Degrees

2024, BA English, University of Pittsburgh.

2024, BA Political Science, University of Pittsburgh.

Bio

I am currently interested in the folklore and cosmological tradition of ancient African civilizations, and the transference of said traditions in modern Black diasporic rhetoric and communication. Works of interest include: Beyoncé’s 2016 album Lemonade, Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Black Death,” and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I am keenly interested in the perseverance of Black tradition under the constraints of colonialism and slavery, and the appearance of the rhetorical traditions in modern society.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2021, MA English, Winthrop University

2020, BA English, Winthrop University

Bio

Faith Rush is a PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is a two-time graduate of Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. During her time there, she became interested in 19th and 20th-century American Literature with an emphasis on Black Southern writers. Faith’s research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to analyze literature’s role in forming and reforming the Black identity. Unpacking well-known and lesser-known works by Black authors, she argues for their insertion into the racialized American literary canon.

Her current research interest is the first-known African American novelist Hannah Crafts and her autobiographic novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative. She hopes to further comprehend Crafts’s literary contributions to American literature and advocate for her placement within academic discourse.

Publications:

• Lift Up. (Rock Hill: The Anthology: Winthrop University Arts & Literary Magazine, 2021).
• Mama Said. (Rock Hill: The Anthology: Winthrop University’s Arts & Literary Magazine, 2021).
• Death of Divorce. (Rochester Hills: Oakland Arts Review, 2020).
• Songs for the People: Music’s Recreation of the Black Identity in the Works of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. (Rock Hill: Showcase of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors, 2020).

Degrees

2015, BA English, University of Georgia

2022, MA English, Georgia State University

Bio

F. Tyler Elrod works among the intersections of critical theory, ecology, and early American literature.

Publications:

• “‘The State of Their Stomachs’: the Politics of Consumption in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation, vol. 57 (2024)

Awards

• 2022 Nichols Graduate Award for Best Graduate Student Paper, British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, BA English, Florida State University

2021, MA English, North Carolina State University

Bio

Madison Storrs is a first-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literature, botany, and art of the long 19th century in Britain. In particular, she considers how women incorporated botanical studies into their writing and art practices. She is also interested in British Romanticism, ecocriticism, ontology, aesthetics, design, and visual culture.

Awards

Teaching Assistantship, First-Year Writing, North Carolina State University, 2020–2021.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA Literature, the representative of the graduates, Waseda University

2020, MA Education, Waseda University

Bio

Satoshi Ohnishi is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.  His research focuses on the relationship between 19th-century American literature and visual media, including the camera obscura and early photographic media. Additionally, he is currently interested in the representation of aging in American literature and African American literature.

Awards

• Okuma Memorial Scholarship, Waseda University, 2018
• Fulbright Scholarship (Fulbright Foreign Student Program), the Japan-United States Educational Commission, 2023-2025
• Graduate Tuition Incentive Scholarship, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2024–25

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, MA English, New York University

2016, BA English, University of California, Los Angeles

Bio

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.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2022, MA English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2016, BA Religious Studies, Wingate University

Bio

A North Carolina native, Joshua Cody Ward joined the program in Fall 2022. His field is Modern and Contemporary American literature broadly (1900-Present), and specifically Literature of the American South, the Appalachian South, and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel, though he is also an avid scholar of Cormac McCarthy and of Thomas Wolfe. His prospective dissertation, Articulating Appalachia, argues that definitions of the region and its people are co-constructed across the 20th c. through both cultural representation (literature, film, music) and Regional and National projects for economic and social uplift.

He is currently a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a Senior Coordinator for the Critical Speakers Series, and a Board Member (2023-2026) for the Thomas Wolfe Society. He is an occasional Reviewer for the The Cormac McCarthy Journal. As a junior scholar, his work has been accepted or published in several journals and essay collections, and he has presented his work at over 20 academic conferences.

Publications:

• “Darkness on the Edge of Town: Beat Subject Formation, Black Ontology, and Fugitivity as Gnosis in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” In This Country’s Hard on People: Cormac McCarthy and American Identity, edited by Vernon Cisney. Forthcoming.
• “Weird Object Relations, Ecology, and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris.” In New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy: Encountering The Passenger and Stella Maris, edited by Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore. Forthcoming.
• “A Literary Ménage à Trois: An Analysis of the Elizabeth Lemmon Collection on Thomas Wolfe, 1934-1935.” Forthcoming.
• “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 88, no. 2-3, 2023, pp. 157-170.
• “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review, vols. 44 & 45, nos. 1 & 2, 2020 & 2021, pp. 8-25.
• [album] The Boron Heist. Ridin’ Rough. Mystery School Records, April 6 2019.
• “Light and Darkness, Sight and Blindness: Religious Knowledge in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.” Wingate Research Review, issue 8, Fall 2016, pp. 87-106.
• “Raison d’être.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 9.
• “On Testing.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 23.

Awards

• Graduate Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022-Present, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
• John R. Bittner Student Literary Prize, May 27^th 2023, Thomas Wolfe Society Conference.
• LSP Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program.
• Graduate Student Transportation Grant, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate School.
• Languages & Literatures Graduate Student Paper Award Recipient, February 23^rd 2023, 44^th Annual SWPACA Conference.
• 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award Recipient, November 12^th 2022, SAMLA 94.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2022, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• The Julian D. Mason Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies, April 29^th 2022, UNC Charlotte, English Department.
• Graduate Teaching Assistantship, Fall 2020-Spring 2022, UNC Charlotte, English Department.
• Wittliff Collections William Hill Research Award, 2021-2022, Texas State University, For archival research conducted July 2021 in the Cormac McCarthy Papers and Woolmer Collections.
• Anne Newman Graduate Student Travel Grant, Fall 2021, UNC Charlotte.
• Excellence in Philosophy Award, April 24^th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
• G. Byrns Coleman Award for Excellence in Religious Studies, April 24^th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
• University Honors, April 24^th, 2016, Wingate University.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, BA English, Wake Forest University

2020, MEd Curriculum and Instruction, Virginia Commonwealth University

Bio

Angelique Bassard is a second-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the English and Comparative Literature program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her Bachelor of Arts degrees in English from Wake Forest University and a Master of Education from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research area is American Literature throughout the Long Nineteenth Century, with special interest in Postbellum African American Literature, Southern Writers, Reconstruction, the memory and haunting of the slave past, and Southern realism and romanticism.

Currently, she is researching NC-born black writer Jack Thorne, pseudonym of David Bryant Fulton, and his use and subversion of Southern romance in his 1901 novel, Hanover; or the Persecution of the Lowly: A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. 

Awards

• Lee Green Award, UNC Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023
• Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC Chapel Hill, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2021, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College

Bio

Doctoral student and Teaching Fellow 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.

Degrees

2018, MA English, Georgetown University

2016, BA English, Sewanee: The University of the South

Bio

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.

Publications:

• Catlett, Beverley. “WH Auden’s On This Island: The Phenomenology of Apocalyptic Revelation at the Point of Epiphany.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 22.3 (2020): 185-205.
• Catlett, Beverley. “Madness as Prophecy in Dystopia: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, and Heller’s Satire of Wartime Insanity.” Janus Head 16.1 (2018): 173-225.

Awards

• 2017 Cosmos Scholar Grant Recipient, The Cosmos Club Foundation (Washington, DC)
• The Andrew Nelson Lytle Prize for Excellence in English and Southern Studies, Sewanee: The University of the South (2016)

Curriculum Vitae / Resume