mind, Life, and Language
(2025-08-01) Pruett, Jacob; Kaup, Monika
The study of life and the study of mind present us with a causality that is not easily explained. How can we reconcile the non-material purposes and intentions that define life and mind with the materialist explanations on which scientific practice depends? This dissertation project broaches this problem using the autopoietic enactivist (AE) approach to cognition. AE reads “cognition” into the foundations of life, and in doing so avers a profound continuity between mind, life, and the environment—as well as between human beings and all other kinds of so-called “lower” life forms. Using the work of Evan Thompson (Mind in Life, 2007) and his AE approach, as well as Terrence Deacon (Incomplete Nature 2013) and his unique contribution to contemporary systems theory which he calls “emergent dynamics,” this project attempts to reconcile AE’s observer-dependent phenomenological and cybernetic underpinnings with the observer-independent methods of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and thermodynamics. Furthermore, it argues that AE’s focus on system-environment couplings—and the embodied cognitive processes therein—provide contemporary literary theory with a robust framework for moving beyond the trappings of language and ideology inaugurated by structuralist linguistics. This project draws a coherent line between materialist science, systems theory, and the field of literary studies, and does so in a way that combines disparate—and seemingly incommensurable—scales of being and knowing, everything from the phenomenology of simple bacteria to contemporary approaches in literary formalism.
South by Southwest: Westerns and Postcolonial Resistance
(2025-08-01) Chaturvedi, Avu; Chrisman, Laura
South by Southwest examines the interplay between tropes from the Hollywood Western film genre and postcolonial masculinities and identity formation, with chapters situated in South Africa, Ireland, the Caribbean, and India. Each chapter pairs literary work and film to pursue this line of inquiry, as the study attempts to critically analyze works that reflect on the cultural and political complexities of pre- and post-imperial statehood, allowing it to engage with themes of identity, power, and representation that resonate within both American and postcolonial contexts. The texts considered explore the possibilities and paradoxes involved in transnational refraction when Hollywood genres are exported to the postcolonial world. Ultimately, the dissertation finds that radicality emerges from the Western when it is filtered through considerations of linguistic imperialism and state power, and that its latent conservatism survives when these factors are set aside in an avowal of ideological formations of heroes and villains under colonial logics.
Students’ Engagement with Mental Disability Knowledge and Theory in the Writing Classroom: Implications for Transfer Research
(2025-08-01) Little, Hunter; Bawarshi, Anis
Drawing on data from a 10-week, classroom-based, qualitative study, this dissertation investigates students’ micro-level processes of transferring knowledge about mental disability from a critical disability studies perspective in a general writing course. The study was conducted at the University of Washington within my self-designed and taught Intermediate Expository Writing course which was meant to build students’ critical disability literacy. This study builds on the work of disability studies, writing studies, uptake theory, and knowledge transfer scholars, including the ongoing and prominent conversations about knowledge transfer in writing studies as well as theories of students’ boundary-work. The results demonstrate that students’ engagement with mental disability knowledge and theory in the writing classroom is deeply informed by their incoming relationships with the subject matter and the innumerable interactions that occur between students’ experience, each other, concepts, readings, writing tasks, and material space/place. Student writing, survey, and interview data were analyzed using thematic and discourse analysis and within the framework of Dylan Medina’s (2017) concept of micro-transfers or moment-to-moment interactions which inform how students define people, places, and things. Tracing such micro-transfers revealed how students uniquely take up and adapt knowledge about mental disability within a single course and across writing tasks. Through this analysis, I present five themes that help complicate traditional understandings of knowledge transfer as broad, easy-to-see translations of knowledge across contexts. The analysis illuminates the unique shifts in students’ relationships to disability, their dynamic process of adapting knowledge about disability, the impact of class environments on knowledge transfer, students’ need for alternative pathways for engaging with difficult concepts, and the potential of courses centered around critical disability studies to support student advocacy stances. These findings illustrate the use of micro-transfer as a framework for the analysis of knowledge transfer and course design and the benefits of incorporating critical disability studies discourse into general writing courses. To close, I offer implications for transfer, writing, and disability studies research; teaching; and writing program administration.
Black Craft: Black Girls Crafting Self and Spirit in The Gilded Ones, Brown Girl in the Ring, and Sing Unburied Sing
(2025-08-01) Smith, Kimaya C.; Paris, Rae
I am a writer of Black girl stories. The use of fantastical elements and speculative futures in fiction puts Black girls in conversation with power; not in the way power is typically used against those less privileged, but redefines it as an equalizing act, a chance. Distortions and retellings are key to sustaining these stories, particularly as it relates to time and memory. I will explore the ways I want my work to become an unfolding and understanding of memory and time. This essay examines my experiences as a Black writer, mother, and daughter through the lens of Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Namina Forna’s The Gilded Ones. These novels reimagine Black girlhood using fantasy and horror, countering violence with magic and self, as I analyze the ways they redefine power, while distortions of time and memory reshape narrative possibility. This essay aims to expand the literary map for those who’ve felt rootless, offering new ways of belonging. Through both creative and critical writing, I hope to remap my family history—transforming pain, loss, and memory into revelation.
Gốc Rễ as Craft: Notes on Survival and Knowing
(2025-08-01) Tang, Binh; Paris, Rae
There is one thing I hold dear is the notion that narrative desire, in any circumstances, arises most strongly once historical erasure takes place, a local, personal reckoning naturally forming against the global, sweeping forces. After the American War in Vietnam, after generations lost to and were displaced by violence, the search for an identity in each individual becomes more sacred, symbolic and urgent, but as quiet as it can be. This critical essay is an amalgamation of autobiographical and critical writing on craft, survival, and language through a transnational lens informed by Vietnamese and Vietnamese American experiences. I look at the notion of mất gốc as a personal trauma and a generative space for craft. I look at the gaps and silences within the literary and historical canon. The works by Ocean Vuong, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Aimee Phan are relevant here as they facilitate my inquiries into the queer, diasporic, and transnational magnitudes of Vietnamese and Vietnamese American narrative works. I imagine a future for a novel that resists the assimilationist gaze and places the fragmented, haunted lives of Vietnamese Amerasians at the center stage. Ultimately, I argue for a literature and storytelling as an embodied act that sees the "art of staying afloat" as craft.
Barbarian + Wizard = Heretic: Evoking the Revolutionary Fantastic in Samuel R. Delany’s NevÃ¨rÃ¿on
(2025-08-01) Alexander, Dorian Lucus; Foster, Ronald
This project reads through Samuel R. Delany’s NevÃ¨rÃ¿on series as a means of conceptualizing a distinctly revolutionary fantastic. To begin, I establish the fantastic as a specific literary function and outline how it has been studied in relation to the genre of Fantasy. Further, I distinguish the revolutionary fantastic from the category of Radical Fantasy based on the former’s resistance to categorizations that impose a definitive fictionality. Relying on the work of thinkers like JosÃ© MuÃ±oz and Gloria AnzaldÃºa, I propose the revolutionary fantastic as an affective, queer, and decolonial practice of making belief related to contemporary esoterism but more attuned to the political poetics of queer of color critique. Through Delany, I evoke the figure of the Barbarian as a queerly racialized anachronism emblematic of the revolutionary fantastic’s deconstructive processes. With a specific focus on the Barbarian’s enmeshment in a pastness distinct from the discipline of history, I position this figure as a model for temporal fugitivity that offers a broader revolutionary imaginary by way of fisting theory. In this reading of Delany, I also assemble the crypt as a marginal zone from which the border between reality and unreality may be trespassed, speaking to the revolutionary potential of such trespassing and meditating on the tragic affect of its inevitable failure as a way of showcasing the reconstructive elements of the project’s titular formula. The project closes with a reading of C. L. Clark’s novel The Unbroken, where I demonstrate the applicability of the revolutionary fantastic as an approach to re-reading and re-writing our world(s).
Writing in the Margins: Critical Multimodal Literacies and Writing Pedagogies Across the Curriculum
(2025-08-01) Taylor, Rebecca; Rai, Candice
This study emerged from a curiosity about how disciplinary faculty engage with critical multimodal literacies in the writing courses they teach. Drawing on data from a yearlong faculty development fellowship, I explored how seven disciplinary instructors from across the university understood, adopted, and negotiated multimodal approaches to their writing pedagogies. Through participant observation of workshops, interviews, and analysis of participant course materials, this dissertation uncovers the ways language ideologies and disciplinary norms shape faculty writing pedagogies and praxes. Findings reveal both barriers and possibilities in grounding disciplinary writing pedagogies in equity-oriented, critical multimodal approaches to writing. This study contributes to conversations in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) by proposing a critical multimodal framework that challenges dominant assumptions about academic writing and supports more inclusive pedagogies.
Moving Poetry: Representations of the Filmic Mode
(2025-08-01) Goldenbaum, Evan; Feld, Andrew
The Imagist tradition of Western poetry has long determined what is considered acceptable in the literary sphere. As the film genre has grown, more and more poets have modified this literary movement from static depictions of the image to more active representations. This paper explores the work of a few of those poets alongside literature that describes the various ways in which we may read and interpret the filmic mode within the literary arts.
Into the Digital Gardens: On the Cyberpastoral Poetics of Ander Monson and Dennis Hinrichsen
(2025-08-01) Williamson, Edwin; Triplett, Pimone
This thesis aims to address the development of a ‘cyberpastoral’ poetic genre situated within the contemporary technological world, and how this genre carries and furthers the scope of the traditional pastoral genre to invite poets into a digital landscape where they may confront the presence of technology within their everyday lives to address and make familiar the relationship that exists between humans and technology. In close readings of two poems which emphasize the pervasive presence of technology, Ander Monson’s “For Orts” and Dennis Hinrichsen’s “[Loop Narcissus] [w/ and iPhone & the Euclidean Plane],” I examine how these poets utilize and operate within a cyberpastoral poetic genre to emphasize the human and technological/online relationship; act as a landscape of escape and reflection; and encourage further critical investigations into our human and digital existences.
Weirding the Other — Transgressing Toward Inhumanity
(2025-08-01) Forrest, Elizabeth; Crouse, Nikki D
This critical essay positions marginalized others as weird and inhuman others, exploring both the weirded experiences of an othered life and the potential for weird others to achieve radical alterity by relinquishing the fight for humanness, and instead finding kinship with the inhuman, and the further weird. This essay engages with seminal critical works regarding the weird, as well as contemporary fiction novels that are widely considered to demonstrate the weird, The City & the City by China MiÃ©ville, and The Ballad of Black Tom Victor LaValle. In addition, I put forth The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright and Henry Dumas’ short story, “Fon”, as illustrations of weirded marginalized experiences.
Close Reading on Poems Sylvia Plath Wrote on February 1st, 1963, in Yeats’s House
(2025-08-01) Morton, Lillian; Triplett, Pimone; Bierds, Linda
In 1962, Sylvia Plath divorced Ted Hughes after six years of marriage. Not long after the finalization of their divorce, Sylvia moved from their infamous home at Court Green to the former childhood home of W.B. Yeats—one of Sylvia’s favorite poets—at 23 Fitzroy Road. For this reason, she connected—with her new phase as a divorcÃ©e, single-parent, and full-time poetess—her lease at 23 Fitzroy Road signaled a promising beginning for Sylvia’s personal and literary life. Sylvia formally moved into 23 Fitzroy Road in December 1962, and after a brutal winter and horrid flu, she wrote thirteen poems as a tenant of Yeats’s home. On February 1st, 1963, Sylvia produced three original poems; the most poems she wrote in a single day, since moving to 23 Fitzroy Road. This thesis is a very straightforward close reading of the meaning and poetics of the three poems Sylvia Plath wrote on February 1st, 1963—ten days before she died by suicide in the very same house. These poems were titled “Mystic”, “Kindness”, and “Words”.
Transsexual as Posthuman: Approaching Trans Studies’ “Narrative Problem” through Trans and Posthumanist Genres
(2025-08-01) Brend, Olive Mallory; Crouse, Nikki
“Transsexual as Posthuman” uses critical and narrative frameworks for trans studies and trans narratives as critiqued in Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager’s 2019 article “After Trans Studies.” With a focus on the role of the transsexual figure in postmodernity—and the haunting of Sandy Stone’s neologism “posttranssexual” therein—I analyze how satire, genre blending, dystopia, and the tagline “writing optimism without hope” may drive trans narratives present and future. I also argue that these tactics intertwine not only with trans, but with decolonial and extinction narratives as well. With persistent reference back to my own MFA creative thesis project, Inside Waters: Killer Whale Stories, I also analyze these tactics in Emily Zhou’s “Gen Z trans” realistic fiction short story collection Girlfriends (2023) and Lousie Erdrich’s Indigenous feminist dystopia Future Home of the Living God (2017).
I Myself Am Hell: A Personal Poetics of Mental Illness With Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell as Corollaries
(2025-08-01) Overby, Kobe; Feld, Andrew
The purpose of this thesis is to define a personal poetics surrounding the topic of mental illness. The thesis, in execution, performs a survey of three poems that are of major import to the author himself. The poems surveyed are as follows: "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath, "Dream Song 14" by John Berryman, and "Skunk Hour" by Robert Lowell. In particular, poetic strategies such as melodrama, dark humor, and the internalization of observed landscapes are noted as important techniques in constructing a successful "mentally ill" poem. Essentially, it is the intent of the author to outline a mode of poetics in which representations of mental illness are cathartic and empowering as opposed to wholly woeful and bewildering.

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