To be fair, were any of Smalltalk, ML or LISP created as part of someone's thesis? I thought they were all academic (or academic/commercial) projects, but developed by academics at a more senior stage in their careers.

I'm pretty sure I've seen some recent theses that did describe the creation of languages, too. Though they had less of a theoretical computer science bent, and more of a focus on saying "this is a language for X problem domain".