Degrees

2019, B.A. English, Clemson University

2023, M.A. English, Wake Forest University

Bio

Jenny is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her scholarship focuses on the rhetoric of health and medicine and bodily rhetoric. She is particularly interested in the language surrounding the treatment of mental and physical health disorders affecting women and the related ways in which women use writing to assert autonomy in literary and popular culture contexts.

Jenny worked as a writing tutor for many years while completing her undergraduate and master’s degrees in English, and now she enjoys helping college students hone their reading and writing skills as an English 105 teaching fellow.

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Awards

Graduate Assistant of the Year Award, Wake Forest University Writing Center, 2023

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, AS in Fashion Management, Bay State College

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

 

Bio

Afro-Caribbean-American writer Dailihana Alfonseca is currently working on her Masters in Health Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her concentration in Literature, Medicine, and Culture continues to amplify marginalized perspectives through her writing and research of the Im/Migrant experiences within America and of the colonial impacts of the past.
In working with what Zora Neale Hurston called “Literary Science,” and what W.E.B. Dubois coined as “Double Consciousness,” her writing marries creative works, archival research, and medical analysis to convey tangible bridges of experiential knowledge. She does this in hopes of expanding the scope of knowledge available to historically under-served communities.

Her poetry has previously appeared in The Bangalore Review, The Global Gazette, and her fiction has appeared in Driftwood Press Literary Magazine.
In 2023 she won a Robert J. Dau Prize and was named an emerging writer to watch by PEN America. Her short story, “Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother,” was also nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize.

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Publications:

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Awards

2023 Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers by P.E.N. America

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Degrees

2021, BA English, Brenau University

Bio

Kaleigh Sullivan is a Master’s student and Graduate Research Assistant at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. She completed a bachelor’s degree at Brenau University (Gainesville, Ga) in 2021, where she majored in English and minored in biology. Following graduation, Kaleigh spent one year teaching the Fundamentals of English as an adjunct instructor at Lanier Technical College (Gainesville, Ga). Now, at UNC-CH, she continues to explore subjects of the Health Humanities and psychopathology through the Literature, Medicine, and Culture (LMC) Program and her assistantship in the HHIVE Lab.

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Awards

Master’s Merit Assistantship, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, 2021 Outstanding Graduate of English, Brenau University, 2021

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Degrees

2009, BA English with Teacher’s Certification, Eastern Illinois University

2020, MA English, Wayne State University

Bio

Originally from central Illinois, Lindsay is a PhD student and teaching fellow focusing on post-conquest (c. 1100-1300) medieval literature.  Previous research has focused on food in medieval literature, early modern broadside ballads, and perceptions of mental illness in medieval Europe.  Outside of medieval literature, Lindsay is also interested in teaching pedagogy and taught high school English and special education before returning to academia.  She has also worked extensively with a group of instructors at UNC who design coursework focusing on publication in the PIT Journal.

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Publications:

Miller, Lindsay, Sarah Chapman and Lynn Losh 2019. Going beyond Lear: Performance and Taming of the Shrew. Dividing the Kingdoms:Interdisciplinary Methods for Teaching King Lear to Undergraduates: Performance: Wayne State University. https://guides.lib.wayne.edu/folgerkinglear/performance

Ragle-Miller, Lindsay et. Al. The Warrior Women Project: Wayne State University. https://s.wayne.edu/warriorwomen/

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2022, MA English, Virginia Tech

2019, BA English, Virginia Commonwealth University

Bio

Kara Rush is a first-year Ph.D. student specializing in early modern literature. In particular, Rush is interested in how early modern English authors use  threatening nature and femininity to mediate anxieties concerning the preservation and contamination of English national identity. Other interests include adaptation studies and late medieval literature.

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Publications:

• “Nobility, Interrupted: The Queer Poetics of Vandana Kataria’s Noblemen.” Borrowers and Lenders. Forthcoming Fall 2024.

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Awards

• Caroline Pace Chermside Award for Best Master’s Thesis: Virginia Tech, 2022.
• Folger Shakespeare Library Grant-in aid, “An Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas,” taught by Marcy North, Claire M. L. Bourne, and Whitney Trettien, 2023.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019, BA English, North Carolina State University

Bio

Cate Rivers is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. She graduated from North Carolina State University in 2019 with a BA in English and minors in history and Japan studies. Her main area focuses are the Southern United States and Japan. Her interests span trauma studies, nationalism, memory, gender and critical race theories, modernism, cultural representations of mental illness, mysticism, and Buddhist literature. Her ongoing research project frames 20th century Japanese novels and novels from the Southern Renaissance as social histories, with particular attention to war memory, family history, culpability, the construction of “family,” and the relation between national identity and self-conception.

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Degrees

2019, BA English, Mount Holyoke College

Bio

My scholarly interests naturally converge around questions of trauma, ethics, affect, and divergent subjectivities in narratives of resistance and reconciliation. My work is grounded in an intersectional feminist hermeneutic lens to explore the role of gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism in texts by contemporary American multiethnic women writers. I am also interested in speculative imagery and it’s significance in illuminating historically silenced facets of subjectivity. Psychoanalytic criticisms surrounding haunting and trauma, in conjunction with an exploration of queer women’s psyches as sites for potential violence or intimacy are also uniquely compelling to me. My work asks how/why ‘deviant affects’ are labeled as such, and why the burden of silencing those affects largely falls on “marginalized” folks, i.e. queer and trans women of color?

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Degrees

2019, MA English, George Washington University

2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University

Bio

Elisabeth studies 19th century American literature and medicine, focusing on how changing theories of mental illness and its treatment were encoded in congregate care institutions over the course of the century. Her research, which draws on a varied archive of patient memoirs, journalistic exposes, and fictional depictions of congregate care, investigates entanglements of race, gender, and disability in questions of mental healthcare.

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Publications:

“Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven, edited by Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Routledge, 2021.

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Awards

• Robert Bain Award for scholarship in American Literature, UNC English Department, 2021
• Southern Futures Graduate Award, 2020
• McCandlish Endowment Fellowship, 2017-2019
• PEO Continuing Education Grant, 2018

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Degrees

2019, MA English, College of Charleston

2001, BA Mass Communications, Emory & Henry College

Bio

Mindy Buchanan-King is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature at UNC Chapel Hill and is a teaching fellow. Mindy is originally from Virginia and received her B.A. from Emory & Henry College and her M.A. from the College of Charleston. Her master’s thesis focused on Edith Wharton’s use of Romanticism in conceptualizing the artistic self in Hudson River Bracketed. Her graduate research is currently focused on questions of photography and medicine in late 19th-/early 20th-century U.S. literature, artistic conceptualizations and the history of “disfigurement,” and representations and interpretations of World War I les gueules cassées (“men with broken faces”) in wartime medical photography, illustrations, and narratives. She is pursuing the graduate certificate in Literature, Medicine, and Culture.

Mindy is a contributing editor for Iris: The Art and Literary Journal at UNC, is a co-coordinator of the Furst Forum, and is the recipient of a Latina/o Studies Teaching Award. She also volunteers as a transcriber on the original manuscript of Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed, for The Complete Works of Edith Wharton to be published by Oxford University Press.

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Publications:

• Buchanan-King, Mindy. “Joan Crawford: Problematizing the (Aging) Female Image and Sexuality in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2019): 1-23.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, MA English, University of Missouri at Columbia

2014, BA English (French minor), Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge

Bio

I am a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long nineteenth century. My research interests largely revolve around animal studies and how literature has shaped historical developments in human-animal relations. At UNC, I have taught classes on poetry, animals in popular literary genres, science writing, and composition, and I have also gained extensive experience working as a graduate writing coach at the UNC Writing Center. As a scholar and a teacher, I am driven by a deep interest in interdisciplinary thinking and how written words actively shape our lived experiences in the world.

In my dissertation project, “‘If You Are Always Kind’: Animals and Becoming Human(e) in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature,” I demonstrate how materials written for and by children were historically significant in the development and consolidation of “humane” values that continue to shape our present moment. My project foregrounds how these materials racialized and gendered different animal species to generate a “humane” discourse that fueled the emergence of animal welfare initiatives. While I focus on these developments in the United States, I also consider the transnational and transatlantic dimensions of the animal welfare movement. As a scholar, much of my methodology is grounded in working with archival materials, and I have held research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society in the course of working on this project. In considering many materials that have been forgotten today but which circulated widely in the nineteenth century, I shed new light on works that—like “Mary’s Lamb” (1830), which I quote in the first part of my title—continue to shape human behavior towards animals from a young age.

In my future work beyond this current project, I’m interested in how literary representations of animals influenced the development of veterinary science as a distinct medical field from the early 1700s up until 1879, when the first public college of veterinary medicine was founded in the United States. I am also more broadly interested in the history of public education in the United States.

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Publications:

• “Black Cats and White Women: Animal Autobiography and the Shaping of Race, Species, and Gender,” forthcoming in American Literature, vol. 96, no. 3, September 2024.
• “‘Our School House is the Universe’: Henry David Thoreau as Radical Educator,” forthcoming chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau, 2025.
• “A Posthumous Life: Thoreau and the Possibilities of Posthuman Biography,” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, vol. 27, 2019, pp. 127-142.
• Review of Antoine Traisnel’s Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) for Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, vol. 30, no. 1, Winter 2022, pp. 107-110.
• Review of Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life for the Emerson Society Papers, vol. 29, no. 2, Fall 2018, p. 14.
• Online Review of LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations for The Carolina Quarterly, March 2019.
• Online Review​ of Caleb Johnson’s ​Treeborne: A Novel f​or ​The Carolina Quarterly, September 2018.
• Online Review​ of Filip Springer’s ​History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town​ for ​The Carolina Quarterly, April 2018.

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Teaching Awards

• Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by Graduate Teaching Assistants, UNC Office of the Provost, 2024
• Krista Turner Award for Excellence in Student Support for Spring 2022, UNC Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
• Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, UNC Chancellor’s Awards, 2022

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Awards

• Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, Spring 2024, The Graduate School, UNC
• Lapides Fellowship in Pre-1865 Juvenile Literature and Ephemera, 2023-2024, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA
• Andrew Oliver Research Fellowship, 2022-2023, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston MA
• Dissertation Research Fellowship, Summer 2022, UNC Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
• Robert Bain Award for Excellence Achieved by a Second-Year Student in Pre-1900 American Literature, 2018, UNC

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume