The Department of English and Comparative Literature is excited to welcome Professor Ben Bolling back to UNC! After some time working outside of academia after completing his PhD here, Prof. Bolling is returningto teaching, where he finds his true calling. “Being back in Carolina classrooms reminded me just how engaged and intellectually curious UNC students can be,” he says. “I couldn’t be more excited to work with the current generation of Tar Heels.”
Current Projects: the graphic and the gothic
Since building a space for his creative work on Substack with The New Futurists in 2022, Bolling has finished an original comic called Southern Gothic with co-creator Ezequiel Rubio and an experiment in superhero storytelling called Into the Omniverse with co-creator Luis Valero-Suarez:
“Ezequiel and I are currently pitching Southern Gothic for print publication as American Gothic: Good Country People and we’ve begun work on a sequel titled American Gothic: The Hand of Poe that will begin dropping online in the next few months. I’m also working on a multimedia project composed of short stories, original songs, and illustrations called “The Pearl Valley Incident.”
He added, “Beyond creative writing, I’m revising some of my original research on serialization and narrative histories for a popular audience and hope to begin publishing that work online in Q1 of 2025.”
Chappell or Charli?
In his ENGL105i: Writing in Law course, Bolling uses a unique “Civil Discourse” assignment to engage students in debates on fun topics:
“Our first question was ‘What was the song of the summer for 2024?’ I heard some very compelling arguments for Charli XCX’s ‘Apple’ and Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’ with other songs like Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ and Chappell Roan’s ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ getting solid representation. I hope that by opening with a low-stakes topic, when we build to discussing more hot button issues, we will have established some best practices that will provide a safe environment for engaging difficult subjects.”
Bolling, Beekeeping, Baldwin, and Broadway
When he’s not teaching or creating, Bolling is an avid beekeeper, finding peace in tending his hives. His go-to literary works include James Baldwin’s Collected Essays and Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Short Stories. His top media recommendation of the moment? The Broadway play “Oh, Mary!”, which he praised as “campy, witty, ignorant, and absolutely brilliant. I’ve told friends it’s the funniest play I’ve ever seen, but I seriously wonder if it’s not the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Period.”
Learn more about Ben Bolling here!
