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Charlotte Scott

February 14, 2025

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

Holly Thompson

August 19, 2024

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

Valerie Burgess

August 7, 2024

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

Jenny Horton

July 24, 2023

Degrees

2019, B.A. English, Clemson University

2023, M.A. English, Wake Forest University

Bio

Jenny is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her scholarship focuses on the rhetoric of health and medicine and bodily rhetoric. 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.

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 an English 105 teaching fellow.


Awards

  • Erika Lindemann Ph.D. Fellowship in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, 2024
  • Graduate Assistant of the Year Award, Wake Forest University Writing Center, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Lindsay Ragle-Miller

August 16, 2022

Degrees

MA in Literature, Wayne State University, April 2020

BA in English, with Teacher’s Certification, Minor: Medieval Studies, Eastern Illinois University, cum laude, with University Honors, May 2009

Bio

Originally from central Illinois, Lindsay is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow focusing on post-conquest (c. 1100-1300) medieval literature.  Previous research has focused on food in medieval literature, early modern broadside ballads, and perceptions of mental illness in medieval Europe.  Currently, Lindsay is working on sorrow as an affect in later medieval dream visions. Outside of medieval literature, Lindsay is also interested in teaching pedagogy and taught high school English and special education before returning to academia.  She has also worked extensively with a group of instructors at UNC who design coursework focusing on publication in the PIT Journal.


Publications:

Miller, Lindsay, Sarah Chapman and Lynn Losh 2019. Going beyond Lear: Performance and Taming of the Shrew. Dividing the Kingdoms:Interdisciplinary Methods for Teaching King Lear to Undergraduates: Performance: Wayne State University. https://guides.lib.wayne.edu/folgerkinglear/performance

Ragle-Miller, Lindsay et. Al. The Warrior Women Project: Wayne State University. https://s.wayne.edu/warriorwomen/


Teaching Awards

Erika Lindemann Teaching Award in Composition and Literature, 2024


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Cate Rivers

September 24, 2021

Degrees

2019, BA English, North Carolina State University

Bio

Cate Rivers is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. She graduated from North Carolina State University in 2019 with a BA in English and minors in history and Japan studies. Her main area focuses are the Southern United States and Japan. Her interests span trauma studies, nationalism, memory, gender and critical race theories, modernism, cultural representations of mental illness, mysticism, and Buddhist literature. Her ongoing research project frames 20th century Japanese novels and novels from the Southern Renaissance as social histories, with particular attention to war memory, family history, culpability, the construction of “family,” and the relation between national identity and self-conception.


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.


Meleena Gil

July 12, 2021

Degrees

2019, BA English Literature, University of Central Florida

Bio

Meleena (they/she) is a first-generation US-American and college graduate now working towards a doctoral degree in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Meleena has vested interests in queer theory and gender studies, environmental humanities, and disability studies. Drawing from a reproductive justice framework, Meleena specializes in the representations of children in contemporary Latinx literature. 
 
Meleena is a teaching fellow in DOECL and in Women’s and Gender Studies. They serve as the program coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, the administrative assistant for UndocuCarolina, and the senior writing coordinator for the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program. Meleena hopes to unite their service work and their research by partnering with various organizations on and off campus to invigorate their pedagogy and foster more formidable local ties. They aim to create a space for meaningful experiences and mutual acknowledgment.

Teaching Awards

Fall 2021 Latina/o Studies Graduate Teaching Affiliate Fellowship


Elisabeth McClanahan Harris

June 15, 2021
Photo of Elisabeth McClanahan

Degrees

2019, MA English, George Washington University

2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University

Bio

Elisabeth is a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long 19th century and the health humanities. Her dissertation, “Power Play: Games, Jokes, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Asylum Narratives” investigates the modes by which asylum patients creatively contested medical authority through memoirs, exposés, poetry, and newspaper writing.


Publications:

  • “‘Send the little patient to the Hospital at once:’ Early Eugenics at the North Carolina State Hospital’s Epileptic Colony,” in The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19th Century, edited by Lucia Hodgson and Allison Giffen (Routledge, forthcoming in 2025). https://www.routledge.com/The-Biopolitics-of-Childhood-in-the-Long-American-19th-Century/Hodgson-Giffen/p/book/9781032563527
  • “Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene,” in Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven, edited by Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Routledge, 2021.

Awards

  • Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024-2025
  • Eliason Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, UNC English Department, 2023
  • C. Hugh Holman Award for a dissertation in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2023
  • Dissertation Prospectus Fellowship, Wilson Library at UNC, 2022
  • Robert Bain Award for scholarship in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2021
  • Southern Futures Graduate Award, UNC Center for the Study of the American South, 2020
  • McCandlish Endowment Fellowship, GWU, 2017-2019

Jonathan Albrite

September 22, 2020

Degrees

2008, BA English, James Madison University

2020, MA English, James Madison University

Bio

I am a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC. I am currently at work on my dissertation, tentatively titled “No Judgment: The Aesthetics of Neutrality in the Postwar American Novel,” which examines the productive tension that arises between neutral narrators and snobby characters in the decades immediately following the Second World War. More broadly, my research concerns expressions of taste and aesthetic judgment in American literature and film as they relate to discourses on race, gender, sexuality, and class. I also work on topics, including climate change and posthumanist aesthetics, related to the environmental humanities, and have taught courses on contemporary literature, film, and composition.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume