2021, BA English, University of Virginia
Emma Bradford is a first year PhD student specializing in early modern literature. Her research focuses on negotiations of identity in medieval and early modern drama. She is particularly interested in how non-aristocratic poets represented themselves in court masques and other occasional works written for English aristocrats.
2009, BA English with Teacher’s Certification, Eastern Illinois University
2020, MA English, Wayne State University
Originally from central Illinois, Lindsay is a PhD student and teaching fellow focusing on post-conquest (c. 1100-1300) medieval literature. Previous research has focused on food in medieval literature, early modern broadside ballads, and perceptions of mental illness in medieval Europe. Outside of medieval literature, Lindsay is also interested in teaching pedagogy and taught high school English and special education before returning to academia. She has also worked extensively with a group of instructors at UNC who design coursework focusing on publication in the PIT Journal.
Miller, Lindsay, Sarah Chapman and Lynn Losh 2019. Going beyond Lear: Performance and Taming of the Shrew. Dividing the Kingdoms:Interdisciplinary Methods for Teaching King Lear to Undergraduates: Performance: Wayne State University. https://guides.lib.wayne.edu/folgerkinglear/performance
Ragle-Miller, Lindsay et. Al. The Warrior Women Project: Wayne State University. https://s.wayne.edu/warriorwomen/
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Children’s Literature | Disability Studies | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | History of the Book | Literature and Education | Literature and History | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Pedagogy | Queer Theory | Science Fiction | The English Language | Women Writers | Writing In The Disciplines
2022, BA English, University of Virginia
Lexi is a second-year PhD student interested in the transmission and reception of early Christian figures, texts, and theologies in the early modern period.
2022, BA English, Meredith College
Krista Telford is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is specializing in medieval literature and is particularly focused on religious writings. Her research examines forms of prayer in medieval and early modern literature as well as the impact of form on medieval depictions of the afterlife. She aims to take an interdisciplinary approach to her study of religious texts, considering the performative aspect of many poems and prayers and drawing on musicological research. Krista’s recent and ongoing work includes a project exploring resistance to transcendence in the ending of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which examines Chaucer’s reading of Boethius, and a paper exploring the polyphonic and dialogic nature of Francesco Suriano’s underexamined 15th century treatise on the Holy Land, Il trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Digital Humanities | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Travel Writing | Women Writers
2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin
Isabel (they/them) is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina. Their research examines representations of embodiment and the soul in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin religious texts, considering how structures between the corporeal, physical self and the sensing, feeling, and immaterial self can be read alongside theories of queer embodiment, affect, and representations.
In this framework, Isabel is concerned with how language informs depictions of physical and metaphysical identity and how these identities are often unsettled and displaced through language. In their reading of queerness in medieval texts, Isabel desires to experiment with how we recognize and interpret ‘queerness’ not as a fixed phenomenon, but an amalgamation of acts, events, and performances in dialogue with identity-formation.
They are currently working on two projects: one entitled ‘I kan nat glose’: Queering Illegible Signification in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale,’ which analyzes the infamous pear tree sex scene in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale as a culmination of unintelligible semiotic exchanges of letters and of sexual organs, and the other, “Needle as Queer Instrument of Authorship in Chrétien de Troyes Yvain,” which considers the implications of the textile worker as auctor.
Aesthetics | British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Creative Writing | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Digital Humanities | History of the Book | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Philosophy Of Language | Poetry and Poetics | Queer Theory | The English Language
2017, MSt English 650-1550, University of Oxford
2014, BA English and Medieval/Early Modern Studies, University of California, Davis
Jillian is a PhD student and teaching fellow in the department of English and Comparative Literature. She is a medievalist with a focus on the post-conquest period ca.1100-1300 whose previous research projects have centered on the lais of Marie de France and other vernacular texts. Additionally, she is interested in exploring the post-medieval transmission of medieval texts and medievalisms in contemporary genre fiction. Her research approaches include digital corpus linguistics, mapping and visualization, feminist and gender theory, cultural studies, and queer theory.
Jillian’s current research explores Celticity and genealogies of white aristocratic hybridity in medieval romance, as well as in modern genre fiction that uses the medieval setting.
In addition to research, she is passionate about teaching, pedagogy, and providing student support.
2019, BA English, Samford University
Emily is a PhD candidate focusing on late-medieval Middle English literature. She is especially interested in questions of authority, counter-authority, legality, and outlawry in late fourteenth and early fifteenth century political poetry and outlaw tales, including Piers Plowman, texts in the Piers Plowman tradition, and Robin Hood traditions.
2017, MA English Literature, University of Virginia
2015, BA English Literature, Bethany College
Khristian S. Smith studies late medieval and early modern literature, primarily drama placed in its religiopolitical and material contexts. Their research interests include the histories of religion and emotion, occult knowledge, and literary representations of the Devil. Their most recent publication places William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in its contemporary religious and scientific contexts by exploring the toxicological roles of night, crypts, and demons in the play. They have delivered papers on the Devil and humor in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, Paracelsianism in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and medieval theories of predestination in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.
Smith’s dissertation project, “Horrors of the Early Modern Imagination,” argues that the roots of current understandings of the genre and experience of horror can be traced to an early modern conception of the imagination. By engaging with the early modern imagination’s power to generate, corrupt, lie, and delude, Smith contends we can understand horror, through the imagination, as onto- epistemological: a state of being and knowing. Drawing on the growing critical work on the history of affect, this project examines historical literature and cultural artifacts to comprehend how emotions and experiences have not only evolved over time but also shaped how we think and react today.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Drama | Early Modern Literature And Culture | History of the Book | Literature and History | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Pedagogy
2018, BA English, University of Tulsa
I am a Ph.D. student studying the overlap of friendship, loyalty, and virtue in Late Medieval Romance.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from 1660 to 1789 | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Drama | Early Modern Literature And Culture | History of the Book | Irish Literature | Literature and History | Philosophy Of Language | Poetry and Poetics | Science Fiction | The English Language | The Novel
2014, MA English, Florida Gulf Coast University
2011, BA English, Florida Gulf Coast University
I’m a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill studying medieval and early modern literature. I’m specifically interested in early modern encyclopedias, epistemology, and the history of science. I’m also interested in insects, gastropods, gender and sexuality, power dynamics, amphibians and amphibiousness, fungi, and the confluence of natural philosophy/magic/religion.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from 1660 to 1789 | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Digital Humanities | Drama | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Literature and History | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Queer Theory
