OPTIONS FOR SENIOR RESEARCH
PAPER
Adventure/Exploration
Arthurian legends (possible option: analyzing
four selections of the following writers?)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Chretien de Troyes
Thomas Malory
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
T.H. White
Bill Bryson
Joseph Conrad
Charles Darwin
Isak Dinesen
Alexandre Dumas
Ian Fleming
William Golding
William Goldman
Ernest Hemingway
James Herriot
James Hilton
Sebastian Junger
Rudyard Kipling
Jon Krakauer
Jack London
Peter Matthiessen
Herman Melville
Dava Sobel
Robert Louis Stevenson
Tom Wolfe
The Ancients
Aeschylus
Aristophanes
Euripides
Herodotus
Homer
Ovid
Sappho
Seneca
Sophocles
Thucydides
Crime/Mystery/Noir
Margery Allingham
James M. Cain
Raymond Chandler
Agatha Christie
Arthur Conan Doyle
Umberto Eco
Jason Goodwin
Dashiell Hammett
P.D. James
Dennis Lehane
Robert Parker
Ian Pears
Edgar Allen Poe
Dorothy Sayers
Drama
Aeschylus
Edward Albee
Aristophanes
Samuel Beckett
Bertholt Brecht
Christopher Durang
Anton Chekhov
Euripides
Henrik Ibsen
Eugene Ionesco
David Mamet
Christopher Marlowe
M. Somerset Maugham
Arthur Miller
Moliere
Eugene O’Neill
Harold Pinter
Jean Racine
William Shakespeare
George Bernard Shaw
Neil Simon
Sophocles
Tom Stoppard
Oscar Wilde
Thornton Wilder
Tennessee Williams
Essays
Maya Angelou
Francis Bacon
James Baldwin
Joan Didion
Frederick Douglas
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Benjamin Franklin
William Hazlitt
Samuel Johnson
Charles Lamb
Montaigne
George Orwell
Thomas Paine
Plutarch
George Saunders
Simon Schama
Seneca
Jonathan Swift
Henry David Thoreau
James Thurber
Gore Vidal
David Foster Wallace
E.B. White
Virginia Woolf
Graphic Novel
Marjane Sartrapi
Art Spiegelman
History
Ancient historians
Herodotus
Thucydides
Plutarch
Suetonius
Tacitus
Will Durant
Michel Foucoult
Shelby Foote
Peter Gay
Edward Gibbon
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Richard Hofstadter
Pauline Maier
William Manchester
David McCullough
William McNeill
Simon Schama
Alexis de Tocqueville
Eugene Weber
Horror/Ghost Story
Peter Benchley
William Peter Blatty
Thomas Harris
Henry James
Stephen King
Ira Levin
Jeff Lindsay
Guy de Maupassant
Edgar Allen Poe
Anne Rice
Mary Shelley
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
Love/Romance
Jane Austen
R.D. Blackmore
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
George Eliot
Laura Esquivel
F. Scott Fitzgerald
E.M. Forster
William Goldman
Graham Greene
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ernest Hemingway
Henry James
Milan Kundera
D.H. Lawrence
Gabriel Maria Marquez
Harumi Murakami
Michael Ondaatje
Boris Pasternak
Shakespeare
Leo Tolstoy
Edith Wharton
Medieval/Early Modern
Dante Alighieri
Arthurian legends (possible option: analyzing
four selections of the following writers?)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Chretien de Troyes
Thomas Malory
Miguel Cervantes
Geoffrey Chaucer
John Donne
Christopher Marlowe
John Milton
William Shakespeare
Edmund Spenser
Philip Sydney
Memoir
Mitch Albom
Maya Angelou
Augusten Burroughs
Frederick Douglas
Dave Eggers
John Howard Griffin
Dan Kennedy
James McBride
Frank McCourt
Marjane Sartrapi
David Sedaris
Jennette Walls
Elie Wiesel
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Malcolm X/Alex Haley
Nature/Ecology/Animals
John James Audubon
Douglas Adams
Bill Bryson
Rachel Carson
Charles Darwin
Annie Dillard
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jon Krakauer
Peter Matthiessen
Norman McLean
Herman Melville
John Muir
Henry David Thoreau
James Thurber
E.B. White
E.O. Wilson
19th Century Novel
Louisa May Alcott
Jane Austen
Honore de Balzac
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Lewis Carroll
Arthur Conan Doyle
Joseph Conrad
Stephn Crane
Daniel Defoe (18th century)
Charles Dickens
Fyodor Dostoevski
Theodore Dreiser
Alexandre Dumas
George Eliot
Gustave Flaubert
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Thomas Hardy
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Victor Hugo
Henry James
Herman Melville
Sir Walter Scott
Mary Shelley
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
William Makepeace Thackeray
Leo Tolstoy
Anthony Trollope
Ivan Turgenev
Mark Twain
Jules Verne
H.G. Wells
Emile Zola
Philosophy
Aristotle
Immanuel Kant
John Locke
Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzche
Plato
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Adam Smith
Poetry
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Maya Angelou
Matthew Arnold
Dante Alighieri
W.H. Auden
Elizabeth Bishop
William Blake
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert Browning
Jorge Luis Borges
Lord Byron
Andre Breton
e.e. cummings
Geoffrey Chaucer
Samuel Coleridge
Emily Dickinson
John Donne
William Dunbar
T.S. Eliot
Robert Frost
Allen Ginsberg
George Herbert
Langston Hughes
Seamus Heaney
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A.E. Housman
James Joyce
John Keats
Omar Khayyam
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Federico Garcia Lorca
C.S. Lewis
Audre Lorde
Edgar Lee Masters
John Milton
William Morris
Pablo Neruda
Wilfred Owen
Edgar Allen Poe
Octavio Paz
Alexander Pushkin
Rainer Maria Rilke
Carl Sandburg
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Wallace Stevens
Siegfried Sassoon
Shakespeare
Edmund Spenser
Philip Sydney
Sara Teasdale
Walt Whitman
William Wordsworth
William Butler Yeats
Postmodernism
Martin Amis
Margaret Atwood
Paul Auster
Julian Barnes
John Barth
Saul Bellow
Jorge Luis Borges
Anthony Burgess
William S. Burroughs
Albert Camus
Michael Chabon
Don DeLillo
Junot Diaz
Philip K. Dick
Umberto Eco
Dave Eggers
Ralph Ellison
John Gardner
Joseph Heller
John Irving
Kazuo Ishiguro
Dan Kennedy
Jack Kerouac
Ken Kesey
Chuck Klosterman
Milan Kundera
Bernard Malamud
Norman Mailer
Cormac McCarthy
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Tim O’Brien
Michael Ondaatje
Thomas Pynchon
Raymond Queneau
Tom Robbins
George Saunders
Zadie Smith
Tom Stoppard
Hunter S. Thompson
Kurt Vonnegut
David Foster Wallace
Satire, Wit, Humor
Douglas Adams
Jane Austen
Robert Benchley
William Blake
Bill Bryson
David Cross
Dave Eggers
Graham Greene
Joseph Heller
Dan Kennedy
George Orwell
Dorothy Parker
Stephen Potter
Saki
George Saunders
Amy Sedaris
David Sedaris
Tom Stoppard
Jonathan Swift
Dylan Thomas
James Thurber
Mark Twain
Voltaire
Kurt Vonnegut
David Foster Wallace
Oscar Wilde
P.G. Wodehouse
Science-fiction/fantasy
Isaac Asimov
Douglas Adams
Margaret Atwood
Ray Bradbury
Arthur C. Clarke
Michael Crichton
Roald Dahl
Philip K. Dick
Neil Gaiman
Aldous Huxley
P.D. James
Stephen King
Stan Lee
C.S. Lewis
H.P. Lovecraft
Edgar Allen Poe
Ayn Rand
Anne Rice
J.K. Rowling
Carl Sagan
Mary Shelley
Bram Stoker
J.R.R. Tolkien
Jules Verne
Kurt Vonnegut
H.G. Wells
Sports
Mitch Albom
David Angell
Jim Bouton
Doris Kearns Goodwin
David Halberstam
Chuck Klosterman
Ring Lardner
Michael Lewis
Stephen Porter
Bill Simmons
Spy/International Intrigue
Tom Clancy
Len Deighton
Ian Fleming
Ken Follett
Fredrick Forsyth
Graham Greene
John Le Carre
Robert Ludlum
20th Century Novelists
Maya Angelou
James Baldwin
Raymond Chandler
Agatha Christie
Joseph Conrad
Isak Dinesen
Theodore Dreiser
Ralph Ellison
William Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald
E.M. Forster
William Golding
Dashiell Hammett
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemingway
Zora Neale Hurston
Aldous Huxley
Henry James
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
Jack Kerouac
Rudyard Kipling
Thomas Mann
M. Somerset Maugham
Carson McCullers
Toni Morrison
George Orwell
Marcel Proust
Salmon Rushdie
J.D. Salinger
John Steinbeck
Kurt Vonnegut
Evelyn Waugh
P.G. Wodehouse
Virginia Woolf
War
Possible option: Ancient Greek/Roman view
of war?
Homer
Thucydides
Virgil
Possible option: medieval/Renaissance view
of war?
Beowulf
Arthurian legends
Edmund Spenser
Stephen Ambrose
Stephen Crane
Graham Greene
David Halberstam
Ernest Hemingway
Sebastian Junger
John Keegan
Ian McEwan
Samuel Eliot Morrison
Tim O’Brien
Shakespeare
Leo Tolstoy
Kurt Vonnegut
Women’s Voices
Louisa May Alcott
Maya Angelou
Margaret Atwood
Jane Austen
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bronte
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Elizabeth Barret Browning
Willa Cather
Kate Chopin
Agatha Christie
Emily Dickinson
Joan Didion
Annie Dillard
Isak Dinesen
George Eliot
Zora Neale Hurston
Carson McCullers
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Margaret Mitchell
Toni Morrison
Dorothy Parker
Sylvia Plath
Ayn Rand
Anne Rice
J.K. Rowling
George Sand
Sappho
Anne Sexton
Mary Shelley
Zadie Smith
Gertrude Stein
Amy Tan
Alice Walker
Evelyn Waugh
Edith Wharton
Mary Wollstonecraft
Virginia Woolf