Degrees

2022, BA English, Belmont University

2024, MA English, Wake Forest University

Bio

Holly (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, with a focus in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. Her primary interests are in disability studies, the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), health humanities, and composition pedagogy.

Recently, Holly’s research has focused on the discursive construction of psychiatric diagnoses and neurodivergent identities. Her first refereed article, forthcoming in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, investigates so-called “Aspergian” positionalities as ideal products of the technocapitalist dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.

In composition studies, Holly focuses on writing transfer, writing in the disciplines (WID), and writing about writing (WAW). She has a particular interest in the interpersonal dynamics of writing instructors and students, with a focus on the impact of these dynamics on student perceptions of competence and confidence in writing tasks. Through her work as a Writing Center tutor in her Master’s program, Holly developed specialties in working with students who self-identified as neurodivergent and/or learning disabled. As a Teaching Fellow, Holly strives to use those pedagogical strategies to create learning opportunities that are accessible and equitable for a diverse population of students.

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Publications:

• Thompson, Holly. “‘Demi-autistic, genetically speaking’: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and the ‘Aspergian’ Loop.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. In press.

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Awards

• Erika Lindemann Fellowship, 2025
• Gordon A. Melson Outstanding Master’s Student Award, Wake Forest University, 2024
• Richter Scholarship Travel Fund, Wake Forest University, 2023
• James and Sarah King Writing Award, Belmont University, 2022

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Degrees

2017, BA English, University of Florida

2021, MA English, University of Colorado Boulder

Bio

My scholarship explores how trauma, mental illness, and suicide affect intrafamilial and interpersonal relationships. Working with representations of the American generational family in popular media, I examine the ways by which narrative-based signifying practices in contemporary American culture harness generic discourses of horror and its adjacent genres to reify interpersonal trauma through depictions of extreme violence and negative affect.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2023, BA English, Washington and Lee University

Bio

My research focuses on the relationship between fear, colonialism, and the Gothic genre. I am interested in how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British texts use Gothic conventions to stoke fear of colonized peoples as well as how more recent postcolonial texts reclaim these conventions to criticize colonialism. I have studied the role of spirituality in the colonial and postcolonial Gothic, including British portrayals of Obeah and other Afro-Caribbean spiritualities.

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Awards

• Sidney M. B. Coulling Prize for Best Senior Work, Washington and Lee University
• Catherine Houston Campbell Scholarship in English Literature, Washington and Lee University
• Jean Amory Wornom Award for Distinguished Critical Writing, Washington and Lee University
• Sidney M. B. Coulling Prize in English, Washington and Lee University

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Florida

Bio

Kyle Cunningham is a doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill. His research explores the intersections of platform studies, fan studies, and narrative and literary theory, focusing on how communities reproduce themselves through digital communication infrastructures. He is particularly interested in tracing the organizational logics and discursive practices of online communities that develop around decentralized, peer-produced narratives and hermeneutic practices.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2022, MA English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2016, BA Religious Studies, Wingate University

Bio

A North Carolina native, Joshua Cody Ward joined the program in Fall 2022. His field is Modern and Contemporary American literature broadly (1900-Present), and specifically Literature of the American South, the Appalachian South, and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel, though he is also an avid scholar of Cormac McCarthy and of Thomas Wolfe. His prospective dissertation, Articulating Appalachia, argues that definitions of the region and its people are co-constructed across the 20th c. through both cultural representation (literature, film, music) and Regional and National projects for economic and social uplift.

He is currently a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a Senior Coordinator for the Critical Speakers Series, and a Board Member (2023-2026) for the Thomas Wolfe Society. He is an occasional Reviewer for the The Cormac McCarthy Journal. As a junior scholar, his work has been accepted or published in several journals and essay collections, and he has presented his work at over 20 academic conferences.

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Publications:

• “Darkness on the Edge of Town: Beat Subject Formation, Black Ontology, and Fugitivity as Gnosis in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” In This Country’s Hard on People: Cormac McCarthy and American Identity, edited by Vernon Cisney. Forthcoming.
• “Weird Object Relations, Ecology, and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris.” In New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy: Encountering The Passenger and Stella Maris, edited by Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore. Forthcoming.
• “A Literary Ménage à Trois: An Analysis of the Elizabeth Lemmon Collection on Thomas Wolfe, 1934-1935.” Forthcoming.
• “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 88, no. 2-3, 2023, pp. 157-170.
• “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review, vols. 44 & 45, nos. 1 & 2, 2020 & 2021, pp. 8-25.
• [album] The Boron Heist. Ridin’ Rough. Mystery School Records, April 6 2019.
• “Light and Darkness, Sight and Blindness: Religious Knowledge in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.” Wingate Research Review, issue 8, Fall 2016, pp. 87-106.
• “Raison d’être.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 9.
• “On Testing.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 23.

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Awards

• Graduate Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022-Present, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
• John R. Bittner Student Literary Prize, May 27^th 2023, Thomas Wolfe Society Conference.
• LSP Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program.
• Graduate Student Transportation Grant, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate School.
• Languages & Literatures Graduate Student Paper Award Recipient, February 23^rd 2023, 44^th Annual SWPACA Conference.
• 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award Recipient, November 12^th 2022, SAMLA 94.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2022, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• The Julian D. Mason Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies, April 29^th 2022, UNC Charlotte, English Department.
• Graduate Teaching Assistantship, Fall 2020-Spring 2022, UNC Charlotte, English Department.
• Wittliff Collections William Hill Research Award, 2021-2022, Texas State University, For archival research conducted July 2021 in the Cormac McCarthy Papers and Woolmer Collections.
• Anne Newman Graduate Student Travel Grant, Fall 2021, UNC Charlotte.
• Excellence in Philosophy Award, April 24^th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
• G. Byrns Coleman Award for Excellence in Religious Studies, April 24^th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
• University Honors, April 24^th, 2016, Wingate University.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, BA English, Wake Forest University

2020, MEd Curriculum and Instruction, Virginia Commonwealth University

Bio

Angelique Bassard is a second-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the English and Comparative Literature program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her Bachelor of Arts degrees in English from Wake Forest University and a Master of Education from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research area is American Literature throughout the Long Nineteenth Century, with special interest in Postbellum African American Literature, Southern Writers, Reconstruction, the memory and haunting of the slave past, and Southern realism and romanticism.

Currently, she is researching NC-born black writer Jack Thorne, pseudonym of David Bryant Fulton, and his use and subversion of Southern romance in his 1901 novel, Hanover; or the Persecution of the Lowly: A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. 

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Awards

• Lee Green Award, UNC Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023
• Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC Chapel Hill, 2023

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, M.A. English, Duke University

2008, B.A. English, Davidson College

Bio

I work on British and transatlantic literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic era, with an emphasis on poetry and genre. I am particularly interested in evolving systems of land use, in working-class writers and rural issues, commons and enclosures, and economic and agricultural history. I have published on Samuel Johnson, antiquarianism, and the mass reading public; on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, vitalism, and Romantic-era natural history, and my journal article on Robert Bloomfield, Wordsworth, and Romantic genre transformations won the 2016 Ralph Cohen Prize in New Literary History. I also publish poetry and literary translations, and I am coeditor of the small poetry press Golias Books.

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Publications:

• “Edward Rushton,” in Jackson Bibliography of Romantic Poetry, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson et al., University of Toronto.
• “Patronage and Poetic Form: Henry Kirke White, Capel Lofft, and the Monthly Mirror,” in Henry Kirke White, 1785–1806, edited by Tim Fulford. Online, August 2022.
• “Refinement and Romantic Genre,” New Literary History 48, no. 1 (2017). Winner of the 2016 Ralph Cohen Prize.
  
• “Johnson, Warton, and the Romance Reader,” in Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle, edited by Anthony Lee (Bucknell University Press, 2019).
• “Survival Narratives: The Georgic and the Romantic Genre-System,” in Narratives of Romanticism, edited by Sandra Heinen and Katharina Rennhak (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017).
• Precious against a Precious Thing: Selected Poems of Michael Field, selected, edited, and introduced by Christopher Catanese and Lawrence Giffin, preface by Stacy Szymaszek (Golias Books, 2019).

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Awards

• 2023. “Listening to the System: Genre in the D. K. Wilgus Papers.” Research grant, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
• 2022–2023. “Land, Labor, Literature.” Public Humanities Incubator Award and Fellowship, Modern Language Association
• 2022. Dahl Family Fellowship, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
• 2016. Graduate Research Fellowship, 18th-century British paintings collections, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
• 2016. Duke International Research Travel Award, University of Vienna, Austria
• 2015–2016. William Preston Few Fellowship, Duke University
• 2015. Six-Month Research Fellowship, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), Seminar für Englische Philologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
• 2015. Duke International Research Travel Award, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
• 2015. Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Summer Research Fellowship, Goethe-Institut Göttingen

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA Classics, minors French & English, summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

I study classics and American poetry. My dissertation considers how and why Black American poets from the Revolutionary Era to the Harlem Renaissance received the classics. Through case studies of four poets, Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, Countee Cullen, and Melvin Beaunorus Tolson, I argue that, over time, Black writers naturalized the classics, encoded as a White discourse in earlier American traditions, as Black, thus demonstrating the spaces within classics that resonated with Black experiences and exposing the construction of classics as White.

My general interests are in poetry and poetics (American; 19^th– and 20^th– centuries French; and ancient Greek and Latin lyric) and classical receptions, especially Black classicisms.

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Publications:

Scholarship:

• “Review of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin 35.1 (2023), 19-20.

Poems et al.:

• “On Hudson River.” Bayou (forthcoming).
• “My Mother Says.” Rattle 83 (2024).
• “Flux.” BlazeVOX: Fall 2021, 412-18.
• “Lai-jee.” Indiana Review 43.1 (2021), 85-92.

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Teaching Awards

• Doris Betts Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2023

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Awards

External:

• Graduate Student Conference Paper Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, 2023
• Dickinson Critical Institute Grant, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2022

Internal:

• Bain Award (Excellence in Pre-1900 American Lit.), UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
• Travel Grant, UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
• Transportation Grant, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2022
• Travel Award, UNC-CH Graduate & Professional Student Government, 2022
• Booker Fellowship, UNC-CH DOECL, 2021
• Inclusive Excellence Top-Up, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2021

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

Bio

Antonia DiNardo is a fifth year PhD candidate in English literature. Her work is focused on mediations of the Middle Ages in modern popular culture from Tolkien to the The Witcher, utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing semiotics, genre theory, critical game studies, and reception studies. Her dissertation, “Imagining White Pasts: Fantasy and Far-Right Pseudo-History” explores the intersection of medievalist media and white nationalist discourse. Antonia has given talks and lectures on the fraught intersection of fantasy and conceptions of “historical authenticity,” on the co-opting of popular fantasy franchises as recruiting tools by far-right groups, on chivalric imagery in far-right identity construction, and on chivalric masculinities in Chaucer and Chretien de Troyes. 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. In 2024, she joined the team in the Greenlaw Gameroom, UNC’s first games-based teaching space.

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Awards

• Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Rare Book Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, 2023

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019, BA English and History, University of South Carolina Honors College

Bio

Rose Steptoe is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research examines the proliferation and aesthetics of body horror in contemporary feminist cinema. More broadly, her interests include genre and horror studies, feminist film theory, age and disability studies, and sound studies. She is also interested in the scholarly and pedagogical value of videographic composition. Read more at www.rosesteptoe.com.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume