Honors in English
- Is there an author or text that you'd love to explore in depth?
- Have you ever written a great essay for a class that you want to expand?
- Are you ready for independent research and writing?
- Would you enjoy working one-on-one with a professor?
- Are you considering graduate school?
- Are you a junior or senior with a GPA of 3.6 or higher in your major?
If the answer to any or all of the above questions is yes, then consider pursuing Honors in English. Qualified students must enroll in both a one-semester seminar and thesis credits. Please read below for more information.
My Honors English Experience
Nina Ligman
Meet Nina Ligman, 2025 English graduate who also minored in Communications. She enhanced the skills she's learned in her major. Nina has always enjoyed reading and writing, so she was excited about the creativity and job flexibility that an English major offered. Read more to see what she did next!
ENGL 4900-001 English Honors Seminar (2 credits)
This course should be taken toward the end of your college career. It is a workshop designed to help you develop, draft, and finish a critical thesis. You will be assigned a sequence of writing assignments-including but not limited to an abstract, annotated bibliography, and proposal-to help you successfully accomplish the various stages of your project. Weekly meetings will give you the opportunity to share and workshop your drafts in a structured environment. The rest of the work will occur through independent research, writing, and tutorials with the English Department Honors Advisor, Dr. Ayendy Bonifacio, as well as with an outside thesis director. The project will culminate in a formal defense with the Honors committee. This is an ideal course for those students who wish to experience the pleasure of pursuing an independent research project or who are considering graduate school in English or another discipline.
Prerequisite: Admission to the course is contingent on permission from the Honors Advisor and Committee. Interested students must contact Dr. Bonifacio before they sign up for the course: ayendy.bonifacio@utoledo.edu.
4960-001 English Honors Thesis (4 credits)
These thesis credit hours are taken in conjunction with the Honors Seminar (ENGL 4900) and are required of all candidates for departmental honors. They represent the actual research and writing of the thesis. Prerequisite: Approval of the Honors Committee.
Please note that ENGL 4900 and ENGL 4960 are usually offered only during the FALL Semester.
Do You Qualify for English Honors?
An Honors candidate must:
- be a junior or senior
- have completed 15 hours of 3000-4000 level English courses
- have a GPA of 3.6 or higher in 3000-4000 level English courses
- discuss the possibility of departmental Honors with the English Honors Advisor prior to enrolling
- fulfill the departmental Honors requirements in addition to the hours required for the major
- receive an A on the thesis to receive the designation of Honors.
Please note that you do not have to be enrolled in the College Honors program to pursue departmental honors.
First-year and sophomore English majors are encouraged to start planning for Honors early! Don't hesitate to contact the Honors Advisor with questions.
Selected Recent Honors Theses
Bella Brass
“This is free country and I am free woman”: Recovering Christophine from the Margins
of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
Director: Parama Sarkar
Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea transforms Charlotte Brontë's literary classic Jane Eyre by illustrating the events that lead to Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway becoming Brontë's mad woman in the attic. Regarded by scholars as a feminist and postcolonial prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s text recovers Antoinette’s character from the margins of Brontë's text and documents the exploitation and deception that lead to her eventual decline. Before reaching this decline, Antoinette is largely supported by her former Black nurse, Christophine who embodies a striking presence through her practice of Obeah and her defiant voice. However, as a white Creole herself, Rhys writes in the interest of this group and reduces Christophine’s centrality to her role merely as a surrogate mother for Antoinette. I propose that while the surrogate mother role is important to Christophine’s character, her true impact upon the novel stems from her commanding presence and voice, which enable her to emerge as a figure of early feminism and colonial disruption in Rhys’s text. In the novel, Christophine is the surrogate mother and caretaker, but she is also the all-seeing figure, the bridge and shield between the white and Black communities, and the overarching model of a powerful and independent woman who acts according to her own wisdom and not the restrictions imposed upon her. In this thesis, I seek to introduce a reading and analysis of Christophine’s character that challenges the scholars who are complicit with Rhys’s own authorial flaw in diminishing Christophine’s narrative impact.
Alice Nyburg
Hawk-Knight: An Analysis of the Queer Identity of Muldumarec in Yonec
Director: Christina Fitzgerald
When scholars bring a queer lens to bear on The Lais of Marie de France, they traditionally focus on such aspects as the male-male relationship at the center of Bisclavret and other homoerotic male pairings and interactions. More recently, scholars have worked to rectify this hyperfocus on overtly male power structures and relationships by fusing their analyses with a feminist perspective to provoke a deeper and more diverse reconsideration of the Lais. In this paper, I take both of these queer perspectives into account and explore a third realm, one that I argue has oft been ignored by scholars of the Lais: that of gender variance and transformation. More specifically, I examine a singular, influential representation of these two important qualities: Muldumarec from Yonec. By examining a number of Muldumarec’s characteristics, from their place as a fairy to their transformations, I argue that Muldumarec is an overlooked symbol of queerness within the Lais, representing an alternative and still heroic existence for a figure that is emblematic of gender fluidity and variance. Through their presentation as a simultaneously fairy and holy force, Muldumarec forges a new category of identity in the Lais, one seen in fragments throughout lais like Lanval. At the same time, Marie de France’s portrayal of Muldumarec brings up questions of intent whose answers I argue are firmly on the side of queer acceptance, at least compared to contemporary works and attitudes. This is especially true when considering Marie de France’s place among the elite of a francophone court and the church’s official stance on fairies and the folk belief in them. Ultimately, I hope that my examination of Muldumarec both demonstrates the existence of queerness throughout history and generates even more discussion of the Lais through a queer lens.
Daria Sysoeva
Witnesses by Proxy: Female Bodies in Contemporary Antiwar Poetry
Director: Timothy Geiger —Winner, Dean’s Essay Prize
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the largest European war since World War II, has been providing us with a vast array of contemporary antiwar poetry that has yet to be studied by scholars. Historically, in literature, the war is viewed from an androcentric point, with a special focus on combating soldiers and veterans, but the current, almost real-time exchange of information turns everyone into witnesses by proxy and shifts the authors’ perspectives. By analyzing the works published in the bi-monthly online magazine Russian Oppositional Arts Review (ROAR), I trace how the perception of war has been changed by the phenomenon of digital witnessing and yet remained a highly gendered issue. In my research, I argue that the female perception of war is primarily communicated through bodily imagery, which can include physical violence towards women as objects of war, but also frequently concentrates on women’s physiology related to fertility, menstruation, separate internal organs, or even the entire body, which results in the destruction of boundaries between the female body and a militarized reality outside.
Nina Ligman
Peeling Back the Curtain: Appearance vs. Reality in Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere
Director: Parama Sarkar
The works of Celeste Ng are highly contemporary, so scholarly research has only just begun, and there has yet to be any research identifying a connecting thread between her first two novels, Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017) beyond the commentary on social issues. While the narratives of these two stories are unrelated, the central themes are very similar. In this paper, I argue that Celeste Ng uses her first two novels, Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere to pull back the curtain on social structures that appear perfect but have a complicated darkness within. More specifically, she uses the town of Shaker Heights, Ohio, the Richardson family, and the Lee family to do this. In Everything I Never Told You, the parents of the Lee family go to great lengths to keep up the illusion of perfection, an illusion that quickly falls apart as they investigate the mysterious death of their eldest daughter. In Little Fires Everywhere, the arrival of the Warrens and the publicity of the Chow v. McCullough case tear their Shaker Heights suburb apart, shattering the utopian society façade they had been displaying.
Autumn Molnar
Challenging Gender Norms: Queer Desire, Misogyny, and Masculinity in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
Director: Joey Kim —Winner, Dean’s Essay Prize
Over 200 years after its publication, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein endures as a groundbreaking piece of gothic literature. Shelley’s complex characters and storyline have sparked extensive critical discussion, with a particularly rich history of scholarly discourse on the queer aspects of the novel. Many scholars have focused on Shelley's portrayal of gender roles in the text or examined the narrative through a feminist lens. Expanding on these readings through a queer lens, my thesis explores the three leading male characters—Victor Frankenstein, the Creature, and Robert Walton—and how Shelley portrays gender and masculinity differently in each. I argue that these characters’ nonnormative relationships reflect themes of gender performativity, toxic masculinity, and queer identity. Victor's relationships with women, the Creature's need to adapt to human gender roles in order to be accepted, and Walton’s subversion of traditional gender expectations all demonstrate how the novel challenges gender norms and roles in the text. Within my analysis, I particularly focus on the characters’ expressions of emotional intimacy and the largely homosocial structures of their relationships. Through this approach, my work occupies a unique position within the critical conversation. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to the novel's queer discourse by offering a sustained focus on Robert Walton as an alternative model of masculinity who deconstructs heteronormative ideas of gender.
Caitlynn Murphy
Scales of Power: Analyzing the Sexual Economy of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure
Director: Joseph Gamble —Winner, Shapiro Best Honors Thesis Prize
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure stages a sexual economy that commercializes sexual and romantic relationships within its plot. Through these representations, a spectrum of socially licit and illicit sexual activity emerges: male characters often are able to maintain their active, socially sanctioned roles, while female characters are suppressed to passive roles that are driven by internalized conventions of purity, beauty, and socioeconomic status. While this may appear to be the social structure, female characters nevertheless have unique relationships within this sexual economy and actively choose to submit to the structure’s conventions or work against them. In this thesis, I analyze Shakespeare’s representations of this power spectrum, homing in on the ways characters both support and destabilize gendered norms of activity and passivity. Scholars have explored the restraints placed on members of these stage worlds, arguing that Shakespeare mirrored aspects of English society as he knew it within his works. My conceptualization of this spectrum is informed by Michel Foucault, who argues that the polyvalent levels of influence power has on the procurement and attainment of knowledge in turn affect the established structures of power. The interconnected scales of heteronormative activity in these two plays create expectations for male and female characters that are informed by contrasting, limiting factors. Not all characters fall within the binary scales and thus each individual acts within their perceived boundaries of power.
Samantha Ruff
A Handless Handmade Book: My Human Effort Versus ChatGPT’s Generated Attempt
Director: Tim Geiger —Winner, Dean’s Essay Prize
With the rise of AI creating anxiety throughout the world of art and literature, it is becoming clearer with each development that we will soon have a much-needed reimaging of the Arts and Crafts Movement. This period was the handmade artisan’s response to the Industrial Revolution during the time automated machinery was developing. Like that period, machines, this time in the form of AI, offer a cheaper and quicker solution to having a relationship with artful products without having to knowingly sacrifice anything. Where ChatGPT can offer an easy way out of the hard work that writing and other forms of art require, a critical issue arises, as accepting this offer comes with the betrayal of humanity when someone claims that their AI-generated art holds just as much value as a person’s handwritten magnum opus. To demonstrate the importance of the human touch in creative writing, I have composed a chapbook of poetry around the concept of change and have compiled it into a physical book. This project contains as little machine intervention as possible, meaning I have written the literature, created the paper, formatted my pages, used a printing press to put my words on my pages, and sewed it together, all by hand. Afterward, I worked with ChatGPT and FreePik to make an AI-generated version of my ideas and work. This allows for a close and exact comparison of whether my hard work pays off or if AI can do better justice to my ideas. Analyzing the differences in these product allows us to see how the future will be made and why we must keep the past in mind as we continue forward.
Tara Smith
Nonbinary Performance and the Critical Binary “Traps” of Twelfth Night
Director: Christina Fitzgerald —Winner, Dean’s Essay Prize and Shapiro Best Honors
Thesis Prize
Figuring the relationship between a play text, its criticism, and its performance faces unique challenges when a core theme of that text—in Twelfth Night’s case, gender identity and performance—radically shifts in society’s understanding over time. In this thesis, I reveal the disconnect between how Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is discussed in academia and how it is performed. To explore the way Twelfth Night is performed in the 21st century, I examine three productions from directors Tim Carroll, Emma Rice, and Simon Godwin. First, I respond to critics’ binary, heteronormative readings of Twelfth Night and explain how they do not honor the play text’s messages. By revealing that their interpretations do not align with the text itself, I argue that this criticism restricts what the play suggests. Next, I examine theory on play texts, queer theory, and trans studies as a basis to outline the potential for reading nonbinary gender in Twelfth Night. Then, I line up directorial choices (from the productions mentioned) with the play text to demonstrate how the play is interpreted in performance. In the productions, I look at casting choices, blocking, and clothing choices; in the text, I look at Cesario/Viola, the lovers, and the play’s narrative. To conclude, I turn to how this research is applicable to the future of Twelfth Night on stage by providing suggestions for activism in casting. I also illustrate how the reception of Twelfth Night by online communities highlights the importance of rectifying criticism’s pitfalls and paying attention to what works for the play in performance. Ultimately, I argue that reading Twelfth Night with a nonbinary lens, particularly the character Viola/Cesario, truly fulfills what the play does: satirize traditional binary standards of identity and engage with the complexity of gender.
