Degrees

2016, BA English, Princeton University

Bio

Nathan possesses a strong interest in late 20th and 21st century American literature, with a particular focus on contemporary works with magical realist and “hysterical realist” elements. This interest has led him in the direction of postsecular theory and the philosophy of language.

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Degrees

2020, BA English, Georgia State University

Bio

Ariannah Kubli is a first-year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill, where she specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. Her current scholarly interests include American literary realism and naturalism; literature and philosophy; intellectual history; and American war narratives. She’s especially interested in examining the philosophical ramifications of warfare as evidenced in the fiction of American realist and naturalist writers. More generally, Ariannah hopes that by exploring the philosophical substructures of texts, she can contribute to our understanding of the texts themselves and the historical moments from which they derive.

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Awards

• James E. Routh Outstanding English Major Award, Georgia State University, 2020

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Degrees

2016, MA English, University of Missouri at Columbia

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

Bio

I focus on pre-1900 American literature and have a special interest in poetics, critical animal studies, histories of natural science, Native American literature, and transatlantic Romanticism.

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Publications:

“A Posthumous Life: Thoreau and the Possibilities of Posthuman Biography,” The Concord Saunterer Vol. 27, 2019 (roundtable article from MLA 2019)

Review of Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life for the Emerson Society Papers (Fall 2018, vol. 29, no. 2)

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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Awards

Robert Bain Award for Excellence Achieved by a Second-Year Student in Pre-1900 American Literature, 2018

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019: B.A. English, Hampshire College.

Bio

Bailey Fernandez is a literary critic and scholar primarily working within the British Romantic period, though he is interested in contemporary literature as well. His thematic interests consist primarily in aesthetics, the philosophy of language, and the formal interchanges between literature, art, and music.

In addition to his scholarship, he also engages in editorial work.  He is a project assistant at The William Blake Archive and an associate editor at the Carolina Quarterly. In his spare time, he writes music and poetry.

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Publications:

“Sun Cycle: A Review” Carolina Quarterly no. 69, vol. 4 (Summer 2020)

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Awards

Digital Innovation Lab, 2019-20

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, MA English, Wake Forest University

2016, BA English, Drexel University

Bio

Krysten is a PhD student and teaching fellow in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research interests reside at the intersection of environmental humanities and contemporary LatinX literature. Topics which she finds exciting relate to the rhetoric of environmental advocacy, the myriad of emotional responses to the threat of climate change, and the ways in which LatinX writers and artists create environmental epistemologies through their works. Outside of the academy, she enjoys nurturing all forms of human and other life through her passion for plants, pets, and parenting.

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Publications:

• “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.

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Teaching Awards

• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (Fall 2020)

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Awards

• H. Broadus Jones MA Student Award for Excellence in English (Spring 2018)

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Degrees

2019, BA English, Boston College

Bio

Brendan is a PhD student studying 20^th century American literature.  His interests lie at the nexus of literature and phenomenology, exploring how writers across genres represent consciousness and perception in their writing.

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Publications:

• “Phenomenological Reproduction in Thompson and Mailer’s New Journalism.” Dianoia. (Spring 2019)

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Awards

• Phi Beta Kappa, Boston College, 2019

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Degrees

2019, BA English, Samford University

Bio

Emily Youree is a PhD student studying medieval British literature. She is especially interested in reception and adaptations of Roman texts and traditions in medieval works.

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Degrees

2019, BA English, Ithaca College

Bio

I am a first-year PhD student in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. My interests include 20th and 21st century American literature, transatlantic modernism, and critical theory.

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Degrees

2016, MA English, Loughborough University

2014, BA English, Loughborough University

Bio

Doug Stark is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Broadly, Doug’s research addresses various ways in which media devices and media systems problematize subject-centered conceptualizations of thinking and acting, posing new political and ethical challenges but also serving as means to experiment with alternate modes of relationality and socio-technical organization in complex ecologies. Mostly in conversation with discourses on media theory/philosophy and critical race theory, his writing and teaching concern twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and new media with a specialism in the history and theory of (video) games.

Doug’s dissertation—tentatively titled Thinking Games—focuses on the implementation of games and play to address epistemological and aesthetic problems in the early- to mid-twentieth-century US. In this period, he explores how games and game-like scenarios served as (proto-)cybernetic epistemic mediators in the computational and human sciences as well as how artists used the metaphor and practice of play for aleatory experimentation. Contributing to histories of art, media, science, and technology, the dissertation re-positions gamification (the application of elements typical to game playing) not as a contemporary phenomenon but as a pervasive historical a priori for a number of significant cultural developments. In analyzing incidents of games assisting in solving specific problems, he makes the media philosophical claim that game-player complexes engender unique capacities to think—an argument he extends to include early computer games.

He has forthcoming and published work on Afrofuturism, neoliberal gamification, videogame literature, walking simulators, and croquet in Extrapolation (2020), Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies (2019), Encyclopedia of Video Games (est. 2020), and the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds (2020), In Media Res (2020) respectively.

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Publications:

• Stark, Doug. “Reimagining Play with Lewis Carroll’s Croquet.” In Media Res, March 2020, http://mediacommons.org/imr/content/reimagining-play-lewis-carroll%E2%80%99s-croquet
• Stark, Doug. “Unsettling Embodied Literacy in QWOP the Walking Simulator.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, vol. 12, no. 1, 2020, pp. 49–67.
• Stark, Doug. “‘A More Realistic View:’ Reimagining Sympoietic Practice in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series,” Extrapolation, vol. 61, no. 1-2, 2020, pp. 151–171.
• Stark, Doug. “Video Game Novels.” Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology and Art of Gaming, 2nd. ed., edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood Press. (Forthcoming est. 2020)
• Stark, Doug. “Ludic Literature: Ready Player One as Didactic Fiction for the Neoliberal Subject.” Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies, edited by Sascha Pöhlmann, De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 153-173.

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Awards

Games and Cultures Humanities Lab Fellow, Duke University. 2019-2020.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

B.A, Humanities, Houghton College. Houghton, NY. 2014 

Bio

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English and 2020 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I study American literature of the long nineteenth century (1830-1914). My research focuses on prose narratives (fiction and non-fiction) in relation to science, critical theory, biopolitics, and race. More broadly, too, I am interested in genre fiction (especially horror, science fiction, and weird fiction), intellectual and social history, and the history of science.

My dissertation centers on literature and discourses of crowd psychology at the turn of the century. Considering novels, short stories, essays, and scientific writing, I argue that American writers between the end of Reconstruction and the start of WWI found in the complicated notion of the crowd a means to justify as well as to resist racial inequality.

My research is published or forthcoming in American Literature, Configurations, and Mississippi Quarterly. Other writing, including essays and reviews, appears with The Millions, PopMatters, boundary2 online, symploke, Gulf Coast, Full Stop, and The Carolina Quarterly. (Visit my website for links to my writing.)

As a Teaching Fellow in the English department, I regularly teach courses in composition and rhetoric. I have also taught ENGL 128: Major American Authors, 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 and CMPL 142: Visual Culture. 

Additionally, I have served in various editorial positions and am currently an editorial assistant for the journal American Literature. 

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Publications:

• “‘Multiplied without Number’: Lynching, Statistics, and Visualization in Ida B. Wells, Mark Twain, and WEB Du Bois” American Literature 92.3 (Spring 2021): forthcoming
• “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

• ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2020-2021
• Quarry Farm Short-Term Fellowship, Center for Mark Twain Studies, 2020
• Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities, UNC Public Humanities 2019-2020
• Hobby Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Department of English, Fall Semester, 2019

• Summer Research Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Graduate School,  2019

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

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume