2017, BA English, College of the Holy Cross
Jane McGrail is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include historical rhetoric, the theory of knowledge, 19th Century British literature and culture, the Victorian novel, and women writers.
2015, English MA, California State University Los Angeles
2013, English BA, University of California Berkeley
2013, Political Science BA, University of California Berkeley
I am a PhD student studying social reform in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, especially in regards to gender and sexuality. I am interested in how literature of the period engages with the free love movement and utopianism. The Oneida Community and Brook Farm are two experimental utopian communities of great interest to me. Additional areas of interest include: women’s writing, sentimental fiction, gothic literature, African American literature, and the American Civil War.
2011, BA English, University of Colorado at Boulder
2018, MA English, University of Colorado at Boulder
I am interested in questions which look at memory and nostalgia and the way in which shifts in technology, political borders and intellectual thought have changed literature’s relationship to both. I’m broadly interested in modernism, 20th century literature, immigrant literature, memory studies, materiality, gender and sexuality, Jewish studies, the interplay of image and language, and critical theory.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature and History | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Modernism | Transatlantic Studies | Visual Culture and Arts | Women Writers
2001, BA English and Philosophy, Emory University
2004, MA English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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.
2012, BA in English and Correlate in Art History, Vassar College
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.
2015, MA English, Ohio University
2013, BA English and Religion, Denison University
Emily Sferra’s interests center on British women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and their depictions of masculinity.
Humanities Professional Pathway Award, UNC, Summer 2018
British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | The Novel | Women Writers
BA of English Literature, Auburn University, 2017
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.
2013, BA English and Plan II Honors, The University of Texas at Austin
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.
Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, Spring 2017
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
BA English, Clemson University
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.
2009, BA English, Kenyon College
2011, MA Humanities with English focus, University of Chicago
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.
