Degrees

2013, AS in Fashion Management, Bay State College

2019, BS in Fashion Merchandising & Management, Southern New Hampshire University

Bio

Dailihana Alfonseca is a Puerto Rican and Dominican-Northern American writer in a Southern World. Her Afro-Caribbean and Spanish linguistic origin help serve as the inspiration for both her research and her written works.

She is currently attaining her M.A. in English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Her Research focuses on finding the intersection of the literature of colonial/western assimilation, the psychological scope of depression and anxiety (sometimes registered as insanity) in the narrative illness of the stories, books, and poems of women writers, and finding ways to view the cultural impacts of the assimilative trauma experience through immigrant Latina/o literature so that we may better be prepared to intervene on behalf of those seen as the marginalized “other” in westernized societies.

Publications:

• English as A Second Language – Poem (The Bangalore Review, 2020)
• Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother – Short Story (Driftwood Press, 2022)

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), specifically Literature of the American South and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel.

Publications:

• “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review. Forthcoming.
• “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review. Forthcoming.
• [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.

Awards

• Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
• Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022-Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill.
• LSP Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program.
• Graduate Student Transportation Grant, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate School, “‘Writing around the edges of things’: On the Lighthouse in American Literature and in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.”
• 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award, November 12^th, 2022, SAMLA 94.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2022, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department, “Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed, and Black Women’s Writing in the 1980s: Perceptions versus Reality” & “Urban Fantasy and the Dickensian in Alex Pheby’s Mordew.”
• 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.
• 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, “Is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon A Modernist Novel.”
• 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.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, B.A. English Literature, Colorado Mesa University

2020, M.A. English, Colorado State University

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. I research recent contemporary American literature from 2000 to present, and am absorbed by questions about mixed-race identity, and how multiethnic and multicultural subjects “rightly” identify themselves and are identified. I also examine what makes writing literary, who creates literature, and how digital media challenges and expands those definitions.

Degrees

2019, BA English Literature, University of Central Florida

Bio

Meleena (they/she) is a first-generation US-American and college graduate now working towards a doctoral degree in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Drawing from queer theoretical and environmental humanities frameworks, Meleena specializes in the portrayals of children’s narratives in contemporary Latinx literature. 

Meleena hopes to unite their service work and their research by partnering with various organizations on and off campus to invigorate their pedagogy and foster more formidable local ties. They aim to create a space for meaningful experiences and mutual acknowledgment.

Teaching Awards

Fall 2021 Latina/o Studies Graduate Teaching Affiliate Fellowship

Degrees

2018, MA English, Wake Forest University

2016, BA English, Drexel University

Bio

Krysten Voelkner is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her primary interests reside at the intersection of environmental humanities and contemporary Latinx literature. Recent publications of hers can be found in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, and Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which investigates the ways in which Latinx writers experiment with aesthetics of horror, dread, anxiety, and other ‘bad’ affects associated with the climate crisis. In this regard, she hopes to explore the affective ecologies of Latinx environmental literature and film as they offer ways of thinking within and beyond the Anthropocene.

Publications:

• “Vectors and Vermin: Gendered Violence and the Role of Insects in the Arthropoetics of Natalie Scenters-Zapico.” Chiricú Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2022.
• “Another Way of Seeing: Ecological Existentialism in Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’.” The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2021.
• “Memory, Temporality, and Communal Realization: Reading the Nomadic Subject in Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2020.

Teaching Awards

• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (UNC Latina/o Studies Department), Spring 2022
• Erika Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition in English 105 (UNC Department of English), Fall 2021.
• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (Fall 2020)

Awards

• UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, Summer 2022
• Nominee: David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies, 2021
• Ruth Rose Richardson Award for outstanding record in the first year of graduate study, (UNC Department of English), 2019-20
• H. Broadus Jones MA Student Award for Excellence in English (Wake Forest University Department of English), Spring 2018

Degrees

• 2017, BA Critical Studies in English Cultures, Literatures, and Film, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire
• 2017, BA Latin American Studies, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire

Bio

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 20^th-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.

Publications:

• Taiveaho, Emilio Jesús. “Cartographies of Refuge, Music, and Survival: A Review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” Carolina Quarterly Online, 2018.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 8: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt. 1).” CQ Speaks Podcast, 25 February 2020.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 9: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt.2) ‘Christ in Alabama.’” CQ Speaks Podcast, 3 June 2020.

Teaching Awards

• Latina/o Studies Teaching Grant – 2020

Awards

• 2017 – Present: Mellon Fellow

Degrees

2017, BA Literature, BA Spanish, University of North Carolina Asheville

Bio

Marcy Pedzwater studies twentieth and twenty-first century North and Latin American literature. Her current research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and colonialism/imperialism in Post-dictatorship literature of the Americas. She is also interested in the function of memory, archive, and trauma in these texts. She teaches English 105, Spanish 105, and Spanish 203.

Publications:

• Review of Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel, by Jennifer Harford Vargas, Chiricú, Fall 2019.
• “Thinking with José Revueltas and Roberto Bolaño: Philosophical Literary Approaches to Latin America.” Review of José Revueltas y Roberto Bolaño: Formas genéricas de la experiencia by Alejandro Sánchez Lopera, A Contracorriente, vol. 15, no. 3, Spring 2018.
•  “Not of this World: Divine Radical Inclusivity as a Foil to Worldly Wisdom in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away,” The Sigma Tau Delta Review, vol. 14, Sigma Tau Delta, Spring 2017.