Innovative Dissertations

Learn more about planning and evaluating innovative dissertations: Next-Generation Dissertations: New Approaches to Humanities Scholarship (Syracuse University) and Next-Generation Dissertations—New Projects for an Engaged Academy (virtual roundtable).

Pitt has a variety of innovative scholarship resources and support for projects.

Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences, 1999–2021

Digital-Only or Hybrid Digital/Analog Dissertations

Video / Multimedia

Audio (including Podcast, Rap Albums, etc.)

Comics / Graphic Novels

Portfolio / Thesis by Practice

Artifacts & Installations

Experimental Texts

Collaborative and/or Community-Engaged Dissertations

Geospatial Visualizations / GIS Database


Digital-Only or Hybrid Digital/Analog Dissertations

Maja Jeranko, in progress
  • Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Dissertation format: “Her dissertation will incorporate ethnographic storytelling and visual methodologies to create an interactive web-based platform” (2020 Digital Dissertation Fellow)
Amy Reynolds, in progress
  • Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Dissertation format: Will include “a webspace to house interviews with Karen refugees from Burma” to expand cultural and historical record and educate general public (2019 Digital Dissertation Fellow)
  • Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, 2022
  • Dissertation format: Two complementary equally weighted components: 1) A website Weaponized Landscapes to contain an exhibit and archive of multimodal artworks by Mary Kavanagh, which will serve as a blueprint for future issues of a journal and case studies; and 2) a 100-page intellectual package containing a metacritical essay that contextualizes the theoretical and technical decisions and offering the mission statement for Weaponized Landscapes that will support the intellectual mission moving forward.
Charlotte Henay, “All of My Peoples’ Bones Are Here: Talking to the Dead as Poesis for Afro-Indigenous Futurities”
Rob Sherman, “Project knole: An Autocosmic Approach to Authoring a Resonant Computational Character”
  • Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Computer Science (Human Computer Interaction), Bath Spa University, 2021
  • Current position: Narrative Experience Designer, Bonfire Dog
  • Dissertation format: Academic thesis and two complementary artworks: one text-based, the other a real-time computer simulation
  • Ph.D. in American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019
  • Current position: Unknown
  • Dissertation format: Documentary website with essays, oral history clips, audio-visual materials, including a map, archival materials, and embedded footnotes. Fryar’s essay about dissertation process
  • Ph.D. in History of Art, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 2018
  • Current position: Heritage Account Manager, Noho Dublin
  • Dissertation format: Written thesis with “practice-based component, the art-historical thematic research collection… to investigate paintings…” (not currently accessible). 
Natalie Berkman, “The Oulipo’s Mathematical Project (1960-2014)”
  • Ph.D. in French Literature, Princeton University, 2018
  • Current position: Academic Manager, SAE Institute Paris
  • Dissertation format: Three primary methodologies: 1) Literary, 2) Historical, and 3) “Digital Humanities, using exploratory programming to understand the effect that electronic literature has on a reader as well as leading the transcription and encoding of the Oulipo archives.” More details on her methodology and her experience.
Cécile Armand, “‘Placing the history of advertising’: A spatial history of advertising in modern Shanghai (1905-1949)”
  • Ph.D. in History, Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon (ENS-Lyon), France, 2017
  • Current position: Postdoctoral Researcher, European Research Council (ERC)
  • Dissertation format: “a two-faced dissertation, with a digital platform on the one hand, and a rather conventional text, on the other hand, which connects to the platform through a simple system of hyperlinks” (123, Shaping the Digital Dissertation)
  • Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, City University of New York, 2017
  • Current position: Digital Humanities researcher at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University
  • Dissertation format: “interdisciplinary digital humanities project that included source code for data visualizations, text mining and a static website” (165-66, Shaping the Digital Dissertation)
  • Ph.D. in History, George Mason University, 2016
  • Current position: Academic Technologist for Instructional Technology, Information Technology Services, Carleton College
  • Dissertation format: “This project is presented through the digital publishing platform Scalar in an alternate structure for the elements required of a historical dissertation—historiography, artifacts, data, analysis, citations.” Dissertation is password-protected due to image permissions
  • Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo, Canada, 2016
  • Current position: Assistant Professor, Game Design and Development, Wilfrid Laurier University
  • Dissertation format: Text with accompanying video game. More information in his abstract.
  • Ph.D in Artistic Research, Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, 2016
  • Current position: Senior Scientist, Doctoral School for Artistic Research, University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz
  • Dissertation format: Website (natively digital dissertation) (Chapter 15, Shaping the Digital Dissertation)
  • Ph.D. in Communication, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015
  • Current position: Associate Director of Digital Learning Projects and Assessment at Center for Teaching and Learning, LaGuardia Community College CUNY
  • Dissertation format: Written thesis with Tumblr archive and “digital performance piece” (not currently available online)
  • Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, University of Maryland, 2012
  • Current position: Deputy Director of Digital Initiatives, Director of Digital Fellowship Programs, City University of New York
  • Dissertation format: “Part II introduces a digital humanities project called “Revising Ekphrasis,” which establishes best practices for using LDA topic modeling and social network analysis to read the ekphrastic genre at scale using a curated dataset of more than 4700 poems” (abstract).
Virginia Kuhn, “Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age”
  • Ph.D. in English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2005
  • Current position: Professor of Cinema, Media Arts + Practice Division, University of Southern California
  • Dissertation format: Used TK3, a hypertext-based program. More descriptions in this article: “My dissertation included more than two hundred “pages” filled with words as well as still and moving images, hyperlinks, and densely layered annotations.”
Patricia Cockram, “Ezra Pound's Italian Cantos: Collapse and Recall”
  • Ph.D. in English, City University of New York, 1999
  • Associate Professor of English, Lehman College
  • Dissertation format: “This is a two-part dissertation: an electronic, multi-media CD-ROM edition of Pound's Italian cantos; and a paper which serves as a textual companion and explores my theoretical approach to this material” (iv) (ProQuest document ID: 304497855)
Kersti Krug, “A hypermediated ethnography of organizational change: Conversations in the Museum of Anthropology”
  • Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada, 1999
  • Position: Assistant Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies and College for Interdisciplinary Studies, 2000-2009
  • Dissertation format: CD-ROM that includes “full transcripts and video clips of participant conversations and work spaces; extensive field notes; five multi-voiced tales created out of, and linked back to, transcripts; analyses of the public performance of organizational discourses; participant and examiner critiques of study framework and content; connections to past studies of the same organization; and conversations made possible by electronic notes added by readers to the computer network” (abstract). (ProQuest document ID: 304572397)
  • Ph.D. in Music, York University, 1999
  • Professor of Communication, Concordia University 1999-2016
  • Dissertation format: Written document with a CD-ROM that includes “a website and an interactive installation”
  • Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Communication, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1998
  • Current position: VP - Lead UX Architect, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
  • Dissertation format: A “hypertextual performance in nonlinear form”
  • Ph.D. in Archaeological Theory, University of Wales, Lampeter, 1998
  • Current position: Professor, Linnaeus University
  • Dissertation format: "electronic monograph that includes a searchable multimedia database of megaliths in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, links to related topics and ideas which are published elsewhere on the WWW, an extensive bibliography, and numerous colour images and maps" (abstract). Abbreviated version
Michele Shauf, “Memory Media”
  • Ph.D. in Semiotics, University of Delaware, 1997
  • Current position: Head of Client Experience Strategy, Nasdaq
  • Dissertation format: CD-ROM for Macintosh: “a hypermedia volume about hypermedia” (abstract) (ProQuest document ID: 304343613).
  • Description in Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Sourcebook for Educators: Students, and Librarians (eds. Fox, Feizabadi, Moxley, and Weisser.)
Constanze Maria Witt, “Barbarians on the Greek Periphery?: Origins of Celtic Art”
  • Ph.D. in History, University of Virginia, 1996
  • Position: Senior Associate Editor at the Papers of George Washington
  • Dissertation format: Written document with an “electronic database consist[ing] of 1,750 manuscript documents” (abstract)

Video / Multimedia

Samuel Boateng, in progress: “Jazz Ghana: History, Diasporic Dialogues, Sustainability, and Identities Beyond the Canon”
Abigail Lee, in progress
  • Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Dissertation format: Will include three distinct video essays to make her research more accessible (2020 Digital Dissertation Fellow)
Leonardo Solano Moraga, in progress
  • Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh
  • Dissertation format: Documentary film, Doyenne, and written component
  • Ph.D. in Anthropology, City University of New York, 2020
  • Current position: Lecturer, Pratt Institute
  • Dissertation format: Written document with two ancillary digital components: “One is a video slideshow, designed to be projected as a visual background to performative reading versions of material from the text…The other consists of webpages with interactive and non-interactive demonstrations of potential functionalities offered through digital document metadata” (xviii).
  • Ed.D. in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2020
  • Current position: Associate Professor at Defense Language Institute
  • Dissertation format: “The dissertation contains a series of videos and the website format allows readers to watch the videos directly on the page, side-by-side with the text without having to leave this site.”
  • Interview of Sonia Estima, Ivan Gonzalez-Soto, Justin Schell, and Anna Williams.
  • Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada, 2019
  • Current position: Unknown
  • Dissertation format: Interactive multimedia installation, “Still Life with a Suitcase” and written text. CAGS profile on Gan.
  • Ph.D. in Radio-Film-Television, University of Texas, Austin, 2010
  • Current position: Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the Department of Communication’s Media & Gaming Lab, Texas A&M
  • Dissertation format: Written document and published online with video chapters
  • Ph.D. in Communications and Culture, Ryerson University and York University, Canada, 2015
  • Current position: Assistant Professor of Education, California State University, Sacramento
  • Dissertation format: “This dissertation is in mixed media format to present half of the content in American Sign Language (ASL) in the form of videos held at online forums within the TerpTube website and the rest in English text in the form of .pdf, also located at the same website.” Article on Hibbard thesis
  • Ph.D. in Education, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia, 2010
  • Current position: Principal Research Fellow (Research Associate Professor) in the School of Education and the Design and Creative Practice ECP, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
  • Dissertation format: Seven films (six co-participant films and my own reflexive film) and text exegesis 
  • Ph.D. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, 2008
  • Current position: Adjunct Lecturer of Theology and Religious Studies, Georgetown University
  • Dissertation format: This “digital, multimedia dissertation explores Indian visual culture of the last two thousand years; it traverses ritual, classical dance-drama, folk theatre, sculpture, film and television narratives and creates a new version of the Hindu epic, The Mahabharata.” Article on Tiwari

Audio (including Podcast, Rap Albums, etc.)

  • Ph.D. in Politics, Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics, University of Brighton, UK, 2020
  • Current position: Independent Researcher
  • Dissertation format: Written thesis with a companion soundtrack composed from her 143 field recordings. “Some tracks are to be listened to with full attention, others are to accompany the reading of parts of the written thesis. She uses poetic writing, improvisation, and music-making as both practices and themes in her thesis, and also uses photographs to illustrate her work” (Helen Kara blog).
Anna Williams, “My Gothic Dissertation

Comics / Graphic Novels

Kay Sohini Kumar, in progress: “Drawing Unbelonging: Comics as Thinking, as Method, as Resistance”
Ebony Flowers, “DrawBridge
  • Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2017
  • Dissertation format: “dissertation as a comic (mostly)”
  • Ph.D. in Education, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, 2017
  • Current position: Lecturer in Education, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
  • Dissertation format: Contains a comic strip version of the abstract and several comic figures to present data excerpts
Marta Madrid-Manrique, “Creating Audiovisual Participatory Narratives: A/R/Tography and Inclusivity [Creando Narrativas Audiovisuales Participativas: A/R/Tografía E Inclusividad]”
  • Ph.D. in Visual Art and Education, University of Granada, Spain, 2014
  • Current position: Senior Lecturer in Animation, Sheffield Hallam University; graphic artist
  • Dissertation format: “The overall structure of the dissertation was traditional, and included an abstract, a theoretical framework, a description of the research methodology and results, and an interpretation and conclusion. The format was highly unusual, however: It was published online in three volumes similar to a graphic novel trilogy, it incorporated many forms of visual data (including photos and watercolour illustrations) and was in part presented in the forms of a comic book, graphic novel, and story book” (Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS), “The Doctoral Dissertation – Purpose, Content, Structure, Assessment,” 9). A/r/tography article on Madrid-Manrique.
  • Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design, Clemson University, 2010
  • Current position: Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Texas Christian University
  • Dissertation format: “This dissertation combines Gregory Ulmer's post-criticism with multimodal composition resulting in a work that critiques the medium of comics in comics format. Six traditional text chapters forge a theoretical and practical foundation; punctuated within and without by occasional visual interludes and three comic sections. I advocate teaching multimodal composition through comics' interplay of image and text" (abstract). 
  • Also published Rhizcomics: Rhetoric, Technology, and New Media Composition (2017), an open access “digital monograph that composes multimodal arguments about rhetoric and comics”

Portfolio / Thesis by Practice

  • Ph.D. in Education, University of Melbourne, Australia, 2017
  • Current position: Senior Lecturer in Art Education, University of Melbourne, Australia
  • Dissertation format: Curated portfolio: “This site is both a digital Phd thesis … a living a/r/tographic digital exhibition and digital object.”
  • Ph.D. in Art, Goldsmiths University of London, UK, 2017
  • Current position: unknown
  • Dissertation format: “Cristina created the open platform http://www.desarquivo.org, which give access to documents, articles and images around the production of collective and common artistic and non artistic practices in Brazil. Her practice in the broadest sense provokes articulations between cartography, memory, history, archives, politics and the common.” Goldsmiths description
Manuel Ángel Macía, “Heterarchies and The Missed Encounter”
  • Ph.D. in Art, Goldsmiths University of London, UK, 2014
  • Current position: Postgraduate theory supervisor, Wintec - Waikato Institute of Technology
  • Dissertation format: Includes “practice engages with archival material and the dispersal of images, through the mass media, working with multi-media technologies such as video and three dimensional printing processes” (Goldsmiths description). Kerr's website.

Artifacts & Installations

Syrus Marcus Ware, “Irresistible Revolutions”
  • Ph.D. in Environmental Studies, York University, Canada, 2021
  • Current position: Assistant Professor, School of the Arts, McMaster University, Canada. 
  • Dissertation format: Twenty 12-foot by five-foot graphite portraits of disabled arts activists and an exegesis of scholarly articles about critical race theory and reflections on disabled arts in Canada. Article including Ware 
  • Ph.D. in Language and Literacy Education Department, The University of Georgia, 2018
  • Current position: Assistant Professor of Literacy Education, Department of Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching, The University of Texas at San Antonio
  • Dissertation format: “written solely outside the written word in the form of a museum exhibition” (from her abstract).  [Text]ure exhibition description.
  • Ph.D. in Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, University of Toronto Harrison, Canada, 2014
  • Current position: Unknown, but he has been instructor in the Department of Drawing and Painting at OCAD University; Director of Camp fYrefly, a camp for LGBTQ2S&A youth
  • Dissertation format: A “full-sized painted circus tent [that] forms the basis of the research and the accompanying written thesis is in the form of an artist's catalogue” (abstract); written thesis is presented in a storied form to make it accessible to a broad range of readers and to leave space for readers to consider their own stories. Through this research I came to understand how I made sense of my world, ways my community can change the narratives that are told about them through telling their own, and the value of art as a mechanism for social change. This research contributes to fields of art for social change, history of sexual and gender minority people, notions of belonging, and furthers Arts-informed and Autoethnographic methodologies.

Experimental Texts

  • Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, 2020
  • Current position: ESOL Faculty at Baltimore City Public Schools
  • Dissertation format: “series of essays focused largely on her public-facing work, which included building a translators’ collective that prints books and creating translation workshops for immigrant high schoolers learning English. She hopes to place the pieces in broad-audience publications rather than academic journals.” From Chronical of Higher Ed article
  • Ph.D. in English, City University of New York, 2018
  • Current position: Senior Developer Educator, Digital Ocean
  • Dissertation format: “Though the final form of the dissertation appears much like any traditional, print-oriented dissertation (apart from its afterword and appendix detailing the #SocialDiss process), it was profoundly influenced by the experimental use of different digital writing and networking technologies” (153, Shaping the Digital Dissertation). She solicited public peer review throughout her dissertation writing through #SocialDiss
  • Ph.D. from Performance and Cultural Industries School, The University of Leeds, UK, 2017
  • Dissertation format: “The thesis sometimes takes the form of a dialogue- with an interrupting, comedic voice pointing out the limitations of academic monologue” and includes original poetry.  Description from Fox's website.
  • Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada, 2015
  • Current position: Architect
  • Dissertation format: His 52,438-word dissertation contains almost no punctuation or uppercase letters: “For the writing style to not follow standard or conventional academic English, the formatting and punctuation or lack thereof, has grown out of my need to privilege Indigenous knowledge in resistance to the colonizing provincial education system that continue to traumatize indigenous peoples in this province” (xi, “Indigenous architecture").
  • Ph.D. in English, CUNY Graduate Center, 2011
  • Current position: Assistant Professor, Hostos Community College
  • Dissertation format: Uses “rules and procedures (such as: a chapter written entirely in interrogatives; a chapter written using aleatory procedures; a recorded and edited transcription of my dissertation defense) in order to write poetic and autobiographical criticism about works of literary constraint”

Collaborative and/or Community-Engaged Dissertations

  • Ph.D. in English with Specialization in Rhetoric and Writing, Bowling Green State University, 2015
  • Current position: Assistant Professor of Communication, The University of Findlay and Founder + CCO, Homeplace Creative
  • Dissertation: Multimedia dissertation using participatory, digitally-driven methods incorporated into a documentary project with media input directly into her dissertation for audiences to experience the stories of community members as they articulated them. Article on Adams.
  • Ph.D. in Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology, University of Birmingham, UK, 2014
  • Current position: Head of Collections & Interiors at the National Trust for Scotland
  • Dissertation format: Collaborative Dissertation; applied, practice-based, quantitative research in the humanities; practitioners in independent charity organization as non-traditional mentors/collaborators. CAGS profile on Hopes.

Geospatial Visualizations / GIS Database

Samantha King, in progress
Grace Riehm, in progress
  • Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Dissertation format: Will use digital technologies to manage, map, analyze, and present this large quantity of data (2020 Digital Dissertation Fellow)
Emma Rothberg, in progress
  • Ph.D. candidate in History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Dissertation format: Will digitally map parades for analysis and to make her research more publicly accessible (2020 Digital Dissertation Fellow)
Alyssa Quintanilla, “A Matter of Waste and Bodies: Life, Death, and Materiality in the United States-Mexico Borderlands 1990 to the Present”
  • Ph.D. in English, University of Pittsburgh, 2021
  • Current position: Assistant Professor of English, United States Naval Academy.
  • Dissertation format: Written thesis with a digital memorial
  • Ph.D. in American Studies, University of Iowa, 2019
  • Current position: Assistant Teaching Professor, University of Notre Dame
  • Dissertation format: Digital humanities dissertation using data analysis, visualization, and mapping
  • Ph.D. in English, City University of New York, 2018
  • Current position: Adjunct Assistant Professor, Queen’s College, CUNY
  • Dissertation format: Written document and a digital component containing “interactive and static maps, charts of quantitative data, written text, and images.”
  • Ph.D. in American History, Stanford University, 2015
  • Current position: Assistant Professor, History Department, Northeastern University
  • Dissertation format: “The written narrative of Chapter One is based on an online visualization that allows ‘readers’ to interact with the underlying data by mapping the geography…. Taken together, Chapter One and the online visualization offer both a synthesis and a starting point” (20). Online visualization: “The Geography of the Post

 


We welcome you to reach out to us with additional dissertations to add to this list.