Your Favorite Beach Read…There’s a Dissertation for That

By Sarah Palmer, Customer Experience Team Lead

The goal: To locate a dissertation in the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database that had a similar subject to the books I read over the summer.  

Success! Please enjoy the summer reading bibliography and register for the upcoming webinars, listed below, to learn more about ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.  

Fox, Paula. 2015. Desperate Characters W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition.

Review: Gentrification in Brooklyn and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the United States. This is a great choice for a book group because it is on the short side but provides many topics for discussion.

Dissertation: The birth of postmodern New York: Gentrification, postindustrialization and race in South Brooklyn, 1950-1980

Morgenstern, Erin. 2011. The Night Circus Doubleday.

Review: Magical. This book would be perfect for a long flight or car ride because it is a hard one to stop reading.

Dissertation: National amusement: Circus and culture in America, 1830—1920

Rowell, Rainbow. 2015. Landline: A Novel St. Martin's Griffin.

Review: Remember when you had to wait for a phone call because you couldn’t carry your phone around? A good beach read. 

Dissertation: iPillowTalk: A Mixed-Methodological Exploration of How Married Couples Use and Experience Mobile Communication Technology to Communicate in Marriage

Simpson, Dave. 2010. The Fallen: Life in and Out of Britain's most Insane Group Canongate UK; Main edition.

Review: Can a band keep going when the lead singer constantly fires its members?  Seems like it – is this a book about managing a business and motivating employees or a book about rock n’ roll? It’s both!

Dissertation: England, year zero: Satire in postwar British popular culture

Thomas, Rob and Jennifer Graham. 2015. Veronica Mars (2): An Original Mystery by Rob Thomas: Mr. Kiss and Tell Vintage; Mti edition.

Review: If you loved the show and the movie, you’ll love the books. Let’s hear it for Marshmallows!

Dissertation: "You know you love me": Surveillance and spectatorship in contemporary teen girl TV

Note: To access the dissertations via the links above your institution must have a subscription to ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

These dissertations above represent just one result from a search in the database – there are many more results on the subjects that could have been selected. Our upcoming webinars will focus on how to get the most out of the Dissertations & Theses database. The webinars will run 30 minutes to provide a quick, and concise, review of the content and functionality.  We look forward to having you join us!

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses for the Graduate Student

This webinar will help ensure that you have up to date research on your topic and research area. In addition, we will review how to search for specific topics, reviewing dissertations styles, accessing dissertation and theses references and bibliographies, searching by advisor and institution and also how to save and organize search results.  

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses for the Researcher and Instructor

Since dissertations and theses are often the first place cutting-edge research is made available, this webinar will review how to use dissertations and theses to stay up to date in your areas of research. We will also review how to search for specific topics and content contained in the research as well as how to set up alerts to know when new dissertations on a subject have been loaded into the database.

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses for the Librarian

This webinar will review – How to use dissertations at the reference desk to help a researcher get started, how to use dissertations to support subject specific research, tips for bibliographic instruction, and how dissertations are often the first place cutting edge research appears.