Degrees

2018, BA English, Davidson College

Bio

Erin Piemont studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States poetry with a special interest in intersections between poetry and the visual arts. Her research explores art-historical considerations of self-portraiture as an alternative to the literary-critical category of lyric.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, B.A. English modified with Philosophy, minor in Ethics, Dartmouth College

Bio

Carly Schnitzler is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow studying digital rhetoric and computational arts and poetics.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, MA English Literature, University of Virginia

2015, BA English Literature, Bethany College

Bio

Khristian S. Smith studies late medieval and early modern literature, primarily drama placed in its religiopolitical and material contexts. Their research interests include the histories of religion and emotion, occult knowledge, and literary representations of the Devil. Their most recent publication places William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in its contemporary religious and scientific contexts by exploring the toxicological roles of night, crypts, and demons in the play. They have delivered papers on the Devil and humor in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, Paracelsianism in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and medieval theories of predestination in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.

Smith’s dissertation project, “Horrors of the Early Modern Imagination,” argues that the roots of current understandings of the genre and experience of horror can be traced to an early modern conception of the imagination. By engaging with the early modern imagination’s power to generate, corrupt, lie, and delude, Smith contends we can understand horror, through the imagination, as onto- epistemological: a state of being and knowing. Drawing on the growing critical work on the history of affect, this project examines historical literature and cultural artifacts to comprehend how emotions and experiences have not only evolved over time but also shaped how we think and react today.

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Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “‘No healthsome air breathes in’: Spiritual Poison in Romeo and Juliet,” Poison on the Early Modern Stage: Plants, Paints and Potions, edited by Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus with Kibrina Davey (Manchester University Press, 2023).

Media & Impact

• “Possets, Drugs, and Milky Effects: A Look at Recipes, Shakespeare’s Plays, and Other Historical References,” Shakespeare and Beyond, February 2020.
• “How to Name Medieval Plants,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, January 2020.
• “Displaying the Body,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, November 2019.
• “Recognizing Evil: The Devil and His Horns,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, October 2019.
• “‘The Blood is the Life’: Dracula and 19th-Century Transfusions,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, September 2019.

Curatorial Work

• Narratives of Queer Identity, The Lewis Round Library Special Collections, Chapel Hill, NC, Cocurator, Online.

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Awards

• Eliason Early Stages Fellowship, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, Summer 2023
• Jerry Leath Mills Research Travel Grant, Studies in Philology, Summer 2022
• ARPA Graduate Degree Completion Grant, UNC Graduate School, Fall 2021
• Eating through the Archives: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Foodways Travel Grant, Folger Shakespeare Library, December 2019
• Sara Malone Conference Grant, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, May 2019
• Florence Hoagland Memorial Award for Outstanding Senior English Major, Bethany College Department of Humanities, Spring 2015
• W. F. Kennedy Prize for Outstanding Junior Man, Bethany College, Spring 2014
• Cammie Pendleton Award for Outstanding Junior English Major, BC Department of Humanities, Spring 2014
• Bettie Blanck Travel Award, BC Department of Humanities, Fall 2013
• Cammie Pendleton Award for Outstanding Sophomore English Major, BC Department of Humanities, Spring 2013

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, BA in English and Comparative Literature, summa cum laude, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

My research focuses on exchanges among literature, science, philosophy, and theology in early modern Europe.

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Awards

• 2016-17, North Carolina Native American Incentive Grant
• 2016-17, Ruth Rose Richardson award for the outstanding record in the first year of graduate study

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Degrees

2014, BA English, University of Oregon

Bio

I study late medieval English and Italian literature, focusing primarily on the works of Dante and Chaucer. I’m also especially interested in folk music, vernacular and vulgar literary traditions, and religion.

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Degrees

2016, MA English, University of Virginia

2013, BA English, University of California Berkeley

Bio

Stephanie Kinzinger is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and the Game Studies Initiative Project Manager in the Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab Gaming Initiative. She focuses on American literature, science, technology, and critical game studies and teaches courses in literature, video games, and multimodal composition and rhetoric. Broadly conceived, her research investigates experiments in the gamification of reality avant la lettre by considering select authors and game designers from the mid nineteenth century to the present who not only depict otherworldly fictions but also insist that such endeavors have the potential to make the world otherwise. Her dissertation –“Playing Reality: The Promise and Peril of Compositional Realities”– uses literary theory, play studies, and critical game studies to explore how the formal and political possibilities of video games are anticipated—and sometimes preemptively challenged—by American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and to interrogate how the limits and possibilities of contemporary experiments in Virtual Reality offer new vistas for potentially recodifying current social structures.

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Publications:

• “Embodied Cognition in Edgar Allan Poe: Eureka’s Cosmology, Dupin’s Intuition.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 1 December 2022; 77 (2-3): 124–144.

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Teaching Awards

• 2022 Professional Development Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Awards

• 2023 The James W. Gargano Award, for the outstanding article on Poe written in 2022, The Poe Studies Association
• 2023 John R. Bittner Award for Outstanding Work on a Dissertation in Literature, Popular Media, and Journalism, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Digital Dissertation Fellowship, Carolina Digital Humanities, Digital Innovation Lab (DIL), UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Excellence in Critical Game Studies Award, Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Thompson-Lumiansky Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2022 Humanities Initiative Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2009, BA English, Kenyon College

2011, MA Humanities with English focus, University of Chicago

Bio

Michele Robinson is pursuing a minor in Women’s and Gender studies and her dissertation focuses on the role of space and gender in nineteenth century literature. She has enjoyed teaching courses like English 105, 123 Into to Fiction: Gendered Politics of Madness and Mental Illness, and 129 Literature and Cultural Diversity.

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Awards

• Julius Sylvester Hanner Memorial Fellowship
• Ruth Rose Richardson Prize

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Degrees

2014, BA English & Psychology, Wesleyan University

Bio

Rachel Warner is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research interests include twentieth-century American literature, women’s and gender studies, queer of color critique, and animal studies. She has completed two peer-reviewed publications: one explores Black feminist theories of embodiment and nature in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, forthcoming from Society & Animals; and the other offers an archival analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s brief tenure at UNC and NCCU, published by North Carolina Literary Review in May 2020. Rachel also co-directs the graduate working group Literature, Medicine and Culture Colloquium (LMCC) which explores topics in health humanities. Finally, Rachel regularly teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, LGBTQIA+ literature and culture, and the history of horror literature and cinema. She is currently working on her dissertation, a literary and cultural history of female masculinity in American modernism.

 

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Publications:

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Awards

Eliason Dissertation Summer Research Fellowship, 2020

MLA COVID-19 Emergency Grant, Modern Language Association, 2020

Graduate Student Travel Fund, ECL Department, 2020

Paul Green Prize, North Carolina Literary Review, 2019

Student Learning Circle Grant, UNC Center for Global Initiatives, 2019

Winchester Fellowship, Wesleyan University, 2018

Deborah W. Shelton Endowment for Graduate Travel Awards, ECL Department, 2018

Winchester Fellowship, Wesleyan University, 2017

Albrecht B. Strauss SAMLA Awards Fund, 2016

Graduate Student Travel Fund, ECL Department, 2016

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Degrees

• 2017, BA Critical Studies in English Cultures, Literatures, and Film, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire
• 2017, BA Latin American Studies, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire

Bio

emilio Jesús Taiveaho Peláez is a first-generation migrant and a PhD. student—in that order—through the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. As both poet and scholar, their work engages the intersection of aesthetic experience and political discipline, blending critical, creative, and archival inquiry. Focusing on 20^th-century hemispheric experimental poetry, their dissertation (tentatively titled Ojos de Hierba: Walt Whitman’s Children & the American Lyric) probes the shared literary and philosophical history of the Américas through the lens of Neobaroque aesthetics, tracing dissonant and dissident relations in the life and work of figures such as Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Néstor Perlongher, and Cecilia Vicuña. emilio’s first book of poetry, landskips (words are a hard look), a latinX exploration of the sonics and optics of our contemporary American Landscapes, is forthcoming through The Concern Newsstand.

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Publications:

• Taiveaho, Emilio Jesús. “Cartographies of Refuge, Music, and Survival: A Review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” Carolina Quarterly Online, 2018.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 8: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt. 1).” CQ Speaks Podcast, 25 February 2020.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 9: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt.2) ‘Christ in Alabama.’” CQ Speaks Podcast, 3 June 2020.

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Teaching Awards

• Latina/o Studies Teaching Grant – 2020

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Awards

• 2017 – Present: Mellon Fellow

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Degrees