Degrees

2017, BA English, University of Florida

2021, MA English, University of Colorado Boulder

Bio

My scholarship explores how trauma, mental illness, and suicide affect intrafamilial and interpersonal relationships. Working with representations of the American generational family in popular media, I examine the ways by which narrative-based signifying practices in contemporary American culture harness generic discourses of horror and its adjacent genres to reify interpersonal trauma through depictions of extreme violence and negative affect.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, BA Religious Studies, Palm Beach Atlantic University

2021, MA Liberal Arts, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

Emily Waller Singeisen is a current PhD student and teaching fellow. As a graduate student and an educator, she has taught courses and developed curriculum in literature, film, and classical reception in English literature and popular culture. She is a graduate of the Masters of Liberal Arts program at the University of Pennsylvania where her research concentrations included the ancient novel and its reception, gender and queer theory, and psychoanalysis. Her published work has examined the formation of gendered subjectivity in the ancient novel through the framework of Freud’s female Oedipus complex, and she continues to investigate the ways in which contemporary theory might enrich our reading of ancient literature.

Publications:

“Gender Constitution and Reversible Potentiality: The Making of the Masculine Subject in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 33, no. 1.

Awards

Recipient of the 2022 Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities Grant by the Society for Classical Studies for the project “Mythic Women / Modern Incarnations,” a public art installation and lecture deepening local engagement with feminist approaches to the Classics.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2023, B.A. Gender Studies / English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

xochi-maría ramos-lara (she/they) is a doctoral student in english and comparative literature. her main research interest focuses on the (lacanian) subjectivity of gay latinx poets as they wrote during the american aids epidemic of the 80s and 90s, taking into account the presence of the hiv virus itself as an important character. besides this, x. is interested in non-white marxist critiques of the state, hegemonic ideologies, and culture; anti-white violent resistance via brown power (ex. the palestinian intifadas); queer performances of subversion in the american drag and ballroom scenes; and the power dynamics of bareback subculture in gay pornography.

outside of the academy, x. loves writing poetry, collective education on critical ethnic studies, participating in local political action, and going to gay clubs as a form of praxis.

Publications:

• “i planted some lavender in my front yard saturday morning,” SAGE, 2024.
• “afuera,” Screen Door Review, 2023.
• “white mother,” Carolina Muse: Literary & Arts Magazine, 2023.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2023, MA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

2022, BA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Bio

Rene Marzuk is interested in exploring continuities across languages and cultures. He is particularly intrigued by literary articulations of marginalized identities and by literary instances of emergence, widely defined. He is drawn to intertextual approaches that reveal the production of knowledge as a collective endeavor spanning times, cultures, and disciplines.

Awards

William Neal Reynolds Fellowship within the Royster Society of Fellows

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, AS in Fashion Management, Bay State College

2019, BS in Fashion Merchandising & Management, Southern New Hampshire University

Bio

Afro-Caribbean-American writer Dailihana Alfonseca is currently working on her Masters in Health Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her concentration in Literature, Medicine, and Culture continues to amplify marginalized perspectives through her writing and research of the Im/Migrant experiences within America and of the colonial impacts of the past.
In working with what Zora Neale Hurston called “Literary Science,” and what W.E.B. Dubois coined as “Double Consciousness,” her writing marries creative works, archival research, and medical analysis to convey tangible bridges of experiential knowledge. She does this in hopes of expanding the scope of knowledge available to historically under-served communities.

Her poetry has previously appeared in The Bangalore Review, The Global Gazette, and her fiction has appeared in Driftwood Press Literary Magazine.
In 2023 she won a Robert J. Dau Prize and was named an emerging writer to watch by PEN America. Her short story, “Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother,” was also nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize.

Publications:

Awards

2023 Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers by P.E.N. America

Degrees

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

Bio

Lara is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature studying woman-written sensation novels of 19th century Britain. More specifically, she is interested in the sensation novel as a potential vehicle for feminist satire and woman’s comedy, and the way that this comedic tradition can be traced back to earlier novelists like Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen. Her interest sometimes branches into the gothic, feminist history, antifeminist woman writers in the Victorian period, and ecocriticism.

Awards

• Dahl Family Fellowship

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, MA English, Boston College

2016, BA English, Case Western Reserve University

Bio

I study twentieth-century American and Russophone literature, and I am also interested in urban studies. In my academic research I focus on things ranging from American movie musicals to postcolonial theory, and I write literary reviews of works in translation.

Teaching Awards

• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award

Degrees

2019, BA English, North Carolina State University

Bio

Cate Rivers is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. She graduated from North Carolina State University in 2019 with a BA in English and minors in history and Japan studies. Her main area focuses are the Southern United States and Japan. Her interests span trauma studies, nationalism, memory, gender and critical race theories, modernism, cultural representations of mental illness, mysticism, and Buddhist literature. Her ongoing research project frames 20th century Japanese novels and novels from the Southern Renaissance as social histories, with particular attention to war memory, family history, culpability, the construction of “family,” and the relation between national identity and self-conception.

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

Degrees

2020, BA English and Visual Arts, University of Richmond

Bio

Carson Watlington is a PhD student in the department of English & Comparative Literature and the Graduate Assistant for Film Studies. Her work is rooted in 20^th/21^st century American Literature, with a particular attention to minority and ethnic texts.