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.

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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 20^th/21^st century American Literature, with a particular attention to minority and ethnic texts.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Degrees

2020, BA English, Georgia State University

Bio

Ariannah Kubli is a second-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 between 1880-1920. 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.

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Awards

• James E. Routh Outstanding English Major Award, Georgia State University, 2020

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Degrees

B.A. Lawrence University

Bio

Adhy Kim is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. His research areas include speculative literature, colonialism and post-colonialism in Japan and Korea, race, and American Cold War empire. His dissertation examines literary intersections between Cold War memory and speculative natural histories.

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Publications:

“Looking Back on Colonial Korea: Nostalgia and Anti-Nostalgia in Park Chan- Wook’s The Handmaiden,” The Journal of Global and Postcolonial Studies 7:2, special issue on postcolonial nostalgia, eds. Simon Lewis and Giusi Russo (2019)

“Japanese Melancholy and the Ethics of Concealment in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 52:4 (Dec. 2019)

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Degrees

2016, M.F.A. Poetry Writing, University of North Carolina — Greensboro

2008, B.A. English, University of Virginia — Charlottesville

Bio

Abigail studies contemporary multiethnic literatures, with a focus on TV, film, music videos, and digital media. She holds an MFA in poetry writing and has taught courses in composition, American literature, and contemporary poetry.

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Publications:

• “Blue can be a place/ please can it be a place” finalist for 2015-2016 Mid-American Review James Wright Prize, Vol 36, no. 2 (spring 2016).
• “somebody or other pretended a revelation” in Prairie Schooner, vol. 90, no. 3 (fall 2016).
• “and while he told the sands of his hour-glass, or the throbs and little beatings of his watch” in Bayou Magazine, vol. 65 (fall/winter 2016).
• “The library of July” in CALYX, vol. 29, no. 1 (winter 2016).
• “Two Face reads that batman has returned” in Barrow Street, (winter 2014).

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Awards

• Humanities for the Public Good, Professional Pathways Award, project developing curricula for UNC correctional education courses, summer 2018
• Richard Bland Fellowship, Center for the Study of the American South, summer 2017

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Degrees

2012, BA English, University of California at Berkeley

Bio

Trisha Federis Remetir is a doctoral candidate at UNC Chapel Hill who writes about transpacific migration, representations of water extractions, interspecies entanglements, coloniality, anglophone Filipinx and world literatures, and gender. In her research and teaching methods, she is committed to pushing the boundaries of literary, cultural, and media studies to examine questions of race, gender, and settler logics, while thinking about futures of care, transnational solidarity, and abolition with students.

Trisha’s dissertation, Unfamiliar Waters: Representations of Resource Extraction in the Philippines, 1970s to present, argues that extractive projects in waters in and around the Philippines have altered the composition of water, both on material and representational scales. By examining  examples of water in transnational Filipinx contemporary poetry, 1970s Filipino social realist film, historical archives, and other media, this project pushes against the assumption that the Philippines’ relationship to the Global North is solely defined by extraction of inanimate resources on land (such as oils and minerals)—in fact, this project argues that 20- and 21st century extractive water projects are focusing more on the management of renewable resources and regulating the movement of animate beings (such as human bodies and fish), to the detriment of all. The three chapters, entitled Saltwater, Freshwater, and Storms, each take on three  “types” of water as they were redefined by various moments of resource extraction, such as transnational migration patterns set into place during the Marcos authoritarian regime, movements to nationalize freshwater spaces for aquaculture, and tenuous responses to ever-increasing typhoons. This project makes significant contributions to the  Critical Filipino Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), and media and cultural studies by conversing with scientific archives and artists as they make sense of their changing relationships to water and aquatic life. And lastly, the project contends that Filipino/a/x water aesthetics also challenges extraction’s singular vision of water by uncovering manifold ways of living in relation to water.  In so doing, artists and cultural producers in this study alter water’s cultural and material makeup as well.

Trisha’s forthcoming work can be seen in the edited collection Ecologies in Southeast Asian Media and Popular culture, and in public digital humanities projects as a 2020 Imagining America PAGE fellow. She has taught courses in digital humanities, world literature, ocean literature, and film.

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Publications:

2021                (Forthcoming) “Aquaculture Visions, Techno-Settler Hierarchies, and The Mysterious Milkfish (1982),” edited collection Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, ed. Paul Michael Atienza and Dr. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez.

 

2020                (Forthcoming) “National Properties, National Ecologies: Postcolonial and ecocritical engagements with Mikhail Red’s Birdshot (2016),” edited collection Ecologies in Southeast Asian Media and Popular Culture, ed. Dr. Jason Telles and Dr. Charles Ryan.

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Teaching Awards

2020

• Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow

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Awards

2021

• Digital Dissertation Fellowship

2020

• Chancellor’s Doctoral Candidacy Award
• Humanities for the Public Good Grant
• UC Speculative Futures Collective grant
• Southeast Asian Language Council Tuition Support Award
• Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow

2019

• Pre-Dissertation Exploration Award
• Summer Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellow
• Institute of the Arts and Humanities Travel Award
• Representing Migrations Humanities Lab Fellowship (Duke)

2018

• Summer Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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.

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Teaching Awards

• LSP Graduate Student Affiliate Teaching Award, Fall 2021

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Awards

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

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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.

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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 

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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 

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume