Degrees

2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Isabel (they/them) is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina. Their research examines representations of embodiment and the soul in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin religious texts, considering how structures between the corporeal, physical self and the sensing, feeling, and immaterial self can be read alongside theories of queer embodiment, affect, and representations.

In this framework, Isabel is concerned with how language informs depictions of physical and metaphysical identity and how these identities are often unsettled and displaced through language. In their reading of queerness in medieval texts, Isabel desires to experiment with how we recognize and interpret ‘queerness’ not as a fixed phenomenon, but an amalgamation of acts, events, and performances in dialogue with identity-formation.

They are currently working on two projects: one entitled ‘I kan nat glose’: Queering Illegible Signification in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale,’ which analyzes the infamous pear tree sex scene in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale as a culmination of unintelligible semiotic exchanges of letters and of sexual organs, and the other, “Needle as Queer Instrument of Authorship in Chrétien de Troyes Yvain,” which considers the implications of the textile worker as auctor.

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Awards

• Joseph Breen Award, UNC Chapel Hill Department of English & Comparative Literature, 2023
• Research Grant, UNC Chapel Hill Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2023
• Travel Award, UNC Chapel Hill Graduate and Professional Student Government, 2023
• Travel Grant, UNC Chapel Hill Department of English & Comparative Literature, 2022
• CARA Summer Scholarship, Medieval Academy of America, 2022
• First Class Honours in English Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 2020

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA Classics, minors French & English, summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

I research 19^th and 20^th century US poetry and poetics. My dissertation seeks to answer what it means to be an American poet by examining the use of classics in the US tradition. In studying the ways in which classical culture is adapted by US poets, I trace the emergence of ideas of Americanness, as projected against the backdrop of a standardized cultural inheritance.

An earlier version of my dissertation idea, “Du Bois as the American Poet,” won the Graduate Student Conference Paper Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society in 2023.

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Publications:

Scholarship:

• “Review of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin 35.1 (2023), 19-20.

Poems et al.:

• “On Hudson River.” Bayou (forthcoming).
• “My Mother Says.” Rattle 83 (2024).
• “Flux.” BlazeVOX: Fall 2021, 412-18.
• “Lai-jee.” Indiana Review 43.1 (2021), 85-92.

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Teaching Awards

• Doris Betts Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2023

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Awards

External:

• Graduate Student Conference Paper Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, 2023
• Dickinson Critical Institute Grant, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2022

Internal:

• Bain Award (Excellence in Pre-1900 American Lit.), UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
• Travel Grant, UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
• Transportation Grant, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2022
• Travel Award, UNC-CH Graduate & Professional Student Government, 2022
• Booker Fellowship, UNC-CH DOECL, 2021
• Inclusive Excellence Top-Up, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2021

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, BA English, George Washington University

Bio

Ryan Carroll is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He is interested in information systems, documentary storytelling, and truth-telling in 19th-century British, American, and Caribbean narrative. He considers these issues in relation to data overload, aesthetics, and epistemological crisis.

Ryan also writes in public outlets on contemporary literature, translation, sitcoms sidekicks, liberation theology, and more.

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Publications:

• Revision and the Politics of Truth-Telling in The Autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano.” Victorian Studies, forthcoming.
• “‘Looking together united them’: Communal and Multivalent Affects in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 97, spring-summer 2021.
• “The Pilgrim’s Book.” The Jesuits, https://www.jesuits.org/stories/the-pilgrims-book/, 2021.
• “Fragments of the Eschaton: Queer Christian Soteriology.” Macrina Magazine, https://macrinamagazine.com/issue-8-general/guest/2021/09/11/fragments-of-the-eschaton-queer-christian-soteriology/, 2021.
• “An Ongoing Revelation: Endings and Poetics of Missingness in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Gabriel García Márquez.” Portals: A Journal in Comparative Literature, 2020.

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Teaching Awards

• 2022 Ruth Rose Richardson Award for First-Year Achievement
• 2023 Earl Hartsell Award for Excellence in Teaching

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Awards

• North American Victorian Studies Association Sally Mitchell Prize
• 2022 Ruth Rose Richardson Award for First-Year Achievement

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Degrees

2008, BA English, James Madison University

2020, MA English, James Madison University

Bio

I am a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC. I am currently at work on my dissertation, tentatively titled “No Judgment: The Aesthetics of Neutrality in the Postwar American Novel,” which examines the productive tension that arises between neutral narrators and snobby characters in the decades immediately following the Second World War. More broadly, my research concerns expressions of taste and aesthetic judgment in American literature and film as they relate to discourses on race, gender, sexuality, and class. I also work on topics, including climate change and posthumanist aesthetics, related to the environmental humanities, and have taught courses on contemporary literature, film, and composition.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019, BA English and History, University of South Carolina Honors College

Bio

Rose Steptoe is a third-year Ph.D. student and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the intersection of feminist authorship and body horror. More broadly, she is interested in genre and horror studies, feminist film theory, and sound studies.

Read more at rosesteptoe.com.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019, MA English, College of Charleston

2001, BA Mass Communications, Emory & Henry College

Bio

Mindy Buchanan-King is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature at UNC Chapel Hill and is a teaching fellow. Mindy is originally from Virginia and received her B.A. from Emory & Henry College and her M.A. from the College of Charleston. Her master’s thesis focused on Edith Wharton’s use of Romanticism in conceptualizing the artistic self in Hudson River Bracketed. Her graduate research is currently focused on questions of photography and medicine in late 19th-/early 20th-century U.S. literature, artistic conceptualizations and the history of “disfigurement,” and representations and interpretations of World War I les gueules cassées (“men with broken faces”) in wartime medical photography, illustrations, and narratives. She is pursuing the graduate certificate in Literature, Medicine, and Culture.

Mindy is a contributing editor for Iris: The Art and Literary Journal at UNC, is a co-coordinator of the Furst Forum, and is the recipient of a Latina/o Studies Teaching Award. She also volunteers as a transcriber on the original manuscript of Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed, for The Complete Works of Edith Wharton to be published by Oxford University Press.

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Publications:

• Buchanan-King, Mindy. “Joan Crawford: Problematizing the (Aging) Female Image and Sexuality in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2019): 1-23.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, BA English, Davidson College

2018, MA English, New York University

Bio

I like to read and write about transatlantic literature of the long nineteenth century and modernism.

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Degrees

2012, B.A. English, University of Vermont

2014, M.A. Modern Literature, CUNY, Graduate Center

2017, M.F.A. Creative Writing, Poetry, New York University

 

Bio

Colin Dekeersgieter studies modern poetry, poetics, and aesthetics with a focus on domesticity. His work has appeared in the North American Review, Greensboro Review, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere.

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Publications:

• Opium and Ambergris (Kent State University Press, forthcoming 2024)

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Awards

• Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Marilyn Chin
• Goldwater Fellowship, New York University
• Global Research Initiative Fellowship, New York University

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Degrees

2019, BA English, Boston College

Bio

Brendan is a PhD student studying 20^th century American literature.  His interests lie at the nexus of literature and phenomenology, exploring how writers across genres represent consciousness and perception in their writing.

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Publications:

• “Phenomenological Reproduction in Thompson and Mailer’s New Journalism.” Dianoia. (Spring 2019)

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Awards

• Phi Beta Kappa, Boston College, 2019

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Degrees

2018, BA English & Computer Science, University of Virginia

Bio

The focus of my studies in the English Department is on video games and understanding how stories get told in this new, developing medium. I am particularly interested in questions of agency, empathy, and virtuality in video game narratives, and how these questions provide interesting and useful lenses outside of the video game medium. I also work on questions of legitimacy and pedagogy surrounding games, and how the physical space of gameplay is important to the inclusion of video games into the academic sphere.

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Awards

• 2019 Center for Faculty Excellence – Lenovo Instructional Innovation Grant

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