Below you’ll find recent life writing related MA theses and Ph.D. dissertations done in the English department.

MA Theses

Sashily Kling
“Being Boricua”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Jordan Luz
“Rearticulating Filipinx American Identity: Ruby Ibarra, CIRCA91, and the Relational Identity”
Chair: Dr. Candace Fujikane

Jenna Saito
“Legitimizing Nisei Identity:  Toward a Model of the Asian Settler in the 1929 Black and Gold”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Rachel Reeves
“Holes in the Net”
Chair: Dr. Rodney Morales

Novelynn Rubsamen
“Erecting and Dismantling the Female Floodwall: U.S. Military Occupation in Postwar Japan”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Lauren Nishimura
“The Fragmented Biographies of Naʻi Aupuni: Colonial Impositions on ʻŌiwi Expressions of Indigeneity and Sovereignty”
Chair: Dr. Georganne Nordstrom

Nicole Kurashige
“Becoming Batman: Postmodern Graphic Memoir, Dean Trippe’s ‘Something Terrible,’ and the Subservision of Dominant Narratives of Suffering”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Claire Gearen
“Sun and Moon: The Ethics of Catachresis as Figure of Trauma in Yusef Komunyakaa’s ‘Starlight Scope Myopia’ and Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried'”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Dax Garcia
“Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord: Value in Life Writing ‘Gone Bad'”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Lisa Shea
“Representing Lives in Institutional ePortfolios: Learning from Life Writing”
Chair: Dr. Jim Henry

Summer Ibara
“Deconstructing Biographies of Queen Emma: Biographer Motivation, Portrayal and a Continued Life”
Chair: Dr. Candace Fujikane

Amy Carlson
“Wiping Clean to Use Again: Finding and Following Life Writing in Shojo Manga and Online Scanlations”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Rasa Fournier
“When Group Identity Threatens Lives: Recovering, or Failing to Recover, a Self Through Narrative”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Ph.D. Dissertations

No‘ukahauoli Revilla
“If We Vanish: A Collection of Queer ‘Ōiwi Poetry”
Chair: Dr. Craig Santos Perez

Rain Wright
“Everything Turns to Light”
Chair: Dr. Shawna Yang Ryan

Elizabeth Soto
“About Homelands Speaking\Her Bodies of Stories”
Chair: Dr. Craig Santos Perez

Madoka Nagado
“Sympathetic Imagination and the Concept of Face in Narratives of Blindness in the Long Nineteenth Century”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Anjoli Roy
“Where the Water Is”
Chair: Dr. S. Shankar

Kim Compoc
“Emergent Allies: Decolonial Hawai‘i from a Filipin@ Perspective”
Chair: Dr. Candace Fujikane

Tiffany Ing
“Ka Ho‘omālamalama ‘ana i nā Hō‘ailona o ka Mō‘ī Kalākaua a me kona Noho Ali‘i ‘ana: Illuminating the American, International, and Hawai‘i Representations of David Kalākaua and His Reign, 1874–1891”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Michael Tsai
“The People’s Race Inc.: An Institutional Biography of the Honolulu Marathon Association”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Marie Alohalani Brown
“Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of Ioane Kaneiakama Papa ʻĪʻī”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Heui-Yung Park
“From the Land of Morning Calm to Hawaiʻi Nei: Korean and Korean American Life Writing in Hawaiʻi”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

Alana Bell
“The Lives of Glenn Gould: The Limits of Musical Auto/Biography”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes

George Garneau
“If It Swings, It’s Music: The Autobiography of Hawaiʻi’s Gabe Baltazar Jr.”
Chair: Dr. Jeffrey Carroll

Claire Morais
“The Fictions of a Nation: Race, State, and Identity in Life Writing from Malaysia”
Chair: Dr. Craig Howes