Degrees

2016, MA English, Loughborough University

2014, BA English, Loughborough University

Bio

Doug Stark is a media and game studies scholar completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At UNC, he works for the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab as the Game Research Coordinator and teaches courses on film, video games, comics, digital media, and writing. Primarily, Doug’s research concerns twentieth and twenty-first century forms of play and game, treating them as both expressions of contemporary social conditions and means of adapting to our technocultural environments. His dissertation – “Playing with Habit: The Biopolitics of Games Under Neoliberalism” – addresses the power games exercise over life by examining the habits they promote in colonial, military, managerial, and entertainment contexts. Find his forthcoming and published work in journals Extrapolation, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Post-45, Eludamos, Qui Parle, Leonardo, and Configurations, and in edited collections Playing the Field, Encyclopedia of Video Games, and Depictions of Power.

---

Publications:

• Stark, Doug. “Exercises in Humility: Gregory Bateson on Contingency, Croquet, and Revising Habits of Thought Through Play.”Leonardo, 56 (1) 2023: 58-63.
• Stark, Doug. “Better Problems: Neoliberalism, Strategic Achronicity, and the Experimental Games To-Be-Made.” Qui Parle, 30 (2) 2021: 399-419.
• Stark, Doug. “Video Game Novels.” Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology and Art of Gaming, 2nd ed., edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood Press, 2021: 1104-1107.
• Stark, Doug. “Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy.” Eludamos, 11 (1) 2021: 125–144.
• Stark, Doug and Teresa O’ Rourke. “The Lost Futures of BoJack and Diane.” Post45, special cluster “Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman,” 2020.
• Stark, Doug. “Unsettling Embodied Literacy in QWOP the Walking Simulator.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 12 (1) 2020: 49–67.
• Stark, Doug. “‘A More Realistic View:’ Reimagining Sympoietic Practice in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series.” Extrapolation, 61 (1-2), 2020: 151–171.
• Stark, Doug. “Ludic Literature: Ready Player One as Didactic Fiction for the Neoliberal Subject.” Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies, ed. by S. Pöhlmann, De Gruyter, 2019: 153-173.

---

Awards

• Digital Dissertation Fellowship, Carolina Digital Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2023
• Institute of the Arts and Humanities (IAH) Grant, “Critical Game Studies Exchange,” Spring 2023
• Richard Brooke Scholarship, UNC Chapel Hill, 2022-2023
• The Bruns Essay Prize, Society for Literature, Science & the Arts, 2022
• Hobby Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2022
• IAH Grant, UNC/KCL “Media Aesthetics” Speaker Series and Working Group, Fall 2022, Spring 2023
• Game Studies Research Award, DLC lab, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2022, Fall 2022
• Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Fellow, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2022
• IAH Grant, UNC/KCL “Digital Aesthetics” Speaker Series, Fall 2021
• Games and Cultures Humanities Lab Fellow, Duke University, 2019-2020
• Santander Postgraduate Scholarship, Loughborough University, UK, 2014-2016

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, Davidson College

Bio

Erin Piemont studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States poetry with a special interest in intersections between poetry and the visual arts. Her research explores art-historical considerations of self-portraiture as an alternative to the literary-critical category of lyric.

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, B.A. English modified with Philosophy, minor in Ethics, Dartmouth College

Bio

Carly Schnitzler is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow studying digital rhetoric and computational arts and poetics.

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2014, BA English, Brigham Young University

2017, MFA Creative Writing, Colorado State University

Bio

Kylan Rice studies nineteenth and twentieth-century American poetry and poetics.

---

Publications:

Books:

• An Image Not a Book (Free Verse Editions, forthcoming 2023)
• Primer, co-authored with Dan Beachy-Quick (Free Poetry Press, 2023)
• Incryptions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021)

Anthologies:

• Southern Lights: 75 Years of the Carolina Quarterly, co-edited with Sophia Houghton and Daniel Wallace (UNC Press, forthcoming 2023)

Articles:

• “‘Bird, Jewel, or Flower?’: On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry,” ELH (forthcoming)
• “A ‘Correspondence of Eyes with Eyes’: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Empathy, and Literary Naturalism,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 20, no. 3, December 2020, pp. 179 – 205.
• “‘In Couples, In Small Companies’: On Robert Duncan and Sentimental Modernism.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, & Theory, vol. 76, no. 2, Summer 2020, pp. 87-113.
• “‘Some Other’s Text’: Dan Beachy-Quick, Moby-Dick, and the Poetics of Reading.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, June 2019, pp. 83-103.
• “‘Light—enabling Light’: Emily Dickinson and the Apparatus of the Poet’s I.” Women’s Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2018, pp. 317-332.

---

Teaching Awards

• Student Undergraduate Teaching and Staff Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2023.

---

Awards

• Lyle V. Jones Dissertation Fellowship, awarded within the Royster Society of Fellows, 2022-23.
• Graduate Student Fellowship, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2023
• Early Stages Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Summer 2021
• Bain Award for outstanding academic performance in the second year of graduate study, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019
• Ruth Richardson Award for outstanding academic performance in the first year of graduate study, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2014, BA English and French Literature, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Bio

My research focuses on gender, sexuality, and sensuality in the cinemas of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora in France. I’ve taught a variety of courses, including French, Arabic, film, and queer literature and culture, and I have experience teaching ESL and English composition to non-native speakers. As a Comparative Literature student, I enjoy doing interdisciplinary work through different departments at UNC, including English and Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and African Studies.

---

Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “Sensing and Self: A Haptic ‘Look’ at the Aesthetics of Women’s Labour in Contemporary Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French Diasporic Cinema.” French Screen Studies. Forthcoming.

Encyclopedia Articles

• “Al-Akharun (2006; Saba Al-Herz).” Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History. Howard Chiang, Anjali Arondekar, Marc Epprecht, Jennifer Evans, Ross G. Forman, Hanadi Al-Samman, et al, eds. (Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019).

Book Reviews

• Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Cinema, by Kaya Davies Hayon. Review of Middle East Studies, 2021.
• Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements, by Suzanne Gauch. Review of Middle East Studies, 2019.

---

Teaching Awards

The Diane R. Leonard Award for Outstanding Foreign Language Instruction in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2019

---

Awards

• Foreign Language Area Scholarship, African Studies: Standard Arabic and Moroccan Dialect in Fes, Morocco, Summer 2018.
• Foreign Language Area Scholarship, African Studies: Arabic, Summer 2016.

---

Degrees

• 2017, BA Critical Studies in English Cultures, Literatures, and Film, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire
• 2017, BA Latin American Studies, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire

Bio

emilio Jesús Taiveaho Peláez is a first-generation migrant and a PhD. student—in that order—through the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. As both poet and scholar, their work engages the intersection of aesthetic experience and political discipline, blending critical, creative, and archival inquiry. Focusing on 20^th-century hemispheric experimental poetry, their dissertation (tentatively titled Ojos de Hierba: Walt Whitman’s Children & the American Lyric) probes the shared literary and philosophical history of the Américas through the lens of Neobaroque aesthetics, tracing dissonant and dissident relations in the life and work of figures such as Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Néstor Perlongher, and Cecilia Vicuña. emilio’s first book of poetry, landskips (words are a hard look), a latinX exploration of the sonics and optics of our contemporary American Landscapes, is forthcoming through The Concern Newsstand.

---

Publications:

• Taiveaho, Emilio Jesús. “Cartographies of Refuge, Music, and Survival: A Review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” Carolina Quarterly Online, 2018.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 8: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt. 1).” CQ Speaks Podcast, 25 February 2020.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 9: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt.2) ‘Christ in Alabama.’” CQ Speaks Podcast, 3 June 2020.

---

Teaching Awards

• Latina/o Studies Teaching Grant – 2020

---

Awards

• 2017 – Present: Mellon Fellow

---

Degrees

2010, BA English, Washington University in St. Louis

Bio

At UNC-Chapel Hill, I study the development of Early Modern thought (roughly 1500 AD – 1700 AD) in England, France, and Italy with Reid Barbour and Jessica Wolfe. I combine traditional and computational research methods to try to understand how revolutionary changes in science and theology in this period were received and interpreted in the different national literary traditions.

---

Publications:

• Ning, B., Ghoshal, S., Thomas, J.B. (2018). Bayesian Method for Causal Inference in High-Dimensional Time Series with Applications to Sales Data. Bayesian Analysis.
• Chen, X., Irie, K., Banks, D., Haslinger, R., Thomas, J.B., West, M. (2017). Bayesian Dynamic Modeling and Analysis of Streaming Network Data. JASA.
• Thomas, J.B., Brier, M.R., Ortega, M., Benzinger, T.L., Ances, B.M. (2015). Weighted brain networks in disease: centrality and entropy in human immunodeficiency virus and aging. Neurobiology of Aging.
• Thomas, J.B.*, Brier, M.R.*, Bateman, R.J., Snyder, A.Z., etc. (2014). Functional connectivity in autosomal dominant and late-onset Alzheimer disease. JAMA Neurology. *Co-first authors
• Thomas, J.B., Brier, M.R., Vaida, F.F., Snyder, AZ., Ances, BM. (2013). Pathways to Neurodegeneration: Effects of HIV and Aging on Resting State Functional Connectivity.
• Duchek, J.*, Balota, D.*, Thomas, J.B.*, Morris, J., Ances, B.M. (2013). Loss of Intra-Network Resting State Functional Connections in the Default Mode Network Predicts Working Memory Performance Deficits. Neuropsychologia. *Co-first authors
• Brier, M.R., Thomas, J.B., Ances, B.M. (2013). Functional connectivity and graph theory in preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease. Neurobiology of Aging.
• Ances, B.M., Benzinger, T.L., Christensen J.J., Thomas, J.B., et al. (2012). C¹¹ Imaging of Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Associated Neurocognitive Disorder. Archives of Neurology.
• Wright, P.W., Heaps, J.M., Shimony, J.S., Thomas, J.B., Ances, B.M. (2012). The effects of HIV and combination antiretroviral therapy on white matter integrity. AIDS.
• Wang, L., Roe, C., Snyder, A.Z., Brier, M.R., Thomas, J.B., Benzinger, T., Morris, J.C., Ances, B.M. (2012). Family History of Alzheimer’s Disease Impacts Resting-State Functional Connectivity in Cognitively Normal Individuals. Annals of Neurology, In Press.
• Brier, M.R., Thomas, J.B., Snyder, A.Z., Benzinger, A.M., Zhang, D., Raichle, M., Holtzman, D.M., Morris, J.C., Ances, B.M. (2012). Loss of Intra- and Inter-Network Resting State Functional Connections with Alzheimer’s Disease Progression. Journal of Neuros
• Wang, L., Brier, M.R., Snyder, A.Z., Thomas, J.B., Fagan, A.M., Xiong, C., Benzinger, T.L., Holtzman, D., Morris, J.C., Ances, B.M. (2013). Amyloid-β and Tau independently affect resting state functional connectivity in the default mode network of cognitively normal individuals. JAMA Neurology.
• Arbelaez, A.M., Su, Y., Thomas, J.B., Ances, B.M., Hershey, T. (2013) Arterial Spin-Labeling Quantification of Cerebral Blood Flow in Euglycemia and Hypoglycemia.
• Wang, L., Day, J., Roe, C.M., Brier, M.R., Thomas, J.B., Benzinger, T.L., Morris, J.C., Ances, B.M. (2013). The APOE ε4 Allele Modulates the Effect of Donepezil on Resting-State Functional Connectivity in Patients with AD. Alzheimer’s Disease and Associated Disorders.
• Thomas, J.B., (2008). “Keble Rowing: A History,” in Keble: Past and Present. Third Millenium Publishing.

---

Awards

2017, PhD Merit Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill

---

Degrees

2017, MA English, University of Virginia

2014, BA English, The College of William and Mary

Bio

Rory Sullivan studies late medieval English literature, art, and culture, and is completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches courses on speculative fiction, visual narrative, and composition, while also working at the Writing and Learning Center as a Writing Coach. Rory’s scholarly work is interested in the lived experiences and devotional practices of late medieval people. His dissertation, “The Virtual Imagination and the Self in Late Medieval England,” investigates the interactions between individuals and art objects, poems, performances, and manuscripts in order to understand how individuals cultivated devotional practices and experiences.

---

Teaching Awards

• Erika Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2022

---

Awards

• Breen Award for outstanding work in the field of Medieval Studies, 2019

• Balch Prize for a Masters Student in English, 2017

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume