2020, MA English, Texas Christian University
2019, BA English, Texas Christian University
Andreley Bjelland is a PhD student and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period.
2022, BA English, Meredith College
Krista Telford is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is specializing in medieval literature and is particularly focused on religious writings. Her research examines forms of prayer in medieval and early modern literature as well as the impact of form on medieval depictions of the afterlife. She aims to take an interdisciplinary approach to her study of religious texts, considering the performative aspect of many poems and prayers and drawing on musicological research. Krista’s recent and ongoing work includes a project exploring resistance to transcendence in the ending of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which examines Chaucer’s reading of Boethius, and a paper exploring the polyphonic and dialogic nature of Francesco Suriano’s underexamined 15th century treatise on the Holy Land, Il trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Digital Humanities | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Travel Writing | Women Writers
2019, BA English, North Carolina State University
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.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Disability Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature and History | Literature and Religion | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Pedagogy | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Social Justice | Southern Literature | Transatlantic Studies
2010, B.A. (Hons) Literae Humaniores, University of Oxford
2018, M.A. Ancient Greek and Latin, Boston College
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.
Aesthetics | British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from 1660 to 1789 | Comparative Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Digital Humanities | Disability Studies | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | History of the Book | Literature and Science | Pedagogy
2019, BA English, Mount Holyoke College
My scholarly interests naturally converge around questions of trauma, ethics, affect, and divergent subjectivities in narratives of resistance and reconciliation. My work is grounded in an intersectional feminist hermeneutic lens to explore the role of gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism in texts by contemporary American multiethnic women writers. I am also interested in speculative imagery and it’s significance in illuminating historically silenced facets of subjectivity. Psychoanalytic criticisms surrounding haunting and trauma, in conjunction with an exploration of queer women’s psyches as sites for potential violence or intimacy are also uniquely compelling to me. My work asks how/why ‘deviant affects’ are labeled as such, and why the burden of silencing those affects largely falls on “marginalized” folks, i.e. queer and trans women of color?
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Social Justice | Women Writers
2018, BA Classics, minors French & English, summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania
I research 19th and 20th century US poetry and poetics. My dissertation seeks to answer what it means to be an American poet by examining the use of classics in the US tradition. In studying the ways in which classical culture is adapted by US poets, I trace the emergence of ideas of Americanness, as projected against the backdrop of a standardized cultural inheritance.
An earlier version of my dissertation idea, “Du Bois as the American Poet,” won the Graduate Student Conference Paper Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society in 2023.
Scholarship:
Poems et al.:
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Internal:
2019, BA English Literature, University of Central Florida
Fall 2021 Latina/o Studies Graduate Teaching Affiliate Fellowship
2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University
2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College
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.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | Children’s Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Disability Studies | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Historiography | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Genre Theory | Irish Literature | Literature and Education | Literature and History | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Media Studies | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Science Fiction | Social Justice | Visual Culture and Arts | Women Writers
2008, BA English, James Madison University
2020, MA English, James Madison University
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.
Aesthetics | African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Disability Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Southern Literature
2019, BA English and History, University of South Carolina Honors College
Rose Steptoe is a third-year Ph.D. student and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the intersection of feminist authorship and body horror. More broadly, she is interested in genre and horror studies, feminist film theory, and sound studies.
Read more at rosesteptoe.com.
