Congratulations to all the doctoral and masters students who earned their degrees in the 2023-2024 academic year. Their research, teaching, and community were invaluable to the department and UNC.
Although we will miss them, we look forward to all of their exciting forthcoming work and future endeavors. We wish them the best!
Master of Arts — Literature, Medicine and Culture
Dailihana Alfonseca, Spring 2024
“Geographies of Health, Harm, and Hope: Imagining Epi-Genetic Trauma as Diasporic Madness in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999)” directed by Kym Weed
Jenna Gordon, Fall 2023
“Resistance Identities: Narrative Reframing, Changemaking, and Community in Judi Chamberlin’s On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System” directed by Kym Weed
Carmen Pharr, Spring 2024
Shame and its Myriad Manifestations: Thematic Analysis of Narratives in the “Shame in Medicine: The Lost Forest” Podcast directed by Jordynn Jack
Kaleigh Sullivan, Spring 2024
Assessing Addiction: A Qualitative Study and socio-biological Model of Substance Use Disorder (SUD) directed by Kym Weed
Master of Arts
Theodore Nollert, Summer 2024
Nathan Quinn, Spring 2024
Ian Sawyer, Fall 2023
Misreading the Question of Determinism: “A Pragmatic Approach to Stephen Crane’s ‘The Blue Hotel.'” directed by Tyler Curtain
Doctorate in Philosophy
Grant Glass, Spring 2024
Fidelity, Remix, and the Adaptive Potential: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Techniques in Literary Adaptation Theory directed by Jeanne Moskal
“This dissertation explores the potential applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques in the field of literary adaptation and examines the implications of these technologies for questions of originality, intellectual property, and remixing.”
Chloe Hamer, Spring 2024
Katharine Henry, Summer 2024
“One Blood of All Nations”: American Protestant Missionaries in Early Nineteenth-Century China directed by Philip Gura
“This project explores the impact that engagement with China had upon American development in the first half of the nineteenth century. It traces development through the 1) personal development of Protestant missionaries whose lives were changed by emigrating to China, 2) national development in the United States that was powered by trade with China, and 3) religious developments during the Taiping Rebellion that stimulated a diplomatic crisis for American government agents in China.”
Stephanie Kinzinger, Summer 2024
Playing Reality: The Promise and Peril of Compositional Realities directed by Matthew Taylor
“Investigating experiments in the gamification of reality avant la lettre, I consider select authors and game designers from the mid nineteenth century to the present who not only depict otherworldly fictions but also insist that such endeavors have the potential to make the world otherwise. This project draws on recent scholarship in game studies, cognitive science, social constructivism, Black studies, and current headlines regarding climate denialism, the “big lie,” and the metaverse, to argue that increasing investments in reality’s “hackability” over the past two centuries hold forth the prospect of both greater freedom and greater constriction, expanded capacity and enlarging forms of control. Viewed ever more as a game, reality has never been more, or less, in play—for better and for worse.”
Margaret Maurer, Spring 2024
“Everyday Alchemy” directed by Mary Floyd-Wilson
“’Everyday Alchemy’ travels to kitchens and stillrooms, paper mills and print houses, gardens and beehives to consider how men and women in early modern (1550-1700) England used animal, domestic, and artisanal practices to engage in alchemical speculation and experimentation. Examining alchemical knowledge within a variety of textual genres illuminates that early modern alchemy was not exclusive to eccentrics or elites. Instead, alchemical texts could be popular, printed, and vernacular; alchemical practices could be domestic and routine; and alchemical practitioners were diverse in their beliefs, practices, and identities.”
Jane Mcgrail, Spring 2024
“The Rhetoric of Mobile Libraries: Circulating Meaningful Literacy Experiences to Build Individual Social Capital” directed by Jordynn Jack
“My dissertation examines mobile library programs as sites of literacy and identifies both material and affective dimensions of rhetorical empowerment. I argue that mobile library programs function rhetorically to circulate definitions of literacy that facilitate patron empowerment and build individual social capital.”
Zachary Metzger, Summer 2024
The Border of Reality: Text Generation and the Birth of the Digital Humanities, 1952-2002
Lauren Pinkerton, Summer 2023
Wander[ing] from Studious Wells: Itinerant Scholars in British Literature. 1850 – 1930 directed by Kim Stern
“My dissertation examines the cultural significance of a largely overlooked figure—the wandering scholar—and argues that the literary trope of the wandering scholar signals a growing distrust of epistemic institutionalization, as well as an effort to envision alternatives to English ways of knowing, at a moment of unprecedented globalization and migration. Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853) contains what is likely the most well-known example of this figure and Arnold’s poem serves as my point of departure for subsequent chapters on the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf, in which I argue that writers of this period often believed that the path to “true” learning and knowing diverged from established educational and intellectual itineraries. By depicting the acquisition of knowledge as shaped by setbacks and digressions, these texts not only critique an educational system that encouraged rote learning and reified social privilege; they also demonstrate that the path to knowledge is inherently uneven, evolving, and politically transgressive.”
Kylan Rice, Summer 2024
Karah Mitchell, Summer 2024
“Primary Lessons: Animals, Children, and Human(e) Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” directed by Eliza Richards
“My dissertation project investigates the development of a “humane” education discourse in materials written for and by children in the nineteenth-century United States. Looking at a range of primarily archival materials, I argue that literary representations of animals were central to the historical development of “humane” education during this time period. Previous historical work has demonstrated how enormous developments in animal welfare initiatives, humane education, and the pet industry occurred during the nineteenth-century United States; by looking at literary texts written for and by children, I argue, we can see how and why these historical developments occurred.”
Michele Robinson, Summer 2023
Writing and Righting Rooms in Nineteenth Century British Literature directed by Kim Stern
Nikki Roulo, Summer 2023
Changeling Humorists: The Speech Acts of the Transatlantic English Fool directed by David Baker
“This dissertation examines the speech acts of early modern English fools and posits that fools (on stage and off) democratizes an access to free speech prior to the English Civil War.”
Carly Schnitzler, Summer 2023
Generations: Creative Computation, Community, and the Rhetorical Canon directed by Dan Anderson
“Generations investigates how computational poets and artists use the rhetoricity of generative computational processes for social critique and community-building, through a renewal of the classical rhetorical canon.”
Che Sokol, Summer 2024
Morgan Souza, Summer 2023
Monstrosity, Nature, and Art in Early Modern English Writers directed by Jessica Wolfe
Douglas Stark, Summer 2024
Untimely Play: History, Habit, Games directed by Gregory Flaxman
“Traditionally, play has been considered an activity separate from any practical purpose, but now, as education, labor, and daily life are increasingly gamified, play has purpose aplenty. What happened? In chapters that traverse colonial cricket, military training, workplace roleplay, and video gaming, my dissertation retrieves neglected files from the archive of game history to argue that play has helped us adapt to our social, cultural, and technological conditions since the late nineteenth century. In this light, it should come as no surprise that today’s games predominantly reproduce the neoliberal status quo. And yet, by drawing on the game-based work of “untimely” artists and critics like C. L. R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Harun Farocki, and Bennett Foddy, I contend that play remains a means of introducing difference because, in play, we don’t just learn from “what is;” we learn from “what if.””
Jewell Thomas, Spring 2024
Sarah Walton, Summer 2023
Guiding ‘The Intelligent English Traveller’: The Collaborative and Interactive Victorian Serialized Handbook directed by Kim Stern
Rachel Warner, Summer 2023
Sexual Inverts, Tomboys, Inverted Women: Literary Female Masculinities in Modernism directed by Heidi Kim
