Skip to main content

Kyle Cunningham

July 25, 2023

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Florida

Bio

Kyle Cunningham is a doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the production and circulation of narrative, ideology, and meaning through the digital technologies and platforms that facilitate (and condition) communication today. He is particularly interested in how specific “genres” of online content cluster together and provide important sites of agency wherein individuals and communities both re-envision and reproduce culture.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Shelby Jackson

July 24, 2023

Degrees

2018, BA English, Nicholls State University

2022, MA English, University of New Orleans

Bio

Shelby is a doctoral student and teaching fellow focusing in Rhetoric and Composition. Primarily, Shelby develops interdisciplinary research on writing transfer with an emphasis on first-year composition pedagogy. Her work on transfer-focused pedagogies thus far has intersected methodologically with other fields of interest such as the Digital and Health Humanities.

Years of teaching writing in different learning settings led to Shelby’s interest in writing transfer. As a teaching fellow for the ECL Writing Program, she designs her first-year course with a transfer objective to prepare her students for future research and writing demands.

Shelby’s other scholarly interests include basic writing, academic research writing, instructional design, knowledge and skill retention, memory processes, metacognition, composition lexicon, and neuro terminologies (e.g., neuroeducation and neuropedagogy).


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Rene Marzuk

July 19, 2023

Degrees

2023, MA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

2022, BA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Bio

Rene Marzuk is interested in exploring continuities across languages and cultures. He is particularly intrigued by literary articulations of marginalized identities and by literary instances of emergence, widely defined. He is drawn to intertextual approaches that reveal the production of knowledge as a collective endeavor spanning times, cultures, and disciplines.


Awards

William Neal Reynolds Fellowship within the Royster Society of Fellows


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Celeste Seifert

October 5, 2022

Degrees

2018, MA English, New York University

2016, BA English, University of California, Los Angeles

Bio

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.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Zayla Crocker

August 15, 2022

Degrees

2020, BA English, Indiana University

2020, BA Anthropology, Indiana University

2022, MA English, Syracuse University

Bio

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.


Krista Wiese Telford

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2022, BA English, Meredith College

Bio

Krista Telford is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is specializing in medieval literature and is particularly focused on religious writings. Her research examines forms of prayer in medieval and early modern literature as well as the impact of form on medieval depictions of the afterlife. She aims to take an interdisciplinary approach to her study of religious texts, considering the performative aspect of many poems and prayers and drawing on musicological research. Krista’s recent and ongoing work includes a project exploring resistance to transcendence in the ending of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which examines Chaucer’s reading of Boethius, and a paper exploring the polyphonic and dialogic nature of Francesco Suriano’s underexamined 15th century treatise on the Holy Land, Il trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Rachel Rackham

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2021, MA English, Brigham Young University

2019, MA Library and Information Science, University of Iowa

2017, BA English, Brigham Young University

Bio

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.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Christopher Catanese

April 26, 2022

Degrees

2013, M.A. English, Duke University

2008, B.A. English, Davidson College

Bio

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.


Publications:

  • “Edward Rushton,” in Jackson Bibliography of Romantic Poetry, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson et al., University of Toronto.
  • “Patronage and Poetic Form: Henry Kirke White, Capel Lofft, and the Monthly Mirror,” in Henry Kirke White, 1785–1806, edited by Tim Fulford. Online, August 2022.
  • “Refinement and Romantic Genre,” New Literary History 48, no. 1 (2017). Winner of the 2016 Ralph Cohen Prize.
  • “Johnson, Warton, and the Romance Reader,” in Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle, edited by Anthony Lee (Bucknell University Press, 2019).
  • “Survival Narratives: The Georgic and the Romantic Genre-System,” in Narratives of Romanticism, edited by Sandra Heinen and Katharina Rennhak (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017).
  • Precious against a Precious Thing: Selected Poems of Michael Fieldselected, edited, and introduced by Christopher Catanese and Lawrence Giffin, preface by Stacy Szymaszek (Golias Books, 2019).

Awards

  • 2023. “Listening to the System: Genre in the D. K. Wilgus Papers.” Research grant, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
  • 2022–2023. “Land, Labor, Literature.” Public Humanities Incubator Award and Fellowship, Modern Language Association
  • 2022. Dahl Family Fellowship, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
  • 2016. Graduate Research Fellowship, 18th-century British paintings collections, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
  • 2016. Duke International Research Travel Award, University of Vienna, Austria
  • 2015–2016. William Preston Few Fellowship, Duke University
  • 2015. Six-Month Research Fellowship, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), Seminar für Englische Philologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
  • 2015. Duke International Research Travel Award, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
  • 2015. Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Summer Research Fellowship, Goethe-Institut Göttingen

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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

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.