Isabel Spencer Landis Doss
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
Research Interests
Aesthetics | American Literature to 1900 to the present | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | British Literature from 1900 to the Present | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Science Writing | The Novel | Visual Culture and Arts | Women Writers