Christ-College-Spiritual

The M.A. Thesis in English

Students in the English Studies and Communication and TESOL M.A. programs have an option of writing a master’s thesis, in the process adding three credits to their degree program.

The thesis option is typically pursued by students who plan to pursue doctoral study, or whose sponsorship requires that they complete a thesis. Students who pursue this option must meet the grade point average and GRE score requirements indicated in the graduate catalog, and be approved for thesis work by their graduate program director, their thesis advisor, and the English department chair.

Students pursuing a thesis register for the following two courses in consecutive semesters: ENGL 695 Independent Study (3 cr) followed by ENGL 795 MA Thesis (3 cr).  In the ESC program, the graduate thesis can substitute for the ENGL 686 Practicum requirement.

The master’s thesis may be a literary-analytic, pedagogical, linguistic, communication, or memoiristic project supervised by appropriate faculty and scaffolded by earlier work in the graduate program. Titles of recent thesis projects in the ESC and TESOL programs include the following:

  • Storks Gone Forever: Coming of Age in Times of War in Iraq’s Kurdistan
  • The Problem of Chaos in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
  • Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 in the Middle East
  • The Effect of Vocabulary Learning Strategy Instruction in College-Level EFL Students
  • The Structure of Noun Phrases in English and Kurdish: A Comparative and Contrastive Study
  • Stigmas and Stereotypes Surrounding the Post-Grad Millennial
  • Reclaiming Kurdish Memory
  • Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh and Hemingway’s Influence
  • Memento Mori and Human Consciousness: An Exploration of Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell
  • Identity and Translation:  The Use of Japanese in Poems by Lawson Inada and Kimiko Hahn
  • The Nature World and the Artificial One: Ecocriticism in Shakespeare
  • Education as Counter-Terrorism in Iraq