Degrees

2021, BA English, University of Virginia

Bio

Emma Bradford is a PhD student specializing in early modern literature. Her research focuses on defenses of theater and negotiations of identity in medieval and early modern drama, with special attention paid to Ben Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s later works. She is particularly interested in playwrights who practiced self-advocacy by comparing their talents to those of aristocrats, body workers, and inventors.

 

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Awards

Mellon Fellowship, Department of English & Comparative Literature, UNC Chapel Hill, Aug. 2023 – May 2029 Folger Institute Grant-in-aid, Research Course, Folger Shakespeare Library, Aug. 2024

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2022, MA English, Virginia Tech

2019, BA English, Virginia Commonwealth University

Bio

Kara Rush is a first-year Ph.D. student specializing in early modern literature. In particular, Rush is interested in how early modern English authors use  threatening nature and femininity to mediate anxieties concerning the preservation and contamination of English national identity. Other interests include adaptation studies and late medieval literature.

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Publications:

• “Nobility, Interrupted: The Queer Poetics of Vandana Kataria’s Noblemen.” Borrowers and Lenders. Forthcoming Fall 2024.

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Awards

• Caroline Pace Chermside Award for Best Master’s Thesis: Virginia Tech, 2022.
• Folger Shakespeare Library Grant-in aid, “An Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas,” taught by Marcy North, Claire M. L. Bourne, and Whitney Trettien, 2023.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, MA English, Texas Christian University

2019, BA English, Texas Christian University

Bio

Andreley Bjelland is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period. Her dissertation explores representations of children and crime in early modern English literature, drama, pamphlets, and ballads.

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Teaching Awards

• PIT Journal and Conference Curricular Innovation Award, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2024
• Erika Lindemann Award for Demonstrated Excellence in Teaching, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023

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Awards

• Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024
• Medieval and Early Modern Studies Small Research Grant, UNC MEMS, 2023
• Druscilla French Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Graduate School, 2021

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Degrees

2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Izzy (they/them) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. They study the relationship between the soul and body in medieval literary, aesthetic, and dramatic representations of Creation. Their dissertation, Made A Living Soul: Genesis and the Creation of the Soul in Medieval Devotional and Mystic Literature examines ideas of the soul as developed in early medieval Scholastic exegesis, and how these understandings of the soul are complicated and affirmed in medieval devotional and mystic texts.

In their research on the medieval soul and body, Izzy examines the language used to structure the corporeal, physical self and the sensing, feeling, and cognative self alongside theories of queer embodiment, affect, and representations.

Their broader interests include manuscript studies, medieval philosophy and theology, poetics, and literary criticism.

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Publications:

With H.M. Cushman “Bodies on Display” in A Cultural History of Trans Lives in the Middle Ages (300-1445). Bloomsbury. Forthcoming.

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Teaching Awards

Latina/o Studies Teaching Fellowship, UNC Latina/o Studies Program, 2022

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Awards

Donald Howard Travel Scholarship, New Chaucer Society, 2024

Trans Travel Fund, Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, 2023

CARA Summer Scholarship, Medieval Academy of America, 2022

Internal:   

Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2024

Joseph Breen Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Dept. of English & Comparative Literature, 2023

Research Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2023

Travel Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate and Professional Student Government, 2023

Travel Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Dept. of English & Comparative Literature, 2022, 2024

First Class Honours in English Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 2020

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019, MA in English, Wake Forest University

2017, BA in English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Bio

Thomas Eric Simonson divides his time between literature of the early modern era, especially drama, and 20th century transatlantic studies and literary theory.

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Degrees

2016, BA English, Rhodes College

2019, MA English, University of Alabama

Bio

I specialize in literature, religion, and politics from 1550-1640, with expertise in lyric, dramatic, and narrative poetry from Chaucer to Milton (including Shakespeare). In addition to secondary competency in literary prose from 1500-1800, and special familiarity with the work of Laurence Sterne, I have taught courses on literature for primary and secondary schools, universities, continuing education programs, and correctional education programs. 

My dissertation will evaluate the political gist of English literary depictions of Julius Caesar in the context of more radical political theory

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Awards

Mellon Fellowship (2019-2024)
Ruth Rose Richardson Award (2020)

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Degrees

2016, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College

Bio

Emma is a Comparative Literature student interested in ancient Greek philosophy.  Her work explores the relationship between philosophy and poetry in Plato and Aristotle.  She is also interested in language, specifically metaphor and simile.

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Degrees

2017, MA English Literature, University of Virginia

2015, BA English Literature, Bethany College

Bio

Khristian S. Smith studies late medieval and early modern literature, primarily drama placed in its religiopolitical and material contexts. Their research interests include the histories of religion and emotion, occult knowledge, and literary representations of the Devil. Their most recent publication places William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in its contemporary religious and scientific contexts by exploring the toxicological roles of night, crypts, and demons in the play. They have delivered papers on the Devil and humor in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, Paracelsianism in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and medieval theories of predestination in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.

Smith’s dissertation project, “Horrors of the Early Modern Imagination,” argues that the roots of current understandings of the genre and experience of horror can be traced to an early modern conception of the imagination. By engaging with the early modern imagination’s power to generate, corrupt, lie, and delude, Smith contends we can understand horror, through the imagination, as onto- epistemological: a state of being and knowing. Drawing on the growing critical work on the history of affect, this project examines historical literature and cultural artifacts to comprehend how emotions and experiences have not only evolved over time but also shaped how we think and react today.

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Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “‘No healthsome air breathes in’: Spiritual Poison in Romeo and Juliet,” Poison on the Early Modern Stage: Plants, Paints and Potions, edited by Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus with Kibrina Davey (Manchester University Press, 2023).

Media & Impact

• “Possets, Drugs, and Milky Effects: A Look at Recipes, Shakespeare’s Plays, and Other Historical References,” Shakespeare and Beyond, February 2020.
• “How to Name Medieval Plants,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, January 2020.
• “Displaying the Body,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, November 2019.
• “Recognizing Evil: The Devil and His Horns,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, October 2019.
• “‘The Blood is the Life’: Dracula and 19th-Century Transfusions,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, September 2019.

Curatorial Work

• Narratives of Queer Identity, The Lewis Round Library Special Collections, Chapel Hill, NC, Cocurator, Online.

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Awards

• Eliason Early Stages Fellowship, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, Summer 2023
• Jerry Leath Mills Research Travel Grant, Studies in Philology, Summer 2022
• ARPA Graduate Degree Completion Grant, UNC Graduate School, Fall 2021
• Eating through the Archives: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Foodways Travel Grant, Folger Shakespeare Library, December 2019
• Sara Malone Conference Grant, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, May 2019
• Florence Hoagland Memorial Award for Outstanding Senior English Major, Bethany College Department of Humanities, Spring 2015
• W. F. Kennedy Prize for Outstanding Junior Man, Bethany College, Spring 2014
• Cammie Pendleton Award for Outstanding Junior English Major, BC Department of Humanities, Spring 2014
• Bettie Blanck Travel Award, BC Department of Humanities, Fall 2013
• Cammie Pendleton Award for Outstanding Sophomore English Major, BC Department of Humanities, Spring 2013

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Tulsa

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student studying the overlap of friendship, loyalty, and virtue in Late Medieval Romance.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, MA English, Claremont Graduate University

2012, BA English Literature and Political Science, Loyola Marymount University

Bio

Eddie is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of British literature of the long eighteenth century, he has particular interests in: authenticity, experimentation with literary form and genre, the Gothic, the history of the novel, influences of popular culture, the material book, and narrative performance.

His dissertation project, entitled Creating Enchantment: a History of the Gothic and Inspiring Interactive Reading, explores the history of intellectual influences on the Gothic, the creative possibilities that writers have found in the genre, and how these writers subsequently experimented with the genre to create a particular reading experience. Bringing together archival research, narrative theory, reader-response theory, and sociological history of reading practices in the long-eighteenth century, he hopes to produce a project that examines how authorial innovation, alongside history of the material book—its paratextual elements, decisions made by publishers, and popular readership—have mediated interactive reading experiences of the Gothic novel in the long eighteenth century.

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Publications:

• Yang, Edward. “Conjuring Sympathy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Inspiring Interactive Reading.” Critical Insights: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. Amenia, Salem Press. (forthcoming 2024)
• Sullivan, Rory and Edward Yang. “Searching for Frankenstein: The Locales of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Then and Now.” 2018

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Teaching Awards

• Krista Turner Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2018.

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Awards

• English Teaching Assistant Award (Germany), The Fulbright Program, 2016-17.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume