Sabrina Wengier (MLL)
Sabrina Wengier’s dissertation, The Politics and Poetics of Ekphrasis in Nineteenth-Century French Art Novels, engages in substantial interdisciplinary research with rich humanities content, by addressing art, art criticism, aesthetics, literature, and history in the context of nineteenth-century French art novels by Zola, Balzac, and the Goncourts, while paying careful attention to the politics of gender representation. The dissertation also addresses the challenging topic of ekphrasis in an approachable and comprehensible way. Her work—erudite and theoretically sophisticated—demonstrates an impressive command of scholarship in three languages: French, German, and English. In addition, Wengier provides a thorough historical and geographical contextualization of her subject matter and makes important contributions to the fields of French nineteenth-century literary and art studies.
Allison Johnson’s dissertation,