Degrees

2019, MA English, George Washington University

2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University

Bio

Elisabeth is a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long 19th century and the health humanities. Her dissertation, “Power Play: Games, Jokes, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Asylum Narratives” investigates the modes by which asylum patients creatively contested medical authority through memoirs, exposés, poetry, and newspaper writing.

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Publications:

• “‘Send the little patient to the Hospital at once:’ Early Eugenics at the North Carolina State Hospital’s Epileptic Colony,” in The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19^th Century, edited by Lucia Hodgson and Allison Giffen (Routledge, forthcoming in 2025). https://www.routledge.com/The-Biopolitics-of-Childhood-in-the-Long-American-19th-Century/Hodgson-Giffen/p/book/9781032563527
• “Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene,” in 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

• Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024-2025
• Eliason Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, UNC English Department, 2023
• C. Hugh Holman Award for a dissertation in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2023
• Dissertation Prospectus Fellowship, Wilson Library at UNC, 2022
• Robert Bain Award for scholarship in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2021
• Southern Futures Graduate Award, UNC Center for the Study of the American South, 2020
• McCandlish Endowment Fellowship, GWU, 2017-2019

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Degrees

2019, MA English, College of Charleston

2001, BA Mass Communications, Emory & Henry College

Bio

My research focuses on the role of women and the circulation and reception of women’s health during the American botanical healing movement of 1830-1860. Using archival material, I consider popular print culture of the time, including periodicals, medical literature, and domestic science/economy texts written by women.

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Publications:

• Buchanan-King, Mindy. “Architecture as Precarity: Edith Wharton’s Haunted Hudson River Bracketed.” Edith Wharton Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-20.
• 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, vol. 37, no. 5, 2019, pp. 408-30.

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Teaching Awards

• Latina/o Studies Teaching Award Recipient (Fall 2021)

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Awards

• 2024-2025 Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society
• 2023-2024 McLendon-Thomas Research Fellowship, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Nineteenth-century Rare Books Collection, History of Medicine)
• Robert Bain Award for Excellence Achieved by a Second-Year Student in Pre-1900 American or Southern Literature (April 2022)

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2010, MA English, DePaul University

2008, BA English, Birmingham-Southern College

Bio

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.

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Publications:

• Smith, Jonathan and Paul Blom. “Those Who Don’t Return: Improving Efforts to Address Tuberculosis Among Former Miners in Southern Africa.” NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, vol. 29, no. 1, May 2019, pp. 76-104.
• Blom, Paul. “‘It wasn’t any good diving unless you had a big hammer’: Psychoanalyzing Hemingway’s ‘After the Storm.’” The Sea in the Literary Imagination: Global Perspectives, edited by Ben P. Robertson, Ekaterina V. Kobeleva, Shannon W. Thompson, and Katona D. Weddle. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Jan. 2019.
• Blom, Paul. “‘A trap of our own making’: Mark Twain and the Mechanized Warfare of King Arthur’s Court.” War, Myths, and Fairy Tales, edited by Sara Buttsworth and Maartje Abbenhuis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Jan. 2017.
• See also https://pauleblom.com/research-and-other-works/publications/.

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Teaching Awards

• Member of Peer Mentoring Committee (PMC) for graduate student instructors, UNC-Chapel Hill, Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, Writing Program, 2023 – 2024
• ENGL 105 Programmatic Assessment Professional Development Award recipient, UNC-Chapel Hill, Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, Writing Program, 2023
• UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Program Professional Development Award Recipient, 2021
• UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Program Professional Development Award Recipient, 2020
• UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Program Professional Development Award Recipient, 2019

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Awards

• GPSG Travel Award recipient for travel to preside over a panel at MLA’s Annual Convention, 2023 in San Francisco, CA in Jan. 2023, Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG) at UNC-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 2023
• Departmental Travel Grant Award recipient for travel to preside over a panel at MLA’s Annual Convention, 2022 in Washington, DC in Jan. 2022, Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 2020
• Departmental Summer Fellowship Service Award to provide administrative support at the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab, 2020
• Departmental Travel Grant Award Recipient for travel to present at annual MELUS Conference in New Orleans, LA, April 2020
• Recipient of multiple grants for “Popular Narratives and the Experience of War,” UNC-Chapel Hill, from The Graduate School; Humanities for the Public Good; The College of Arts & Sciences, Division of Fine Arts & Humanities; The College of Arts & Sciences, Division of Social Sciences & Global Programs; Carolina Veterans Resource Center; Department of English and Comparative Literature; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of History; and Center for the Study of the American South, 2019

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, MA English, The Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at The University of Alabama

2013, BA English, Angelo State University

Bio

Mandy L. Fowler is a PhD student specializing in early modern literature and the history of medicine. Her research interests include patient-caregiver exchanges, performances of care, and the material experiences of illness. She is more broadly interested in early modern approaches to human bodies (“be they alive or dead”) and the senses.

Her most recent presentations explore the role of the physician in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions the relationship between of olfaction and practices of reading in the sixteenth century.

Fowler is also interested in the medical humanities more generally and has a background in health sciences writing from her time as an editor and writer with The University of Alabama’s Institute for Rural Health Research.

She completed her master’s thesis, “They are gone to read upon me:” The Donnean Body-Text, with the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance studies.

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Degrees

2017, BA English, Bellarmine University

2017, BA Spanish, Bellarmine Univesity

Bio

Leslie Rowen studies 20th Century American literature with a focus on the literature of war. Her research concentrates on under-studied soldier writing, with a particular interest in race, gender expression, and trauma. By nature this work relies heavily on the archive, and occasionally extends into the field of medical humanities.

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Teaching Awards

• Professional Development Teaching Award, Department of English & Comparative Literature, Spring 2021, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award, Fall 2020, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

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Awards

• Center for the Study of the American South Summer Research Grant, Summer 2021, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• James Peacock REACH Fellowship, Center for Global Initiatives, Summer 2020, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, MA English Literature, University of Virginia

2015, BA English Literature, Bethany College

Bio

Khristian S. Smith studies late medieval and early modern literature, primarily drama placed in its religiopolitical and material contexts. Their research interests include the histories of religion and emotion, occult knowledge, and literary representations of the Devil. Their most recent publication places William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in its contemporary religious and scientific contexts by exploring the toxicological roles of night, crypts, and demons in the play. They have delivered papers on the Devil and humor in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, Paracelsianism in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and medieval theories of predestination in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.

Smith’s dissertation project, “Horrors of the Early Modern Imagination,” argues that the roots of current understandings of the genre and experience of horror can be traced to an early modern conception of the imagination. By engaging with the early modern imagination’s power to generate, corrupt, lie, and delude, Smith contends we can understand horror, through the imagination, as onto- epistemological: a state of being and knowing. Drawing on the growing critical work on the history of affect, this project examines historical literature and cultural artifacts to comprehend how emotions and experiences have not only evolved over time but also shaped how we think and react today.

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Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “‘No healthsome air breathes in’: Spiritual Poison in Romeo and Juliet,” Poison on the Early Modern Stage: Plants, Paints and Potions, edited by Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus with Kibrina Davey (Manchester University Press, 2023).

Media & Impact

• “Possets, Drugs, and Milky Effects: A Look at Recipes, Shakespeare’s Plays, and Other Historical References,” Shakespeare and Beyond, February 2020.
• “How to Name Medieval Plants,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, January 2020.
• “Displaying the Body,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, November 2019.
• “Recognizing Evil: The Devil and His Horns,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, October 2019.
• “‘The Blood is the Life’: Dracula and 19th-Century Transfusions,” The Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, September 2019.

Curatorial Work

• Narratives of Queer Identity, The Lewis Round Library Special Collections, Chapel Hill, NC, Cocurator, Online.

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Awards

• Eliason Early Stages Fellowship, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, Summer 2023
• Jerry Leath Mills Research Travel Grant, Studies in Philology, Summer 2022
• ARPA Graduate Degree Completion Grant, UNC Graduate School, Fall 2021
• Eating through the Archives: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Foodways Travel Grant, Folger Shakespeare Library, December 2019
• Sara Malone Conference Grant, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, May 2019
• Florence Hoagland Memorial Award for Outstanding Senior English Major, Bethany College Department of Humanities, Spring 2015
• W. F. Kennedy Prize for Outstanding Junior Man, Bethany College, Spring 2014
• Cammie Pendleton Award for Outstanding Junior English Major, BC Department of Humanities, Spring 2014
• Bettie Blanck Travel Award, BC Department of Humanities, Fall 2013
• Cammie Pendleton Award for Outstanding Sophomore English Major, BC Department of Humanities, Spring 2013

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume