2017, BA English, Bellarmine University
Leslie Rowen studies 20th Century American War literature with a focus on the intersection of race, gender, and trauma. Her archival research engages with soldier newspapers published during wartime.
BA of English Literature, Auburn University, 2017
My area of study lies in 20th century African American literature with a focus on gender and sexuality studies. I like to say I live in Harlem Renaissance, but I’m also poking out into the later 20th century as well as into film of the 21st.
2013, BA English and Plan II Honors, The University of Texas at Austin
Travis is broadly invested in postwar American fiction, film, and visual art. His research specifically clusters around portrayals of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the 1980s to the present in literary, filmic, and theoretical domains. Travis is particularly interested in the extent to which scripts governing racial representation inform these portrayals.
Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, Spring 2017
Short Term Fellowship, The Huntington Library, 2019
Summer Research Grant, Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2018
Graduate Student Research Award, Program in Sexuality Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2018
Ruth Rose Richardson Award for Outstanding Record in the First Year of Graduate Study, Department of English, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2015
Dean’s Distinguished Graduate, College of Liberal Arts (12 students chosen from 2,983 graduates), The University of Texas at Austin, 2013
2015, BA English with Teaching Licensure, Liberty University
I study hip-hop and African-American literature post-1940, particularly how hip-hop’s compositional processes work within the spectrum of orality and literacy. I also write about religion and hip-hop inflected through post-secular theory with a focus on evangelicalism and contemporary mainstream hip-hop.
2012, MA English, Brandeis University.
2007, BA English and Philosophy, Columbia University.
My research interests are 20th and 21st Century Experimental Narratives, particularly African-American Fiction.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | British Literature from 1900 to the Present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Literature and Philosophy | Modernism | Philosophy Of Language
2014, BA English & Psychology, Wesleyan University
Rachel Warner is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research interests include twentieth-century American literature, women’s and gender studies, queer of color critique, and animal studies. She has completed two peer-reviewed publications: one explores Black feminist theories of embodiment and nature in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, forthcoming from Society & Animals; and the other offers an archival analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s brief tenure at UNC and NCCU, published by North Carolina Literary Review in May 2020. Rachel also co-directs the graduate working group Literature, Medicine and Culture Colloquium (LMCC) which explores topics in health humanities. Finally, Rachel regularly teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, LGBTQIA+ literature and culture, and the history of horror literature and cinema. She is currently working on her dissertation, a literary and cultural history of female masculinity in American modernism.
“Zora Neale Hurston in North Carolina: Drama, Education, and Contemporary Activism.” North Carolina Literary Review, no. 29, August 2020.
“‘A Winged but Grounded Bird’: Morrison’s Mixed Treatment of Animality in The Bluest Eye.” Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies. (forthcoming spring 2021)
“A Crisis in (Female) Masculinity: My Ántonia & the Imaginative Recreation of the Western Frontier.” The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture, edited by Lydia Cooper and Joana Conings. (forthcoming spring 2021)
““The Poems and the Dances of the Shades’: Destabilizing Psychological Theories of Grief in The Year of Magical Thinking.” Death Within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, edited by Adriana Teodorescu (2018): 10-27.
Eliason Dissertation Summer Research Fellowship, 2020
MLA COVID-19 Emergency Grant, Modern Language Association, 2020
Graduate Student Travel Fund, ECL Department, 2020
Paul Green Prize, North Carolina Literary Review, 2019
Student Learning Circle Grant, UNC Center for Global Initiatives, 2019
Winchester Fellowship, Wesleyan University, 2018
Deborah W. Shelton Endowment for Graduate Travel Awards, ECL Department, 2018
Winchester Fellowship, Wesleyan University, 2017
Albrecht B. Strauss SAMLA Awards Fund, 2016
Graduate Student Travel Fund, ECL Department, 2016
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Modernism | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Women Writers
Dwight Tanner is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the recipient of a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship for 2019-2020. Dwight works in 21st century American/British literature with a focus on Ethnic Literatures and Critical Race Theory. His current research focuses on minoritarian identity and conceptions/rhetorics of change in apocalyptic narratives. He also studies posthumanism, speculative fiction, environmental humanism, and drama and performance theory.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | British Literature from 1900 to the Present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Drama | Film and Media Studies | Latina / Latino Literature | Narrative Theory | Pedagogy | Posthumanism | Science Fiction
2012, M. Div., Duke University
2007, BA Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, University of Chicago
Eric studies 19th and early 20th Century American Literature with a particular focus on Civil War literature and its impact on American cultural identity. He is also interested in the intersections of race, religion, and empire.
2012, MA English, University of Virginia
2010, BA English, Tulane University
Kenneth is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century American fiction, with interests in genre, film, and the literary moment after postmodernism. His dissertation focuses on the re-invention of the tropes of film noir and hard-boiled crime fiction of the 1930s and 40s in mainstream contemporary American literature. His solo-taught literature classes so far have included a version of the Contemporary Literature class titled “Alternatives to Realism” and a version of the Popular Genres class focused on detective fiction, science fiction, graphic novels, horror, and children’s literature. He managed to successfully teach House of Leaves in a 100-level undergraduate class. In his spare time, he has written reviews of over 1,000 films.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | British Literature from 1900 to the Present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Film and Media Studies | Genre Theory | Media Studies | Science Fiction | The Novel | Visual Culture and Arts | Women Writers
2015, MA English, Appalachian State University
2010, BS Secondary English Education, Piedmont International University
2010, BA English, High Point University
Kevin Pyon’s research interests include African American history, religion, music, and literature. His current dissertation project explores 18th and 19th century African American literature through the lens of the black radical tradition. Through a re-configuration of traditional Marxist literary theory, it seeks to discover in early black autobiography and fiction what might be called the “racial unconscious” of capitalism itself–that is, the ways that the racial structure(s) of 19th century American capitalism (in both the slave South and industrial North) are thematically and formally manifested in the narratives and novels of black authors of the era.
