Degrees

2001, BA English and Philosophy, Emory University

2004, MA English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

I am a PhD candidate in English. My research interests include popular culture, African American performance, and black womanhood.  My dissertation examines how gospel music performance serves as both extension and projection of black feminist thought, suggesting ways that we might read the representations of black womanhood in twentieth century African American literature as a fluctuating, dynamic performances in response to contemporary noise.  I have taught composition and literature courses at UNC-Chapel Hill, Durham Technical Community College, and Saint Augustine’s University.

Publications:

Awards

• Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellow, 2003, 2005-2007

Degrees

2012, BA in English and Correlate in Art History, Vassar College

Bio

Liz Shand is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research stitches together questions from media studies, book history, gender studies, and Victorian criticism. She is particularly interested in the dominant depictions of women’s reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through analyses of print culture, material studies, and the history of technology, she is interested in the way that women accessed and shared texts within and outside of dominant reading networks.

Aside from her research, Liz integrates design and digital writing in her research and pedagogy. She has developed design resources and guides for UNC’s Design Lab and for Wilson Special Collections Library and has worked in the Digital Innovation Lab.

Publications:

• “Enfolded Narrative in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Refusing ‘a perfect work of art’, Brontë Studies (forthcoming)
• “Women’s Reading as Protest in Gissing’s The Odd Women: ‘I’ll see how I like this first,’” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 62:1 (2019): 53-71.

Teaching Awards

• Doris Betts Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2017-2018

Awards

• Elsie Van Dyck Dewitt Scholarship Fund Fellowship (2018/2019)
• Rare Book School Director’s Fellowship (2018)
• Digital Humanities Summer Institute Course Fellowship (2018)
• North American Victorian Studies Association Travel Grant (2017)
• Digital Literacy Initiative Fellow (2017)
• Digital Literacy Curricular Development Fellowship (2017)
• The Robert M. and Janet Lumiansky Graduate Student Excellence Fund in English (2016)
• W. Bruce Lea Jr. Graduate Fund in English (2016)
• Ford Scholar, Vassar College (2010)

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, MA English, Ohio University

2013, BA English and Religion, Denison University

Bio

Emily Sferra’s interests center on British women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and their depictions of masculinity.

Awards

Humanities Professional Pathway Award, UNC, Summer 2018

Degrees

BA of English Literature, Auburn University, 2017

Bio

My area of study lies in 20th century African American literature with a focus on gender and sexuality studies. I like to say I live in Harlem Renaissance, but I’m also poking out into the later 20th century as well as into film of the 21st.

Degrees

2013, BA English and Plan II Honors, The University of Texas at Austin

Bio

Travis is broadly invested in postwar American fiction, film, and visual art. His research specifically clusters around portrayals of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the 1980s to the present in literary, filmic, and theoretical domains. Travis is particularly interested in the extent to which scripts governing racial representation inform these portrayals.

Publications:

• “Immunity’s Racial Empire: Virality, Melancholy, Whiteness,” American Literature (revised and resubmitted)
• “Speaking Fees: Capital, Colony, and Reference in China Mieville’s Embassytown.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory1 (forthcoming 2020)
• “‘A hint of industrial espionage in the eye’: Orientalism, Essayism, and the Politics of Memory in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video1 (2019): 42 – 61.
• “Long Live the Old Flesh: AIDS and the Americans with Disabilities Act at Quarter Century.” symplokē1-2 (December 2018): 251 – 266.
• “Deregulating Grief: A Review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS,” boundary 2, 2016

Teaching Awards

Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, Spring 2017

Awards

Short Term Fellowship, The Huntington Library, 2019

Summer Research Grant, Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2018

Graduate Student Research Award, Program in Sexuality Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2018

Ruth Rose Richardson Award for Outstanding Record in the First Year of Graduate Study, Department of English, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2015

Dean’s Distinguished Graduate, College of Liberal Arts (12 students chosen from 2,983 graduates), The University of Texas at Austin, 2013

Degrees

BA English, Clemson University

Bio

Matt Duncan is a second-year PhD student and teaching fellow at the UNC Chapel Hill. His research explores the unique role of digital tools in shaping the composition classroom, with an emphasis on a low-bridge approach to the application of technology in writing curriculum. He is also Co-Editor of Fiction for Carolina Quarterly and is a Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative Project Management Fellow.

Awards

• CDHI Project Management Fellowship
• CDHI Recruitment Fellowship
• Fred W. Shilstone Memorial Award
• Lucy K. Rollins Award

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2014, BA English and Piano Performance, Lawrence University

Bio

Andrew Kim is a third-year doctoral student with interests in contemporary transnational literature and film, East Asian studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies.

Publications:

Looking Back on Colonial Korea: Nostalgia and Anti-Nostalgia in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, forthcoming early 2019

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

2014, BA English and French Literature, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Bio

While my interests are varied–from British Modernism to North African Cinema to RPG tabletop and videogames–my current research focuses on gender and sexuality in French and North African Film. While I usually teach French language classes, I also have a background in Women’s and Gender Studies, Global Cinema, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic. As a Comparative Literature student, I enjoy doing interdisciplinary work through different departments at UNC, including English and Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Asian Studies, and African Studies.

Awards

• Foreign Language Area Scholarship, African Studies: Arabic, Summer 2016
• Foreign Language Area Scholarship, African Studies: Arabic, Summer 2018

Degrees

2012, BA English, University of Michigan

Bio

Awards

• Merit Graduate Fellow, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2012
• University of North Carolina George Hills Harper Award, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2013