Skip to main content

Dailihana Esperanza Alfonseca

September 19, 2022

Degrees

2013, AS in Fashion Management, Bay State College

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

 

Bio

Dailihana Alfonseca is a Puerto Rican and Dominican-Northern American writer in a Southern World. Her Afro-Caribbean and Spanish linguistic origin help serve as the inspiration for both her research and her written works.

She is currently attaining her M.A. in English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Her Research focuses on finding the intersection of the literature of colonial/western assimilation, the psychological scope of depression and anxiety (sometimes registered as insanity) in the narrative illness of the stories, books, and poems of women writers, and finding ways to view the cultural impacts of the assimilative trauma experience through immigrant Latina/o literature so that we may better be prepared to intervene on behalf of those seen as the marginalized “other” in westernized societies.


Publications:

  • English as A Second Language – Poem (The Bangalore Review, 2020)
  • Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother – Short Story (Driftwood Press, 2022)

Lara Nicole Pur

August 3, 2022

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 the 19th (and late 18th) century British novel. More specifically, she is focused on women writers and the unique contributions they made to the development of the medium. Feminist comedy and theory, eco-criticism, and classical influence also fall under her umbrella of interest.


Awards

  • Dahl Family Fellowship

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Madison (Madi) Hester

August 24, 2021

Degrees

2018, B.A. English Literature, Colorado Mesa University

2020, M.A. English, Colorado State University

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. I research recent contemporary American literature from 2000 to present, and am absorbed by questions about mixed-race identity, and how multiethnic and multicultural subjects “rightly” identify themselves and are identified. I also examine what makes writing literary, who creates literature, and how digital media challenges and expands those definitions.


Antonia DiNardo

September 28, 2020

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.


Jane McGrail

April 25, 2019

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.


Margaret Maurer

November 19, 2018

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:


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

Michele Robinson

June 13, 2018

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

Lauren Pinkerton

April 23, 2018

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)