Degrees

2012, MA English, University of Virginia

2010, BA English, Tulane University

Bio

Kenneth is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century American fiction, with interests in genre, film, and the literary moment after postmodernism. His dissertation focuses on the re-invention of the tropes of film noir and hard-boiled crime fiction of the 1930s and 40s in mainstream contemporary American literature. His solo-taught literature classes so far have included a version of the Contemporary Literature class titled “Alternatives to Realism” and a version of the Popular Genres class focused on detective fiction, science fiction, graphic novels, horror, and children’s literature. He managed to successfully teach House of Leaves in a 100-level undergraduate class. In his spare time, he has written reviews of over 1,000 films.

---

Publications:

• “Cool Girls and Bad Girls: Reinventing the Femme Fatale in Contemporary American Fiction.” Interdisciplinary Humanities 33.1 (Spring 2016): 150 – 170.

---

Awards

• 2017 Graduate School Summer Research Fellowship
• 2010 Senior Scholar Award in English, Tulane University

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

BA English, University of Colorado

MFA Fiction, University of Pittsburgh

Bio

I study the intersections between place, space and identity in contemporary literature, with a particular focus on the Southwest and indigenous writers, gentrification and the city, and liminality.

---

Degrees

2017, BA Literature, BA Spanish, University of North Carolina Asheville

Bio

Marcy Pedzwater studies twentieth and twenty-first century North and Latin American literature. Her current research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and colonialism/imperialism in Post-dictatorship literature of the Americas. She is also interested in the function of memory, archive, and trauma in these texts. She teaches English 105, Spanish 105, and Spanish 203.

---

Publications:

• Review of Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel, by Jennifer Harford Vargas, Chiricú, Fall 2019.
• “Thinking with José Revueltas and Roberto Bolaño: Philosophical Literary Approaches to Latin America.” Review of José Revueltas y Roberto Bolaño: Formas genéricas de la experiencia by Alejandro Sánchez Lopera, A Contracorriente, vol. 15, no. 3, Spring 2018.
•  “Not of this World: Divine Radical Inclusivity as a Foil to Worldly Wisdom in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away,” The Sigma Tau Delta Review, vol. 14, Sigma Tau Delta, Spring 2017.

---

Degrees

2011, B.A. Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Cornell University

2012, M.A. History, Carnegie Mellon University

Bio

Mark Collins is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works in the fields of contemporary American and multi-ethnic literature and women’s and gender studies. His academic interests include: feminist theory, science and technology studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies. Mark is currently working on his dissertation project, called “Nuclear Reproduction: Race, Gender, and Reproductive Control in US Cold War Speculative Fiction,” which explores the relationship between the discourses of nuclear warfare and reproduction in literary and cultural texts from the decades spanning the Cold War period.

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2011, Bachelor of Arts in English, Sewanee: The University of the South

Bio

Elisa is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow. She is currently writing a dissertation entitled “Domesticating the Apocalypse: Motherhood and the Novel at the End of Time.”

---

Publications:

• Faison, Elisa. Rev. of The Lightkeepers by Abby Geni. Carolina Quarterly 67.1 (Fall/Winter 2017).

---

Awards

• Graduate School Summer Research Fellowship, 2018

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

M.A. University of Colorado, Boulder

B.A. Illinois State University

Bio

Sean DiLeonardi teaches and writes broadly about contemporary American literature and its relationship to race, technology, science, and media. Drawing from an interdisciplinary mix of literary criticism, media theory, and science/technology studies, Sean’s research catalogues the effects of new technologies on literary form and, inversely, literary culture’s role in shaping American discourse on race, science, and digitality.

 

Sean is currently preparing a dissertation that traces an epistemological shift in scientific and literary ideas about probability in the American midcentury. The dissertation argues that an array of new media—from digital translators to the first major English translation of the I Ching—automates probability, thus inspiring a set of formal innovations in both scientific and literary narratives. 

 

Chair, 2017-18 Boundaries of Literature Symposium

Co-editor, Ethos Review (http://www.ethosreview.org/)

Co-organizer, the Americanist Speaker Series, in collaboration with Duke English

---

Publications:

• “Cryptographic Reading: Machine Translation, the New Criticism, and Nabokov’s Pnin,” Post45: Peer-Reviewed (forthcoming)

---

Awards

• Dean’s Graduate Fellowship. Dean’s Office, College of Arts and Sciences, 2018-19.
• Carl Hartsell Award for Teaching Excellence. Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, UNC, 2018
• Research Fellowship. The Graduate School, UNC, Spring 2018.
• Maynard Adams Fellowship. Carolina Public Humanities, 2017-18.
• Robert Bain Award. Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, UNC, 2016.
• Digital Media Internship. SITES Laboratory, UNC, 2015-16.
• Travel Grant. Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, UNC, 2014.
• Travel Grant. United Gov. for Graduate Students, UC Boulder, 2013.
• Brome Creative Writing Award. English Dept., ISU, 2007.
• Associated Bank National Scholarship. 2003.

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume