Hoang Gia Phan, a candidate for the Ph.D. in English, examines in his dissertation, The Labors of Difference: Citizenship and the Transformation of Legal and Literary Form, 1789-1900, the transformation of United States citizenship from the time of its constitutional founding in 1789. The dissertation takes up both literary texts and legal documents in order to explore the convergence of legal and literary narrative forms in the production of the concept of the citizen as the ideal, universal form of subjectivity and personhood. Hoang Gia Phan begins his study with Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, and moves through the work of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe (specifically Poe's invention of detective fiction), and Mark Twain (in his realist re-working of Poe at the end of the nineteenth century).