Degrees

2022, BA English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2022, BS Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

Laura is a master’s student studying Literature, Medicine & Culture. Her research interests focus on experiences of pregnancy, labor, delivery, and parenting. She is especially interested in the conjunction of broader social forces with the lived experiences of individual birthing people. Her capstone project examines the language used by birthing people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Laura received degrees in English and Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an undergraduate student, she spent time studying early modern false pregnancies as well as gene therapeutics.

Degrees

2009, BA English with Teacher’s Certification, Eastern Illinois University

2020, MA English, Wayne State University

Bio

Originally from central Illinois, Lindsay is a PhD student 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.  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/

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 author’s used nature, elements, and bodies to speak against political authority norms and to interrogate the parameters of British national identity. Other interests include adaptation studies, late medieval literature, post-colonial theory, and critical race studies.

Awards

• Caroline Pace Chermside Award for Best Master’s Thesis: Virginia Tech, 2022

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, MA English, Texas Christian University

2019, BA English, Texas Christian University

Bio

Andreley Bjelland is a PhD student and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period.

Awards

• Druscilla French Graduate Student Excellence Award, 2021

Degrees

2022, BA English, University of Virginia

Bio

Lexi is a first-year PhD student interested in the reception and evolution of early Christian figures, texts, theologies, and tropes through the late Middle Ages into the Early Modern period in both literature and art. Her research interests also include the diverse roles of women in religious settings in these and the creation of apocryphon in these periods.

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

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.

Degrees

2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Isabel (they/them) is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina. Their research broadly focuses on the intersections between language, textual culture, and queer theory in medieval literature. Medieval theories of language and rhetoric inform their investigation, alongside structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. Ambiguous words, semiology, and narratives concerning sex change are of particular interest to their research.

Isabel’s reading of queerness in medieval literature is twofold: they seek to locate queer instances in both didactic religious texts, such as the trans saints in medieval hagiography, and in secular narratives like the 13th century Le Roman de Silence. In both secular and religious frameworks, Isabel is concerned with how language informs structures of sexuality and gender and how these structures are often unsettled and displaced through language. In their reading of queerness in medieval texts, Isabel desires to experiment with how we recognize and interpret ‘queerness’ not as a fixed identity, but as acts, events, and performances in dialogue with identity-formation.

They are currently working on two projects: one entitled ‘I kan nat glose’: Queering Illegible Signification in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale,’ which analyzes the infamous pear tree sex scene in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale as a culmination of unintelligible semiotic exchanges of letters and of sexual organs, and the other, “Needle as Queer Instrument of Authorship in Chrétien de Troyes Yvain,” which considers the implications of the textile worker as auctor.

Awards

CARA Summer Scholarship, The Medieval Academy of America, 2022

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

Bio

Toni DiNardo is a third year PhD student in the department of English and Comparative literature. A “medievalismist,” in the words of one colleague,” Toni’s work is predominantly concerned with the reception of medieval thought and perceptions of the Middle Ages as they have been mediated in modern genre fantasy. In particular, they explore the ways in which various audiences attempt to recuperate the Middle Ages through fantasy in order to construct and sustain identities, from queer rehabilitation of the medieval to white nationalist idealization of the Middle Ages as a putative ethno-nationalist paradise. They are also interested in the subjective experience – particularly among queer players – of the tabletop fantasy role-playing game. Other interests include the role of sexuality in Jacobean historiography, the queerness of faith in Donne’s ouevre, and anything to do with Margery Kempe.

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.