Alia Abiad, 2022, Medical Student, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. Senior Thesis: “Care and Coloniality: A Comparative Analysis of Memoirs of Healers from the Philippines and Mexico”

Aliza Aufrichtig, 2008, Graphics and Multimedia Editor, The New York Times. SeniorThesis: “Your Friend and Comrade, Ernesto”: Translating Difference in Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls””

Elif Batuman, 1999, Author; “Either/Or”, “The Idiot“, “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.” Senior Thesis: “The Bottled Djinn:  Narratives of the Orientalized, the Confined, and the Nonlinguistic”

Elizabeth Brook, 2010, Founder, Citizen Genetics. Senior Thesis:  “The Political to the Playful:  Nuyorican Poetry and Representations of Hybridity from the 1970s to the Present” (website submission)

Aline Brosch, 1989, Screenwriter, Director, Producer, “The Devil Wears Prada”, “The Devil Wears Prada II”. Senior Thesis: “The Pronouns of Mechanical Narration: The Mainstream American Screenplay as Genre”

Jackie Chen, 2026, Associate Consultant, Bain and Co.  Senior Thesis: “Mythologizing the Trade: Postwar Reckoning with the Classical Tradition in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”

Alex Cohen, 2022, Judicial Law Clerk, US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.  Senior Thesis: “Mara and Chinese Modernity: Anachrony, Memory, and the Literature of Crisis”

Becky Cooper, 2011, Author: “We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence“, “Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers.” Senior Thesis: “Quo Vadis? The Life and Literary Philosophy of David Foster Wallace”

Monica Eav, 1999, CEO/Executive Director, General Counsel, Public Law Center. Senior Thesis: “Listen all you like, but disbelieve all you hear”:  “The Contest for Authority, the Politics of Gossip, and the Power of the People in Three Contemporary Novels about the Philippines”

Noah Fabricant, 2004, Rabbi. Senior Thesis:  “Poetry as Prayer:  The Case of Liberal Judaism”

Juan Gallo, 2026, Investment Banking Analyst, Goldman Sachs. Senior Thesis: “When the Magic Breaks, Blindness Spreads, and the Devil Arrives: Narrative Heterotopias and Politics of Spatial Estrangement in Bulgakov, García Márquez, and Saramago”

Keir GoGwilt, 2013, Violinist and Composer.  Senior Thesis: Performing Responsibility: Musical Writing in Beckett, Berg, and Rilke. – This thesis on performance in both verbal and musical media included a video documenting a musical performance. –

Emma Haidar, 2026, Journalist, Bloomberg News. Senior Thesis: “The Writer as a Mercenary Witness: The Ethics of Fictionalizing Suffering in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La prière de l’absent, Les yeux baissés, and Partir”

Mia Hazra, 2024, JD Candidate, University of Chicago Law School. Senior Thesis: “Literary Peronism, Borges in Politics, and the Struggle for Symbolic Space in Argentina”

Minyang Jiang, 2007, Chief Strategy Officer, Credibly. Senior Thesis: “Difficult Women, Exiled Heroes, Old Men: Reconstructing the Chinese Ideological Novel”

Pelin Kivrak, 2011, Assistant Professor of Global Literature, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Emerson College. Senior Thesis: “Displacement, Travails, Redemption, Success”: Searching for the Traditional Immigration Paradigm in The Works of Aleksandar Hemon

Heather K. Love, 1991, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania; Senior Thesis: “What We Call Home:  Utopian Vision in the Poetry of Renée Vivien”

Sophie Lucas, 2024, Investment Banking Analyst, Goldman Sachs. Senior Thesis: “Voicing Silence, voicing le pays, voicing bodies”: A translation of Marie-Hélène Lafon’s Les Sources”

D.T. Max, 1984, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; author, “Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim”; “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery”; “Every Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.”

Alexandra McCormack, 2000, Partner/Lawyer, Skadden, Arps. Senior Thesis: “Beating Sense Out of the Text:  Kreisleriana, Sarrasine, Barthes”

Mark McGurl, 1989, Professor of Literature, Stanford. Senior Thesis: “Arguing Otherwise:  Authority and Authorship in Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconsciousand J.M. Coetzee’s Foe”

Garry Nitz, 2026, PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature, NYU. Senior Thesis: “The Gag is X: Or Black Humor, in Theory, in Two Plays, One Show and A Story, and Two Memes”

B.J. Novak, 2001, Actor, Writer, Director, “The Office”, “Inglorious Basterds.” Senior Thesis: “’To Be or Not To Be:’  Hollywood’s Answers to Hamlet’s Question”

Tony Qian, 2008, JD, Harvard Law School; PhD, Comparative Literature, Harvard University; Associate Professor of Asian Studies, Underwood International College, Yonsei University. Senior Thesis: “Fiction and Testimony: 20th-Century Shanghai in History and the Imagination”

Ben Roberts, 2023, History and English Teacher, The Commonwealth School. Senior Thesis: “Sculpting the Future: The Final Three Films of Andrei Tarkovsky”