Please join me in congratulating Susana Montañés-Lleras, whose dissertation, “The Sleeping Princess and the Creeping Briar: Book Illustration, Pictorial Language, and the Rhetoric of Fantasy” was unanimously and enthusiastically approved by her committee today!  On behalf of my fellow committee members, Dr. Henry Adams, Dr. Britany Salsbury, and Dr. Kurt Koenigsberger, I can share that this ground-breaking interdisciplinary dissertation cogently illuminates the transformation of book illustration in nineteenth-century Britain, while bringing new attention to the Sleeping Beauty fairytale across multiple iterations.  Exploring the work of Richard Doyle, Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Léon Bakst, and Arthur Rackham, the dissertation combines close visual and textual analysis with a nuanced examination of the allegorical possibilities of this timeless story of stasis and awakening, fate and transformation, the magical and the material.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Montañés-Lleras on this outstanding achievement!