Celebrating our newest PhDs

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

PhD graduate at convocation

A doctoral degree is the ultimate culmination of hard work and dedication. After countless hours attending seminars and conducting research, TA'ing or teaching courses and preparing a dissertation, our doctoral students are becoming doctoral graduates. 

On behalf of the Faculty of Arts, congratulations to our newest cohort of Doctors of Philosophy!

Congratulations to our newest PhDs!

Daniel Attrell

Department: History
ThesisIntelligentia Spiritualis: Platonism, the Latin Polemical Tradition, and the Renaissance Approach to the Prophetic Sense of History

Demonstrating how interreligious theological disputes served as a vehicle for the exchange of knowledge across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Jennifer Doyle

Department: English
ThesisElement Focused Inquiry: Air and Water in American Literature

Drawing on three environmental crisis novels from the late 20th to early 21st century to embrace the ways literary fiction forms a relation to the world.


Ian Gibson

Department: English
ThesisSome Mysterious Resonance Between Thing and Language: On Contradiction and the Materialist Theologies of Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson

Articulating what resonance between human experience and literary form means with respect to authors McCarthy and Robinson.

Anna Godollei

Department: Psychology
ThesisHoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst: Employee Reactions to Automation at Work

Examining employees' psychological evaluations and subsequent attitudinal and behavioural reactions to automation at work.


Emma Green

Department: Psychology
ThesisWhat do you think? Associations between social anxiety, mentalizing, and social competence in middle childhood.

Demonstrating that children's self-reported social anxiety is associated with the ways they perceive and reason about others' emotions.

Anna Hudson

Department: Psychology
ThesisExamining the neural, behavioural, and social responses associated with affective self-referential processing in adults and children.

Examining how self-referential and positivity biases modulate the encoding and memory of social information in adults and children.


Cynthia Leal Garza

Department: Global Governance
ThesisWas Bretton Woods Working for the Common Good? Mexico's Advocacy to Consider the Human Implications of the International Monetary and Financial Systems at the Bretton Woods Conference

Developing a critical reframing that articulates Mexico's desire for a fairer, more inclusive, and more sustainable approach to the international economic system at the Bretton Woods conference.

Christopher Lok

Department: Psychology
ThesisLay Theories and Self-Perceptions of Maturity in Young Adulthood

Exploring young adults' lay theories of what it means to be mature and whether these perceptions apply to their own self-perceptions of maturity, and applying these findings to the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic.


Rukhsana Merkand

Department: Psychology
ThesisDon’t Ask, I’ll Tell: Investigating Strategy Use During Disability Disclosure at Work

Investigating the various strategies that individuals with disabilities use while disclosing their disabilities in work-related contexts.

Chris Miller

Department: Religious Studies
ThesisOut of the 'Broom Closet' and Into the Academy: The Development of Contemporary Pagan Studies and the Role of Scholarship in Shaping Legitimacy

Exploring how academic fields develop, how Pagan studies interact with Pagans themselves, and how scholars can legitimize communities.


Midori Nishioka

Department: Psychology
ThesisWhen our co-workers share their unfair experiences, do we believe them? Perceptions of workplace fairness are negatively related to perceived credibility of coworkers’ claims of injustice

Arguing that third parties rely on their perceptions of an organization's overall fairness when interpreting a claim of unfairness.

Samantha Sargent

Department: Philosophy
ThesisThe Techno-Inclusive Model of Disability: Motivations, Influences, and Applications

Advancing a techno-inclusive model of disability and making recommendations to improve current Ontario policies regarding assistive technologies.


Cameron Smith

Department: Psychology
ThesisInterpersonal Consequences of Self-Disclosures: The effect of self-esteem on perceived risks of self-disclosure

Examining the association between self-esteem and expected interpersonal consequences of self-disclosure.

Ryan Yeung

Department: Psychology
ThesisThe Persistence of Involuntary Memory: Analyzing Phenomenology, Links to Mental Health, and Content

Demonstrating that recurrent involuntary autobiographical memories consistently predict symptoms of mental health disorders.