2019, BA English, Ithaca College
I am a first-year PhD student in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. My interests include 20th and 21st century American literature, transatlantic modernism, and critical theory.
2016, MA English, Loughborough University
2014, BA English, Loughborough University
Doug Stark is a media and game studies scholar completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At UNC, he works for the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab as the Game Research Coordinator and teaches courses on film, video games, comics, digital media, and writing. Primarily, Doug’s research concerns twentieth and twenty-first century forms of play and game, treating them as both expressions of contemporary social conditions and means of adapting to our technocultural environments. His dissertation – “Playing with Habit: The Biopolitics of Games Under Neoliberalism” – addresses the power games exercise over life by examining the habits they promote in colonial, military, managerial, and entertainment contexts. Find his forthcoming and published work in journals Extrapolation, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Post-45, Eludamos, Qui Parle, Leonardo, and Configurations, and in edited collections Playing the Field, Encyclopedia of Video Games, and Depictions of Power.
2010, MA English, DePaul University
2008, BA English, Birmingham-Southern College
Originally from LaGrange, GA, Paul is primarily interested in American literature from 1865 to the present and its intersections with the health humanities, especially literary trauma studies. He is primarily interested in the ethical and political implications of depictions of trauma in literature and other media, especially acts of violence and atrocity for both perpetrators and survivors. In addition to his scholarly work, he also teaches sections of ENGL 105 and ENGL 105i: Writing in Health and Medicine, has tutored for the athletic department, has served for several years as the Fiction Editor for The Carolina Quarterly, and currently serves as the Co-Director for UNC’s Literature, Medicine, and Culture Colloquium (LMCC), https://lmcc.web.unc.edu/. He also writes original pieces of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and drama as well as scripts for promotional videos and short narrative or documentary films.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Creative Writing | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Digital Humanities | Digital Rhetorics | Disability Studies | Film and Media Studies | Literature and Science | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Modernism | Pedagogy | Social Justice
B.A. English, 2010, University of Delhi
M.A. English, 2012, University of Delhi
M.Phil, English Literature, 2014, University of Delhi
My research focuses on environmental justice in the Anthropocene. I am interested in the convergences in the fields of ecocriticism, post-colonial theory and global socioeconomics, to examine how the effects of climate change, displacement, toxic and electronic waste, and resource extraction are differentially experienced across the Global North and South. I am also interested reading in environmental advocacy through the the intersections between art and activism in grassroots movements. I study gobal anglophone literature, with a focus on environmental justice movements in India and the U.S.A.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Comparative Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Digital Humanities | Film and Media Studies | Literature and Science | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Posthumanism | Science Fiction | Science Writing | Social Justice
BA of English Literature, Auburn University, 2017
Hannah (they/them) is a scholar of Black and African American literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries with a scholarly focus on Black LGBTQ film, literature, and archives.
2013, BA English, Hendrix College
2016, MA Social Sciences, University of Chicago
My work centers on questions of subjectivity, agency, and desire in twentieth-century American literature and global cinema. Most recently, I have become interested in the relationship between debt and desire as dual economic and psychological forces that structure contemporary experience. Living and teaching abroad (most recently, Brazil) has shaped my approach to literature and film and has enabled me to explore transatlantic cultural and aesthetic influences on literary and cinematic forms.
2014, BA English and French Literature, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
My research focuses on gender, sexuality, and sensuality in the cinemas of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora in France. I’ve taught a variety of courses, including French, Arabic, film, and queer literature and culture, and I have experience teaching ESL and English composition to non-native speakers. As a Comparative Literature student, I enjoy doing interdisciplinary work through different departments at UNC, including English and Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and African Studies.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Encyclopedia Articles
Book Reviews
The Diane R. Leonard Award for Outstanding Foreign Language Instruction in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2019
2015, MA English, Claremont Graduate University
2012, BA English Literature and Political Science, Loyola Marymount University
Eddie is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of British literature of the long eighteenth century, he has particular interests in: authenticity, experimentation with literary form and genre, the Gothic, the history of the novel, influences of popular culture, the material book, and narrative performance.
His dissertation project, entitled Creating Enchantment: a History of the Gothic and Inspiring Interactive Reading, explores the history of intellectual influences on the Gothic, the creative possibilities that writers have found in the genre, and how these writers subsequently experimented with the genre to create a particular reading experience. Bringing together archival research, narrative theory, reader-response theory, and sociological history of reading practices in the long-eighteenth century, he hopes to produce a project that examines how authorial innovation, alongside history of the material book—its paratextual elements, decisions made by publishers, and popular readership—have mediated interactive reading experiences of the Gothic novel in the long eighteenth century.
Aesthetics | American Literature to 1900 to the present | British Literature from 1660 to 1789 | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | British Literature from 1900 to the Present | Depictions Of The Child | Drama | Film and Media Studies | Genre Theory | History of the Book | Irish Literature | Literature and Education | Literature and History | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Narrative Theory | Pedagogy | Performance Studies | Science Fiction | The Novel | Transatlantic Studies | Visual Culture and Arts
emilio Jesús Taiveaho Peláez is a first-generation migrant and a PhD. student—in that order—through the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. As both poet and scholar, their work engages the intersection of aesthetic experience and political discipline, blending critical, creative, and archival inquiry. Focusing on 20th-century hemispheric experimental poetry, their dissertation (tentatively titled Ojos de Hierba: Walt Whitman’s Children & the American Lyric) probes the shared literary and philosophical history of the Américas through the lens of Neobaroque aesthetics, tracing dissonant and dissident relations in the life and work of figures such as Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Néstor Perlongher, and Cecilia Vicuña. emilio’s first book of poetry, landskips (words are a hard look), a latinX exploration of the sonics and optics of our contemporary American Landscapes, is forthcoming through The Concern Newsstand.
Aesthetics | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Film and Media Studies | Latina / Latino Literature | Literature and Philosophy | Literature of the Americas | Modernism | Performance Studies | Poetry and Poetics | Queer Theory | Visual Culture and Arts
2017, MA English, University of Virginia
2014, BA English, The College of William and Mary
Rory Sullivan studies late medieval English literature, art, and culture, and is completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches courses on speculative fiction, visual narrative, and composition, while also working at the Writing and Learning Center as a Writing Coach. Rory’s scholarly work is interested in the lived experiences and devotional practices of late medieval people. His dissertation, “The Virtual Imagination and the Self in Late Medieval England,” investigates the interactions between individuals and art objects, poems, performances, and manuscripts in order to understand how individuals cultivated devotional practices and experiences.
Breen Award for outstanding work in the field of Medieval Studies, 2019
Balch Prize for a Masters Student in English, 2017
Aesthetics | British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Film and Media Studies | Literature and History | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Science Fiction | Visual Culture and Arts
