Dissertation: Engaging Frames and Absorbing Names: Interpolating the Subject in Visual and Verbal Art, 1760-1880

Advisors: Alexander Regier and Helena Michie

Nina Cook received a bachelor’s degree in Literary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas and completed a master’s degree in the Humanities at the same university. Her dissertation analyzes the interaction between art and audience through the framework of immersion, arguing that at the turn of the nineteenth century, a desire developed for art to envelop and immerse an audience: to provide an emotional, intellectual, and bodily experience. Her archive includes art and literature produced in France and England, most notably the works of William Blake, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Gustave Flaubert, and George Eliot, as well as visual artworks by J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Eugene Delacroix, and Edouard Manet. She is a recipient of the James T. Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship (2022) and the Marilyn Marrs Gillet Travel Grant (2022), which supported her archival research throughout Europe. Her writing has been accepted for publication at The CEA Critic. She has held multiple service roles and positions on campus, including serving as English Department Graduate Representative (2019-20), Humanities Graduate Student Association President (2021-22), and dramaturge for the VADA production of On the Verge (2021). She has also taught and assisted in multiple courses including a survey course on British Literature (ENGL 211) and a writing course on Museums in World History (FWIS 145). She currently serves as a Graduate Student Ambassador for the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and continues to work towards the completion of her dissertation.