My dissertation received the Alumni and Doctoral Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year from the English Program at the CUNY GC.
Here’s what the Department had to say about my diss, “Literary Theories of Circumcision”:
In this arrestingly learned, wide-ranging, and critically sophisticated study, Strouse investigates the foreskin as a conceptual metaphor organizing literary experience. In writers from the patristic era to the present day, textuality is often figured as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision, a literary theoretical formulation traced from Saint Paul through medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. The prepuce is found to contain an alternate literary history, one that queers received understanding of phallocentric writing.
