This fall, the Department of English and Comparative Literature welcomes seventeen new PhD students! We are excited to introduce them and their wide-ranging research interests below:
Ulyera Brooks studies African folklore and mythology and its literary effect on the African diaspora within the 20th and 21st century. Specific areas of interest for Brooks include key themes, motifs, and ritual practices in the creative composition of Black creatives.
Margarita Buitrago focuses on Anglo-French-Iberian medieval literature and is especially interested in allegories and travel literature. Her research explores how the role of vernacular texts, history, translation, and visual culture shaped medieval transnational identities. In addition to medieval studies, Buitrago is also interested in pedagogy, the digital humanities, and the history of the book.
Valerie Burgess studies 20th and 21st-century American literature and the health humanities more broadly. She is primarily interested in investigating the intersection of psychology and literature to understand the depiction of mental illness, particularly themes of trauma and memory, in women’s writings and to gain a more complete understanding of how women relate to their labor and environment.
Reece Carter is in the master’s program for Literature, Medicine, and Culture. He is interested in the ways bodies and selves are represented in literature and how these representations reflect larger social constructions of embodiment. He is also curious about lay and professional rhetorics of health, how they vary and overlap, and in what ways they create problems for mutual understanding in the clinical setting.
Haeley Christensen explores Asian-American literature and multiethnic studies, with a focus on the mixed-race experience and the body in literature, graphic novels, and film. She aims to research how authors’ recreation of their own bodies in these mediums bridges gaps in readers’ understanding of complex, intersectional experiences, deepening engagement with the fluidity of identity in multiethnic contexts.
Spencer Doss studies British literature of the long nineteenth century, with special interests in understudied women’s literature of the fin-de-siècle, Gothic novels, and sensation fiction. Doss is intrigued by the narrative interventions of Victorian medical ideology, particularly gynecology, as a tool for both reinforcing and undermining patriarchal authority in the novel.
Cal Draper received his BA from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and his MA from Yale University. He plans to research early modern literature and religion.
F. Tyler Elrod works at the intersections of early American literature, critical theory, and ecology. He is particularly fascinated by the myriad ways in which nonhumans co-produce our cultural, political, and social structures; put differently, by the ways nonhumans and humans vibrantly (and sometimes violently) collaborate. Most recently, he’s written on figurations of eating and empire in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
Audrey Garcia focuses on visual and cultural studies with an emphasis in nationalism and national identity. She has previously studied how tropes in comics digest conceptions of identity within the American superhero genre and in Franco-Belgian Westerns.
Devin Gregg studies multiethnic literature of the global south. She is particularly interested in how Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latinidad literature reveal the intricacies of identities, theorize and explore spatiotemporality, and negotiate historical memory.
Steve Henry Liu studies how the humanities can be applied as a force for social change. In particular, he’s been working to imagine pathways for individuals and communities to slow down, use less energy, and develop creative means of coexistence.
Mitch Losito is a critical games scholar interested in thinking about how games reinscribe colonial histories and epistemologies, how players navigate these spaces, and, crucially, how we can begin to decolonize them.
Faith Rush studies 19th—21st-century American literature, focusing on female slave narratives and their use of writing as an act of agency and resistance. By analyzing the literary conventions used in these texts as a vehicle of creativity and social commentary, Rush argues for their acknowledgment within the American literary canon.
Charlotte Scott received her BA from Haverford College and her MA from Trinity College (Dublin). She plans to research in the fields of comparative literature and psychology.
Simone Sparks received her BA and MA from St. Louis University and plans to research in the fields of rhetoric, composition, and digital humanities.
Holly Thompson is an incoming doctoral student and Teaching Fellow with a focus in rhetoric, composition, and literacy. She has a vested interest in the intersection between disability studies and rhet/comp. In her Master’s thesis, she investigated expert paratexts for autistic autobiographies and analyzed their perpetuation of epistemic injustice against autistic authors. Thompson is the 2025 recipient of the Erika Lindemann Fellowship.
Gray Underwood focuses on film aesthetics, genre history and cultural study, with an emphasis on cinematic horror and the macabre. His work thus far studies the historical, aesthetic, and cultural impact of horror and art cinema crossover, generation of atmosphere and narrative ambiguity, and the ways in which the horror genre impacts and engages viewers on an artistic, emotional, intellectual, and sociocultural level.
Yang Yang has a BA from the University of Richmond and is interested in global modernism, especially transatlantic literary experiments in the early twentieth century and its transformation in the latter half of the century.
