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

DA Hall is an English & Comparative Literature PhD Candidate and Assistant Director of the Critical Game Studies Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Their dissertation centers questions of historical development of genre, queer narrative temporalities, and radical community meaning-making within a genealogy of Japanese video games. DA Hall has written and presented extensively on FromSoftware’s Soulsborne series, and is currently co-organizing a volume that explores Japanese video game perspectives on Western worlding as aesthetic navigations of the contested cultural situation of Japan in the wake of World War II. As Assistant Director of the Critical Game Studies Program, they have worked to build the Greenlaw Gameroom, a game-focused classroom which centers accessibility and critical pedagogy, as well as the proposed Critical Game Studies Minor within the English & Comparative Literature department.

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Publications:

• Hall, DA, “A Beginner’s Guide to Painted Worlds: The Haunted Mansion, Dark Souls III, and the Playground of Interpretation,” Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association, 2024.
• Hall, DA, “The Fallen Leaves Tell a Story: Elden Ring and the Emergence of the Soulslike Genre,” New Formations of Game Genres, Approaches to Digital Game Studies, Bloomsbury Publishing, forthcoming.
• Hall, DA, and Jones, Nicholas, “A War Without End: Industrial Warfare and the Negation of Individual Agency in Edward Berger’s Im Westen nichts Neues” Screening War: Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front in Context, forthcoming.

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Teaching Awards

• Guest Instructor Award, 2023 – Department of American Studies, UNC
• Critical Game Studies Award, 2021 – Department of English & Comparative Literature, UNC

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Awards

• 2024 Institute for the Arts and Humanities – King’s College London Collaboration Grant
• 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities – Humanities Initiative Grant: “Integrating Storytelling & Critical Game Studies into the Curriculum.”
• 2019 Center for Faculty Excellence – Lenovo Instructional Innovation Grant

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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.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, MA English, Claremont Graduate University

2012, BA English Literature and Political Science, Loyola Marymount University

Bio

Eddie is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of British literature of the long eighteenth century, he has particular interests in: authenticity, experimentation with literary form and genre, the Gothic, the history of the novel, influences of popular culture, the material book, and narrative performance.

His dissertation project, entitled Creating Enchantment: a History of the Gothic and Inspiring Interactive Reading, explores the history of intellectual influences on the Gothic, the creative possibilities that writers have found in the genre, and how these writers subsequently experimented with the genre to create a particular reading experience. Bringing together archival research, narrative theory, reader-response theory, and sociological history of reading practices in the long-eighteenth century, he hopes to produce a project that examines how authorial innovation, alongside history of the material book—its paratextual elements, decisions made by publishers, and popular readership—have mediated interactive reading experiences of the Gothic novel in the long eighteenth century.

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Publications:

• Yang, Edward. “Conjuring Sympathy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Inspiring Interactive Reading.” Critical Insights: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. Amenia, Salem Press. (forthcoming 2024)
• Sullivan, Rory and Edward Yang. “Searching for Frankenstein: The Locales of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Then and Now.” 2018

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Teaching Awards

• Krista Turner Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2018.

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Awards

• English Teaching Assistant Award (Germany), The Fulbright Program, 2016-17.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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.

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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.

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Teaching Awards

• Latina/o Studies Teaching Grant – 2020

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Awards

• 2017 – Present: Mellon Fellow

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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.

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Teaching Awards

• Erika Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2022

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Awards

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

• Balch Prize for a Masters Student in English, 2017

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume