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Cate Rivers

September 24, 2021

Degrees

2019, BA English, North Carolina State University

Bio

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.


Carson Watlington

September 20, 2021

Degrees

2020, BA English and Visual Arts, University of Richmond

Bio

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.


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

Ariannah Kubli

September 15, 2020

Degrees

2020, BA English, Georgia State University

Bio

Ariannah Kubli is a third-year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill, where she specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. Her scholarly interests include American literary realism and naturalism; Marxist theory; intellectual history; critical pedagogy; and the public humanities. Her current work explores the interplay between fiction, labor movements, and radical politics in the United States from 1870-1920. She’s particularly attentive to the ways literature encouraged and informed agitation for more equitable economic, political, and social systems, and the ways inequitable systems in turn inflected the period’s literary output.


Awards

  • Arlene Feiner Memorial Research Grant for Women’s Studies, Working Men’s Institute, 2022
  • Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities, Carolina Public Humanities, 2021
  • James E. Routh Outstanding English Major Award, Georgia State University, 2020

Sejal Mahendru

October 9, 2018

Degrees

B.A. English, 2010, University of Delhi

M.A. English, 2012, University of Delhi

M.Phil, English Literature, 2014, University of Delhi

Bio

My research focuses on environmental justice in the Anthropocene. I am interested in the convergences in the fields of ecocriticism, post-colonial theory and global socioeconomics, to examine how the effects of climate change, displacement, toxic and electronic waste, and resource extraction are differentially experienced across the Global North and South. I am also interested reading in environmental advocacy through the the intersections between art and activism in grassroots movements. I study gobal anglophone literature, with a focus on environmental justice movements in India and the U.S.A.


Teaching Awards

  • LSP Graduate Student Affiliate Teaching Award, Fall 2021

Awards

  • Centre for the Studies of the American South Summer Fellowship, 2021

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Leslie Rowen

October 2, 2018

Degrees

2017, BA English, Bellarmine University

2017, BA Spanish, Bellarmine Univesity

Bio

Leslie Rowen studies 20th Century American literature with a focus on the literature of war. Her research concentrates on under-studied soldier writing, with a particular interest in race, gender expression, and trauma. By nature this work relies heavily on the archive, and occasionally extends into the field of medical humanities.


Teaching Awards

  • Professional Development Teaching Award, Department of English & Comparative Literature, Spring 2021, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award, Fall 2020, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Awards

  • Center for the Study of the American South Summer Research Grant, Summer 2021, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • James Peacock REACH Fellowship, Center for Global Initiatives, Summer 2020, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Curriculum Vitae / Resume