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Answered By: Laura Galas Last Updated: Jan 19, 2024     Views: 20508

Current Yale students, faculty and staff can access Yale dissertations and theses. 

After dissertations are accepted by and submitted to the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences , they are sent to ProQuest/UMI for microfilming according Yale University policy . In most cases, this process takes 8 months to a year before the original and the m icrofilm copy are returned to the Yale University Library . Once returned, they are discoverable through the searches below. 

Print dissertations

Find print dissertations using  Orbis  or Quicksearch  Books+ .

• Search by title or keyword and use the format filter for "Dissertations & Theses" (image below)
• Many print dissertations are located at our off-site shelving facility (LSF), and you will need place a request for the item. It generally takes 24-48 hours for the item to arrive. You will receive an email notification when the item is available for pickup.

Online dissertations

If you are interested in an electronic copy, you can also find some Yale dissertations in the database Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University .

If you do not find the Yale dissertation you need, please contact [email protected] or call 203-432-1744 during business hours .

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During the late 1800’s, only a trickle of dissertations were submitted annually, but today, the department averages about 25 per year. See who some of those intrepid scholars were and what they wrote about by clicking on any of the years listed below.

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Search for theses.

• Orbis , Yale Online Catalog Search for all Yale theses using Orbis by including the words "Yale" and  "thesis" as keywords in your search.  Items cataloged in Orbis will have both a call number and a "handle" URL for the catalog record. Please include both if if you make an email inquiry about access.  
• Dissertations & Theses - Full Text  Digital Dissertations contains more than 1.6 million entries with information about doctoral dissertations, including Yale MD/PhD dissertations. It is the same database as Dissertation Abstracts, but with the significant advantage that titles published since 1997 are available in PDF digital format.  
• Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library Project Starting in 2006, each YSM graduating class is required to deposit an electronic thesis. Theses from 2011-onward are also accessible through Dissertations & Theses - Full Text . Note: If a medical student selects a temporary or permanent embargo for campus-only access, the full-text will not be available in the Proquest system during the embargo. Thesis abstracts should be available in either EliScholar or Proquest.  
• EliScholar Alumni theses can be found in Yale University’s institutional repository. If you would like to have your thesis added to EliScholar, please complete this form .

Theses in the Library

The Medical Library receives one copy of each Yale School of Medicine thesis and two copies of each School of Nursing thesis. School of Public Health theses are in the Medical Library through 2008. In 2009, SPH theses are electronic only and available in the Proquest Dissertations & Theses - Full Text  product. Each thesis is cataloged with author and subject entries for Orbis, the Yale online catalog. In addition, a historical list of theses arranged by year , indicating the call numbers for requesting the thesis, is shelved in the Medical Library Information Room. To view a print thesis, thesis request forms are available at the Circulation Desk. Theses from 1974 to the present are shelved within the Medical Library and are retrieved twice a day, at 11:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Earlier theses are stored in the Library Shelving Facility (LSF). Theses at LSF may be delivered to the Medical Library via the campus library delivery service. The second copy of the School of Nursing theses may be checked out for home use, but all other theses must be used in the Library. For more information, please call the Circulation Desk 203-785-5354.

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Graduate School degrees are awarded twice each year, at Commencement in May and at the end of the fall term (normally in December, depending on the schedule of the Yale Corporation).

Degree petitions that are recommended to the Graduate School by a student’s department are then reviewed by the Graduate School Degree Committee. Once the Degree Committee has given its approval, petitions are forwarded first to the Graduate School faculty and then to the Yale Corporation for approval.

For the Graduate School's official policies concerning degree petitioning, see the Programs & Policies Bulletin .

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Students in terminal Master's programs (MA/MS) must petition for their degrees in the term in which they expect to complete their degree requirements in order to receive the degree at the end of the term. To petition for a terminal MA or MS, students should send the Degree Petition Form to their department for approval.

Please note that terminal Master's students may only participate in Commencement activities in the term in which their degree is expected or thereafter.

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In some PhD programs, students are eligible to receive an MA, MS, or MPhil degree prior to the award of the PhD. These are referred to as en route degrees, as they are "en route" to the PhD.

PhD students are automatically petitioned for any eligible en route degrees (MA, MS, and MPhil) by the University Registrar in the term in which they advance to candidacy.

PhD students who would like to petition for an en route degree prior to advancing to candidacy may petition for the degree in the term following that in which all requirements for the en route degree have been completed. For example, students completing en route degree requirements during the spring term may submit a petition for the degree in the following fall term. Deadlines for petitioning are the same as those listed for terminal Master's degrees above.

Please note that students receiving en route degrees do not participate in Commencement.    

Dissertation Submission

Students must notify their departments in the semester in which they intend to submit the dissertation. For a May degree, this must be done no later than February 15. For a December degree, this must be done no later than September 1.

The University Registrar's Office oversees the dissertation submission process . Please contact them with any questions you may have about submission. 

Dissertations can be submitted on any day of the year, but the submission date will affect your degree conferral date. Dissertations must be submitted by the following dates:

• March 15 to be considered for the May degree.
• October 1 to be considered for the December degree.

No exceptions can be made to these deadlines.

Students who submit after these deadlines will automatically be considered in the next degree cycle. For example, if a student submits on October 1, they will be considered for a December degree. If they submit on October 2, however, they will be considered for a May degree. Students cannot register, receive a stipend, or remain on Yale Health student coverage beyond the term in which the dissertation is submitted.

IMPORTANT: Students who submit their dissertations before the end of the add/drop course enrollment period (see the academic calendar ) are NOT eligible to register as students for the remainder of that term. Students who wish to remain registered until the end of a given semester must submit their dissertations AFTER add/drop closes in order to remain registered for that semester.

Students are not required to be registered to be eligible to submit a dissertation, as long as their program agrees to read and assess the dissertation. Decisions about whether a student who is no longer registered may submit a dissertation are entirely up to the student's department or program.

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Dissertations.

Marcus Alaimo: “The Romantic-Utilitarian Debate” directed by David Bromwich, Leslie Brisman, Stefanie Markovits

Andie Berry: “This Has Not Happened: African American Performances At The Edge Of The Century” directed by Daphne A. Brooks, Tavia Nyong’o, Marc Robinson

Daniel de la Rocha: “Frustrated Journeys: Social Immobility and the Aesthetics of Disappointment in Nineteenth-Century Fiction” directed by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Marta Figlerowicz, Stefanie Markovits

Seamus Dwyer: “Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425” directed by Jessica Brantley, Ardis Butterfield, Emily Thornbury

Emily Glider: “Geopolitical Players: Diplomacy, Trade, and English Itinerant Theater in Early Modern Europe” directed by David Kastan, Lawrence Manley, Ayesha Ramachandran

Tobi Haslett: “All This Sociology and Economics Jazz: Blackness, Writing, and Totality after Civil Rights” directed by Jacqueline Goldsby, Michael Warner, Michael Denning

Adam C. Keller: “Character in Conflict: Soldiers and the Formation of Eighteenth-Century Literary Character” directed by David Bromwich, Jill Campbell, Anastasia Eccles

Elizabeth R. Mundell-Perkins: “Matter of the Mind: Narrative’s Knowledge and the Novel of Impressionability, 1897-present” directed by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Marta Figlerowicz, Juno Richards

Colton Valentine: “Between Languages: Queer Multilingualism in the British Belle Époque” directed by Marta Figlerowicz, Stefanie Markovits, Katie Trumpener, Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Elizabeth Colette Wiet: “Maximalism: An Art of the Minor” directed by Marc Robinson, Joseph Roach

Helen Hyoun Jung Yang: “Healed by Water: American Hydropathy and the Search for Meaning in Nature” directed by Caleb Smith, John Durham Peters, Wai Chee Dimock

December 2023

Shu-han Luo: “Didactic Poetry as Formal Experiment in Early Medieval England” directed by Emily Thornbury, Ardis Butterfield, Lucas Bender

Cera Smith: “Blackened Biology: Physiology of the Self and Society in African American Literature and Sculpture” directed by Jacqueline Goldsby, Tavia Nyong’o, Aimee Meredith Cox

Michael Abraham: “The Avant-Garde of Feeling: Queer Love and Modernism” directed by Langdon Hammer, Marta Figlerowicz, Ben Glaser

Peter Conroy: “Unreconciled: American Power and the End of History, 1945 to the Present” directed by Joe Cleary, Joseph North, Paul North

Trina Hyun: “Media Theologies, 1615-1668” directed by John Durham Peters, Catherine Nicholson, Marta Figlerowicz, John Rogers (University of Toronto)

Margaret McGowan: “A Natural History of the Novel: Species, Sense, Atmosphere” directed by Jonathan Kramnick, Katie Trumpener, Marta Figlerowicz

Benjamin Pokross: “Writing History in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes” directed by Caleb Smith, Greta LaFleur, Michael Warner

Sophia Richardson: “Reading the Surface in Early Modern English Literature” directed by Catherine Nicholson, Lawrence Manley, John Rogers(University of Toronto)

Melissa Shao Hsuan Tu: “Sonic Virtuality: First-Person Voices in Late Medieval English Lyric” directed by Ardis Butterfield, Jessica Brantley, John Durham Peters

Sarah Weston: “The Cypher and the Abyss: Outline Against Infinity” directed by Paul Fry, Tim Barringer, John Durham Peters

December 2022

Anna Hill: “Sublime Accumulations: Narrating the Global Climate, 1969-2001” directed by Joe Cleary, Marta Figlerowicz, Ursula Heise (UCLA)

Christopher McGowan: “Inherited Worlds: The British Modernist Novel and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre” directed by Joe Cleary, Michael Denning, Katie Trumpener

Samuel Huber: “Every Day About the World: Feminist Internationalism in the Second Wave” directed by  Jacqueline Goldsby, Margaret Homans, Jill Richards

Shayne McGregor: “An Intellectual History of Black Literary Discourse 1910-1956” directed by Joseph North, Robert Stepto

Brandon Menke: “Slow Tyrannies: Queer Lyricism, Visual Regionalism, and the Transfigured World” directed by Langdon Hammer, Wai Chee Dimock, Marta Figlerowicz

Arthur Wang: “Minor Theories of Everything: On Popular Science and Contemporary Fiction” directed by Amy Hungerford, John Durham Peters, Sunny Xiang

December 2021

Sarah Robbins: “Re(-)Markable Texts: Making Meaning of Revision in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature” directed by Caleb Smith, Jacqueline Goldsby, Anthony Reed

David de León: “Epic Black: Poetics in Protest in the Time of Black Lives Matter” directed by  Langdon Hammer, Daphne Brooks, Marta Figlerowicz

Clio Doyle: “Rough Beginnings: Imagining the Origins of Agriculture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain” directed by Lawrence Manley, David Kastan, Catherine Nicholson

Clay Greene: “The Preexistence of the Soul in the Early English Enlightenment: 1640-1740” directed by John Rogers, Jonathan Kramnick, Lawrence Manley

December 2020

Wing Chun Julia Chan: “Veritable Utopia: Revolutionary Russia and the Modernism of the British Left” directed by Katie Trumpener, Jill Richards, Katerina Clark

James Eric Ensley: “Troubled Signs: Thomas Hoccleve’s Objects of Absence” directed by Jessica Brantley, Alastair Minnis, Ardis Butterfield

Paul Franz: “Because so it is made new”: D. H. Lawrence’s charismatic modernism directed by David Bromwich, Ben Glaser, and Langdon Hammer

Chelsie Malyszek: Just Words: Diction and Misdirection in Modern Poetry directed by Lanny Hammer, David Bromwich, and Ben Glaser

Justin Park: “The Children of Revenge: Managing Emotion in Early English Literature” directed by Roberta Frank, Alastair Minnis, David Kastan

Peter Raccuglia: “Lives of Grass: Prairie Literature and US Settler Capitalism” directed by Michael Warner, Jonathan Kramnick, Michael Denning

Ashley James: “ ‘Moist, Fleshy, Pulsating Surfaces’: Seeing and Reading Black Life after Experientiality” directed by Professors Jacqueline Goldsby, Elizabeth Alexander, and Anthony Reed

Brittany Levingston: “In the Day of Salvation: Christ and Salvation in Early Twentieth-Century African American Literature” directed by Professors Jacqueline Goldsby, Robert Stepto, and Anthony Reed

Lukas Moe: “Radical Afterlives: U.S. Poetry, 1935-1968” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer, Jacqueline Goldsby, and Michael Denning

Carlos Nugent: “Imagined Environments: Mediating Race and Nature in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock, Amy Hungerford, and Michael Warner

Anna Shechtman: “The Media Concept: A Genealogy” directed by Professors Amy Hungerford, John Durham Peters, and Michael Warner

December 2019

Bofang Li: “Old Media/New Media: Intimate Networked Publics and the Commodity Text Since 1700” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock, R. John Williams, and Francesco Casetti

Scarlet Luk: “Gender Unbound: The Novel Narrator Beyond the Binary” directed by Professors Margaret Homans, Jill Campbell, and Jill Richards

Phoenix Alexander: “Voices with Vision: Writing Black, Feminist Futures in Twentieth-Century African America” directed by Professors Jacqueline Goldsby, Daphne Brooks, Anthony Reed, and Wai Chee Dimock

Andrew S. Brown: “Artificial Persons: Fictions of Representation in Early Modern Drama” directed by Professors David Kastan, John Rogers, and Joseph Roach

Margaret Deli: “Authorizing Taste: Connoisseurship and Transatlantic Modernity, 1880-1959” directed by Professors Ruth Yeazell, Joseph Cleary, and R. John Williams

Ann Killian: “Expanding Lyric Networks: The Transformation of a Genre in Late Medieval England” directed by Professors Ardis Butterfield, Jessica Brantley, and Alastair Minnis

Alexandra Reider: “The Multilingual English Manuscript Page, c. 950-1300” directed by Professors Roberta Frank, Ardis Butterfield, and Alastair Minnis

December 2018

Seo Hee Im: “After Totality: Late Modernism and the Globalization of the Novel” directed by Professors Joseph Cleary, Katie Trumpener, and Marta Figlerowicz

Angus Ledingham: “Styles of Abstraction: Objectivity and Moral Thought in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” directed by Professors David Bromwich, Jill Campbell, and Stefanie Markovits

Jason Bell: “Archiving Displacement in America” directed by Professors Caleb Smith, Wai Chee Dimock, and Jacqueline Goldsby

Joshua Stanley: “If but Once We Have Been Strong: Collective Agency and Poetic Technique in England during the Period of Early Capitalism” directed by Professors Paul Fry, David Bromwich, and Anthony Reed

December 2017

Carla Baricz: “Early Modern Two-Part and Sequel Drama, 1490-1590” directed by Professors David Quint, Lawrence Manley, and David Kastan

Edward King: “The World-Historical Novel: Writing the Periphery” directed by Professors Joseph Cleary, R. John Williams, and Michael Denning

Palmer Rampell: “The Genres of the Person in Post-World War II America” directed by Professors Amy Hungerford, Michael Warner, and R. John Williams

Anya Adair: “Composing the Law: Literature and Legislation in Early Medieval England” directed by Professors Roberta Frank, Ardis Butterfield, and Alastair Minnis

Robert Bradley Holden: “Milton between the Reformation and Enlightenment: Religion in an Age of Revolution” directed by Professors David Quint, Bruce Gordon, and John Rogers

Andrew Kau: “Astraea’s Adversary: The Rivalry Between Law and Literature in Elizabethan England” directed by Professors Lawrence Manley, David Quint, and David Kastan

Natalie Prizel: “The Good Look: Victorian Visual Ethics and the Problem of Physical Difference” direcgted by Professors Janice Carlisle and Tim Barringer

Rebecca Rush: “The Fetters of Rhyme: Freedom and Limitation in Early Modern Verse” direcgted by Professors David Quint, David Kastan, and John Rogers

Prashant Sharma: “Conversions to the Baroque: Catholic Modernism from James Joyce to Graham Greene” directed by Professors Paul Fry, Joseph Cleary, and Marta Figlerowicz

Joseph Stadolnik: “Subtle Arts: Practical Science and Middle English Literature” directed by Professors Ardis Butterfield and Alastair Minnis

Steven Kirk Warner: “Versions of Narcissus: The Aesthetics and Erotics of the Male Form in English Renaissance Poetry” directed by Professors John Rogers and Catherine Nicholson

December 2016

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews: “The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the University since 1970” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer, Paul Fry, and Wai Chee Dimock

Alexis Chema: “Fancy’s Mirror: Romantic Poetry and the Art of Persuasion” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Paul Fry

Daniel Jump: “Metadiscursive Struggle and the Eighteenth-Century British Social Imaginary: From the End of Licensing to the Revolution Controversy” directed by Professors Michael Warner, Jill Campbell, and Paul Fry

Jordan Brower: “A Literary History of the Studio System, 1911-1950” directed by Wai Chee Dimock, JD Connor, and Joe Cleary

Ryan Carr: “Expressivism in America” directed by Michael Warner, Caleb Smith, and Paul Fry

Megan Eckerle: “Speculation and Time in Late Medieval Visionary Discourse” directed by Jessica Brantley and Alastair Minnis

Gabriele Hayden: “Routes and Roots of the New World Baroque: U.S. Modernist Poets Translate from Spanish” directed by Landon Hammer and Wai Chee Dimock

Matthew Hunter: “The Pursuit of Style in Shakespeare’s Drama” directed by David Kastan, Lawrence Manley, and Brian Walsh

Leslie Jamison: “The Recovered: Addiction and Sincerity in 20th Century American Literature” directed by Wai Chee Dimock, Amy Hungerford, and Caleb Smith

Jessica Matuozzi: “Double Agency: A Multimedia History of the War on Drugs” directed by Jacqueline Goldsby, Amy Hungerford, and Anthony Reed

Aaron Pratt: “The Status of Printed Playbooks in Early Modern England” directed by David Kastan, Lawrence Manley, and Keith Wrightson

Madeleine Saraceni: “The Idea of Writing for Women in Late Medieval Literature” directed by Jessica Brantley, Ardis Butterfield, and Alastair Minnis

J. Antonio Templanza: “Know to Know No More: The Composition of Knowledge in Milton’s Epic Poetry” directed by John Rogers and Paul Fry

Andrew Willson: “Idle Works: Unproductiveness, Literature Labor, and the Victorian Novel” directed by Janice Carlisle, Stefanie Markovits, and Ruth Yeazell

December 2015

Melina Moe: “Public Intimacies: Literary and Sexual Reproduction in the Eighteenth Century” directed by Katie Trumpener, Wendy Lee, Jonathan Kramnick, and Jill Campbell

Merve Emre: “Paraliterary Institutions” directed by Wai Chee Dimock and Amy Hungerford

Samuel Fallon: “Personal Effects: Personal and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England” directed by David Kastan, Catherine Nicholson, and Lawrence Manley

Edgar Garcia: “Deep Land: Hemispheric Modernisms and Indigenous Media” directed by Wai Chee Dimock, Langdon Hammer, and Anthony Reed

Jean Elyse Graham: “The Book Unbound: Print Logic between Old Books and New Media” directed by David Kastan, Catherine Nicholson, and R. John Williams

December 2014

Len Gutkin: “Dandiacal Forms” directed by Amy Hungerford, Sam See, and Katie Trumpener

Justin Sider: “Parting Words: Address and Exemplarity in Victorian Poetry” directed by Linda Peterson, Leslie Brisman, and Stefanie Markovits

William Weber: “Shakespearean Metamorphoses” directed by David Kastan

Thomas Koenigs: “Fictionality in the United States, 1789-1861” directed by Michael Warner, Jill Campbell, and Caleb Smith

Andrew Kraebel: “English Traditions of Biblical Criticism and Translation in the Later Middle Ages” directed by Alastair Minnis, Jessica Brantley, and Ian Cornelius

Tessie Prakas: “The Office of the Poet: Ministry and Verse Practice in the Seventeenth Century” directed by John Rogers, David Kastan, and Catherine Nicholson

Nienke Christine Venderbosch: “‘Tha Com of More under Misthleothum Grendel Gongan’: The Scholarly and Popular Reception of Beowulf ’s Grendel from 1805 to the Present Day” directed by Roberta Frank and Paul Fry

Eric Weiskott: “The Durable Alliterative Tradition” directed by Roberta Frank, Alastair Minnis, Ian Cornelius

December 2013

Anthony Domestico: “Theologies of Crisis in British Literature of the Interwar Period” directed by Amy Hungerford and Pericles Lewis

Glyn Salton-Cox: “Cobbett and the Comintern:  Transnational Provincialism and Revolutionary Desire from the Popular Front to the New Left” directed by Katie Trumpener, Katerina Clark, and Joe Cleary

Samuel Alexander: “Demographic Modernism: Character and Quantification in Twentieth Century Fiction” directed by Professors Pericles Lewis and Barry McCrea

Andrew Karas: “Versions of Modern Poetry” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Langdon Hammer

James Ross Macdonald: “Popular Religious Belief and Literature in Early Modern England” directed by Professors David Kastan and John Rogers

December 2012

Michael Komorowski: “The Arts of Interest: Private Property and the English Literary Imagination in the Age of Milton” directed by Professors David Quint and John Rogers

Fiona Robinson: “Raising the Dead: Writing Lives and Writing Wars in Britain, 1914-1941” directed by Professors Katie Trumpener, Margaret Homans, and Sam See

Nathalie Wolfram: “Novel Play: Gothic Performance and the Making of Eighteenth Century Fiction” directed by Professors Joseph Roach and Katie Trumpener

Michaela Bronstein: “Imperishable Consciousness: The Rescue of Meaning in the Modernist Novel” directed by Professors Ruth Yeazell and Pericles Lewis

David Currell: “Epic Satire: Structures of Heroic Mockery in Early Modern English Literature” directed by Professor David Quint

Andrew Heisel: “Reading in Darkness: Sacred Text and Aesthetics in the Long Eighteenth Century” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and Elliott Visconsi

Hilary Menges: “Authorship before Copyright: The Monumental Book, 1649-1743” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and John Rogers

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma: “Poetry and the Making of the Anglophone Literary World, 1950-1975” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Langdon Hammer

December 2011

Patrick Gray: “The Passionate Stoic: Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Rome” directed by Professors Lawrence Manley and David Quint

Christopher Grobe: “Performing Confession: American Poetry, Performance, and New Media 1959” directed by Professors Amy Hungerford and Joseph Roach

Sebastian LeCourt: “Culture and Secularity: Religion in the Victorian Anthropological Imagination” directed by Professors Linda Peterson and Katie Trumpener

Laura Saetveit Miles: “Mary’s Book: The Annunciation in Middle England” directed by Jessica Brantley and Alastair Minnis

Stephen Tedeschi: “Urbanization in English Romantic Poetry” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Christopher R. Miller

Julia Fawcett: “Over-Expressing the Self: Celebrity, Shandeism, and Autobiographical Performance, 1696-1801” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and Joseph Roach

Daniel Gustafson: “Stuart Restorations: History, Memory, Performance” directed by Professor Joseph Roach and Elliott Visconsi

Sarah Mahurin: “American Exodus: Migration and Oscillation in the Modern American Novel” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Robert Stepto

Erica Levy McAlpine: “Lyric Elsewhere: Strategies of Poetic Remove” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer

Sarah Novacich: “Ark and Archive: Narrative Enclosures in Medieval and Early Modern Texts” directed by Professors Roberta Frank and Alastair Minnis

Jesse Schotter: “The Hieroglyphic Imagination: Language and Visuality in Modern Fiction and Film” directed by Professors Peter Brooks and Pericles Lewis

Matthew Vernon: “Strangers in a Familiar Land: The Medieval and African-American Literary Tradition” directed by Professor Alastair Minnis

Chia-Je Weng: “Natural Religion and Its Discontents: Critiques and Revisions in Blake and Coleridge” directed by Professors Leslie Brisman and Paul Fry

Nicole Wright: “‘A contractile power’: Boundaries of Character and the Culpable Self in the British Novel, 1750-1830” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and Katie Trumpener

December 2010

Molly Farrell: “Counting Bodies: Imagining Population in the New World” directed by Professor Wai Chee Dimock

John Muse: “Short Attention Span Theaters: Modernist Shorts Since 1880” directed by Professors Joseph Roach and Marc Robinson

Denis Ferhatović: “An Early English Poetics of the Artifact” directed by Professor Roberta Frank

Colin Gillis: “Forming the Normal: Sexology and the Modern British Novel, 1890-1939” directed by Professors Laura Frost and Pericles Lewis

Katherine Harrison: “Tales Twice Told: Sound Technology and American Fiction after 1940” directed by Professor Amy Hungerford

Jean Otsuki: “British Modernism in the Country” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Margaret Homans

Erin Peterson: “On Intrusion and Interruption: An Exploration of an Early Modern Literary Mode” directed by Professor John Rogers

Patrick Redding: “A Distinctive Equality: The Democratic Imagination in Modern American Poetry” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer

Emily Setina: “Modernism’s Darkrooms: Photography and Literary Process” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer and Pericles Lewis

Jordan Zweck: “Letters from Heaven in the British Isles, 800-1500” directed by Professor Roberta Frank

December 2009

Elizabeth Twitchell Antrim: “Relief Work: Aid to Africa in the American Novel Since 1960” directed by Professor Wai Chee Dimock

Emily Coit: “The Trial of Abundance: Consumption and Morality in the Anglo-American Novel, 1871-1907” directed by Professors Catherine Labio and Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Andrew Goldstone: “Modernist Fictions of Aesthetic Autonomy” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer and Amy Hungerford

Matthew Mutter: “Poetry Against Religion, Poetry As Religion: Secularism and its Discontents in Literary Modernism” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Pericles Lewis

Anna Chen: “Kinship Lessons: The Cultural Uses of Childhood in Late Medieval England” directed by Professors Jessica Brantley and Lee Patterson

Anne DeWitt: “The Uses of Scientific Thinking and the Realist Novel” directed by Professor Linda Peterson

Irina Dumitrescu: “The Instructional Moment in Anglo-Saxon Literature” directed by Professor Roberta Frank

Susannah Hollister: “Poetries of Geography in Postwar America” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Langdon Hammer

James Horowitz: “Rebellious Hearts and Loyal Passions: Imagining Civic Consciousness in Ovidian Writing on Women, 1680-1819” directed by Professors Jill Campbell and Elliott Visconsi

Ben LaBreche: “The Rule of Friendship: Literary Culture and Early Modern Liberty” directed by Professors David Quint and John Rogers

December 2008

Sarah Van der Laan: “What Virtue and Wisdom Can Do: Homer’s Odyssey in the Renaissance Imagination” directed by Professor David Quint

Annmarie Drury: “Literary Translators and Victorian Poetry” directed by Professor Linda Peterson

Jeffrey Glover: “People of the Word: Puritans, Algonquians, and the Politics of Print in Early New England” directed by Professors Elizabeth Dillon and Wai Chee Dimock

Dana Goldblatt: “From Contract to Social Contract: Fortescue’s Governance and Malory’s Morte ” directed by Professors David Quint and Alastair Minnis

Kamran Javadizadeh: “Bedlam and Parnassus: Madness and Poetry in Postwar America” directed by Professor Langdon Hammer

Ayesha Ramachandran: “Worldmaking in Early Modern Europe: Global Imaginations from Montaigne to Milton” directed by Professors Annabel Patterson and David Quint

Jennifer Sisk: “Forms of Speculation: Religious Genres and Religious Inquiry in Late Medieval England” directed by Professor Lee Patterson

Ariel Watson: “The Anxious Triangle: Modern Metatheatres of the Playwright, Performer, and Spectator” directed by Professor Joseph Roach

Jesse Zuba: “The Shape of Life: First Books and the Twentieth-Century Poetic Career” directed by Professors Langdon Hammer and Amy Hungerford

December 2007

Rebecca Boggs: “The Gem-Like Flame: the Aesthetics of Intensity in Hopkins, Crane, and H.D.” directed by Professor Langdon Hammer

Maria Fackler: “A Portrait of the Artist Manqué : Form and Failure in the British Novel Since 1945” directed by Professors Pericles Lewis and Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Melissa Ganz: “Fictions of Contract: Women, Consent, and the English Novel, 1722-1814” directed by Professor Jill Campbell

Siobhan Phillips: “The Poetics of Everyday Time in Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer

Morgan Swan: “The Literary Construction of a Capital City: Late-Medieval London and the Difficulty of Self-Definition” directed by Professor Lee Patterson

Andrea Walkden: “Lives, Letters and History: Walton to Defoe” directed by Professors David Quint and John Rogers

Rebecca Berne: “Regionalism, Modernism and the American Short Story Cycle” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Vera Kutzinski

Leslie Eckel: “Transatlantic Professionalism: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World” directed by Professors Wai Chee Dimock and Jennifer Baker

December 2006

Gregory Byala: “Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Beginning” directed by Professors Paul Fry and Pericles Lewis

Eric Lindstrom: “Romantic Fiat” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Paul H. Fry

Megan Quigley: “Modernist Fiction and the Re-instatement of the Vague” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Pericles Lewis

Randi Saloman: “Where Truth is Important: The Modern Novel and the Essayistic Mode” directed by Professors David Bromwich and Laura Frost

Michael Wenthe: “Arthurian Outsiders: Heterogeneity and the Cultural Politics of Medieval Arthurian Literature” directed by Professor Lee Patterson

Christopher Bond: “Exemplary Heroism and Christian Redemption in the Epic Poetry of Spenser and Milton” directed by Professors David Quint and John Rogers

Lara Cohen: “Counterfeit Presentments: Fraud and the Production of Nineteenth-Century American Literature” directed by Professors Elizabeth Dillon and Wai Chee Dimock

Nicholas Salvato: “Uncloseting Drama: Modernism’s Queer Theaters” directed by Professors Joseph Roach and Michael Trask

Anthony Welch: “Songs of Dido: Epic Poetry and Opera in Seventeenth-Century England” directed by Professor David Quint

December 2005

Brooke Conti: “Anxious Acts: Religion and Autobiography in Early Modern England” directed by Professor Annabel Patterson

Brett Foster: “The Metropolis of Popery: Writing of Rome in the English Renaissance” directed by Professors Lawrence Manley and David Quint

Curtis Perrin: “Langland’s Comic Vision” directed by Professor Traugott Lawler

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School of Public Health 2023–2024

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Thesis Prospectus

The major assignment during the fall term is the submission of a prospectus to the thesis adviser. The prospectus is designed to help ensure that a student and faculty adviser are explicit about the thesis topic, to promote continued progress during the fall term, and to increase the likelihood of a final high-quality product. Students are strongly encouraged to work on the thesis throughout the second year. These prospectus guidelines, therefore, are a minimum requirement. Furthermore, given a student’s ongoing work, the prospectus is considered more of a “progress report.”

A first draft of the prospectus is due to the thesis adviser no later than November 2, with the full prospectus due to the thesis adviser and the YSPH registrar on December 1. The prospectus should be completed using the format below. In addition, it is expected that students include proper citations and references when preparing the prospectus. More information regarding proper citing of sources can be found on the YSPH website at  https://ysph.yale.edu/myysph/students/mph/citations .

Please note that the preferred thesis for students is one that is in the style and length of a publishable, peer-reviewed paper.

Note: While drafting your prospectus with your advisers, you may have discussions around publication and authorship. Please refer to the Submission and Publication page at  https://ysph.yale.edu/myysph/students/mph/thesis/submission  for publication guidelines that are intended to avoid miscommunication and differential expectations of authorship between students and thesis advisers.

Thesis Prospectus Format

Title Primary Thesis Adviser Secondary Thesis Adviser

• Specific Aims & Hypotheses. Clear and succinct statement of the thesis objectives, including primary study hypothesis.
• Background & Rationale. Brief overview of existing literature (three to five paragraphs is sufficient for the prospectus). Why is this project important? How is it different from existing research?
• Study Design (case/control, cohort, observational, cross-sectional, laboratory, other)
• Study Population (who, how many, what information is available/to be collected for population members)
• Sample Size/Power Calculations (is sample size sufficient to address the primary study aim?)
• Data Analysis Plan and Software to be Used
• Competencies. Select three to five M.P.H. core and department-specific competencies that you will master as part of this culminating experience. Briefly describe how this thesis will address these competencies.

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Congratulations to the 2024 Undergraduate Senior Prize Winners!

Each year, the Department of Economics awards prizes for outstanding student work in courses and senior essays. This year, the Department is proud to announce the five recipients of those prizes: Anup Bottu , Jorn Dammann , Iris Li , Kyle Shin , and Rock Zhu .

Around 30-50 students write senior essays in economics, and this year these essays spanned a wide array of topics across all fields of economics including econometrics, environmental economics, finance, macroeconomics, spatial economics, and more.

The top essays are nominated for prizes by the student’s advisor and a second reader from the department. A committee of economics faculty members read and select the winning essays, and the prizes are awarded on commencement day during the students’ respective college ceremonies.

The senior essay prizes are as follows:

• The Charles Heber Dickerman Memorial Prize: the best departmental essay(s).
• The Ronald Meltzer/Cornelia Awdziewicz Economic Award: runner-up(s) for the Dickerman Prize.
• The Ellington Prize: the best departmental essay in the field of finance.

Both the Dickerman Prize for the best departmental essay and the Ellington Prize for the best essay in finance go to Rock Zhu for his paper titled “ Examining Pairs Trading Profitability ,” supervised by William Goetzmann.

The Meltzer/Awdziewicz Prize goes to Iris Li for her paper titled “ A Causal Mediation Model on the Valuation Effects of Cross-Listings ,” supervised by Xiaohong Chen.

In addition to essays, the Department of Economics awarded two additional prizes to graduating seniors majoring in economics:

• Laun Prize: outstanding course record in all courses taken at Yale College.
• Massee Prize: outstanding record in economics courses.

This year’s Laun Prize goes to Jorn Dammann , and this year’s Massee Prize goes to Kyle Shin and Anup Bottu .

Congratulations to all of these seniors for their exceptional accomplishments! Please see below for more information about the prize winners and their work.

Anup Bottu: Massee Prize

Senior Essay: Examining the Corporate Bond Credit Surface (supervised by John Geanakoplos)

Anup’s Senior Essay studies heterogeneity in the credit spreads of corporate bonds. It creates credit surfaces that plot spreads at a given time as a function of credit rating and leverage. It verifies predictions of the Merton (1974) model using a series of regressions and performs a principal components analysis on movements of the surface. The second principal component reveals that there are moments in which the spreads of riskier firms increase in great excess to the spreads of less risky firms, such as the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper argues that large moves in the second principal component are plausible points for the Fed to intervene and support credit to riskier borrowers.

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“My favorite memories in the economics department come from Professor English's course on Monetary Policy and Professor Geanakoplos's course on General Equilibrium. Both courses opened my mind to the power of economics as a lens through which I can understand the world.” — Anup Bottu, Massee Prize Winner

Jorn Dammann: Laun Prize

Senior Essay: Covariate Adjustment and Post-stratification for Treatment Effect Estimation (supervised by Max Cytrynbaum)

Jorn’s paper studies covariate-adjusted estimation methods for potential outcomes in randomized experiments. We consider a general framework with multiple treatment arms and consider the cases of both covariate-dependent and fixed treatment propensities. Though linear covariate adjustment is a known technique for reducing estimator variance, its interaction with post-stratification is less well-explored. We derive asymptotically optimal linear covariate adjustments for three types of estimators: (i) inverse propensity weighted estimator, (ii) difference-in-means estimator, and (iii) post-stratified difference-in-means estimator. Finally, we provide asymptotically valid confidence intervals for each optimally adjusted estimator. The results illustrate the utility of combining post-stratification and covariate adjustment in randomized experiments for improved inference on potential outcomes and, in turn, arbitrary contrasts of these potential outcomes (e.g., average treatment effects).

“I got interested in economics because the field applies mathematical and statistical tools to questions of social interest in a way that I find well-motivated and exciting.” — Jorn Dammann, Laun Prize Winner

Iris Li: Meltzer/Awdziewicz Prize

Senior Essay: A Causal Mediation Model on the Valuation Effects of Cross-Listings (supervised by Xiaohong Chen)

A company's decision to list its stock on multiple exchanges has been associated with higher valuation, as well as a change in how informative a company's ordinary stock price listing is. Since informativeness itself has been shown to impact valuation, this thesis applies a causal mediation model to decompose the causal impact that cross-listing has on valuation both directly and indirectly through informativeness. In our analysis, a significant, positive average direct effect and total effect are identified in mediation analysis both at the cross-section and pooled across years. The average indirect effect of cross-listing on valuation through informativeness tends to be negative and smaller in magnitude, but still significant; it is present at the aggregated level and in some years. Therefore, in the absence of a causal mediation model, the positive direct effect of cross-listing may be underestimated.

“I was introduced to the idea of cross-listings during my investment banking internship with Wells Fargo last summer. I saw my thesis as an interesting opportunity to analyze an industry-relevant topic through an academic lens, and I enjoyed the chance to dive into the many potential research pathways focused on the consequences of corporate decision-making.” — Iris Li, Meltzer/Awdziewicz Prize Winner

Kyle Shin: Massee Prize

Senior Essay: OLS Asymptotics Along Drifting Parameter Sequences for AR(2) Processes (supervised by Max Cytrynbaum)

This paper solves OLS asymptotic behavior for an AR(2) model with drifting au- toregressive parameter sequences. We make extensive use of results regarding AR(1) asymptotics under similar drifting parameter sequences. Then, we attempt to use our results, follow Andrews et al. (2020), and construct a uniform confidence set for the AR(2) parameters that has correct asymptotic size regardless of the true value of the parameters, making them robust in finite samples. However, we show the failure of key continuity assumptions that bars us from using this method.

“Professor Moscarini’s macro class is what inspired me to love economics.” — Kyle Shin, Massee Prize Winner

Rock Zhu: Dickerman Prize & Ellington Prize

Senior Essay: Examining Pairs Trading Profitability (supervised by William Goetzmann)

This paper analyzes the profitability of pairs trading, a popular statistical arbitrage strategy that identifies close-moving stocks and capitalizes on their temporary divergence. We first replicate the strategy initially proposed by Gatev et al. (2006) using data from the past twenty years and show that a simple benchmark model can result in an average annual excess return of 6.2% and a Sharpe ratio of 1.35. We then delve into the risks of the strategy and show that it is decreasing in the momentum factor and increasing in market risk premium, which suggests that arbitrageurs are compensated for enforcing the Law of One Price. Lastly, we propose and analyze a psychology-based model that generates these empirical findings in equilibrium through simulation. Taken together, these results help bridge the theory and practice of pairs trading.

“I still remember when Professor John Geanakoplos gave his annual talk to Herb Scarf research assistants during the summer after my freshman year. It was the first time I was exposed to what lies beyond the models and methods introduced in the core economics sequence, and, more importantly, how it can assist decision-making in real life. I would go on to take his general equilibrium class the next fall, which made me discover the beautiful applications of math in economics.” — Kyle Shin, Dickerman Prize & Ellington Prize Winner

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Finding her calling in building relationships, not just a resumé.

Mirabel Nguyen (Photo by Daniel Havlat)

Mirabel Nguyen came to Yale having never visited the campus. In fact, she’d barely seen any photographs before arriving in New Haven for the first time. But when selecting a college, she was determined not to be swayed by beautiful scenery anyway; she wanted to choose a school solely on its academic merits.

Nguyen, from Denver, Colorado, was accepted to Yale through QuestBridge, a national nonprofit program that connects high-achieving students from lower-income backgrounds with selective colleges and universities. She was determined to excel academically and busy herself with extracurricular activities.

But after finally arriving at Yale, she began to develop more holistic goals.

“ I learned that it’s so much more than academic and extracurricular excellence that matters to me,” Nguyen said. “It’s the relationships that I’ve been building with people that show me how to be a better person.”

By all accounts, Nguyen has been a force for helping to foster a warm, welcoming community within her residential college, Saybrook College, where she has served as activities co-chair, president of the college council, and aide to Head of College Thomas Near.

Convening people for activities and shared interests took on special importance during her sophomore year, a time when campus life began to take on some semblance of normalcy following the restrictive first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“ My fellow activities co-chair and I ran a lot of events that brought us together for formal events or more low-key activities, like an Easter egg hunt in the courtyard,” said Nguyen. “It was hard to develop social relationships when everybody was being quarantined. We were really trying to rebuild the community in our second year.”

As president of the Saybrook College Council, Nguyen encouraged students to participate in the college’s affinity groups, and shared information and served as a point person for her peers. She also fostered a respectful sexual and social climate on campus as a communication and consent educator. A classical pianist, she occasionally performed at her residential college.

For her altruism and community service, Nguyen won the John Schroeder Award, given by the Council of Heads of College to a junior “who will find his or her place and play a part in the good labor of the world.” This year, she won the Saybrook Fellows’ Prize for distinguished intellectual achievement.

“ In my first year I wondered if Saybrook College was the right fit for me,” she said. “But it became a community where I connected with people — many who are really different from me — in wonderful ways. It was fun to be and work with so many brilliant people who care deeply about their little corners of Saybrook.”

Nguyen majored in the history of science, medicine, and public health. For her senior thesis, Nguyen, who is the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, explored how the mental health of Vietnamese refugees was evaluated when they arrived in U.S. after the Vietnam War and how those evaluations affected the care and treatment they received. This year, she studied Vietnamese, and is excited about her newfound ability to communicate in her family’s native language. She took “Intensive French” during her first year and studied the language in Paris for a summer.

As she prepares to graduate, Nguyen says what stands out for her are the little moments she shared with friends — tackling the demands of the intensive, interdisciplinary  Directed Studies  program in her first year, or eating sandwiches at 2 a.m. —  and the professors whose classrooms were not just places of learning but of community connection as well. She is grateful for the daily phone conversations she had with her mother and sister, who never failed to express their confidence in her ability to succeed.

Nguyen is undecided about future plans, but will spend some time with her family in Colorado after graduating. Law school may be ahead. One goal she is certain of, she said, is “to go forward being a kind person.”

She has come to appreciate the beauty of the Yale campus, but she leaves more certain than ever that the excellence of the university runs deeper than its scenery.

“ Yale far exceeded my expectations, because while it’s very beautiful on the outside, I think it has so much more beauty on the inside, mostly because of the people I’ve spent my time with,” she said. “I was expecting to grow a lot academically, but most of my learning has come from my friends and the people around me, who have taught me so much about compassion and care.”

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Dean’s Prize for Outstanding MPH Thesis: Emily Goddard

Thesis: Short-Term Exposure To Wildfire Smoke PM2.5 And Symptoms Of Anxiety And Depression Among U.S. Veterans: A Cross-Sectional Study

In her MPH thesis, Goddard examined the relationship between short-term and long-term exposure to the fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) from wildfire smoke and symptoms of anxiety and depression among participants in the 2019 National Health and Resilience in Veterans Study. Goddard, whose degree was in Social and Behavioral Sciences (climate change and health), was a data analyst for the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC), and a graduate assistant for the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE). Her focus was on preventative health through equitable access to environmental resources. She was most interested in exploring the relationship between the environment and mental health, the health co-benefits of climate change adaptation and mitigation, and the environmental benefits of equitable and sustainable global food systems.

Dean’s Prize for Outstanding MPH Thesis: Caroline Helsen

Thesis: Are News Media Organizations Protecting Youth Mental Health? A Content Analysis of the Top 4 News Organizations on TikTok

Helsen (Social and Behavioral Sciences) wrote her thesis as a response to a December 2012 call to action by the Surgeon General to address the youth mental health crisis, including actions media organizations could take to protect viewers’ mental health. She analyzed a year of TikTok videos posted by the four American news organizations with the largest TikTok followings (ABC News, CBS News, NBC News and the Daily Wire) to determine whether they had taken steps to protect youth mental health. Her work at YSPH also included conducting policy research and focus groups for a labor union to inform recommendations for the electrification and weatherization of home-based childcare facilities; interning at UNICEF's Maternal Newborn Adolescent Health Unit; conducting a rapid-needs assessment for a local health department regarding COVID-19 vaccine uptake for children under 12 years old; teaching a graduate-level discussion section for a course on health equity; and interning at the Office of Policy and Planning within the Health Resources and Services Administration's Maternal Child Health Bureau.

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Thesis: Epidemiology of Human Hookworm (Necator americanus) Infection in Rural Ghana: Investigating Host-Parasite Factors That Mediate Infection

Hookworm infections cause significant morbidity in high-risk populations, and pose a global health concern in locations of rural poverty. Infections in sub-Saharan Africa account for nearly 40% of global hookworm infections, leading to increased morbidity. In her thesis, Randi, whose concentration was epidemiology (Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases), investigated the epidemiology of hookworm infection in Beposo, Ghana, from June to August 2022, aiming to provide insight into the host-parasite relationship and epidemiologic factors that mediate human hookworm infection in West Africa. Randi, a Horstmann Scholar and recipient of a Lindsay Fellowship for Research in Africa, was also a member of the testing staff of YSPH’s SalivaDirect initiative.

Outstanding MPH Thesis Prize in Health Equity: Anna Preston

Thesis: “I was reaching out for help and they did not help me”: Mental Healthcare in the Carceral State”

For her MPH thesis, Preston – who earned both her MPH in Social and Behavioral Sciences at YSPH and her MD at the Yale School of Medicine in 2023 – examined the perspectives of nine people who experienced mental healthcare within the carceral state, whether in prison or on parole or probation, with a special focus on how attributes of the carceral state create ideological and functional barriers to effective mental healthcare. While working to complete her two degrees, Preston also found time to write poetry. One of her poems, Birth, was a co-winner in the poetry category of the Marguerite Rush-Lerner and Program for Humanities in Medicine Prize, an annual poetry, prose, and visual art competition open to all Yale health profession students. Another of her poems, Letter to a younger universe, earned an honorable mention.

Outstanding MPH Thesis Prize in Health Equity: Sydney Hussett-Richardson

Thesis: “Hair-Esteem Toolkit for Black Girls”: The development of a self-esteem toolkit for Black adolescent girls centering hair as a tool for empowerment

Hussett-Richardson, whose MPH is in Social and Behavioral Sciences, wrote her thesis to explore the relationship between self-esteem and hair among Black girls, and integrated her findings into a culturally relevant digital toolkit to promote and develop their hair-esteem and self-esteem. Gendered racism and Eurocentric beauty standards pathologize Black girls and their hair, she wrote, leading them to experience high rates of hair harassment and discrimination. These experiences negatively impact their self-esteem, which has important implications for a host of health behaviors. Hussett-Richardson worked on various projects as a research assistant in the SASH Lab, including the Dreamer Girls Project, an HIV and drug use prevention study for Black Girls. She also co-led the Dreamer Girls Project Youth Advisory Board, which brings together Black girls in New Jersey and other parts of the country to discuss ways in which research can be used as an empowerment tool for Black girls.

Henry J. (Sam) Chauncey Inspiration Award: Jacob Eisner

Lowell levin award for excellence in global health: anqi he, student award for outstanding contributions to advancing belonging, equity and justice: eiman abdoalsadig, nassim ashford, maame-owusua boateng and mukund desibhatla, teaching fellow award: sarah megiel.

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The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Going to College

Benjamin B. Bolger has spent his whole life amassing academic degrees. What can we learn from him?

Bolger has spent the last 30-odd years attending top universities. Credit...

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By Joseph Bernstein

• June 3, 2024

Benjamin B. Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Over all, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s. Some of Bolger’s degrees took many years to complete, such as a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Others have required rather less commitment: low-residency M.F.A.s from Ashland University and the University of Tampa, for example.

Listen to this article, read by Robert Petkoff

Some produced microscopically specific research, like Bolger’s Harvard dissertation, “Deliberative Democratic Design: Participants’ Perception of Strategy Used for Deliberative Public Participation and the Types of Participant Satisfaction Generated From Deliberative Public Participation in the Design Process.” Others have been more of a grab bag, such as a 2004 master’s from Dartmouth, for which Bolger studied Iranian sociology and the poetry of Robert Frost.

He has degrees in international development, creative nonfiction and education. He has studied “conflict and coexistence” under Mari Fitzduff, the Irish policymaker who mediated during the Troubles, and American architecture under the eminent historian Gwendolyn Wright. He is currently working, remotely, toward a master’s in writing for performance from Cambridge.

Bolger is a broad man, with lank, whitish, chin-length hair and a dignified profile, like a figure from an antique coin. One of his favorite places is Walden Pond — he met his wife there, on one of his early-morning constitutionals — and as he expounds upon learning and nature, it is easy to imagine him back in Thoreau’s time, with all the other polymathic gentlemen, perhaps by lamplight, stroking their old-timey facial hair, considering propositions about a wide range of topics, advancing theories of the life well lived.

And there’s something almost anachronistically earnest, even romantic, about the reason he gives for spending the past 30-odd years pursuing college degrees. “I love learning,” he told me over lunch last year, without even a touch of irony. I had been pestering him for the better part of two days, from every angle I could imagine, to offer some deeper explanation for his life as a perpetual student. Every time I tried, and failed, I felt irredeemably 21st-century, like an extra in a historical production who has forgotten to remove his Apple Watch.

“I believe that people are like trees,” he said. “I hope I am a sequoia. I want to grow for as long as possible and reach toward the highest level of the sky.”

Against a backdrop of pervasive cynicism about the nature of higher education, it is tempting to dismiss a figure like Bolger as the wacky byproduct of an empty system. Then again, Bolger has run himself through that system, over and over and over again; it continues to take him in, and he continues to return to it for more. In fact, there is reportedly only one person in the United States with more college degrees than Bolger, and the vast majority of those came from universities within the state of Michigan (no disrespect to the Broncos, Eagles or Lakers). Because Bolger is just 48, and Michael Nicholson, of Kalamazoo, is 83, Bolger could surpass him, according to back-of-envelope math, as soon as 2054. In other words, Bolger is on a plausible track to becoming the country’s single most credentialed individual — at which point, perhaps, he could rest.

A proposition: No one more fully embodies the nature of elite American higher education today, in all its contradictions, than a man who has spent so much time being molded by it, following its incentives and internalizing its values. But what are those values, exactly? Of course, there are the oft-cited, traditional virtues of spending several years set apart from the rest of the world, reading and thinking. You know: the chance to expand your mind, challenge your preconceptions and cultivate a passion for learning. In this vision, eager minds are called to great institutions to reach their intellectual potential, and we know these institutions can perform this function simply because they are called Harvard and Yale.

That may be the way a prestigious education works for some, but probably not most. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that 41 percent — 41 percent! — were entering careers in consulting or finance. The same percentage were graduating to a starting salary of at least $110,000, more than double the national median. Last year, the most popular majors at Stanford were economics and computer science. The ultimate value of college for many is the credential, guaranteeing a starting spot many rungs up the ladder of worldly success: Nothing you learn at an elite university is as important as the line on your C.V. that you’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to type. And if you were feeling cynical, you could argue that the time you spend applying to college will affect the rest of your life more than anything in particular that happens while you’re there.

“It is only when we forget our learning that we begin to know,” Thoreau observed, famously, after his experiment in simple living. (Though, rich of Thoreau: he went to Harvard.) In a much different, much opposed way — one involving central heat — Bolger has spent the past three decades conducting his own half-mad American experiment in education. He has drunk deeper at the well of the university than almost anyone else. What does he know?

In 1978, Bolger was 2, riding in a Buick Riviera in Durand, Mich., when the car was hit by a drunken driver. He was basically fine, but his parents were seriously injured, and his mother, Loretta, spent months in the hospital, ending up with a metal plate in one of her legs. She had to leave her job as a schoolteacher. Bolger’s parents’ marriage disintegrated. His mother could be difficult, and his father, an engineer and patent lawyer who represented himself during the nasty divorce, was emotionally abusive. Bolger and his mother began splitting time between their comfortable home near Flint and his grandfather’s ramshackle farm in Grand Haven, which was so drafty they sometimes curled up by the wood-burning furnace.

Bolger’s mother spent much of her money in the ensuing custody battle, and her stress was worsened by her son’s severe dyslexia. In third grade, when Bolger still couldn’t read, his teachers said he wouldn’t graduate from high school. Recognizing that her boy was bright, just different, his mother resolved to home-school him — though “home” is perhaps not the right word: The two spent endless hours driving, to science museums, to the elite Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit for drawing lessons, even to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. At night she read to him: epic works of literature like “War and Peace” but also choose-your-own-adventure books and “Star Wars” novelizations.

The pair passed days in the library at Michigan State University, watched campus speakers in the evening and ate free at the receptions afterward. Sometimes, rather than drive the two hours back to Grand Haven, they would sleep in his mother’s pickup truck somewhere in East Lansing and do the same thing the next day.

“I saw the university as a home,” Bolger says.

Bolger wore secondhand clothes and had only one close friend his age. Yet he felt he was on a grand adventure. At 11, he began taking classes at Muskegon Community College. Still reading below a third-grade level, Bolger needed his mother to read his assigned texts out loud; he dictated papers back to her. At 16, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, moving with her into an off-campus apartment. He recorded his lectures so he could listen to them at home; his mother still read to him. Majoring in sociology, he graduated with a 4.0. He was 19.

Next, Bolger decided to apply to law school because of his admiration for the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whose crusade for safer vehicles resonated with Bolger after his accident as a toddler. He was administered the LSAT questions orally and was admitted to Harvard, Stanford and Yale.

At Yale Law School, Bolger floundered. The method Bolger and his mother had devised to cover reading assignments fell apart: There was so much of it, and it was so detailed. Bolger’s age made him a kind of celebrity on campus, and not in a good way. Classmates found him bombastic and insecure. “He was 19, and I suppose he acted it,” says Andrea Roth, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was friendly with Bolger at the time. Bolger failed two classes his first semester and dropped out.

To attend Yale, Bolger had deferred a master’s program in sociology at Oxford, so in 1996, he moved to England. There, he thrived under the tutorial system, which reminded him of home-schooling. Then he just kept going, embarking on an odyssey through the Anglosphere’s great universities, during which he improved his reading but still leaned on his mother. From Oxford, he went to Cambridge, where he took a master’s in sociology and politics. After three years in Britain, Bolger moved to California, where he studied for a master’s in interdisciplinary education from Stanford, and then quickly to New York, where he got another master’s, in the politics of education, as well as a master’s degree in architecture, both from Columbia, in a single academic year. He found time in the summers to work toward a master’s of arts in liberal studies from Dartmouth. He slept four hours a night.

And he kept on stacking degrees: a master’s in design studies with a real estate concentration from Harvard; a master’s in international development from Brown; the “coexistence and conflict” master’s from Brandeis; a master’s from Skidmore, where he studied “positive psychology”; all culminating in his doctorate in design, focused on urban planning and real estate, from Harvard in 2007. More recently, Bolger has done a trio of M.F.A.s in which he said he learned how to write “in a compelling narrative way,” “how to communicate stories in a compelling and gripping way” and how to delve deep into “the different genres of writing.” He has worked as an adjunct or visiting professor at more than a dozen colleges to fund his endless pursuit of learning.

One thing Bolger has not seemed to learn over the years is to introspect. Why has he driven himself to this extent — to place himself over and over in the kinds of impractical programs young adults enter to wait out a bad economy or delay the onset of adulthood à la National Lampoon’s Van Wilder? Many of us love learning, too, but we don’t do what Bolger has done; we listen to history podcasts on our commutes or pick our way through long books in the minutes before sleep. Despite all his degrees, Bolger has never sought a tenure-track job — only a few of his degrees would even qualify him for such a position — and he has never really specialized.

Unless you consider putting together a killer college application a form of expertise, which both the market and Bolger do.

Over the past 35 years, acceptance rates to the United States’ most elite universities have shrunk to about 6 percent from nearly 30 percent. Students, frightened by those numbers, are applying to more colleges than ever and making these numbers more frightening in the process. At the same time, overtaxed counselors don’t have the time to help as much as applicants and parents want. The rise of so-called holistic admissions, which look beyond grades and test scores, has also contributed to a sense that there is a “secret sauce” to getting into exclusive colleges and turbocharged demand for people who can demystify it.

After he got his doctorate in 2007, Bolger became a full-time private college-admissions consultant. “No other consultant has Dr. Bolger’s record of success,” reads his website — a claim that is difficult to verify, yet one that many people seem to believe. Four years with Bolger runs at least $100,000. (In the world of elite college coaching , this isn’t exceptional: A five-year plan from the New York firm Ivy Coach costs as much as $1.5 million.) Over the past 15 years, he has developed a coaching style he compares with that of Bill Belichick, Mr. Miyagi and Yoda.

On a humid morning late last summer, Bolger saw clients in an upstairs room at the ‘Quin House, a modish Back Bay members’ club in an ornate Commonwealth Avenue limestone. He has a home office in Cambridge but prefers to work as much as he can out of the private clubs to which he belongs, including the staid Union Club, opposite Boston Common, and the Harvard Club, which feels loosey-goosey by comparison.

That day he was meeting with Anjali Anand, a sunny then-17-year-old who was in Boston for the summer to do research at Boston University; and Vivian Chen, also 17 at the time, also sunny, also in Boston to study on B.U.’s campus. Anjali and Vivian faced a brutal fact: For young strivers of the American upper middle class, credentials and a can-do attitude are no longer sufficient for entry into the top tiers of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings. These accomplishments must be arranged into stories so compelling that they stand out from the many other compelling stories of the teenagers clamoring for admission.

And so Bolger devoted the meetings to teaching self-narrativization, particularly as it relates to the all-important essay component of the application. He encouraged the high-achieving Anjali to be vulnerable. “Someone who is 100 percent confident with no hesitations isn’t as compelling,” he said. “This is why there are more movies made about Batman than Superman.” With Vivian, he tried to connect her desire to become a dentist to a deeper narrative thread.

“Why the mouth and teeth?” Bolger asked.

Bolger said his business has enabled him to mix with “the 1 percent crowd.” In addition to his condo on Cambridge’s tony Memorial Drive, Bolger owns a house in Virginia and his family farm in Michigan. He has an Amex invite-only Centurion card. In 2016, he donated more than $50,000 to support Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for which he received a special Jeff Koons print; more recently, he has donated more than $2,500 to the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He loves to attend celebrity talks: Bruce Springsteen, George Clooney, Joe Montana — anyone who, in his mind, defines a category.

Bolger carries about 25 clients at a time, but his most important pupil is his 9-year-old daughter, Benjamina, whom he home-schools and considers his best friend. Bolger models his daughter’s education after his own: hands-on, interactive, wide-ranging, lots of time in the car. (Bolger’s son, Blitze, is also being home-schooled, but he’s only 4, so there’s less to do.) His wife, Anil, who helps him recruit clients, is happy to let him oversee the liberal-arts component of their children’s education while she handles math and Chinese. Bolger is trying to be less intense than his mother, to emphasize the development of his daughter’s emotional intelligence. But one of his main pedagogical devices is still the field trip.

On another bright morning last summer, Bolger took Benjamina to Concord’s North Bridge, for a holistic lesson but also a lesson in holism. He was joined there by his friend Dan Sullivan, a fellow polymath, who has also collected a staggering number of credentials. (The 42 entries under the “Experience” section of his LinkedIn page include Ambassador at the Parliament of the World’s Religions and Colonel at the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels.) Bolger had planned a discussion around bridges and diplomacy. But he believes the world is “nonlinear,” and his habits of speech reflect this. There were digressions into history, comparative government, union organizing, car safety, Robert McNamara, the strength of triangles, the cryogenic preservation of corpses.

A composed, precocious and sweet girl, Benjamina followed her tutors across the bridge and to the bronze statue of a Minute Man, inscribed with Emerson’s “Concord Hymn.” There the three of them stood in contemplation, looking a little like a child star and her security detail.

“Was that shot actually heard around the world?” Bolger asked.

“I don’t think so,” Benjamina replied.

“Yes,” Bolger said. “So this is an example of a metaphor.”

​​After stopping in Concord for a bite, Bolger and Benjamina drove the two miles to Walden Pond. The pair sat on a wooden plank above the beach on the pond’s east side. Except for the sounds of teenagers flirting and retirees shifting in folding chairs, it was quiet. Bolger explained Thoreau, the woods, the essential facts.

“I don’t know if you find this inspirational or not,” Bolger said. “I have the ability to pretend no one is here.”

Benjamina made a skeptical noise.

“I guess I could do it for a week,” Bolger said. “A year just seems too long.”

Thoreau’s experiment made him one of the most important men in American history. Bolger’s experiment has, well, not done that. Instead, it has done something even weirder. To spend any time around Bolger is to feel that you have been enrolled in a bespoke, man-shaped university, one capable of astonishing interdisciplinary leaps, and it basically all hangs together — the way that any mix of freshman electives at a top university might complement one another, might rhyme, produce its own sort of harmony. It is unclear what, exactly, is at the center. But there are gravitational forces at work nonetheless.

Also, Bolger’s experiment has made him a wildly compelling father to a daughter who, it must be said, is exceptional. She is fluent in two languages, she is nice, she is funny, and last summer she performed Fritz Kreisler’s thorny violin piece “Sicilienne and Rigaudon” at Carnegie Hall with grace, élan and even wit. At the very least, Benjamina has on her hands the material for one of the all-time great college-admissions essays.

The day after their colonial field trip, father and daughter had lunch at the Harvard Club. Surrounded by dark wood and wine refrigerators, they ordered off the Veritas menu: Bolger had a B.L.T., and Benjamina had a hamburger with fries. The meat arrived on a bun with an “H” grill mark, for Harvard.

“Do you think the burger looks better because it has an ‘H’ on it?” Bolger asked.

Benjamina didn’t hesitate. “Yes!”

Read by Robert Petkoff

Narration produced by Anna Diamond and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by Devin Murphy

Source for illustration at the top: Photographs from the Bolger family; Arnold Gold/The New Haven Register, via Associated Press.

David Hilliard is an artist and educator from Boston. He creates narrative multipaneled photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him.

Joseph Bernstein is a Times reporter who writes feature stories for the Styles section. More about Joseph Bernstein

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May 2024 news.

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Rescheduled: Master of Architecture Thesis Presentations

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Shattuck Hall 1914 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR

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In the School of Architecture, students pursuing the Master of Architecture degree engage in a yearlong investigation in which they select a topical issue, develop a body of research both within and outside the discipline of architecture, and create a complete and detailed architectural design response to the topic. Master of Architecture thesis projects at Portland State range from community-focused public interest design concepts to explorations of architectural materiality and sustainability, from the poetic to the concrete and everything in between. The thesis program culminates in oral presentations to a panel of invited jurors, followed by the production of a commemorative book detailing the students' research, design process, and inspiring results.

*Thesis Reviews have been pushed back one week and will now take place May 13-16.

Schedule of Reviews: Subject to change

Monday 13th:

12:00 - 01:00 Maribel Zepeda | SH 212

01:00 - 02:00 Athena Rilatos | SH 212

02:30 - 03:30 Regina Batiste | SH 212

03:30 - 04:30 Van Khue Do Thai | SH 235

Tuesday 14th:

09:45 - 10:00 Niusha Manavi Namaghi | SH 137

10:45 - 11:45 Eric Giovannetti | SH 235

01:15 - 02:15 Victoria Fuentes-Sotelo | SH 3rd Floor

02:30 - 03:30 Brandi Barlow | SH 212

03:30 - 04:30 Alondra Maldonado | SH 212

Wednesday 15th:

12:00 - 01:00 Zeta Blice | SH 212

01:00 - 02:00 Rebecca Silk | SH 235

02:30 - 04:00 Ethan Goldblatt & Kaleb Huerta | SH 3rd Floor Crit Corner

Thursday 16th:

12:00 - 01:00 Adam Lee Soon | SH 3rd Floor

01:00 - 02:00 Lauren Espinoza | SH 212

02:30 - 03:30 Brianna Montes | SH 212

03:30 - 04:30 Sam Barber | SH 212

Visiting Guest Reviewers

Sharone Tomer | Virginia Tech

Sharone Tomer teaches design studios and courses on urbanism and social issues at Virginia Tech. Her work sits at the intersection of architectural history and urban studies through research that explores how architectural practices operate within and address conditions of urbanized inequality; her teaching and research focus on housing, public space, and architectural activism. Her research topics include spatial change in late-apartheid Cape Town, contested histories, and transforming spaces in Appalachia.

Jonathan Bolch | Woofter Bolch Architecture

Jonathan Bolch is Principal, RA, LEED AP of Woofter Bolch Architecture. A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, Jonathan has over 20 years of professional experience practicing and teaching architecture in a diverse array of places, including New York, Boston, Seoul, and Portland. As an architect, he has led the design effort on a wide range of project types and scales, including institutional, commercial, and residential, with a particular focus on creating enduring buildings for colleges and universities. His portfolio of educational projects includes work for leading institutions around the country, from Princeton to Portland State, from the University of Virginia to the University of Hawaii. Jonathan received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. In addition to his work as an architect, Jonathan has taught as Adjunct Faculty at the Portland State University School of Architecture since 2012.

Elisandra Garcia-Gonsalez | El Dorado

Elisandra is a designer, activist, and educator from Ciudad Juárez, México. Elisandra is the Director of Engagement at El Dorado Architects, a national firm with offices in Portland and Kansas City. She leads engagement and design processes for diverse project typologies, from equitable urban frameworks for communities to interior architecture grounded on Trauma-Informed design. Elisandra Garcia served as the Design for Spatial Justice Fellow at the University of Oregon School of Architecture & Environment from 2021 to 2023, where she continues to lead the Urban Violence Lab, an advanced architectural design studio that focuses on social inequities within our shared urban environment. 

Yuki Bowman | Waechter Architecture

Yuki is an architect and project lead at Waechter Architecture. She holds a Master of Architecture degree from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College. She brings a foundation in design writing and Japanese woodcraft to more than a decade of architectural practice focused on conceptual clarity and spatial dynamism. She led award-winning residential projects with Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects in San Francisco before moving to Portland, where she helped spearhead high-profile cultural projects such as the recently opened PRAx building at OSU's campus in Corvallis. On every project, she collaborates closely with consultants, contractors, and client teams to maintain design rigor throughout the detailing and construction of residential, civic, and educational projects. Yuki is also a lecturer, mentor, and educator for architectural students, with experience teaching at UC Berkeley and Portland State University Department of Architecture.

Justin Fowler | University of Oregon

Justin Fowler teaches studios in architectural design and seminars in history and theory in the urban architecture specialization at the University of Oregon. His doctoral work centers on Pragmatism and the tectonic aesthetics of social and psychological relief in U.S. architecture and urbanism from the late 19th Century to the New Deal, and his contemporary research concerns public health and precarity in the built environment, climate action, anthropotechnics, housing, aging populations, narrative practices, games, and exchanges between physical and digital media environments. His writing has appeared in publications such as Volume, Harvard Design Magazine, Thresholds, PIN-UP, Domus, and Topos, and he has given talks at the GSD, the University of Virginia, the Cooper Union, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, among others. He is an editor of Public Natures: Evolutionary Infrastructures by Weiss/Manfredi (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015) and a founding editor of Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism, the recipient of two grants from the Graham Foundation. He has worked as a designer for Dick van Gameren Architecten in Amsterdam, Somatic Collaborative in Cambridge, and managed research and editorial projects at the Columbia University Lab for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab) in New York.

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