Degrees

B.A., Humanities & Writing, Houghton College, 2014

Bio

Ben Murphy is a PhD candidate in nineteenth-century American literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research draws on the history and philosophy of science (especially ecology, biology, medicine, and the social sciences), the environmental humanities, and American literature from antebellum to World War I (approx. 1830s – 1914). Writing on these topics and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly, Boundary2, symploke, and The Carolina Quarterly. His dissertation centers on vitalism, biopolitics, and discourses of crowd behavior and theory in literature of the long nineteenth century.

As a Teaching Fellow in the English department, Ben teaches courses in composition and rhetoric. He has also taught ENGL 144: Popular Genres, served as a Teaching Assistant for ENGL 268: Literature, Medicine, and Culture, and been a Graduate Research Consultant for ENGL 344: Literature of the American West. Additionally, Ben is a member of the department’s Peer Mentoring Committee, a Research Assistant in UNC’s Music Library, and the Book Review Editor at the The Carolina Quarterly.

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Publications:

• “Not So New Materialism: Homeostasis Revisited” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 27.1 (Winter 2019) Forthcoming
• “The Lasting Impressions of Biopower,” Review of Kyla Schuller’s The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century [Duke University Press, 2018] symploke 26.1 (Forthcoming 2018)
• “Exceptional Infidelity: James Dickey’s Deliverance, Film Adaptation, and the Postsouthern”Mississippi Quarterly 69.2 (Spring 2016) [Published Summer 2018]
• “The Universes of Speculative Realism,” Review of Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism [University of Minnesota Press, 2014] boundary 2: b2o review (June 1, 2017) Web

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Teaching Awards

• Erika Lindemann Teaching Award in Composition and Literature, 2018
• Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2018
• Student Undergraduate Teaching and Staff Award (SUTSA), 2017

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Awards

• Best Graduate Student Essay, South Atlantic MLA (SAMLA), 2016

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, BA French and Comparative Literature, Binghamton University

Bio

Chloe Hamer is a third-year graduate student focusing on 20th Century Francophone Caribbean literature and memory studies.

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Degrees

2010, S.B. Literature (21L), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2010, S.B. Science and Humanities (21S), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bio

I am a doctoral candidate whose research interests include American literature and science, the birth of American conservation movements, periodical studies, and natural history. Archival portions of my research have been supported by fellowships from the Science Fiction Society, the Graduate School at UNC, and the Mary and David Harrison Institute at the University of Virginia. My dissertation, In Situ: Environmental Management and the American Literary Imagination, explores how popular, serialized narratives used the scientific project of wilderness exploration and conservation as a tool of literary nationalism in the decades immediately preceding the foundation of the National Parks Service. My research is informed by my background in the biological sciences and a deep personal interest in backpacking and mountaineering.

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Awards

• UNC Graduate School Dissertation Travel Fellowship, 2017
• National Humanities Center “Humanities in Class” Internship, 2017
• UVA Lillian Gary Taylor Visiting Fellowship in American Literature, 2017
• SFS Mullen Research Fellowship, 2016
• Robert A. Bain Award for Excellence in 19^thCentury American Literature, 2014

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, BA English, Hendrix College

2016, MA Social Sciences, University of Chicago

Bio

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.

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Publications:

• “Pilar’s Turn Inward: Storytelling in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Teaching Hemingway and War, Kent State University Press, 2015.

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Awards

• Fulbright English Teaching Fellowship, Brazil, 2014
• FLAS Fellowship, Brazil, 2018

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2009, MA Comparative Literature, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2005, BA Spanish, Goucher College

Bio

Rebecca Garonzik is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. Her areas of specialization are twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American and Latinx literatures. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Eros Galvanized: Critical Intersections of Eroticism and Politics in Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o/x Literatures (1965-2011),” under the direction of Juan Carlos González Espitia. In addition to her research on socially committed literature, Rebecca has also published work on poetics and Foucauldian discourse analysis. She is the founding co-president of the Literatures of the Americas working group.

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Publications:

• “Beyond Marcuse: Guevara’s Influence on the Revolutionary Erotic in Julio Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel.” A Contracorriente 13.2 (Winter 2016): 1-24. Web. 8 March 2016.
• “Deconstructing Psychiatric Discourse and Idealized Madness in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar.” Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 43.1 (May 2014): 3-14.
• “‘To name that thing without a name’: Linking Poetry and the Child’s Voice in Sandra   Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” Letras Femeninas 37.2 (Winter 2011): 139-55.
• “Queering Feminism: Cristina Rivera Garza’s La cresta de Ilión and the Feminine Sublime.” Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanísticos y Literatura 14 (Fall 2010): 45-56.
• “Permanencias de Juan Rulfo en la crítica contemporánea.” Rev. of Ecos y murmullos en la obra de Rulfo, Ed. Julio Moguel and Enrique Sáinz. Confluencia 24.2 (Spring 2009): 151-53.

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Awards

• Frankel Dissertation Fellowship
• Phi Beta Kappa
• Helen Carroll Shelley Prize in Romance Languages

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, BA Critical Studies (in English Cultures, Literatures, and Film) & Latin American Studies, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire.

Bio

Emilio Taiveaho was born in Quito, Ecuador, to a Finnish Father and Ecuadorian Mother, and spent his childhood prehending—and being prehended by—the beatific and magnanimous Andes. A first-generation immigrant, Emilio moved to the United States to further his education, finishing his High School career in Winona, Minnesota, and graduating from the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire in 2017. He is currently pursuing a PhD. in literature from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, where he specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics across the Américas, and is interested in the intersection of aesthetics, biopolitics, performance, and visual art.

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Awards

• 2017 – Present: Mellon Fellow

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

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

Bio

Marcy Pedzwater studies twentieth-century North and Latin American literature. Her current research interests include the intersections of race, gender, and colonialism/imperialism in the Americas. She is also interested in the function of memory, archive, and trauma in twentieth-century texts. She currently teaches Spanish 105.

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Degrees

• 2013, M.A. English and Comparative Literature, UNC-Chapel Hill.
• 2008, B.A. English, George Mason University.

Bio

María J. Durán is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and Graduate Assistant for the UNC Latina/o Studies Program. Her dissertation examines portrayals of pain in Latinx literature and the ways it can give birth to or elevate political consciousness to incite resistance and social protest in Latinx communities.

Durán has served as a guest blogger for UNC’s Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA), and she has published in the leading Chicana/o Studies Journal, Aztlán. She has taught ENGL 105, ENGL 105i Business, ENGL 129, WGST 233, and ENGL 364.  As a theatre artist, Durán co-directed a sold-out production of In the Heights(Spring 2017), staged at The ArtsCenter in Carrboro, NC. She was invited to share her theatre work at the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) Regional Arts Training in Charlotte, NC (Summer 2017). Recently, she directed a staged reading of Just Like Us, a play about undocumented youth by Karen Zacarías (March 2018). She currently serves on the PlayMakers Repertory Company Advisory Council.

Durán is an advocate for underrepresented minority education.  She has worked with The Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill to assist talented underrepresented undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in their pursuit of doctoral degrees. In Summer 2015, she received the UNC Graduate School’s Richard Bland Fellowship and interned with Juntos, a North Carolina State University cooperative extension program that helps Latinx students achieve higher education. She is also a Carolina Firsts Advocate for undergraduate students and serves on the advisory board for the Carolina Grad Student F1RSTS. In her spare time, Durán enjoys visiting coffeeshops, hot yoga, traveling, and spending time with her two pet bunnies. Click here to read about Durán’s decision to pursue graduate studies and what advice she has for prospective graduate students.

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Publications:

Refereed Journal Articles

• “Bodies That Should Matter: Chicana/o Farmworkers, Slow Violence, and the Politics of (In)visibility in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol 42, no 1, 2017, pp. 45-71.

Other Publications (published under maiden name “Obando”)

• “Harvesting Dignity: Remembering the Lives of Farmworkers.” Institute for the Study of the Americas, UNC-CH (December 2012).
• “Latinos Reach New Highs in College Enrollment.” Institute for the Study of the Americas, UNC-CH (November 2012).

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Awards

• Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, Honorable Mention (April 2018)
• Diversity and Student Success Travel Award, The Graduate School, UNC-CH (April 2018)
• Performing Arts Special Activities Fund Grant, Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, UNC-CH (2017-2018)
• Chancellor’s Doctoral Candidacy Award, Initiative for Minority Excellence, UNC-CH (Fall 2017).
• Mellon Dissertation Grant, Institute for the Study of the Americas, UNC-CH (Summer 2017).
• Hispanic Scholarship Fund Scholar (Spring 2017).
• Future Faculty Fellowship Program, Center for Faculty Excellence, UNC-CH (Fall 2016).
• Florence Brann Eble Summer Research Fellowship, The Graduate School, UNC-CH (Summer 2016).
• Richard Bland Fellowship, The Graduate School, UNC-CH (Summer 2015).
• Travel Grant, English and Comparative Literature, UNC-CH (Spring 2017, 2015, 2013, 2012).
• Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program Fellowship (Summer 2008).

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