2018, MA English, New York University
2016, BA English, University of California, Los Angeles
Celeste is a graduate student in UNC’s English and Comparative Literature Department. They work as a teaching fellow for the department, an assistant at The William Blake Archive, and for the Jane Austen Summer Program. Celeste is currently interested in exploring ideas of apocalypse and ruin in the Long Nineteenth-Century.
2022, MA English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
2016, BA Religious Studies, Wingate University
A North Carolina native, Joshua Cody Ward joined the program in Fall 2022. His field is Modern and Contemporary American literature broadly (1900-Present), specifically Literature of the American South and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel.
African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Creative Writing | Genre Theory | Latina / Latino Literature | Literature and Philosophy | Modernism | Poetry and Poetics | Posthumanism | Science Fiction | Southern Literature | The Novel
2013, BA English, Wake Forest University
2020, MEd Curriculum and Instruction, Virginia Commonwealth University
My interests include Postbellum African American literature from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century (1870s-1910s), Southern black writers, and speculative fiction.
African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | Critical Race Studies | Southern Literature | The Novel
2021, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College
First-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, focusing on Southern literature and religion.
2018, MA English, Georgetown University
2016, BA English, Sewanee: The University of the South
I am a first-year PhD candidate and TA in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. Prior to entering the program, I earned my MA in English from Georgetown (2018), and my BA in English from Sewanee: The University of the South (2016). From 2017 to 2019, I pursued a long-term archival research project at Yale University, supported by grants from The Cosmos Club Foundation and Georgetown University. My current research interests include 19th century American literature; literature of the sea; ecocriticism; literary theory; and philosophy.
2019, BA Philosophy and Religious Studies, Manhattan College
2021, MA English and American Literature, New York University
2021, MLIS Rare Books and Special Collections, Long Island University
Tim Gress is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Fellow in the department of English & Comparative Literature. His research focuses primarily on the literary and cultural history of Britain during the 19th century, especially as it relates to the history of the book. Other interests include lesser-known woman writers of the late-Romantic and early-Victorian periods, the history and development of the novel in English, descriptive bibliography, and book collecting. Tim also works as a Graduate Assistant in the Rare Book Collection at Wilson Special Collections Library.
2018, BA Classics, University of Pennsylvania
2020, BA English, George Washington University
Ryan Carroll is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He is interested in information, documentary storytelling, and truth-telling in 19th-century British and Transatlantic literature. He works to read these issues in light of contemporary polycrisis, information overload, and activist action.
Outside of academia, Ryan writes on theology, particularly queer and liberation theologies. His work has been published by theology publications and the Jesuit Conference of Canada and North America.
Aesthetics | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | British Literature from 1900 to the Present | Comparative Literature | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Media Studies | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | The Novel | Transatlantic Studies
2019, MA English, George Washington University
2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University
Elisabeth studies 19th century American literature and medicine, focusing on how changing theories of mental illness and its treatment were encoded in congregate care institutions over the course of the century. Her research, which draws on a varied archive of patient memoirs, journalistic exposes, and fictional depictions of congregate care, investigates entanglements of race, gender, and disability in questions of mental healthcare.
“Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven, edited by Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Routledge, 2021.
African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Depictions Of The Child | Disability Studies | History of the Book | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Poetry and Poetics | Southern Literature | The Novel | Women Writers
2008, BA English, James Madison University
2020, MA English, James Madison University
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.
Aesthetics | African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Disability Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Southern Literature
