2016, BS, Princeton University
2020, MA, Duke University
My research deals with the aesthetics of self-disclosure, especially in its relationship to political crisis, and for the questions of affect, queerness, and repair.
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
2021, BA English, Brenau University
Kaleigh Sullivan is a Master’s student and Graduate Research Assistant at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. She completed a bachelor’s degree at Brenau University (Gainesville, Ga) in 2021, where she majored in English and minored in biology. Following graduation, Kaleigh spent one year teaching the Fundamentals of English as an adjunct instructor at Lanier Technical College (Gainesville, Ga). Now, at UNC-CH, she continues to explore subjects of the Health Humanities and psychopathology through the Literature, Medicine, and Culture (LMC) Program and her assistantship in the HHIVE Lab.
Master’s Merit Assistantship, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, 2021 Outstanding Graduate of English, Brenau University, 2021
2020, BA English, Indiana University
2020, BA Anthropology, Indiana University
2022, MA English, Syracuse University
My area of focus is on horror, race, gender, and sexuality and how the these intersecting ties are utilized within popular media throughout American history. Specifically within film, television, novels, and video games, I am interested in how these various mediums relay American history through a horror/gothic lens.
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.
2020, MA English, Boston College
2016, BA English, Case Western Reserve University
I study twentieth-century American and Russophone literature, and I am also interested in urban studies. In my academic research I focus on things ranging from American movie musicals to postcolonial theory, and I write literary reviews of works in translation.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Film and Media Studies | Modernism | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Social Justice | The Novel
2019, BA English, North Carolina State University
Cate Rivers is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. She graduated from North Carolina State University in 2019 with a BA in English and minors in history and Japan studies. Her main area focuses are the Southern United States and Japan. Her interests span trauma studies, nationalism, memory, gender and critical race theories, modernism, cultural representations of mental illness, mysticism, and Buddhist literature. Her ongoing research project frames 20th century Japanese novels and novels from the Southern Renaissance as social histories, with particular attention to war memory, family history, culpability, the construction of “family,” and the relation between national identity and self-conception.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Disability Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature and History | Literature and Religion | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Pedagogy | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Social Justice | Southern Literature | Transatlantic Studies
2020, BA English and Visual Arts, University of Richmond
Carson Watlington is a PhD student in the department of English & Comparative Literature and the Graduate Assistant for Film Studies. Her work is rooted in 20th/21st century American Literature, with a particular attention to minority and ethnic texts.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Digital Humanities | Film and Media Studies | Philosophy Of Language | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Visual Culture and Arts | Women Writers
2021, BA English, Centenary College of Louisiana
2021, BA French, Centenary College of Louisiana
Audrey Gibson is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is broadly interested in 19th and 20th century American literature, with particular emphasis on Southern and multiethnic writing. Her research is mainly focused on French-language poetry, particularly Afro-Creole literature and newspaper writing, situated in New Orleans during the Civil War and Reconstruction. This research explores the construction of identity and community through language, publication, education, religion, and political involvement.
Tempêtes et Éclairs: Poésies d’Adolphe Duhart, écrivain créole de la Louisiane by Adolphe Duhart, edited by Audrey J. Gibson, Éditions Tintamarre, 2022.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Literature and History | Modernism | Pedagogy | Poetry and Poetics | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Social Justice | Southern Literature | Transatlantic Studies
2019, BA English, Mount Holyoke College
My scholarly interests naturally converge around questions of trauma, ethics, affect, and divergent subjectivities in narratives of resistance and reconciliation. My work is grounded in an intersectional feminist hermeneutic lens to explore the role of gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism in texts by contemporary American multiethnic women writers. I am also interested in speculative imagery and it’s significance in illuminating historically silenced facets of subjectivity. Psychoanalytic criticisms surrounding haunting and trauma, in conjunction with an exploration of queer women’s psyches as sites for potential violence or intimacy are also uniquely compelling to me. My work asks how/why ‘deviant affects’ are labeled as such, and why the burden of silencing those affects largely falls on “marginalized” folks, i.e. queer and trans women of color?
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Social Justice | Women Writers
