Degrees

2023, BA English, Washington and Lee University

Bio

My research focuses on the relationship between fear, colonialism, and the Gothic genre. I am interested in how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British texts use Gothic conventions to stoke fear of colonized peoples as well as how more recent postcolonial texts reclaim these conventions to criticize colonialism. I have studied the role of spirituality in the colonial and postcolonial Gothic, including British portrayals of Obeah and other Afro-Caribbean spiritualities. More recently, I have been interested in how the Gothic intersects with travel writing.

Awards

• Travel Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2024
• Sidney M. B. Coulling Prize for Best Senior Work, Washington and Lee University
• Catherine Houston Campbell Scholarship in English Literature, Washington and Lee University
• Jean Amory Wornom Award for Distinguished Critical Writing, Washington and Lee University
• Sidney M. B. Coulling Prize in English, Washington and Lee University

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, MA English, Texas Christian University

2019, BA English, Texas Christian University

Bio

Andreley Bjelland is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period. Her dissertation explores representations of children and crime in early modern English literature, drama, pamphlets, and ballads.

Teaching Awards

• PIT Journal and Conference Curricular Innovation Award, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2024
• Erika Lindemann Award for Demonstrated Excellence in Teaching, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023

Awards

• Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024
• Medieval and Early Modern Studies Small Research Grant, UNC MEMS, 2023
• Druscilla French Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Graduate School, 2021

Degrees

2013, M.A. English, Duke University

2008, B.A. English, Davidson College

Bio

I work on British and transatlantic literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic era, with an emphasis on poetry and genre. I am particularly interested in evolving systems of land use, in working-class writers and rural issues, commons and enclosures, and economic and agricultural history. I have published on Samuel Johnson, antiquarianism, and the mass reading public; on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, vitalism, and Romantic-era natural history, and my journal article on Robert Bloomfield, Wordsworth, and Romantic genre transformations won the 2016 Ralph Cohen Prize in New Literary History. I also publish poetry and literary translations, and I am coeditor of the small poetry press Golias Books.

Publications:

• “Edward Rushton,” in Jackson Bibliography of Romantic Poetry, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson et al., University of Toronto.
• “Patronage and Poetic Form: Henry Kirke White, Capel Lofft, and the Monthly Mirror,” in Henry Kirke White, 1785–1806, edited by Tim Fulford. Online, August 2022.
• “Refinement and Romantic Genre,” New Literary History 48, no. 1 (2017). Winner of the 2016 Ralph Cohen Prize.
  
• “Johnson, Warton, and the Romance Reader,” in Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle, edited by Anthony Lee (Bucknell University Press, 2019).
• “Survival Narratives: The Georgic and the Romantic Genre-System,” in Narratives of Romanticism, edited by Sandra Heinen and Katharina Rennhak (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017).
• Precious against a Precious Thing: Selected Poems of Michael Field, selected, edited, and introduced by Christopher Catanese and Lawrence Giffin, preface by Stacy Szymaszek (Golias Books, 2019).

Awards

• 2023. “Listening to the System: Genre in the D. K. Wilgus Papers.” Research grant, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
• 2022–2023. “Land, Labor, Literature.” Public Humanities Incubator Award and Fellowship, Modern Language Association
• 2022. Dahl Family Fellowship, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
• 2016. Graduate Research Fellowship, 18th-century British paintings collections, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
• 2016. Duke International Research Travel Award, University of Vienna, Austria
• 2015–2016. William Preston Few Fellowship, Duke University
• 2015. Six-Month Research Fellowship, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), Seminar für Englische Philologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
• 2015. Duke International Research Travel Award, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
• 2015. Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Summer Research Fellowship, Goethe-Institut Göttingen

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, MA English Literature, Virginia Tech
2015, BA English Literature and Education, Roanoke College

Bio

Anna Merz is a second year PhD student interested in literature of the long, undisciplined nineteenth century, Anna’s past research projects have centered literary depictions of Victorian education and childhood. Her early-stage dissertation research focuses on depictions and illustrations of “bad” children in Victorian literature, especially the ways in which “badness” as a label is often gendered and racialized.

At UNC, Anna works closely with the Jane Austen Summer Program, a public humanities outreach program, and in the William Blake Archive—a Digital Humanities project cataloguing Blake’s works.

Teaching Awards

• Richard Hoffman GTA Teaching Award for Excellence: Virginia Tech English Departmental Award, 2020
• Michael J. Sandridge Education Award for Excellence: Roanoke College, 2015
• English Department Teaching Award for Excellence: Roanoke College, 2015

Awards

• Caroline Pace Chermside Award for Best Master’s Thesis: Virginia Tech, 2020
• Dickens Universe Fellow, 2020
• Phi Beta Kappa, 2015
• Briethaupt Scholarship for the Scholarly Study of Literature: Roanoke College, 2014

Degrees

2010, B.A. (Hons) Literae Humaniores, University of Oxford

2018, M.A. Ancient Greek and Latin, Boston College

Bio

Everett Lang studies Ancient Greek and Latin literature, primarily from the Roman Imperial period, and its later reception in Early Modern Britain and northern Europe.

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

Degrees

2016, BA English, Rhodes College

2019, MA English, University of Alabama

Bio

I specialize in literature, religion, and politics from 1550-1640, with expertise in lyric, dramatic, and narrative poetry from Chaucer to Milton (including Shakespeare). In addition to secondary competency in literary prose from 1500-1800, and special familiarity with the work of Laurence Sterne, I have taught courses on literature for primary and secondary schools, universities, continuing education programs, and correctional education programs. 

My dissertation will evaluate the political gist of English literary depictions of Julius Caesar in the context of more radical political theory

Awards

Mellon Fellowship (2019-2024)
Ruth Rose Richardson Award (2020)

Degrees

2015, MA English, The Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at The University of Alabama

2013, BA English, Angelo State University

Bio

Mandy L. Fowler is a PhD student specializing in early modern literature and the history of medicine. Her research interests include patient-caregiver exchanges, performances of care, and the material experiences of illness. She is more broadly interested in early modern approaches to human bodies (“be they alive or dead”) and the senses.

Her most recent presentations explore the role of the physician in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions the relationship between of olfaction and practices of reading in the sixteenth century.

Fowler is also interested in the medical humanities more generally and has a background in health sciences writing from her time as an editor and writer with The University of Alabama’s Institute for Rural Health Research.

She completed her master’s thesis, “They are gone to read upon me:” The Donnean Body-Text, with the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance studies.

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Tulsa

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student studying the overlap of friendship, loyalty, and virtue in Late Medieval Romance.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, BA in English and Comparative Literature, summa cum laude, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

My research focuses on exchanges among literature, science, philosophy, and theology in early modern Europe.

Awards

• 2016-17, North Carolina Native American Incentive Grant
• 2016-17, Ruth Rose Richardson award for the outstanding record in the first year of graduate study