Women's Studies Commons^™

Hindu Poetry And The Project Of An Inter-Spiritual Catholic Theology, Francis X. Clooney

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article engages the work of the Indian south Indian Tamil-language Vaiṣṇava poet saints known as the Alvārs. The article specifically focuses the First HundredHoly Linked verses of Poykai Ālvār to argue for inter-spiritual learning between Catholics and Hindus. The article concludes with personal reflections on this encounter within the context of the global Catholic Church

"Ostracized As We Are With God": Mina Loy's Anti-Career And The Search For Originality, Peyton L. Phillips

Master's Theses

Among many modernist artists, Mina Loy remains one of the most complex and allusive. Recent posthumous exposure of Loy's life and work adds to this precarity. A significant piece of Loy's life that is especially complex to contemporaries is her time spent writing. By establishing Loy's subjective relationship with her Victorian upbringing, this paper seeks to show examples of its influence on her search for originality. Mainly, the paper examines Loy's concept of originality, where that concept may have come from, and how it is reflected in her literature. The paper analyzes three of Loy's literary works, her poems "Virgins …

The Revelations, Lily Mckenna

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

The Revelations is a self-actualization in the form of a poetry collection. The speaker’s realization that reality is relative arrives through a Title IX case against an abusive boyfriend and former bandmate. Poems such as “Complainant / Respondent” use rigid legal structures to investigate the fluidity of truth and perception and how they can be manipulated. With her band on hiatus and the case propelling her into a new world, the speaker starts running DIY shows alongside a cast of characters with a shared love of music. She interrogates their realities in the character studies “On The Relative Reality Of…,” …

If Your Muses Don't Hate You..., Hannah Howe

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

If Your Muses Don’t Hate You… interrogates a speaker who feels she lacks the tools needed to properly assess trauma and grief. This collection follows the speaker as she delves into obsessive analysis of self, often using metaphysical lenses as methods of comprehension. Each section explores a facet of the subject’s identity, and examines whether her heartache is self-inflicted, preordained, or both. Six of the seven sections provide the reader with imaginative interpretations of the speaker’s natal chart, allowing the reader the opportunity to analyze alongside the speaker. The first half of these sections present the speaker struggling to separate …

Blood-Red And Flaming And True, Kate Gaskin

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Blood-Red and Flaming and True contains poems that explore the immense feelings of love and loss tied to the relationship between parent and child. They chronicle my experience raising a neurodivergent child, as well as undergoing infant loss and navigating a U.S. medical system that is renowned for putting women and people capable of giving birth—especially BIPOC—at greater risk than other countries with similar resources. Through poems that inhabit a variety of forms, I sift through grief and joy while attempting to tap into the sublime state that underlies extreme loss and love. Throughout, I investigate how lyric poetry is …

The Dialectic Of Airless Space, Ophelia Arc

Masters Theses

The Dialectic of Airless Space is a cumulative, cross-disciplinary research project that explores ‘airless space’ as a somatic and psychological condition shaped by institutional environments. Unfolding over time through five interrelated books, the project weaves together writing, ephemera, textile sculpture, and drawing to archive the invisible architectures of bodily and mental experience.

Chasqui, Nicole Lachat

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Chasqui is a creative dissertation comprised of a thirteen-page critical introduction and a series of poems which consider varying forms of migration, including that of border crossings. The internalization of displacement through longing and alienation is examined in these poems. The author considers questions of inheritance through an exploration of personal, familial and sociopolitical bonds. Varying forms of violence, including colonial and gendered violence are reflected upon in the work.

Advisor: Kwame Dawes

“Women Who Don’T Know How To Stay Married”: The Poetic Afterlives Of The 1927 Bristol Sessions, Aubrey R. Adkins

Honors Theses

This project begins from the understanding that song lyrics can have lasting impacts on the poetic work that proceeds from them, and can and should, therefore, be read as literature. In the cultural context of Southern Appalachia, a historically underserved and academically underrepresented region, this understanding is intertwined with Audre Lorde’s idea that “For women...[poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence.” The women of Southern Appalachia, denied access to particular modes of expression as a result of external circumstances such as poverty and sexism, need poetry, according to Lorde, to take “tangible action” in their lives. What came before …

My Soul, She Walks Behind Me, Sanyukta Shiv Kumar

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis reimagines the consequences of my great-grandmother’s life. It is an attempt to demystify women’s conditioned roles within private and public spaces and note how, through this conditioning, their identity is repressed to the point of diffidence and eventually, abhorrence towards their own bodies and the physical spaces they occupy. This is portrayed in poetry form through the voice of my great-grandmother as the primary speaker, and is interspersed with the voices of the grandmother, the mother, and the great-granddaughter.

My great-grandmother’s lived experience consisted mostly of her life as a young wife, mother, devotee, and storyteller. She told …

A Journey To A Black Woman’S (Read Black Girl’S) Joy And Her Story Of Coming Home, Brittany Lauren Brock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an auto/ethnography about the self-actualizing journey of reclaiming storytelling as my native tongue and my journey to joy. Throughout, using my story and the stories of so many others, I not only lay out the wounds (the pain, the loss, then the hope that comes) within the academy and outside in the world but I also use storytelling as a tool of healing—my tool of healing—to show how I wrote myself free.

When Black women (read Black girls) go through The Reckoning (the moment we realize something isn’t right with how we are perceived by others) …

Rgb Root Matriz Color Dance, Danielle E. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

RGB Root Matriz Color Dance (Color Dance) is an immersive, interactive experience that combines poetic phrases and color filters to create a womb-like environment. Designed by Danielle Gauthier, this artistic piece uses a webcam to respond to users’ movements in real time, allowing them to confront and express their emotions through metaphor and dance. Color Dance creates a unique platform for self-discovery and empowerment by fostering a connection between the body and discomforting emotions.

“Caroline”: Deviance In Southern Women’S Poetry, Sage Aspyn Short

All Theses

Deviance in Southern women’s poetry can be characterized by uncertainty, religious images, and through the telling of stories often unheard of, forgotten, or erased, like racial and gendered violence. Glenis Redmond’s poetry in The Listening Skin and What My Hand Say both explore Southern womanhood alongside race, history, violence, illness, and legacy, among other themes and topics. In Caroline: Poems some deviances include religious metaphors alongside obsessive compulsive disorder, excessive cursing from a woman speaker, and historical graveyard musings. Critical texts about lyric theory and voice provide some background and historical significance to be used in this contemporary study and …

Killdeer, Elizabeth Muscari

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project investigates, through poetry, how women and nature intersect. Formal decisions depict themes of inheritance and the body through couplets, tercets, quatrains, contrapuntal, sonnets, among other free-verse forms.

Ukrainian Beauty, Daryna Gladun

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

‘Ukrainian Beauty’ is a collection of poetry that emerged from my two years in MALS. It confronts the misrepresentation of a female body and experience in a male-dominant society of a rising democracy.

The poetry collection commences with an essay, ‘Ukrainian Beauty—91’ and beyond,’ which delves into the historical and political backdrop of the first national pageant, ‘Ukrainian Beauty,’ held in February 1991, a pivotal year marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The 20 poems in the collection reference the late 1980s-1990s artworks by the Kharkiv School of Photography and Odesa Conceptual Artists, Les Podervianskyi’s radio plays, texts …

Honeysuckles & Irises: Effigies Of The Land, Ami` L. Hanna-Huff

English Creative Writing Theses

Here is a memoir of my paternal line through the lens of my Great-Grandmother and myself. A reclamation of the land I hail from and a connection to a history previously felt distant, this examination of race and gender explicitly focused on the African American Southern female experience; I try to make sense of the juxtaposing positions in our lives. The culture built from its creation through Tennessee personified. Here, I integrate history and theory with lyrics and prose to experience the eighty-one years of progress brought between our births and the lingering anxiety of slavery. My great-grandmother, Hazel Irene …

Spadafore, Sampson, Benjamin Lachapelle

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Sampson Spadafore is a 27-year-old queer, transmasculine person who currently lives in Westbrook, Maine. They are originally from Syracuse, New York, and attended Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. They graduated with a degree in musical theater. Spadafore discusses shifts in their gender self-presentation and gender fluidity as well as media erasure of trans men. They then moved to Portland, Maine, to work for Maine Boys to Men and have also worked with Speak About It; Maine Renters United; and Democratic Socialists of America. A political current focus is using social media and art to raise awareness about Palestine. Writing …

In Yellow: A Solo Poem-Play, Emily Kitchens

Faculty Articles

“In Yellow” was developed in the INKubator residency at Art House Productions (Jersey City, NJ) in 2019 with the following blurb:

In Yellow is a solo poem-play about a relationship between a young woman and a ceramic doll her grandmother made that she has just accidentally broken. It is about grief. It is about breaking out of generationally instilled feminine values. It is about the color yellow. It’s all true.

“In Yellow” is an experiment of a poem and play for one voice. I was in New York City for about 10 years, before that The Bay Area, but am …

Cadwallader, Megan, Gretchen Thiele

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Meghan Cadwallader was born in 1976 in a small, rural town in Upstate New York. She grew up with a stable family and surrounded by the Catholic religion. Cadwallader realized she was lesbian around her junior year of high school. However, her sexuality was never a huge deal, more just another part of her. She went to college at Holland’s University, and all-girls school, in which she initially came out to people resulting in mixed responses. Meghan then went to Bucknell University In Pennsylvania. She received a degree in French and English with a concentration in creative writing. She talks …

Excavation Of Silenced Voices: (Re)Visiting Menka Shivdasani’S Frazil Through The Modern Feminist Discourse Of Indian Writing In English, Rangnath Thakur, Binod Mishra

Journal of International Women's Studies

The postmodernist phase of Indian English writing is characterized by the voices of many strong women expressing a feminist exploration of alternative discourses in women’s writing which are distinguished from the patriarchal framework of literary discourse. Along with Kamala Das, Meena Alexander, Imtiaz Dharkar, and Eunice de Souza, Menka Shivdasani is an active voice in contemporary Indian English poetry. Shivdasani is a prolific poet who has written poetry on various social, cultural, religious, and personal issues. Her four poetry collections include Nirvana at Ten Rupees (1990), Stet (2001), Safe House (2015), and Frazil (2018). Through her poetry, she has endeavored …

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Unraveling Milk And Honey: Women’S Voice, Patriarchy, And Sexuality, Renidia Audinia Siva, Ida Rosida, Muhammad Azwar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article discusses patriarchy and sexuality portrayed in Milk and Honey; a poetry collection written by Canadian author Rupi Kaur. Kaur is an amazing poet, artist, and performer who touches on trauma, feminism, migration, love, and loss in her works. Milk and Honey is a unique book of poetry as it combines written poetry with line art images. The collection is split into four chapters: “the hurting,” “the loving,” “the breaking,” and “the healing.” This research aims to show how the illustrations that appear alongside the poems have amplified the speaker’s voice in response to patriarchy and sexuality. This study …

The Kin-Ship, Zheng Moham Wang

Comparative Woman

This is a group of two English poems the author composed separately in 2019 and 2021 about the imaginary scenes of his grandpa and mother from a Iu-Mien family of Southeast Asia and Southwestern China. The group was submitted to the upcoming Kinship volume of the Comparative Woman journal of Louisiana State University.

Muele Las Palabras Con Canela: How Queer Xicanx Writing Practices Reclaim Indigeneity, Karen Zurita

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

My thesis project is a multi-genre story in itself, dedicated to my community. By using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel’s Decolonize Your Diet, I emphasize the importance of Xicanx writing needing to reflect their Indigenous identity by intertwining the spiritual and physical in their writing practices. In the process of creating this thesis project I was able to heal my own writing and have it shapeshift into creating a summer poetry class for high school students in the Humboldt County Area. In all, I found these writing practices to be crucial …

Help, Elizabeth Marie Cox

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Ana (A Work In Progress), Amanda Hellewell

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Life Giver Pantoum, Amy Griffin

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Yes ... But, Elizabeth Marie Cox

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Twenty-Two, Amy Griffin

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

On The Inside: A Small Collection Of Poems, Lauren Moss

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Mightier Than The Men, Sydney Springer

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.