Degrees

2017, BA English, Florida State University

2021, MA English, North Carolina State University

 

Bio

Madison Storrs is a first-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literature, botany, and art of the long 19th century in Britain. In particular, she considers how women incorporated botanical studies into their writing and art practices. She is also interested in British Romanticism, ecocriticism, ontology, aesthetics, design, and visual culture.

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Awards

Teaching Assistantship, First-Year Writing, North Carolina State University, 2020–2021.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, MA English, Texas Christian University

2019, BA English, Texas Christian University

Bio

Andreley Bjelland is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period. Her dissertation explores representations of children and crime in early modern English literature, drama, pamphlets, and ballads.

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Teaching Awards

• PIT Journal and Conference Curricular Innovation Award, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2024
• Erika Lindemann Award for Demonstrated Excellence in Teaching, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023

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Awards

• Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024
• Medieval and Early Modern Studies Small Research Grant, UNC MEMS, 2023
• Druscilla French Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Graduate School, 2021

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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.

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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

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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

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Degrees

2019, MA English, George Washington University

2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University

Bio

Elisabeth is a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long 19th century and the health humanities. Her dissertation, “Power Play: Games, Jokes, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Asylum Narratives” investigates the modes by which asylum patients creatively contested medical authority through memoirs, exposés, poetry, and newspaper writing.

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Publications:

• “‘Send the little patient to the Hospital at once:’ Early Eugenics at the North Carolina State Hospital’s Epileptic Colony,” in The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19^th Century, edited by Lucia Hodgson and Allison Giffen (Routledge, forthcoming in 2025). https://www.routledge.com/The-Biopolitics-of-Childhood-in-the-Long-American-19th-Century/Hodgson-Giffen/p/book/9781032563527
• “Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene,” in 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.

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Awards

• Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024-2025
• Eliason Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, UNC English Department, 2023
• C. Hugh Holman Award for a dissertation in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2023
• Dissertation Prospectus Fellowship, Wilson Library at UNC, 2022
• Robert Bain Award for scholarship in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2021
• Southern Futures Graduate Award, UNC Center for the Study of the American South, 2020
• McCandlish Endowment Fellowship, GWU, 2017-2019

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Degrees

2019, Honors BA English Literature and History, Marquette University

Bio

Katherine Stein is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying Victorian literature, with a special focus on historiography and the figure of the child.  Reaching forward from the Victorian period into the early twentieth century, her research is both interdisciplinary and transhistorical, with additional interests in historical fiction (both past and present), national identity, children’s literature, and juvenilia.  Katherine’s work – both inside and outside the university – is deeply invested in publicness and the public humanities.

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Publications:

• “A Child’s History of England.”  The Literary Encyclopedia.  Edited by Grace Moore, 2023. https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7216.
• Co-Editor, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Early Poems and Prose. Under contract with the Juvenilia Press of Sydney, Australia.  Edited with Laurie Langbauer, Beverly Taylor, and six others, 2023.

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Awards

• Juliet McMaster Award for Emerging Scholarship, International Society of Literary Juvenilia (2023)
• James Peacock REACH Fellowship, UNC Office of the Vice Provost for Global Affairs (2021)
• Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities, UNC-Chapel Hill (2020)
• Outstanding Scholar of the Year, Marquette University English Department (2019)
• Walter C. Boden Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Marquette University History Department (2019)

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Degrees

2015, MA English, Claremont Graduate University

2012, BA English Literature and Political Science, Loyola Marymount University

Bio

Eddie is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of British literature of the long eighteenth century, he has particular interests in: authenticity, experimentation with literary form and genre, the Gothic, the history of the novel, influences of popular culture, the material book, and narrative performance.

His dissertation project, entitled Creating Enchantment: a History of the Gothic and Inspiring Interactive Reading, explores the history of intellectual influences on the Gothic, the creative possibilities that writers have found in the genre, and how these writers subsequently experimented with the genre to create a particular reading experience. Bringing together archival research, narrative theory, reader-response theory, and sociological history of reading practices in the long-eighteenth century, he hopes to produce a project that examines how authorial innovation, alongside history of the material book—its paratextual elements, decisions made by publishers, and popular readership—have mediated interactive reading experiences of the Gothic novel in the long eighteenth century.

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Publications:

• Yang, Edward. “Conjuring Sympathy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Inspiring Interactive Reading.” Critical Insights: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. Amenia, Salem Press. (forthcoming 2024)
• Sullivan, Rory and Edward Yang. “Searching for Frankenstein: The Locales of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Then and Now.” 2018

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Teaching Awards

• Krista Turner Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2018.

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Awards

• English Teaching Assistant Award (Germany), The Fulbright Program, 2016-17.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume