Congratulations to Nicholas Knopf, who successfully defended his dissertation this fall and officially received his PhD in December. Nick's dissertation, Disability, Disease, and Dissent: Embodiment as Critique of British and American Empire from the Stamp-Act Crisis to Manifest Destiny, argued that the literary representation of traditionally marginalized bodies (women, slaves, wounded veterans, the sick or elderly) served to expose the costs of imperialism, and to imply that the Empire itself (as a "body politic") was not in fact as hale and hearty as its proponents claimed. The transatlantic project was supervised by both Katherine Mannheimer and Ezra Tawil. Please join the Department in extending all our best wishes to Nick!