Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Florida

Bio

I’m a PhD student studying contemporary American literature. I am primarily interested in understanding our contemporary culture and, precisely, the position of cultural expression within it: by what processes and under what ideological pressures are cultures shaped and reshaped, and how does culture both respond to and condition individual acts of expression, be they aesthetic in nature or otherwise?

Degrees

2019, B.A. English, Clemson University

2023, M.A. English, Wake Forest University

Bio

Jenny is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her scholarship focuses on bodily rhetorics and rhetorics of health and medicine. She is particularly interested in the language surrounding the treatment of mental and physical health disorders affecting women and the related ways in which women use writing to assert autonomy in literary and popular culture contexts, such as on social media.

Jenny worked as a writing tutor for many years while completing her undergraduate and master’s degrees in English, and now she enjoys helping college students hone their reading and writing skills as a teaching fellow.

Awards

Graduate Assistant of the Year Award, Wake Forest University Writing Center, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, Nicholls State University

2022, MA English, University of New Orleans

Bio

Shelby is a doctoral student and teaching fellow at Chapel Hill focusing in Rhetoric and Composition. Primarily, she works to develop interdisciplinary pedagogical research on writing transfer with an emphasis on first-year composition practices.

Years as a student of literature led to Shelby’s passion for British Romanticism, especially the work of Blake. During her graduate studies, she developed an interest in Blake’s use of the Bible and concentrated on how biblical notions manifest and evolve in his writings and philosophies.

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

Degrees

BA English, Andrews University

MA English, University of Oklahoma

Bio

I am currently interested in video game studies, digital rhetoric, and digitial composition pedagogy. My previous work looked at the horror video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and its uses of virtual spaces to generate affects of fear and anxiety. Currently, I’m interested in studying competitive e-sports titles such as League of Legends and Starcraft II to understand how their fast-paced forms of gameplay require and generate new forms of literacies.

Publications:

Lee, Charles (2021), ‘Running scared: Fear and Space in Amnesia: The Dark
Descent’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 13:1, pp. 93–112.

Degrees

2018, BA English & Computer Science, University of Virginia

Bio

The focus of my studies in the English Department is on video games and understanding how stories get told in this new, developing medium. I am particularly interested in questions of agency, empathy, and virtuality in video game narratives, and how these questions provide interesting and useful lenses outside of the video game medium. I also work on questions of legitimacy and pedagogy surrounding games, and how the physical space of gameplay is important to the inclusion of video games into the academic sphere.

Awards

• 2019 Center for Faculty Excellence – Lenovo Instructional Innovation Grant

Degrees

2010, MA English, DePaul University

2008, BA English, Birmingham-Southern College

Bio

Originally from LaGrange, GA, Paul is primarily interested in American literature from 1865 to the present and its intersection with medical humanities, especially trauma studies. He is primarily interested in the ethical and political implications of depictions of trauma in literature and other media. In addition to his scholarly work, he also teaches sections of ENGL105, tutors for the athletic department, and currently serves as the Fiction Editor for The Carolina Quarterly. He also writes original pieces of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and drama as well as scripts for promotional videos and short narrative or documentary films.

Publications:

• Smith, Jonathan and Paul Blom. “Those Who Don’t Return: Improving Efforts to Address Tuberculosis Among Former Miners in Southern Africa.” NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, vol. 29, no. 1, May 2019, pp. 76-104.
• Blom, Paul. “‘It wasn’t any good diving unless you had a big hammer’: Psychoanalyzing Hemingway’s ‘After the Storm.’” The Sea in the Literary Imagination: Global Perspectives, edited by Ben P. Robertson, Ekaterina V. Kobeleva, Shannon W. Thompson, and Katona D. Weddle. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Jan. 2019.
• Blom, Paul. “‘A trap of our own making’: Mark Twain and the Mechanized Warfare of King Arthur’s Court.” War, Myths, and Fairy Tales, edited by Sara Buttsworth and Maartje Abbenhuis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Jan. 2017.

Awards

• UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Program Professional Development Award Recipient, 2021
• Departmental Summer Fellowship Service Award to provide administrative support at the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab, 2020
• Departmental Travel Grant Award Recipient for travel to present at annual MELUS Conference in New Orleans, LA, April 2020
• UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Program Professional Development Award Recipient, 2020
• UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Program Professional Development Award Recipient, 2019
• Recipient of multiple grants for “Popular Narratives and the Experience of War,” UNC-Chapel Hill, from The Graduate School; Humanities for the Public Good; The College of Arts & Sciences, Division of Fine Arts & Humanities; The College of Arts & Sciences, Division of Social Sciences & Global Programs; Carolina Veterans Resource Center; Department of English and Comparative Literature; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of History; and Center for the Study of the American South, 2019

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, BA English, College of the Holy Cross

Bio

Jane McGrail is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Her research interests include the public humanities, cultural rhetorics, feminisms and rhetorics, community literacy studies, and engaged pedagogy.

Degrees

2016, B.A. English modified with Philosophy, minor in Ethics, Dartmouth College

Bio

Carly Schnitzler is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow studying digital rhetoric and computational arts and poetics.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

BA English, Clemson University

Bio

Matt Duncan is a second-year PhD student and teaching fellow at the UNC Chapel Hill. His research explores the unique role of digital tools in shaping the composition classroom, with an emphasis on a low-bridge approach to the application of technology in writing curriculum. He is also Co-Editor of Fiction for Carolina Quarterly and is a Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative Project Management Fellow.

Awards

• CDHI Project Management Fellowship
• CDHI Recruitment Fellowship
• Fred W. Shilstone Memorial Award
• Lucy K. Rollins Award

Curriculum Vitae / Resume