Recent Theses

Source: https://german.fas.harvard.edu/recent-theses Parent: https://german.fas.harvard.edu/

As a result of the wide range of both concentration options and student interests in the department, and because of the equally wide range of faculty research and interests to support them, our seniors' honors essays address an unusually wide variety of topics -- from literature to philology, from medieval to modern, from narrative to lyric, from strictly German to comparative, from thematic to gender-oriented, from literature and film to politics and philosophy. Following is a sampling of recent senior thesis titles:

Peter Horowitz, '24: Nach wie vor: A Transhistorical Study of the Posthuman in German Literature, 1630-2020

Zachary Lech, '24: Reckoning with the Past in Recent German Narratives about the Herero and Nama Genocide

William Brown, '24: The System of Deed’: On the Political Philosophy of Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–1861)

Rosalind DeLaura, ‘22: Disturbing Memories: The Critical Construction of Cultural Memory in Contemporary German Literature (Erpenbeck, Stein, Krug)

Leigh Wilson ‘22: On the Beautiful Blue Charles: Leroy Anderson and the Viennese Middlebrow Tradition

Adam Gordon ‘21:  Bauhaus’ Wagner: Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet as Gesamtkunstwerk

Kyra Jones '20, "Geschlechtergerechte Sprache: Gender-Fair Noun Usage in German"

Brianni Lee '20, "Searching for Happiness Within Unfreedom: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as an Authentic Social Critique and a Preservation of Hope"

Benjamin Altshuler '19, "Dissolving Identity: Re-constructing the Third Reich Through the Cinematic Dissolve"

Daniel Menz '19, "Mobilizing Memory: Social Movement Activism on Remembrance of the Holocaust and Nazi era in 1980s West Berlin"

Joseph André Zivny '19, "Seeing as Feeling: Representations of Embodied Sight in Homo Faber and The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Vince Guo '18, "Does Brecht Still Hold? Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Uias a Case for Adapting Bertolt Brecht’s Theater in the Twenty-First Century"

Maxwell Phillips '15, "Formphantasien: Composing the Echoes of Adorno’s Musical Thought Today"

Michael Raleigh '15, “'Nänie'”: Poetry and Setting"

Michael Ardeljan '13, "On the Cutting Edge: Prussian Battlefield Medicine and the Wars of German Unification, 1864-1871"

Daniel Asher Reichert '12, "Brinkmann's Vision: The Aesthetic Fabrication of Rome" [on Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's Rom, Blicke]

Jasmine Ford '10, “Kein Ausländer und doch ein Fremder: The Construction of Contemporary Afro-German Identity through Hip-Hop”.

Shaun Patrick Hughes '10, "Germany's Achtundsechziger Generation and the Rise of the Rote Armee Fraktion: Burned Children returning to the Fire as seen through Die Bleierne Zeit"

Preston Scott Copeland '09,"Toxi Grows Up: A Changing Appraisal of the Afro-German Cinematic Image in Post-Reunification German through Branwen Okpako's Dreckfresser"

Nicole E. Rosner '08, "The Network of (Image)ination: A Framework for Navigating the Literature of the Berliner U-Bahn"

Caroline Lillian Schopp '08, "Monument and Counter-Monument: the Sculptural Libraries of Anselm Kiefer, Micha Ullmann and Rachel Whiteread"

Moira Gallagher Weigel '06, "Holding the Hohlspiegel up to nature: Crises of reading, reflections, and inheritance in Shakespear and Kleist"

Joshua Henry Billings '06, "Misreadings the Chorus: Nietzsche's Geburt der Tragödie as Methodological Critique"

Sharon Doku '05, “Johann Eberlin von Günzburg's Lutheran Utopia Wolfaria (1521): Laws for a New German State”\ \ Alison Giordano '05, “The Crisis of Identity in Schiele's Self-Portraits”

DoanNhi Dona Le '05, “The Sound of Silence, as Written by Paul Celan and Composed by Harrison Birtwistle: A Contemporary Setting of ‘Tenebrae’”

Ruth Mirsky '05, “Anxiety on the Silver Screen: Society and the Outsider in Paul Leni's Das Wachsfiguren-kabinett & The Man Who Laughs”

Anicia Chung Timberlake '05, “Turning Inwards: Musical Tradition and German Identity in the Weimar Republic”