The novel portion of the Mystery Dissertation Project takes place at the fictional Schenley University in Pittsburgh. Because it’s a mystery novel, it’s been important to me to establish a small, distinct cast of characters at the start of my writing process. And since many of the characters are grad students, the way I decided to differentiate them was through the titles of their dissertations. (I don’t want to perpetuate the unhelpful tendency of grad students to locate their sense of self in their research, but…………)

These dissertation titles were very fun to write, largely because I don’t have to follow up with the actual dissertations. I tried to honor the contemporary trend of titling humanities projects, namely, INTERESTING PHRASE followed by a colon followed by WHAT I WANT MY SEARCH ENGINE KEYWORDS TO BE. (My friend Chelsea gives this formula to her undergrads when they get stuck writing essay titles.) I also tried to capture the academic’s love for questionable wordplay.

So! Announcing the narratively important grad students of Schenley University’s spectacularly dysfunctional English department:

Piper Ansell. “The Jewel in the Crown and the Crown Jewels: Sex, Race, and Precious Stones in c19 Colonial India”

Katie Lin. “fizz pop a dissertation in five acts”

Antonio Ramirez. “Marlowe Doesn’t Even Go Here: Early Modern Mean Girls”

Phoebe Koning. “Willa, Gertrude, and All My Bad Mothers”

Kevin Ng. “Ich bin ein Frankfurter: Food, Fascism, and the Frankfurt School”

Karen Gavras. “Before Lyme Regis: The Eighteenth-Century Prehistory of the Prehistoric”

Jack Hart. “Crooked Men: Disabling Masculinity in Victorian Britain”

Todd Burns. “Anaphora and Aporia in Shakespeare’s Romances”

and Lu Fairchild, whose dissertation title is TBA because I actually have to write this one.