Degrees

2024, Honors BA English Literature and Philosophy, Marquette University

Bio

Margarita Buitrago is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She focuses on Anglo-French-Iberian medieval literature and is especially interested in allegories and travel literature. Her research explores how the role of vernacular texts, history, translation, and visual culture shaped medieval transnational identities. 

In addition to medieval studies, Margarita is also interested in pedagogy, the digital humanities, and the history of the book. Currently, she works in writing center research and as an editorial assistant at the William Blake Archive. 

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Publications:

(co-author) Eugenia Afinoguénova and Margarita Buitrago, “Child Refugees and the Transnational Iconographies of a Better Future During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2025).

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Awards

• Doctoral Merit Fellowship, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (2024)
• Outstanding English Major Award, Marquette University Department of English (2024)
• Undergraduate Research Assistantship, Marquette University (2024)
• Honors Research Fellowship Award for Summer 2023, Marquette University Honors Program (2023)

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Degrees

2023, BS English and Environmental Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Bio

Steve is a PhD student researching conviviality, energy, and degrowth. His research revolves around how the humanities can be applied as a force for social change. In particular, he’s been working to develop pathways for individuals and communities to move away from violent patterns of capitalist extraction and accumulation.

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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.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

University of Pennsylvania, M.A., Liberal Studies
Palm Beach Atlantic University, B.A., Religious Studies

Bio

Emily Waller Singeisen is a PhD student and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a graduate of the Masters of Liberal Arts program at the University of Pennsylvania where her research concentrations included the ancient literature 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. Her current research focuses on receptions of classical literatures from the early twentieth century to the present that mobilize ancient texts for the representation of bodies and sexualities that defy heteronormative ideals.

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Publications:

Peer Reviewed Articles

Waller Singeisen, E. (Forthcoming). “Watched Men and Phallus-Wielding Women: Aubrey Beardsley’s Reception of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire” in Classical Receptions Journal. 

Waller, E. (June 2022). “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.

Essays

Waller Singeisen, E. (June 2024). “Trojan Horse Universities: How Tech Billionaires and Alt-Right Figures Legitimise Intolerance in Classics.” Working Classicists. https://www.workingclassicists.com/post/trojan-horse-universities-how-tech-billionaires-and-alt-right-figures-legitimise-intolerance-in-cla.

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Awards

UNC Graduate Essay Prize in Comparative Literature, 2024. 

Society for Classical Studies’ Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities Grant Recipient, 2022.

Lambda Classical Caucus Graduate Student Paper Award Nominee, 2021.

University of Pennsylvania Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement in a Capstone Project, 2021.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Awards

William Neal Reynolds Fellowship within the Royster Society of Fellows, 2023-2028

Ruth Rose Richardson Award for Outstanding Record in the First Year of Graduate Study, 2024

Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2023

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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.

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Awards

• Dahl Family Fellowship

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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.

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Teaching Awards

• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume