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Anna Merz

March 16, 2022

Degrees

2020, MA English Literature, Virginia Tech
2015, BA English Literature and Education, Roanoke College

Bio

Anna Merz is a second year PhD student interested in literature of the long, undisciplined nineteenth century, Anna’s past research projects have centered literary depictions of Victorian education and childhood. Her early-stage dissertation research focuses on depictions and illustrations of “bad” children in Victorian literature, especially the ways in which “badness” as a label is often gendered and racialized.

At UNC, Anna works closely with the Jane Austen Summer Program, a public humanities outreach program, and in the William Blake Archive—a Digital Humanities project cataloguing Blake’s works.


Teaching Awards

  • Richard Hoffman GTA Teaching Award for Excellence: Virginia Tech English Departmental Award, 2020
  • Michael J. Sandridge Education Award for Excellence: Roanoke College, 2015
  • English Department Teaching Award for Excellence: Roanoke College, 2015

Awards

  • Caroline Pace Chermside Award for Best Master’s Thesis: Virginia Tech, 2020
  • Dickens Universe Fellow, 2020
  • Phi Beta Kappa, 2015
  • Briethaupt Scholarship for the Scholarly Study of Literature: Roanoke College, 2014

Cate Rivers

September 24, 2021

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.


Carson Watlington

September 20, 2021

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 20th/21st century American Literature, with a particular attention to minority and ethnic texts.


Everett Lang

September 20, 2021

Degrees

2010, B.A. (Hons) Literae Humaniores, University of Oxford

2018, M.A. Ancient Greek and Latin, Boston College

Bio

Everett Lang studies Ancient Greek and Latin literature, primarily from the Roman Imperial period, and its later reception in Early Modern Britain and northern Europe.


Sarah Lofstrom

August 9, 2021

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?


Meleena Gil

July 12, 2021

Degrees

2019, BA English Literature, University of Central Florida

Bio

Meleena (they/she) is a first-generation US-American and college graduate now working towards a doctoral degree in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Meleena has vested interests in queer theory and gender studies, environmental humanities, and disability studies. Drawing from a reproductive justice framework, Meleena specializes in the representations of children in contemporary Latinx literature. 
 
Meleena is a teaching fellow in DOECL and in Women’s and Gender Studies. They serve as the program coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, the administrative assistant for UndocuCarolina, and the senior writing coordinator for the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program. Meleena hopes to unite their service work and their research by partnering with various organizations on and off campus to invigorate their pedagogy and foster more formidable local ties. They aim to create a space for meaningful experiences and mutual acknowledgment.

Teaching Awards

Fall 2021 Latina/o Studies Graduate Teaching Affiliate Fellowship


Antonia DiNardo

September 28, 2020

Degrees

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

Bio

Antonia DiNardo is a fifth year PhD candidate in English literature. Her work is focused on mediations of the Middle Ages in modern popular culture from Tolkien to the The Witcher, utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing semiotics, genre theory, critical game studies, and reception studies. Her dissertation, “Imagining White Pasts: Fantasy and Far-Right Pseudo-History” explores the intersection of medievalist media and white nationalist discourse. Antonia has given talks and lectures on the fraught intersection of fantasy and conceptions of “historical authenticity,” on the co-opting of popular fantasy franchises as recruiting tools by far-right groups, on chivalric imagery in far-right identity construction, and on chivalric masculinities in Chaucer and Chretien de Troyes. In 2023, she held the Hanes Graduate Fellowship, studying the annotations and marginalia of C. S. Lewis’ personal collection of medieval and early modern texts. In 2024, she joined the team in the Greenlaw Gameroom, UNC’s first games-based teaching space.


Awards

  • Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Rare Book Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Jonathan Albrite

September 22, 2020

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

Krysten Voelkner

October 28, 2019

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.


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.

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)

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

Thomas Eric Simonson

September 18, 2019

Degrees

2019, MA in English, Wake Forest University

2017, BA in English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Bio

Thomas Eric Simonson divides his time between literature of the early modern era, especially drama, and 20th century transatlantic studies and literary theory.