MA English Thesis Projects

See ways that MA in English students are using their thesis projects to support their areas of scholarly and professional interest.

Felicia Juliano

The purpose of my study is to determine how administrators and tutors perceive the differences between required and voluntary writing center visits, and to determine what strategies tutors and administrators employ when dealing with required visits. I developed a survey targeted towards writing center administrators and tutors to collect necessary data.

Chad Pettit

Combining scholarship in the fields of composition studies and educational theory, my thesis presents an integrated pedagogy for secondary English teachers. High school composition instructors face an imbalance of instructional time, high stakes testing, and disproportionate student-teacher ratios. Burdened with the task of teaching writing to diverse learners, they must avoid burnout while providing effective instruction and feedback. The purpose of my thesis is to restore balance to these instructors.

Sue Ellen Sitton

While Hawthorne scholars have studied both instances of silence in Hawthorne's works and speech act theory in some of his texts, scholars have yet to apply the ideas included in speech act theory to those acts of silence in the works. This is where my focus lies. My thesis will attempt to apply the concepts associated with speech act theory to specific instances of silence in the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Stacey Torres

My thesis encompasses two ideas: (1) The Hunger Games can be read as a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and (2) one detail kept within this loose adaptation is the scapegoat mechanism. Someone who follows Girard’s mimetic theory, mainly that the scapegoat mechanism has been exposed, would expect to see this detail revised. Yet, it is still very much alive.

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