The Department of English offers a 30 hour program of study leading to the Master of Arts degree in English. The Department of English also offers a 48-hour program of study leading to the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA-CW) degree.
Graduate students in English may: prepare for careers of teaching on the college and pre-college levels; engage in literary research and composition on advanced levels; prepare for further advanced study and degrees; or pursue other pre-professional goals.
Theses/Dissertations from 2022
House of Lambs, Taylor Janell Anderson
Scatterbrain, Abigail C. Byrd-Stapleton
Samuel Beckett's Theory of Repetition, Kennedy Carpenter
Multimodality And The Sociality Of Literacies: Shaping First-Year Writing Students’ Literacies Through Multimodal Approaches, Jonathon Collins
A Tender Head, Whitney N. Cooper
Broken Rules and Ugly Rumors, Sam Floyd
Unitl the Well Runs Dry, Wesley Adam Gift
Asking Appalachia: Appalachian English in the Writing Classroom, Rachel Nicole Hampton
Wattpad as an Online Medium for Contemporary Folklore, Alisha Tess Helton
The Touching Rooms, Kimberly Mattheussens
All the Broken Pieces, Ellen Harrison Mitchell
BECAUSE: A Son’s Odyssey to Expose a CIA Coverup and Find the Father He Never Knew, James B. Wells
Theses/Dissertations from 2021
Dirt Road Magic, Carrie Callahan
Broken, Jeffrey Hyde Jr
Shadows Hold Their Breath, Sherry Robinson
Coasting '71: a memoir, Richard Stuecker
Not Angry but Angy: The Rhetorical Effects of Non-Standard Language in Memes, Cailin Rhiannon Wile
Theses/Dissertations from 2020
Widows' Breath: Grief Fractures, Artie Ann Bates
False Starts: A Collection of Stories, Amaleq Eleazar Esmurria
The Flower Shop, Ian McKinzey Hall
Creating a Place for Monstrosity: The Forced Liminality and Limited Mobility of Codified Monstrosity in Leigh Bardugo's King of Scars, Kaylee Brooke Lambert
Kitty Hawk Way, Mary Elizabeth Pope
Hometown, Edy Thomas
Atlas: a collection of poems on moving to the Wild West, William Andrew White
Syncretic Immersion: Tolkien’s Languages As History, Artifacts, And Meta-Narratives, Stewart Raymond Zdrojowy
Theses/Dissertations from 2019
Mouse, Joseph Breen
In The Blood, Joey Elizabeth Burke
23: The Appalachian Foothills People, Place, And, The Opioid Epidemic, Sarah E. Diamond Burroway
Out With the Old, In With Revitalized Grammar Through Style-based Composition Pedagogy, Courtney Forester
Defending the Bodice Ripper, Dora Abigail Gardner
"Where Is A Story Before It Becomes Words?": Understanding Queer Composition's Place in Writing Studies Through Lynda Barry's What It Is, James Franklin McClure
High Altitude Fish, Micah McGurk
Mountain Roosters, Matthew Parsons
Dirt Work, Rachel Anne Parsons
The Chivalrous and Feminist King: How the Arthurian Legends Chronicled the Formation of Two Gender Identities, Gary Andrew Pickle
Autobiography, Kristen Marie Ruggles
Hidden Weather and Other Stories, Lydia K. Sanders
Personal Jesus and Other True Stories, Leslie Scheuler
Holler If You Need Me, Lori Singleton
Desolation Road, Eric James Smith
The King's Apothecary, Sherri Ann Williams
Theses/Dissertations from 2018
Everything Broken is Waiting to Be Fixed, Jake Russell Bingham
The Face You Draw into Your Skin Is Not Your Own, Patricia Coscia
All Saints and Sinners, Wendy Elizabeth Gowins
Talking Sports: Rhetorical Benefits Of Blogging Sports Journalism, Lucas Green
Tell Me One True Thing, Roxanne Kent-Drury
Soup Beans, Savannah Korey Marlow
Bridezilla Descends Upon Tokyo and Other Strange Stories, Katherine McMullen
Designing the Teacher: Applying 'Design Thinking' to Improve Composition Pedagogy and Practice, Jordan Nicole Newman
Both Sides: The Classroom From Where I Stand, Rebecca Potter
The Mind's Eye: Visualizing Montage Theory, Eric Cody Smothers
One Lonely Line, Carissa Stevens
Finding the Self, Brenda Thomas
Crawlspace, Joseph Andrew Torres
The Woodline, William Roy Wilson
Theses/Dissertations from 2017
Religious Poetry and the Red Dot, Lori Curry
Breaking the Binary: Negotiating Space and Power in Course-Embedded Consulting, Courtnie Jude Morin
The Art of Sungazing, Jane Ann Mortkowitz
A Sylvan Convergence, Jennifer Anne Parks
Sequence, Deri Ross Pryor
Whitman And The Elegy: Mythologizing Lincoln And The Poetic Reconstruction Of Mourning, Brytani Raymond
(Re)Writing Woman with "The Laugh of the Medusa" and AntiOedipus, Samantha Rodgers
Masks of the Dark Goddess in Arthurian Literature: Origin and Evolution of Morgan le Fay, John Christopher Shearer
Farpointe: The Ice Princess Chronicles: Book 2, Kelsey Shea Weber
Theses/Dissertations from 2016
Going Home, Clinton Blake
Come, Set a Spell: A Novel in Stories, Ansley M. Bredar
Sorry Horses, Douglas Forrest Brewer
Grave Desires, Lisa Ann Chapman
Rail and Tie, Rebecca Daff
Collected Snow Globes, Bernard Fredrick Deville
Saw Briers, Cecile Gale Dixon
Barefoot and Bindi-ed, Kristian Goli
Panspermia, Lance Hood
Female Agency in Religious Disassembly of Culture: Where Do Women Fit In?, Megan Elizabeth Kirby
Butterflies Thrive On Octane, Phillip Wenturine
Theses/Dissertations from 2015
Esoterika, Michael Jernigan
a people blessed, a land teeming, Jay McCoy
Crafting Dreams of Lucid Shape, Joseph Allen Nichols
Bitter Relish, Heather Noland
Sarah Across America, Christopher Rowe
Saudade, Whitnee Elaine Thorp
Theses/Dissertations from 2014
The Consort, Cynthia Ann Behunin
An Envoy, Courtney Anne Combs
Animal People, Mary Rachael Hamm
This Is How You Live, James Andrew Hartman
Sleeper Cell, Jennifer Jordan Hartman
Ellipses of Gravel, Brandyn Christian Johnson
Fragments of Joshua, Bruce Chandler Lewis
Judgment, Joseph M. Mau
We Bare All, Wesley Shane Parsons
Rhaptein/Aidein, Kristen Roach Thompson
Saul Cyriaque & the Siren of Jean Lafitte, Laura E. Wooffitt
Theses/Dissertations from 2013
"It's Like We Were Being Watched ... Like There Were Only 3 Walls, And Not a Fourth Wall": Manifestations of Metafiction in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Caleb Randall Dempsey-Richardson
Confessions of a Scaredy Cat, Todd King
Like So Many Purple Boughs, Lisa M. Schmidley
Theses/Dissertations from 2012
Civilian Aviation Screening: A Time-Series Analysis of Confiscated Firearms at Screening Checkpoints, Shon Agard
Subversive Liminality and Ideological Warfare: The Zombie Mash-Up as Resistance to Hypermasculine Revenge Narratives Post-9/11, Veronica L. Cooper
The Painted Box, Veronica Louise Harryman
The Black Gum Well, Carolyn Ruth Pennington
The Rhetorical Criteria of Kennedy's Camelot, Stacy Fawn Wilder
