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Isabel Spencer Landis Doss

July 24, 2024

Degrees

2024, M.A. English, University of Georgia

2020, B.A. English cum laude, Willamette University

Bio

Spencer Doss is a first-year PhD student and teaching fellow in UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. She studies nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on Victorian women writers and their responses to patriarchal authority. Spencer’s master’s thesis, “Styling Society: Medicine, Art, and Sarah Grand’s New Women,” investigates how male characters in Grand’s oeuvre view women with a gaze that is at once aestheticizing and anatomizing. This phenomenon demonstrates the convergence of the institutions of art and medicine at the fin-de-siècle, with artists and doctors alike appraising women according to a patriarchal style that emphasizes their physical form, or bodies, over their subjective content, or their identities. Much of her research has centered understudied nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century feminist authors, including Catherine Carswell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, H.D., and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In addition, Spencer is intrigued by how Victorian medical models manifest in the novel and their capacity to pathologize female bodies, especially in Gothic and sensation fiction.

As an instructor of writing, Spencer is passionate about establishing a classroom environment where students are empowered to explore and define their identities as writers. Her background as a writing center consultant informs her approach to instructor-student communication, which prioritizes one-on-one conferencing in addition to an interactive classroom model. Courses she has taught have involved the interplay of public and private memory and fictional texts that define and redefine the natural, from Beowulf to the present.

 


Awards

  • Christy Desmet Memorial Fund Award, University of Georgia, 2024
  • Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, inducted 2024
  • Research Out of State Tuition Award, University of Georgia, 2022
  • English Department Honors, Willamette University, 2020
  • John Dryden Award, Willamette University, 2020

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Anna Blackburn

July 31, 2023

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.


Awards

  • 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

Madison Storrs

July 24, 2023

Degrees

2017, BA English, Florida State University

2021, MA English, North Carolina State University

 

Bio

Madison Storrs is a first-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literature, botany, and art of the long 19th century in Britain. In particular, she considers how women incorporated botanical studies into their writing and art practices. She is also interested in British Romanticism, ecocriticism, ontology, aesthetics, design, and visual culture.


Awards

Teaching Assistantship, First-Year Writing, North Carolina State University, 2020–2021.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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

Lara Nicole Pur

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2020, BA English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Bio

Lara Nicole Pur is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature studying woman-written sensation novels of 19th century Britain. More specifically, she is interested in feminist commentary and resistance within sensation novels. She often finds herself examining questions regarding the so-called “girl of the period,” women’s joy and pleasure, and bodily autonomy.


Awards

  • Dahl Family Fellowship

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Rachel Rackham

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2021, MA English, Brigham Young University

2019, MA Library and Information Science, University of Iowa

2017, BA English, Brigham Young University

Bio

As a PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, Rachel studies British Victorian literature. Specifically, she is interested in ruins, material culture, and imperialism in the Victorian era, interests which were shaped by her studies in literary tourism and heritage in her MLIS degree. She plans to expand her studies in these topics by exploring print media and culture, industrialization, commodity culture, memory, and nostalgia in nineteenth-century Britain.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Christopher Catanese

April 26, 2022

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 Fieldselected, 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

Anna Merz

March 16, 2022

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

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