The ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards (DDA) recognize exceptional work produced by doctoral students for the high caliber of their scholarship and the significance and interest of their findings. Each year, faculty who have served as chairs of dissertation committees nominate outstanding students who have completed their dissertations. These nominations are reviewed by a faculty panel and then read closely by postdoctoral fellows who are members of the Michigan Society of Fellows, a unique interdisciplinary community of outstanding scholars. The awards are co-sponsored by ProQuest, a global information-content and technology company based in Ann Arbor that publishes more than 200,000 dissertations and theses annually, including more than 800 by University of Michigan graduate students.
From the award ceremony program:
Emily Coccia, English and Women’s and Gender Studies
Workingwomen and Pleasured Reading: Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction and the Formation of Queer Readers
Coccia’s dissertation makes a case for reading nineteenth-century American workingwomen’s works through a method of “too close reading.” Whereas scholarship on sapphic writings from this period focuses on upper-class white women’s works that are well documented and preserved, Coccia turns to texts authored by working women—texts that were often ephemeral and registered queer desires through modes of elision and latency. How does one read texts that were deemed unimportant for posterity and went out of their way to hide their writers’ desires? Drawing on fandom studies, Coccia propounds “too close reading” as a method for textual analysis that is commendably historicist—a form of scholarly engagement that does not assume a sedate objective distance but stays true to how authors and readers read these texts historically by taking seriously readerly sympathies, overidentification, and hyperattachment. It insists on a fearless affective attachment to the text—reading like a fan, as it were—and thus becoming absorbed by not only the text but also its materiality and the lives that shaped it. Coccia’s work deserves this award as it is incredibly well-researched, pulling together archival materials with published works for an intellectually bold undertaking that does not balk at apparent archival “absences” and analyzes queer pleasure in beautiful and clear prose that is indeed a true pleasure to read.
Comments by Meghna Sapui, English Language and Literature
Dissertation Committee: Valerie Traub, Chair, Nadine Hubbs, Dana Seitler
