Degrees

2o21, BA Comparative Literature and Psychology, Haverford College

2024, MPhil English Literature, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Charlotte Scott (she/her) is a first year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. After graduating from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Charlotte spent two years as a psychology research assistant at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She then studied modern and contemporary English literature in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin.

Charlotte’s research interests bring together comparative literature and psychology, focusing particularly on 20th and 21st century speculative fiction. She is curious about the potential of speculative/non-realist literature to represent experiences of marginalization and to imagine and create a more just future.

Publications:

“Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Science and Technology in the United States.” Haverford College: Lutnick Library. Exhibition catalogue. 2021. https://ds-omeka.haverford.edu/writing-the-modern-world/exhibits/show/writing-the-modern-world/introduction

Awards

• Haverford College Augustus Taber Murray Fellowship, 2024
• Phi Beta Kappa, 2020

Degrees

2019, BA English, Davidson College
2023, MA English, Georgetown University

Bio

Mitch Losito is a twentieth and twenty-first century and critical games scholar interested in thinking about how speculative fiction games, the people who play them, and their representations imagine alternative futures.

Degrees

2022, BA English, Belmont University

2024, MA English, Wake Forest University

Bio

Holly (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, with a focus in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. Her primary interests are in disability studies, the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), health humanities, and composition pedagogy.

Recently, Holly’s research has focused on the discursive construction of psychiatric diagnoses and neurodivergent identities. Her first refereed article, forthcoming in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, investigates so-called “Aspergian” positionalities as ideal products of the technocapitalist dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.

In composition studies, Holly focuses on writing transfer, writing in the disciplines (WID), and writing about writing (WAW). She has a particular interest in the interpersonal dynamics of writing instructors and students, with a focus on the impact of these dynamics on student perceptions of competence and confidence in writing tasks. Through her work as a Writing Center tutor in her Master’s program, Holly developed specialties in working with students who self-identified as neurodivergent and/or learning disabled. As a Teaching Fellow, Holly strives to use those pedagogical strategies to create learning opportunities that are accessible and equitable for a diverse population of students.

Publications:

• Thompson, Holly. “‘Demi-autistic, genetically speaking’: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and the ‘Aspergian’ Loop.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. In press.

Awards

• Erika Lindemann Fellowship, 2025
• Gordon A. Melson Outstanding Master’s Student Award, Wake Forest University, 2024
• Richter Scholarship Travel Fund, Wake Forest University, 2023
• James and Sarah King Writing Award, Belmont University, 2022

Degrees

2024, Honors BA English Literature and Philosophy, Marquette University

Bio

Margarita Buitrago is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She focuses on Anglo-French-Iberian medieval literature and is especially interested in allegories and travel literature. Her research explores how the role of vernacular texts, history, translation, and visual culture shaped medieval transnational identities. 

In addition to medieval studies, Margarita is also interested in pedagogy, the digital humanities, and the history of the book. Currently, she works in writing center research and as an editorial assistant at the William Blake Archive. 

Publications:

(co-author) Eugenia Afinoguénova and Margarita Buitrago, “Child Refugees and the Transnational Iconographies of a Better Future During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2025).

Awards

• Doctoral Merit Fellowship, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (2024)
• Outstanding English Major Award, Marquette University Department of English (2024)
• Undergraduate Research Assistantship, Marquette University (2024)
• Honors Research Fellowship Award for Summer 2023, Marquette University Honors Program (2023)

Degrees

2021, BA English, University of Southern California (with Honors)

2021, BA Cognitive Science, University of Southern California

Bio

Valerie Burgess is a first-year Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a dual Bachelors of Arts in English and Cognitive Sciences. While delving into two distinct fields, she developed an interest in the representation of mental health and feminine labor in women’s writings.

Her current research interest is investigating the intersection of psychology and literature to shed light on the depiction of mental illness in 20th—and 21st-century American Literature. Furthermore, she plans to engage in the Department’s interdisciplinary Health Humanities consortium to increase public engagement in the humanities and foster meaningful conversations across disciplines.

Awards

May 2021, Renaissance Scholar, University of Southern California

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Florida

Bio

Kyle Cunningham is a doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill. His research explores the intersections of platform studies, fan studies, and narrative and literary theory, focusing on how communities reproduce themselves through digital communication infrastructures. He is particularly interested in tracing the organizational logics and discursive practices of online communities that develop around decentralized, peer-produced narratives and hermeneutic practices.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, Nicholls State University

2022, MA English, University of New Orleans

Bio

Shelby is a Rhetoric and Composition Ph.D student, teaching fellow, and writing program assistant. She develops interdisciplinary research on writing transfer and hopes that one day her work results in a transfer pedagogy for first-year courses. Years of teaching writing in different learning settings led to Shelby’s interest in writing transfer, so at the core of her work as a Ph.D. student is a desire to help student writers develop confidence and experience long-term success in diverse writing contexts. Recently, Shelby’s research has intersected with embodiment theory. In relation to her primary topic, she explores embodied cognition, embodied pedagogy, visual pedagogy, disability studies, instructional design, memory processes, and metacognition.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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.

Degrees

2022, BA English, Meredith College

Bio

Krista Telford is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 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 in her research, 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.

Awards

• Fall 2022-Present Graduate Teaching Fellow, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English and Comparative Literature
• 2024 GPSG Travel Award, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate and Professional Student Government
• 2024 AI. Curricular Excellence Award, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
• 2024 Breen Award for Outstanding Work in Medieval Studies, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
• 2024 Donald R. Howard Travel Scholarship, The New Chaucer Society
• 2024 LSP Teaching Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program
• 2023 Travel Grant, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
• 2023 Ruth Rose Richardson Award for outstanding performance in the first year of graduate
  study, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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