Degrees

2016, MA English, University of Missouri at Columbia

2014, BA English (French minor), Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge

Bio

I am a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long nineteenth century. My research interests largely revolve around animal studies and how literature has shaped historical developments in human-animal relations. At UNC, I have taught classes on poetry, animals in popular literary genres, science writing, and composition, and I have also gained extensive experience working as a graduate writing coach at the UNC Writing Center. As a scholar and a teacher, I am driven by a deep interest in interdisciplinary thinking and how written words actively shape our lived experiences in the world.

In my dissertation project, “‘If You Are Always Kind’: Animals and Becoming Human(e) in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature,” I demonstrate how materials written for and by children were historically significant in the development and consolidation of “humane” values that continue to shape our present moment. My project foregrounds how these materials racialized and gendered different animal species to generate a “humane” discourse that fueled the emergence of animal welfare initiatives. While I focus on these developments in the United States, I also consider the transnational and transatlantic dimensions of the animal welfare movement. As a scholar, much of my methodology is grounded in working with archival materials, and I have held research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society in the course of working on this project. In considering many materials that have been forgotten today but which circulated widely in the nineteenth century, I shed new light on works that—like “Mary’s Lamb” (1830), which I quote in the first part of my title—continue to shape human behavior towards animals from a young age.

In my future work beyond this current project, I’m interested in how literary representations of animals influenced the development of veterinary science as a distinct medical field from the early 1700s up until 1879, when the first public college of veterinary medicine was founded in the United States. I am also more broadly interested in the history of public education in the United States.

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Publications:

• “Black Cats and White Women: Animal Autobiography and the Shaping of Race, Species, and Gender,” forthcoming in American Literature, vol. 96, no. 3, September 2024.
• “‘Our School House is the Universe’: Henry David Thoreau as Radical Educator,” forthcoming chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau, 2025.
• “A Posthumous Life: Thoreau and the Possibilities of Posthuman Biography,” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, vol. 27, 2019, pp. 127-142.
• Review of Antoine Traisnel’s Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) for Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, vol. 30, no. 1, Winter 2022, pp. 107-110.
• Review of Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life for the Emerson Society Papers, vol. 29, no. 2, Fall 2018, p. 14.
• Online Review of LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations for The Carolina Quarterly, March 2019.
• Online Review​ of Caleb Johnson’s ​Treeborne: A Novel f​or ​The Carolina Quarterly, September 2018.
• Online Review​ of Filip Springer’s ​History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town​ for ​The Carolina Quarterly, April 2018.

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Teaching Awards

• Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by Graduate Teaching Assistants, UNC Office of the Provost, 2024
• Krista Turner Award for Excellence in Student Support for Spring 2022, UNC Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
• Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, UNC Chancellor’s Awards, 2022

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Awards

• Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, Spring 2024, The Graduate School, UNC
• Lapides Fellowship in Pre-1865 Juvenile Literature and Ephemera, 2023-2024, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA
• Andrew Oliver Research Fellowship, 2022-2023, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston MA
• Dissertation Research Fellowship, Summer 2022, UNC Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
• Robert Bain Award for Excellence Achieved by a Second-Year Student in Pre-1900 American Literature, 2018, UNC

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, BA English, Davidson College

2018, MA English, New York University

Bio

I like to read and write about transatlantic literature of the long nineteenth century and modernism.

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Degrees

2012, BA English, Saint Michael’s College

2018, MA English, University of Colorado at Boulder

Bio

Erica studies women’s literature from the Romantic era and the American Civil War with a focus on infrastructure, the history of the book, memory and trauma studies, and intellectual history.

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Degrees

2019, Honors BA English Literature and History, Marquette University

Bio

Katherine Stein is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying Victorian literature, with a special focus on historiography and the figure of the child.  Reaching forward from the Victorian period into the early twentieth century, her research is both interdisciplinary and transhistorical, with additional interests in historical fiction (both past and present), national identity, children’s literature, and juvenilia.  Katherine’s work – both inside and outside the university – is deeply invested in publicness and the public humanities.

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Publications:

• “A Child’s History of England.”  The Literary Encyclopedia.  Edited by Grace Moore, 2023. https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7216.
• Co-Editor, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Early Poems and Prose. Under contract with the Juvenilia Press of Sydney, Australia.  Edited with Laurie Langbauer, Beverly Taylor, and six others, 2023.

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Awards

• Juliet McMaster Award for Emerging Scholarship, International Society of Literary Juvenilia (2023)
• James Peacock REACH Fellowship, UNC Office of the Vice Provost for Global Affairs (2021)
• Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities, UNC-Chapel Hill (2020)
• Outstanding Scholar of the Year, Marquette University English Department (2019)
• Walter C. Boden Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Marquette University History Department (2019)

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Degrees

2018, BA English, Davidson College

Bio

Erin Piemont studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States poetry with a special interest in intersections between poetry and the visual arts. Her research explores art-historical considerations of self-portraiture as an alternative to the literary-critical category of lyric.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, MA English, Ohio University

2013, BA English and Religion, Denison University

Bio

Emily Sferra’s research considers depictions of adolescent women who fail to follow the expected trajectory of domestication and their relationships with other young women. She is a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow, and she is also completing a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies.

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Publications:

•   “One of her delusions”: Maternity, Selfhood, and Voice in Mr. Rochester. Victorians Institute Journal 17 December 2021; 48 (1): 43–64. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0043

• “Portsmouth, Eveline.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Edited by Lesa Scholl. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_325-1.

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Teaching Awards

• Erika Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition in English 105 (award Fall 2020)

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Awards

• Early Stages Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature (awarded Spring 2022)
• Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia (BSUVA) Scholarship, Rare Book School (awarded January 2020)
• Travel Grant, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature (awarded Fall 2019)
• Arts Everywhere Fellow for PlayMakers Repertory Company, UNC (awarded Fall 2020)
• Humanities for the Public Good Fellowship for PlayMakers Repertory Company, UNC (awarded Fall 2019)
• Humanities Professional Pathway Award, UNC (awarded Summer 2018)
• Outstanding Master’s Essay Award, Ohio University (awarded Spring 2016)
• Distinguished Leader Award, Denison University (awarded Spring 2013)
• A. Blair Knapp Award for Dedication to the Liberal Arts, Denison University (awarded Spring 2013)
• Vinton R. Shepard Memorial Scholarship, Denison University (awarded Fall 2012)
• Mary Carr Endowed Scholarship, Denison University (2009-2013)

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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.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2009, BA English, Kenyon College

2011, MA Humanities with English focus, University of Chicago

Bio

Michele Robinson is pursuing a minor in Women’s and Gender studies and her dissertation focuses on the role of space and gender in nineteenth century literature. She has enjoyed teaching courses like English 105, 123 Into to Fiction: Gendered Politics of Madness and Mental Illness, and 129 Literature and Cultural Diversity.

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Awards

• Julius Sylvester Hanner Memorial Fellowship
• Ruth Rose Richardson Prize

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Degrees

B.A., Plan II and English Honors, The University of Texas at Austin (2011)

Bio

English PhD student studying late nineteenth and early twentieth century British literature with a focus on the theory and history of knowledge, women’s writing, and novel studies.

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Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:

• “Archiving Dracula: Knowledge Acquisition and Interdisciplinarity,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts (forthcoming)

Edited Special Issues:

• Guest co-editor, with Doreen Thierauf, Generational Exchange and Transition in Women’s Writing, special issue of Women’s Writing, vol. 26, no. 2, 2019.

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Awards

• Evan Frankel Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill (2020)
• Inductee, Frank Porter Graham Graduate and Professional Student Honor Society, UNC-Chapel Hill (2018)

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Degrees

2015, MA English, Claremont Graduate University

2012, BA English Literature and Political Science, Loyola Marymount University

Bio

Eddie is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of British literature of the long eighteenth century, he has particular interests in: authenticity, experimentation with literary form and genre, the Gothic, the history of the novel, influences of popular culture, the material book, and narrative performance.

His dissertation project, entitled Creating Enchantment: a History of the Gothic and Inspiring Interactive Reading, explores the history of intellectual influences on the Gothic, the creative possibilities that writers have found in the genre, and how these writers subsequently experimented with the genre to create a particular reading experience. Bringing together archival research, narrative theory, reader-response theory, and sociological history of reading practices in the long-eighteenth century, he hopes to produce a project that examines how authorial innovation, alongside history of the material book—its paratextual elements, decisions made by publishers, and popular readership—have mediated interactive reading experiences of the Gothic novel in the long eighteenth century.

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Publications:

• Yang, Edward. “Conjuring Sympathy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Inspiring Interactive Reading.” Critical Insights: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. Amenia, Salem Press. (forthcoming 2024)
• Sullivan, Rory and Edward Yang. “Searching for Frankenstein: The Locales of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Then and Now.” 2018

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Teaching Awards

• Krista Turner Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2018.

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Awards

• English Teaching Assistant Award (Germany), The Fulbright Program, 2016-17.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume