Degrees

2018, BA Classics, minors French & English, summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

I study nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry and poetics, working at the intersection of the erotic and the philosophical. My dissertation (tentatively) examines lyrical representations of sex and desire as political allegory. I am particularly interested in considering the implications of possession, submission, and orgasm—in theme and as mimesis—for figuring the democratic subject.

I am currently at work on an essay investigating erotic apostrophe in Whitman’s poem “The Sleepers” in light of dominant-submissive power dynamics.

I am also currently at work on an essay considering the leveling of speaker-addressee hierarchies in Dickinson’s tropings on orgasm (in contribution to a long and rich feminist critical tradition).

And lastly, I have an article on retainer that makes a case for Du Bois as Emerson’s poet by attending to the moral-philosophical grounds of Emerson’s essay “The Poet.”

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Publications:

Critical:

“Review of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin 35.1 (2023), 19-20.

 

Creative:

“My Mother Says.” Rattle 83 (2024).

“Flux.” BlazeVOX: Fall 2021, 412-8.

“Lai-jee.” Indiana Review 43.1 (2021), 85-92.

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Awards

External:

• Graduate Student Conference Paper Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, 2023
• Dickinson Critical Institute Grant, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2022

Internal:

• Bain Award (Excellence in Pre-1900 American Lit.), UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
• Travel Grant, UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
• Transportation Grant, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2022
• Travel Award, UNC-CH Graduate & Professional Student Government, 2022
• Booker Fellowship, UNC-CH DOECL, 2021
• Inclusive Excellence Top-Up, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2021

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, BA English, George Washington University

Bio

Ryan Carroll is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He is interested in information systems, documentary storytelling, and truth-telling in 19th-century British, American, and Caribbean narrative. He considers these issues in relation to data overload, aesthetics, and epistemological crisis.

Outside of academia, Ryan writes on theology, particularly queer and liberation theologies. His work has been published by theology publications and the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.

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Publications:

• “‘Looking together united them’: Communal and Multivalent Affects in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 97, spring-summer 2021.
• “The Pilgrim’s Book.” The Jesuits, https://www.jesuits.org/stories/the-pilgrims-book/, 2021.
• “Fragments of the Eschaton: Queer Christian Soteriology.” Macrina Magazine, https://macrinamagazine.com/issue-8-general/guest/2021/09/11/fragments-of-the-eschaton-queer-christian-soteriology/, 2021.
• “An Ongoing Revelation: Endings and Poetics of Missingness in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Gabriel García Márquez.” Portals: A Journal in Comparative Literature, 2020.

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Teaching Awards

• 2022 Ruth Rose Richardson Award for First-Year Achievement
• 2023 Earl Hartsell Award for Excellence in Teaching

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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,” has been accepted for publication in American Literature contingent upon review of final revisions (as of October 2023)
• “‘Our School House is the Universe’: Henry David Thoreau as Radical Educator,” forthcoming in the new proposed 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
• 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 (Winter 2022, Vol. 30, No. 1)
• Review of Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life for the Emerson Society Papers (Fall 2018, vol. 29, no. 2)
• 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

• 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

2018, MA English, Wake Forest University

2016, BA English, Drexel University

Bio

Krysten Voelkner is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her primary interests reside at the intersection of environmental humanities and contemporary Latinx literature. Recent publications of hers can be found in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, and Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which investigates the ways in which Latinx writers experiment with aesthetics of horror, dread, anxiety, and other ‘bad’ affects associated with the climate crisis. In this regard, she hopes to explore the affective ecologies of Latinx environmental literature and film as they offer ways of thinking within and beyond the Anthropocene.

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Publications:

• “Vectors and Vermin: Gendered Violence and the Role of Insects in the Arthropoetics of Natalie Scenters-Zapico.” Chiricú Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2022.
• “Another Way of Seeing: Ecological Existentialism in Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’.” The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2021.
• “Memory, Temporality, and Communal Realization: Reading the Nomadic Subject in Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2020.

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Teaching Awards

• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (UNC Latina/o Studies Department), Spring 2022
• Erika Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition in English 105 (UNC Department of English), Fall 2021.
• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (Fall 2020)

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Awards

• UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, Summer 2022
• Nominee: David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies, 2021
• Ruth Rose Richardson Award for outstanding record in the first year of graduate study, (UNC Department of English), 2019-20
• H. Broadus Jones MA Student Award for Excellence in English (Wake Forest University Department of English), Spring 2018

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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

2016, M.A.T. Secondary English Education, Duke University

2013, M.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures, UNC-Chapel Hill

2011, B.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures, UNC-Chapel Hill

Bio

Jessica’s research focuses on late 19th and early 20th century Russian and German fiction, with special interests in the depictions of animals and death in literature. Key authors for her include Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Mann. She has been studying Russian since 2007 and has studied in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. She has taught Russian language courses and TA’d for Russian and German culture courses in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, as well as tutors for the new UNC Russian Flagship Program.

 

 

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Awards

• UNC CSEEES Summer Research & Language Study Award, 2021
• FLAS Fellowship, Summer 2012 (Russian)

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Degrees

2016, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College

Bio

Emma is a Comparative Literature student interested in ancient Greek philosophy.  Her work explores the relationship between philosophy and poetry in Plato and Aristotle.  She is also interested in language, specifically metaphor and simile.

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Degrees

B.A. English, 2010, University of Delhi

M.A. English, 2012, University of Delhi

M.Phil, English Literature, 2014, University of Delhi

Bio

My research focuses on environmental justice in the Anthropocene. I am interested in the convergences in the fields of ecocriticism, post-colonial theory and global socioeconomics, to examine how the effects of climate change, displacement, toxic and electronic waste, and resource extraction are differentially experienced across the Global North and South. I am also interested reading in environmental advocacy through the the intersections between art and activism in grassroots movements. I study gobal anglophone literature, with a focus on environmental justice movements in India and the U.S.A.

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Teaching Awards

• LSP Graduate Student Affiliate Teaching Award, Fall 2021

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Awards

• Centre for the Studies of the American South Summer Fellowship, 2021

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, BA French and Comparative Literature, Binghamton University

Bio

Chloe Hamer is a third-year graduate student focusing on 20th Century Francophone Caribbean literature and memory studies.

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Degrees

2017, M. A. Pennsylvania State University

Bio

I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research focuses primarily upon early modern literature and in particular, the intersections of poetics and performance, the fool figure, ballads and politics. My dissertation, “Changeling Humorists: The Speech Acts of the Early Modern English Fool,” traces the intellectual history of the fool figure through the seventeenth century. It explores how the fool democratizes an access to public voice and transfers a form of sovereignty to its audience. Currently, I am also editing Robert Armin’s Quips upon Questions for Digital Renaissance Editions.

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Publications:

• Robert Armin, Quips upon Questions, in Digital Renaissance Editions. University of Victoria.
• Review of Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare, Technicity and the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020. In Shakespeare Quarterly (forthcoming).
• Review of Henze, Catherine. Robert Armin and Shakespeare’s Performed Songs. New York: Routledge Press, 2017. In Renaissance Quarterly. 71 No. 4 (2018): 1554-1555.
• Review of  Marno, David. Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. In Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18 No. 2 (2018): 175-177.

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Teaching Awards

• 2020 Latina/o Studies Teaching Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Awards

External 

• 2020       UCLA Clark Library/Center for Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Studies Predoctoral Fellowship
• 2019       Conference Bursary, British Shakespeare Association
• 2018       Jerry Leath Mills Research Travel Fellowship, Studies in Philology
• 2018       Conference Bursary, British Shakespeare Association
• 2018       NEMLA Graduate Student Travel Grant

Internal

• 2021       Howell-Voitle Award for Dissertation in Early Modern English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2021       Department of English and Comparative Literature Summer Dissertation Fellowship,  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2021       Medieval and Early Modern Summer Research Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2020       Eliason Dissertation Research Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2020       Medieval and Early Modern Society Travel Grant, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2019       The Graduate and Professional Student Federation Travel Grant, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2018       Travel Grant, Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2017       Wilma Ebbitt Fellowship in Rhetoric, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume