Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Florida

Bio

I’m a PhD student studying contemporary American literature. I am primarily interested in understanding our contemporary culture and, precisely, the position of cultural expression within it: by what processes and under what ideological pressures are cultures shaped and reshaped, and how does culture both respond to and condition individual acts of expression, be they aesthetic in nature or otherwise?

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

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

Bio

X. (she/her) is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is primarily interested in the construction of racialized queer identities in performance spaces, especially the American ballroom and drag scenes, as they feature in documentary, literature, and television. She is also interested in viewing HIV as a performing subject in AIDS-era American literature. Outside of academia, X. enjoys being a part-time drag queen, discussing communist politics, and writing poetry about her Xicana queerness.

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

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

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.

Degrees

2019, BA English, Mount Holyoke College

Bio

My scholarly interests naturally converge around questions of trauma, ethics, affect, and divergent subjectivities in narratives of resistance and reconciliation. My work is grounded in an intersectional feminist hermeneutic lens to explore the role of gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism in texts by contemporary American multiethnic women writers. I am also interested in speculative imagery and it’s significance in illuminating historically silenced facets of subjectivity. Psychoanalytic criticisms surrounding haunting and trauma, in conjunction with an exploration of queer women’s psyches as sites for potential violence or intimacy are also uniquely compelling to me. My work asks how/why ‘deviant affects’ are labeled as such, and why the burden of silencing those affects largely falls on “marginalized” folks, i.e. queer and trans women of color?

Degrees

2019, BA English Literature, University of Central Florida

Bio

Teaching Awards

Fall 2021 Latina/o Studies Graduate Teaching Affiliate Fellowship

Degrees

2016, BA English, Princeton University

Bio

Nathan possesses a strong interest in late 20th and 21st century American literature, with a particular focus on contemporary works with magical realist and “hysterical realist” elements. This interest has led him in the direction of postsecular theory and the philosophy of language.

Degrees

2008, BA English, James Madison University

2020, MA English, James Madison University

Bio

I am a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC. I am currently at work on my dissertation, tentatively titled “No Judgment: The Aesthetics of Neutrality in the Postwar American Novel,” which examines the productive tension that arises between neutral narrators and snobby characters in the decades immediately following the Second World War. More broadly, my research concerns expressions of taste and aesthetic judgment in American literature and film as they relate to discourses on race, gender, sexuality, and class. I also work on topics, including climate change and posthumanist aesthetics, related to the environmental humanities, and have taught courses on contemporary literature, film, and composition.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume