Degrees

2023, B.A. Gender Studies / English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

Bio

X. (she/her) is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is primarily interested in the construction of racialized queer identities in performance spaces, especially the American ballroom and drag scenes, as they feature in documentary, literature, and television. She is also interested in viewing HIV as a performing subject in AIDS-era American literature. Outside of academia, X. enjoys being a part-time drag queen, discussing communist politics, and writing poetry about her Xicana queerness.

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, AS in Fashion Management, Bay State College

2019, BS in Fashion Merchandising & Management, Southern New Hampshire University

 

Bio

Afro-Caribbean-American writer Dailihana Alfonseca is currently working on her Masters in Health Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her concentration in Literature, Medicine, and Culture continues to amplify marginalized perspectives through her writing and research of the Im/Migrant experiences within America and of the colonial impacts of the past.
In working with what Zora Neale Hurston called “Literary Science,” and what W.E.B. Dubois coined as “Double Consciousness,” her writing marries creative works, archival research, and medical analysis to convey tangible bridges of experiential knowledge. She does this in hopes of expanding the scope of knowledge available to historically under-served communities.

Her poetry has previously appeared in The Bangalore Review, The Global Gazette, and her fiction has appeared in Driftwood Press Literary Magazine.
In 2023 she won a Robert J. Dau Prize and was named an emerging writer to watch by PEN America. Her short story, “Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother,” was also nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize.

---

Publications:

---

Awards

2023 Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers by P.E.N. America

---

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 woman-written sensation novels of 19th century Britain. More specifically, she is interested in the sensation novel as a potential vehicle for feminist satire and woman’s comedy, and the way that this comedic tradition can be traced back to earlier novelists like Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen. Her interest sometimes branches into the gothic, feminist history, antifeminist woman writers in the Victorian period, and ecocriticism.

---

Awards

• Dahl Family Fellowship

---

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

Bio

Toni DiNardo is a fourth year PhD student in the department of English and Comparative literature. Once described by a colleague as a “medievalismist,” her work is predominantly concerned with the mediation of medieval thought and constructions of the middle ages in modern genre fantasy. She is particularly interested in the use of what Umberto Eco called “the Middle Ages as pretext” as a backdrop for the construction and sustenance of socio-political identities, from bucolic queer medievalisms to white nationalist idealization of a putatively ethno-nationalist Middle Ages. Toni has given talks on the fraught intersection of fantasy and conceptions of “historical accuracy” and on the co-opting of popular fantasy franchises as recruiting tools by far-right groups, and in 2023 she held the Hanes Graduate Fellowship, studying the annotations and marginalia of C. S. Lewis’ personal collection of medieval and early modern texts.

---

Awards

• Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Rare Book Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, 2023

---

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

2015, M.Phil. Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University

2014, Pedagogy, Brooklyn College (non-degree)

2013, A.B. English Literature & Theater, Brown University

Bio

Margaret Maurer’s research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and science, especially alchemy and chymistry. She explores the interaction between literature and science through manuscript and print culture, the material book, and book history.

---

Publications:

• “‘I Have Known’: Copying Personal Accounts in Early Modern Receipt Books,” The Recipes Project, 2022.
• “‘The undiscovered country’: Shakespeare, Star Trek, and Intertextual Narratives in Station Eleven,” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (vol. 48, issue 134, p. 32-44), November 2019.
• “Receiving Alchemical Knowledge”, The Recipes Project, 2018.

---

Teaching Awards

• Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, UNC Chancellor’s Awards, Spring 2021
• Erika Lindemann Award for Demonstrated Excellence in Teaching, UNC English and Comparative Literature Department, Spring 2020
• Professional Development Award, UNC Writing Program, Fall 2018-Spring 2021

---

Awards

• Allington Fellow, Science History Institute, 2022-2023
• Dissertation Fellowship, Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2022-2023
• Dean’s Fellowship, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Spring 2022
• Off-Campus Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, Fall 2021
• Jerry Leath Mills Research Travel Grant, Studies in Philology, Spring 2020
• Medieval and Early Modern Studies Research Grant, UNC MEMS, Spring 2020
• Pre-Dissertation Exploration Award, UNC Center for Global Initiatives, Spring 2020
• The Languages of Nature: Science, Literature, and the Imagination Travel Grant, Folger Shakespeare Library, September 2019
• Ruth Rose Richardson Award for Outstanding Record in the First Year of Graduate Study, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, August 2018
• A Folger Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas Travel Grant, Folger Shakespeare Library, May 2018
• Incubator Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2018
• Digital Rolls and Fragments Graduate Workshop, Beineike Library, November 2017
• Medieval and Early Modern Studies Small Research Grant, UNC MEMS, 2017
• Millie Helen Hicks Premium, Brown University, 2013

---

Degrees

2009, BA English, Kenyon College

2011, MA Humanities with English focus, University of Chicago

Bio

Michele Robinson is pursuing a minor in Women’s and Gender studies and her dissertation focuses on the role of space and gender in nineteenth century literature. She has enjoyed teaching courses like English 105, 123 Into to Fiction: Gendered Politics of Madness and Mental Illness, and 129 Literature and Cultural Diversity.

---

Awards

• Julius Sylvester Hanner Memorial Fellowship
• Ruth Rose Richardson Prize

---

Degrees

B.A., Plan II and English Honors, The University of Texas at Austin (2011)

Bio

English PhD student studying late nineteenth and early twentieth century British literature with a focus on the theory and history of knowledge, women’s writing, and novel studies.

---

Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:

• “Archiving Dracula: Knowledge Acquisition and Interdisciplinarity,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts (forthcoming)

Edited Special Issues:

• Guest co-editor, with Doreen Thierauf, Generational Exchange and Transition in Women’s Writing, special issue of Women’s Writing, vol. 26, no. 2, 2019.

---

Awards

• Evan Frankel Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC-Chapel Hill (2020)
• Inductee, Frank Porter Graham Graduate and Professional Student Honor Society, UNC-Chapel Hill (2018)

---