2019, BA Classics and Literature, University of North Carolina Asheville
Grace Derenne is a first-year Ph.D. candidate and research assistant in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include horror studies, sexuality studies, film and media studies, and depictions of the child in literature and film.
2020, MA English Literature, Virginia Tech
2015, BA English Literature and Education, Roanoke College
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.
British Literature from 1660 to 1789 | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | Critical Race Studies | Depictions Of The Child | Digital Humanities | Literature and Education | Narrative Theory | Pedagogy | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | The Novel | Transatlantic Studies | Women Writers
2019, MA English, George Washington University
2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University
Elisabeth studies 19th century American literature and medicine, focusing on how changing theories of mental illness and its treatment were encoded in congregate care institutions over the course of the century. Her research, which draws on a varied archive of patient memoirs, journalistic exposes, and fictional depictions of congregate care, investigates entanglements of race, gender, and disability in questions of mental healthcare.
“Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven, edited by Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Routledge, 2021.
African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Depictions Of The Child | Disability Studies | History of the Book | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Poetry and Poetics | Southern Literature | The Novel | Women Writers
2019, Honors BA English Literature and History, Marquette University
Katherine Stein is a third-year PhD student whose work is absorbed in the lines between historical fact and fictional narrative, with a special focus on Victorian historiography and the figure of the child. Reaching forward from the Victorian period into the early twentieth century, she has interests in historical fiction, national identity, and children’s literature. Katherine’s work is invested in the public humanities; at UNC, she works with the Jane Austen Summer Program, a public humanities outreach program, and also works in various public-facing communications roles.
2012, BA English Literature and Political Science, Loyola Marymount University
2015, MA English, Claremont Graduate University
My research interests include the history of the novel, narrative performance, and authenticity. Drawing from British novels of the Long Eighteenth Century and Twentieth Century American novels, I hope to produce a project that examines narrative interruptions: moments in a text when a voice, distinct from that of any other character, enters the narrative.
Some of my past research examines: the performance of authenticity in The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zoey, competing narrative frames in Frankenstein, a blending of genres in The Castle of Otranto, resistance to introspection in Mumblecore films, and the role of authenticity in Hip Hop.
