I’ve been involved with the following dissertations, either as adviser (director), as a reviewer (who approves the dissertation before the final examination), or as  another member of the examination committee. Except as indicated, the students were enrolled in the Department of English.

• Joan Menefee, “Decoding Distraction: Attention in American Culture, 1871–1916,” 2004. (Committee chair.)
• Steven Hardy, “Expatriate Writing, Expatriate Readers: English Language Fiction Published Along the China Coast in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” 2003. (Adviser.)
  
• Betty Bright, “No Longer Innocent: The Book Arts in America, 1960 to 1980,” 2000; Department of Art History. (Reviewer.) Published as No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America, 1960–1980 (New York, NY: Granary Books, 2005).
  
• Sarah Wadsworth, “Reading the Marketplace: The Culture of the Book in Nineteenth-Century America,” 2000. (Reviewer.) Published as In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).
  
• Myungjin Kim, “Dialogism in Dickens’ First-Person Narratives: A Bakhtinian Study,” 1999. (Committee chair).
  
• Yvonne Lindsay, “Yeats and Pater: An Aesthetic Journey,” 1999. (Adviser.)
• Katherine Mapes, “Intimate Language: The Correspondence between Byron’s Letters and Journals and Don Juan,” 1999. (Committee chair.)
• Sang-chul Lee, “Republic of Korea President Kim Young-sam’s Rhetoric in the 1992 Campaign and the First Year in Office: A Case Study of Presidential Rhetoric in Democratization,” 1998; Department of  Speech-Communication. (Committee member)
• Soo-jae Lee, “Relevance and Processing in Interpreting Null Object Sentences in Korean: The Interaction of Context and Processing Effort,” 1998; Institute of Linguistics and Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures. (Reviewer)
  
• Thomas Edward Fitch, “Anima-Animus for String Quartet,” 1997; School of Music. (Reviewer.)
  
• Linda Fletcher, “The Clergyman’s Daughter,” 1997. (Reviewer and committee chair.)
• J Paul Johnson, “Literacy, Technology, and Progress: The Social Construction of World Wide Web Hypertexts in First-Year Composition.” 1997. (Reviewer.)
• Robert E. Kibler, “The Road to Jade Dragon Mountain: Ezra Pound’s Aesthetic Movement from West to East and His Creation of a Paradiso Terrestre,” 1997. (Reviewer.)
• Christopher Miles Michaelson, “Philosophy Out of the Cave: An Expedition in Philosophical Style,” 1997; Department of Philosophy. (Reviewer.)
• William Anthony Rozaitis, “Desire Reduced to a Petal’s Span: William Carlos Williams, Charles Demuth, and Floral Representation in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America,” 1997. (Committee member.)
• Helen J. Aling, “Dickens’s Unitarian Theology,” 1996. (Committee member.)
• Sonia Nora Feder-Lewis, “History at Home: Reassessing the Role of Women in theVictorian Historical Novel,” 1996. (Reviewer.)
• Julie L’Enfant, “Truth in Art: William Michael Rossetti and Nineteenth-Century Realist Criticism,” 1996. (Reviewer and committee chair.) Published as William Rossetti’s Art Criticism: The Search for Truth in Victorian Art (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998).
• David S. Rothstein, “Chivalry and Nostalgia: British Literature and the Formation of a Tory-Medievalist National Identity, 1820–1845,” 1996. (Committee chair.)
• Deborah F. Rossen-Knill, “Toward a Pragmatics of Dialogue in Fiction,” 1995. (Committee member.)
• Larry Shillock, “Disciplining Vision: Fin de siècle Literature, Optics, and Psychoanalysis, 1885–1900,” 1995. (Committee member.)
• Richard Scott Carr, “Who Are We?: The Australian Quest for Literary Identity,” 1994. (Committee member.)
• Carlos Barney Dews, “Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers,” 1994. (Reviewer.) Published as Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography (Madison: University of Wicsonsin Press, 1999).
  
• Richard Michael Henry, “Pretending and Meaning” 1994. (Adviser.) Published as Pretending and Meaning: Toward a Pragmatic Theory of Fictional Discourse, Contributions in Philosophy 57 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996).
• Susan Ann Hyman, “Green Fields: The Spirit of Place in Novels and Memoirs of the Victorian Countryside,” 1994. (Committee member.)
• James Maertens, “Promethean Desires: The Technician as Hero and Myths of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Literature,” 1993. (Reviewer.)
• Daniel Francis Cooper Alcarón, “The Aztec Palimpsest: Discursive Appropriations of Mexican Culture,” 1992. (Committee member.)
• Ersu Ding, “Meaning and Power: A Study in the Marxist Theory of Language,” 1992. (Committee member.)
• LuMing Robert Mao, “Pragmatic Universals and Their Implications,” 1991. (Adviser.) Published in part as “Beyond Politeness Theory: ‘Face’ Revisited and Renewed,” Journal of Pragmatics 21 (1994): 451–86.
  
• Katherine Allison Retan, “The Representation and Resolution of Class and Gender Conflict in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell,” 1991. (Reviewer.)
• John Dunning Wenstrom, “Modernist Irony: Frost, Eliot,” 1991. (Adviser.)
• Donna Rae White, “The Mabinogi in Children’s Literature: Welsh Legends in English-Language Children’s Books,” 1991. (Committee chair.) Published as A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature, Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 77 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998).
• Ruth Wood, “A Challenge to Highbrow Hegemony: A Study Based on Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow American Novels of the Nineteen-Fifties,” 1991. (Committee member.)
• Colleen Denney, “Exhibition Reforms and Systems: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877–1890,” 1990; Department of Art History. (Reviewer.) Published in part in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, ed. Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1996).
• Kyungwon Shin, “The English Origins of Wordsworth’s Organicism,” 1990. (Committee chair.)
• Miguel Tamen. “Manners of Interpretation,” 1990; Department of Comparative Literature. (Reviewer. ) Published as Manners of Interpretation: The Ends of Argument in Literary Studies, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
• Kari Joy Winter, “Subjects of Slavery, Agents of History: Women and Power in Female Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1900,” 1990. (Adviser.) Published as Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
• Elizabeth Frick Baldwin, “Linguistics and Ideology in the ‘English-Only’ Movement,” 1998. (Committee chair.)
• Laura Ann Brady, “Collaborative Literary Writing: Issues of Authorship and Authority,” 1988. (Committee chair.)
• James Michael Kaufman, “The Rhetoric of Medical Writing: Case Studies of Physicians Writing for Journal Publication” 1988. (Committee chair.)
• Timothy Robert Sweet, “Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Question of Representation in the American Civil War,” 1988. (Adviser.) Published as Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union, Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
• Cynthia Clara Carlton-Ford, 1987. “Conversation, Gender, and Power: Dialogue in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” (Reviewer.)
• Julia Marie Gergits,“Women Can Paint Sometimes: Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Novels,” 1987. (Committee member.)
• Paula Reed Nancarrow, “Remythologizing the Bible: Fantasy and the Revelatory Hermeneutic of George MacDonald,” 1987. (Co-adviser.)
• Jerome D. DeNuccio. “A Testimony of My Innocency: The Literary Dimensions of Robert Keaynes's Last Will and Testament, 1653,” 1986, (Committee member.)
• Carl George Herndl, “Maid/Made in the Image: Solitary Women in Wordsworth’s Early Poetry,” 1986. (Committee member.)
• Margaret Ann Crouch, “Concepts and Reality: An Examination of Realism,” 1985; Department of Philosophy. (Reviewer.)
• Sara Joan Eaton, “The Rhetoric of Sexual Revenge in Jacobean Drama,” 1985. (Committee member.)
• Michael J. Opitz, “Poetry as Appropriate Epistemology: Gregory Bateson and W. B. Yeats,” 1985. (Committee member.)
• Gordon Philip Thomas, “Reading, Writing, and Mutual Knowledge,” 1985. (Reviewer.)
• James Dana Alexander, “Aphesis in English,” 1984. (Committee member.)
• Matthew Cannon Brennan, “Wordsworth, Turner, and Romantic Landscape Traditions: A Study in the Picturesque and the Sublime,” 1984. (Committee member.) Published as Wordsworth, Turner, and Romantic Landscape: A Study of the Traditions of the Picturesque and the Sublime, Studies in English and American Literature, Linguistics, and Culture 5 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1987),
• Robert Edward Brooke. “Writing and Commitment: Some Psychosocial Functions of College Writing,” 1984. (Committee member.)
• Erle Patrick Moore, “The Broken Pentameter: William Carlos Williams and the Conventions of Poetry,”1984. (Committee member.)
• William Michael Kleine, “Syntactic Choice and a Theory of Discourse: Rethinking Sentence-Combining,” 1983. (Committee member.)
• Janis Lull. “Language Behavior and Renaissance Poetry: Studies in Shakespeare, Herbert, and Donne," 1983. (Reviwer.)
• Sandra Dianne Sandell, “‘A Very Poetic Circumstance’: Incest and the English Literary Imagination,” 1981. (Adviser.)
• John Edgar Tidwell, “Cultural Collaboration and Iconoclasm: The Literary and Cultural Criticism of Alain Locke and Sterling Brown,” 1981. (Committee member.)
• Marilyn Marie Cooper, “Implicatures in Dramatic Conversations,” 1980. (Reviewer.)
• Karen Louise Olson Murray, “Speakers in Lyric Poetry,” 1980. (Committee chair.)
• Stephen James Adams, “‘To Set All Well Afloat’: Romantic Structures and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” 1970. (Committee member.)
• Joel Francis Jackson, “Speech-Act Theory and Reader-Response Criticism,” 1977. (Committee member.)
• James Harry McCormick, “The Distinctive Literary Property: A Study of a Theme in Twentieth-Century Criticism,” 1977. (Committee member.)
• Barton Winfield Galle, Jr. “Self-Sacrifice versus Self-Help in Selected Victorian Novels,” 1976. (Committee member.)
• Russell Joseph Meyer, “Tudor Laughter: A Preliminary Study for a Theory of Humor,” 1976. (Committee member.)
  

Michael Hancher
Department of English, University of Minnesota
Comments to: mh@umn.edu
Created July 10, 1996
Last revised July 16, 2007