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Celeste Seifert

October 5, 2022

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

Joshua Cody Ward

September 8, 2022

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), specifically Literature of the American South and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel.


Publications:

  • “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review. Forthcoming.
  • “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review. Forthcoming.
  • [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.

Awards

  • Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
  • Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022-Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill.
  • LSP Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program.
  • Graduate Student Transportation Grant, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate School, “‘Writing around the edges of things’: On the Lighthouse in American Literature and in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.”
  • 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award, November 12th, 2022, SAMLA 94.
  • Travel Grant, Fall 2022, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department, “Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed, and Black Women’s Writing in the 1980s: Perceptions versus Reality” & “Urban Fantasy and the Dickensian in Alex Pheby’s Mordew.”
  • The Julian D. Mason Award for Excellence in Graduate StudiesApril 29th, 2022, UNC Charlotte English Department.
  • Graduate Teaching Assistantship, Fall 2020-Spring 2022, UNC Charlotte.
  • 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, “Is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon A Modernist Novel.”
  • Excellence in Philosophy Award, April 24th, 2016, Wingate University Religious Studies Department.
  • G. Byrns Coleman Award for Excellence in Religious Studies, April 24th, 2016, Wingate University Religious Studies Department.
  • University Honors, April 24th, 2016, Wingate University.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Angelique Bassard

August 22, 2022

Degrees

2013, BA English, Wake Forest University

2020, MEd Curriculum and Instruction, Virginia Commonwealth University

Bio

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.


Brennan Jones

August 15, 2022

Degrees

2021, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College

Bio

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.


Beverley Catlett

September 22, 2021

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

Timothy Gress

August 19, 2021

Degrees

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

Bio

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.


Publications:

  • A Collector’s Zeal: Treasures from the DeCoursey Fales Collection at Manhattan College. (Riverdale, New York: Manhattan College, 2020).

Awards

  • William T. Buice III Scholarship, Rare Book School, University of Virginia, 2020
  • Director’s Scholarship, Rare Book School, University of Virginia, 2019
  • Edward Branigan Scholars Grant for Research in the Humanities, Manhattan College, 2018

Amy Yue-Yin Chan

August 5, 2021

Degrees

2018, BA Classics, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

I am interested in studying the lyric poem in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Awards

  • Dickinson Critical Institute Grant, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2022
  • Transportation Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate School, 2022
  • Travel Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate & Professional Student Government, 2022
  • Booker Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill Department of English & Comparative Literature, 2021
  • Inclusive Excellence Top-Up, UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate School, 2021

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Ryan Carroll

August 4, 2021

Degrees

2020, BA English, George Washington University

Bio

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.


Publications:


Awards

  • 2022 Ruth Rose Richardson Award

Elisabeth McClanahan Harris

June 15, 2021
Photo of Elisabeth McClanahan

Degrees

2019, MA English, George Washington University

2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University

Bio

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.


Publications:

“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.


Awards

  • Robert Bain Award for scholarship in American Literature, UNC English Department, 2021
  • Southern Futures Graduate Award, 2020
  • McCandlish Endowment Fellowship, 2017-2019
  • PEO Continuing Education Grant, 2018

Jonathan Albrite

September 22, 2020

Degrees

2008, BA English, James Madison University

2020, MA English, James Madison University

Bio

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.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume