Emily Coccia, former Ph.D. student in the Women's and Gender Studies and English joint program, earned the 2024 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award for her outstanding dissertation, Workingwomen and Pleasured Reading: Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction and the Formation of Queer Readers.
From the ceremony program:
"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."
Coccia is one of ten scholars selected by a committee of faculty members and members of the Michigan Society of Fellows.
Coccia now works as the Robert A. Oden Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Liberal Arts at Carleton College and she teaches courses in English, American Studies, and Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies.
Congratulations to Dr. Coccia on this incredible achievement!
Read more about the award here.
