2018, MA English, New York University
2016, BA English, University of California, Los Angeles
Celeste is a graduate student in UNC’s English and Comparative Literature Department. They work as a teaching fellow for the department, an assistant at The William Blake Archive, and for the Jane Austen Summer Program. Celeste is currently interested in exploring ideas of apocalypse and ruin in the Long Nineteenth-Century.
2020, BA English, Indiana University
2020, BA Anthropology, Indiana University
2022, MA English, Syracuse University
My area of focus is on horror, race, gender, and sexuality and how the these intersecting ties are utilized within popular media throughout American history. Specifically within film, television, novels, and video games, I am interested in how these various mediums relay American history through a horror/gothic lens.
2020, BA English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne
Lara is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature studying women writers and controversial texts of the Early Modern period. More specifically, she is interested in the ways that controversies and social norms outside of texts affect literary meaning within those texts. Other areas of interest include feminist theory, the occult in literature, Marxist theory, and classical Greek.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Creative Writing | Digital Humanities | Digital Rhetorics | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Women Writers
2021, MA English, Brigham Young University
2019, MA Library and Information Science, University of Iowa
2017, BA English, Brigham Young University
As a PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, Rachel studies British Victorian literature. Specifically, she is interested in ruins, material culture, and imperialism in the Victorian era, interests which were shaped by her studies in literary tourism and heritage in her MLIS degree. She plans to expand her studies in these topics by exploring print media and culture, industrialization, commodity culture, memory, and nostalgia in nineteenth-century Britain.
Aesthetics | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | Digital Humanities | History of the Book | Literature and History | Narrative Theory | The Novel | Travel Writing | Visual Culture and Arts
2021, English BA, Minor in Communication, Texas A&M University at College Station
As a relatively new student to rhetoric and composition, my research interests are ever-evolving. My undergraduate thesis examined the implications of metaphor as used in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder treatment texts, which was a study intended to dissect language as a tool that demands authorial sacrifice. Here, I found a fascination with how meaning “seeps” from figures of speech in ways both beneficial and harmful to the reader, as well as for how engaging with language offers a view into a site of endless, yet interesting, compromises.
While my thesis oriented me within health and disability studies, my interests extend to digital rhetorics, game studies, technology discourse, and film and tv. Some topics in these fields that encapsulate my interests include the study of review scores as aggregated on websites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, observing the rhetorical nature of industry competition (MCU vs DCEU, XBox vs Playstation, Apple vs Samsung), and discussing accessibility in near-universal technologies like streaming services, smartphones, and gaming.
Digital Humanities | Digital Rhetorics | Disability Studies | Film and Media Studies | Literature and Science | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Media Studies | Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy | Science Fiction | Science Writing | The English Language | Visual Culture and Arts | Writing In The Disciplines
2013, M.A. English, Duke University
2008, B.A. English, Davidson College
I work on British and transatlantic literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic era, with an emphasis on poetry and genre. I am particularly interested in evolving systems of land use, in working-class writers and rural issues, commons and enclosures, and economic and agricultural history. I have published on Samuel Johnson, antiquarianism, and the mass reading public; on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, vitalism, and Romantic-era natural history, and my journal article on Robert Bloomfield, Wordsworth, and Romantic genre transformations won the 2016 Ralph Cohen Prize in New Literary History. I also publish poetry and literary translations, and I am coeditor of the small poetry press Golias Books.
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
2020, BA English and Visual Arts, University of Richmond
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.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Digital Humanities | Film and Media Studies | Philosophy Of Language | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Visual Culture and Arts | Women Writers
2010, B.A. (Hons) Literae Humaniores, University of Oxford
2018, M.A. Ancient Greek and Latin, Boston College
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.
Aesthetics | British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from 1660 to 1789 | Comparative Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Digital Humanities | Disability Studies | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | History of the Book | Literature and Science | Pedagogy
2018, B.A. English Literature, Colorado Mesa University
2020, M.A. English, Colorado State University
I am a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. I research recent contemporary American literature from 2000 to present, and am absorbed by questions about mixed-race identity, and how multiethnic and multicultural subjects “rightly” identify themselves and are identified. I also examine what makes writing literary, who creates literature, and how digital media challenges and expands those definitions.
African American Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Creative Writing | Critical Race Studies | Digital Humanities | Digital Rhetorics | Disability Studies | Feminist Historiography | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Genre Theory | Latina / Latino Literature | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Media Studies | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Social Justice | Southern Literature | Women Writers
