Degrees

2014, BA English & Psychology, Wesleyan University

Bio

Rachel Warner is a doctoral student in English and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work lies at the intersection of queer and transgender studies, poststructuralist feminist theorizing, and American culture studies. She is particularly interested in representations of non-normative gendered embodiments and transgressive sexualities in 20^th century multiethnic American literature. In May of 2017, Rachel received the Winchester Fellowship from her alma mater to prepare for comprehensive exams and conduct preliminary research for her prospectus. She has also worked in the emerging field of health humanities by helping convene the 2016 Health Humanities Exchange conference at UNC-CH and serving as director of the of Literature, Medicine, and Culture Colloquium for the 2016-2017 academic year.

 

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Degrees

2012, M. Div., Duke University

2007, BA Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, University of Chicago

Bio

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.

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Publications:

• What’s in a name? Racial Transparency and the Jazz-Age in “Hills Like White Elephants”, The Hemingway Review, Fall 2018.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2012, MA English, University of Virginia

2010, BA English, Tulane University

Bio

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.

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Publications:

• “Cool Girls and Bad Girls: Reinventing the Femme Fatale in Contemporary American Fiction.” Interdisciplinary Humanities 33.1 (Spring 2016): 150 – 170.

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Awards

• 2017 Graduate School Summer Research Fellowship
• 2010 Senior Scholar Award in English, Tulane University

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, MA English, Appalachian State University

2010, BS Secondary English Education, Piedmont International University

2010, BA English, High Point University

Bio

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.

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Publications:

• “Towards an African-American Genealogy of Market and Religion in Rap Music.” Popular Music and Society. Online ahead of print (April 2018): 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2018.1458275

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Awards

• Ruth Rose Richardson Award, UNC, Fall 2016
• Blyden and Roberta Jackson Fellowship in Afro-American Literature, UNC, 2015-2016
• Cratis D. Williams Society Inductee, Appalachian State U, 2015

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2011, B.A. Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Cornell University

2012, M.A. History, Carnegie Mellon University

Bio

Mark Collins is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works in the fields of contemporary American and multi-ethnic literature and women’s and gender studies. His academic interests include: feminist theory, science and technology studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies. Mark is currently working on his dissertation project, called “Nuclear Reproduction: Race, Gender, and Reproductive Control in US Cold War Speculative Fiction,” which explores the relationship between the discourses of nuclear warfare and reproduction in literary and cultural texts from the decades spanning the Cold War period.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2012, BA English (Honors), The George Washington University

Bio

I am a PhD candidate in English who specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and poetry and poetics. I am currently completing a dissertation entitled “American Contentment (and Its Discontents),” which stages a claim for the recuperation of contentment within literary studies through an engagement with American literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

 

At UNC, I have taught introductory composition courses and TA’d for Professor Thrailkill’s Literature, Medicine, and Culture course.

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Publications:

• “ ‘There Is No Miracle More Cruel Than This’: Read, Relaxation, and Maternal Agency   in Plath’s Three Women” (Literature and Medicine 36.1: 2018)

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Teaching Awards

• Hartsell Award for excellence in teaching first year composition, 2015

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Awards

• Mellon Graduate Five-Year Fellowship, 2013—2018
• Robert Bain Award for outstanding achievement in nineteenth-century American literature, 2015
• Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2018-2019

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2010, BA English, History, Political Science, Vanderbilt University

2013, MA English, Southern Illinois Univerity

Bio

A Midwestern transplant to North Carolina, Sarah has taken a circuitous route to Chapel Hill. After graduating from Vanderbilt with too many majors, she joined the Peace Corps as an Environmental Extension in Mali where she helped build women’s gardens, drank a lot of tea, and made friends with goats. She is currently working on an alternative dissertation that highlights fabric, cloth, and textiles in contemporary multi-ethnic literature. She’s creating an art installation from texts and textiles, exploring how memory, gender, kinship, and labor get lodged in warps and wefts. She lives in Hillsborough with her husband, a dog and two cats rescued from the North Carolina wilderness, and nine chickens who do their own thing. She’s the current Editor-in-Chief for The Carolina Quarterly, and spends a lot of her time telling campus stories through her work with UNC Visitors Center.

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Awards

• UNC Royster Fellow

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Degrees

M.A. University of Colorado, Boulder

B.A. Illinois State University

Bio

Sean DiLeonardi teaches and writes broadly about contemporary American literature and its relationship to race, technology, science, and media. Drawing from an interdisciplinary mix of literary criticism, media theory, and science/technology studies, Sean’s research catalogues the effects of new technologies on literary form and, inversely, literary culture’s role in shaping American discourse on race, science, and digitality.

 

Sean is currently preparing a dissertation that traces an epistemological shift in scientific and literary ideas about probability in the American midcentury. The dissertation argues that an array of new media—from digital translators to the first major English translation of the I Ching—automates probability, thus inspiring a set of formal innovations in both scientific and literary narratives. 

 

Chair, 2017-18 Boundaries of Literature Symposium

Co-editor, Ethos Review (http://www.ethosreview.org/)

Co-organizer, the Americanist Speaker Series, in collaboration with Duke English

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Publications:

• “Cryptographic Reading: Machine Translation, the New Criticism, and Nabokov’s Pnin,” Post45: Peer-Reviewed (forthcoming)

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Awards

• Dean’s Graduate Fellowship. Dean’s Office, College of Arts and Sciences, 2018-19.
• Carl Hartsell Award for Teaching Excellence. Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, UNC, 2018
• Research Fellowship. The Graduate School, UNC, Spring 2018.
• Maynard Adams Fellowship. Carolina Public Humanities, 2017-18.
• Robert Bain Award. Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, UNC, 2016.
• Digital Media Internship. SITES Laboratory, UNC, 2015-16.
• Travel Grant. Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, UNC, 2014.
• Travel Grant. United Gov. for Graduate Students, UC Boulder, 2013.
• Brome Creative Writing Award. English Dept., ISU, 2007.
• Associated Bank National Scholarship. 2003.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2008, BA English and Studio Art, Drew University

2010, MA English, University of Maine at Orono

2019 (expected), PhD English, University or North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

Adra Raine is a scholar, teacher, and poet who studies and teaches American Literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on contemporary literature, poetry and poetics, and the innovative tradition. Her dissertation, “Resonance Over Resolution: Resisting Definition in Nathaniel Mackey, Ed Roberson, and Susan Howe’s Post-1968 Poetics” focuses on three major American poets whose works engage the politics of poetic form as an urgent response to global social crisis in the late twentieth century, innovating poetic forms that prefer resonance over resolution: to study all sides of meaning, history, and struggle in cross-cultural relation to one another, rather than resolve into single definitions that privilege one culture of meaning over another.

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Publications:

• “In the Folds: Process and Interval in Nathaniel Mackey’s and Ed Roberson’s Post-1968Poetics,” Paideuma (in review).
• “Excavations of ‘a Reagan Childhood’: Lauren Levin’s The Braid.” Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion (accepted).
• Want-Catcher (New York: The Operating System, 2018)
• “Dear Djamilaa: On Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Issue 43 (2015): n.

  pag.

• “Poetry as ‘Syndrome and Song’ in Bruce Smith’s Devotions.” Free Verse, Issue 22(Spring 2012): n. pag.

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Awards

• Kirby Dissertation Fellowship, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2018)
• Distinguished Teaching Fellow, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017)
• Dissertation Research Fellowship, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017)
• Most Outstanding Graduate Student, English Department, University of Maine at Orono (2010)
• Honorable Mention, Turner Award for Essay Writing, University of Maine at Orono (2010)

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

• 2013, M.A. English and Comparative Literature, UNC-Chapel Hill.
• 2008, B.A. English, George Mason University.

Bio

María J. Durán is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and Graduate Assistant for the UNC Latina/o Studies Program. Her dissertation examines portrayals of pain in Latinx literature and the ways it can give birth to or elevate political consciousness to incite resistance and social protest in Latinx communities.

Durán has served as a guest blogger for UNC’s Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA), and she has published in the leading Chicana/o Studies Journal, Aztlán. She has taught ENGL 105, ENGL 105i Business, ENGL 129, WGST 233, and ENGL 364.  As a theatre artist, Durán co-directed a sold-out production of In the Heights(Spring 2017), staged at The ArtsCenter in Carrboro, NC. She was invited to share her theatre work at the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) Regional Arts Training in Charlotte, NC (Summer 2017). Recently, she directed a staged reading of Just Like Us, a play about undocumented youth by Karen Zacarías (March 2018). She currently serves on the PlayMakers Repertory Company Advisory Council.

Durán is an advocate for underrepresented minority education.  She has worked with The Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill to assist talented underrepresented undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in their pursuit of doctoral degrees. In Summer 2015, she received the UNC Graduate School’s Richard Bland Fellowship and interned with Juntos, a North Carolina State University cooperative extension program that helps Latinx students achieve higher education. She is also a Carolina Firsts Advocate for undergraduate students and serves on the advisory board for the Carolina Grad Student F1RSTS. In her spare time, Durán enjoys visiting coffeeshops, hot yoga, traveling, and spending time with her two pet bunnies. Click here to read about Durán’s decision to pursue graduate studies and what advice she has for prospective graduate students.

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Publications:

Refereed Journal Articles

• “Bodies That Should Matter: Chicana/o Farmworkers, Slow Violence, and the Politics of (In)visibility in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol 42, no 1, 2017, pp. 45-71.

Other Publications (published under maiden name “Obando”)

• “Harvesting Dignity: Remembering the Lives of Farmworkers.” Institute for the Study of the Americas, UNC-CH (December 2012).
• “Latinos Reach New Highs in College Enrollment.” Institute for the Study of the Americas, UNC-CH (November 2012).

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Awards

• Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, Honorable Mention (April 2018)
• Diversity and Student Success Travel Award, The Graduate School, UNC-CH (April 2018)
• Performing Arts Special Activities Fund Grant, Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, UNC-CH (2017-2018)
• Chancellor’s Doctoral Candidacy Award, Initiative for Minority Excellence, UNC-CH (Fall 2017).
• Mellon Dissertation Grant, Institute for the Study of the Americas, UNC-CH (Summer 2017).
• Hispanic Scholarship Fund Scholar (Spring 2017).
• Future Faculty Fellowship Program, Center for Faculty Excellence, UNC-CH (Fall 2016).
• Florence Brann Eble Summer Research Fellowship, The Graduate School, UNC-CH (Summer 2016).
• Richard Bland Fellowship, The Graduate School, UNC-CH (Summer 2015).
• Travel Grant, English and Comparative Literature, UNC-CH (Spring 2017, 2015, 2013, 2012).
• Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program Fellowship (Summer 2008).

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