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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.


Lara Nicole Pur

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2020, BA English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne

Bio

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.


Awards

  • Dahl Family Fellowship

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

Adrin Martin

August 2, 2022

Degrees

2021, English BA, Minor in Communication, Texas A&M University at College Station

Bio

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.


Awards

  • Tarheel Writing Guide Professional Development Award
  • Undergraduate Research Scholar, Texas A&M University
  • 2021 Rhetoric and Discourse Studies Essay Contest Winner, Texas A&M University
  • Gathright Phi Kappa Phi Dean’s Excellence Award Semi-Finalist

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.


Everett Lang

September 20, 2021

Degrees

2010, B.A. (Hons) Literae Humaniores, University of Oxford

2018, M.A. Ancient Greek and Latin, Boston College

Bio

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.


Madison (Madi) Hester

August 24, 2021

Degrees

2018, B.A. English Literature, Colorado Mesa University

2020, M.A. English, Colorado State University

Bio

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.