Degrees

2016, BA Religious Studies, Palm Beach Atlantic University

2021, MA Liberal Arts, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

Emily Waller Singeisen is a current PhD student and teaching fellow. As a graduate student and an educator, she has taught courses and developed curriculum in literature, film, and classical reception in English literature and popular culture. She is a graduate of the Masters of Liberal Arts program at the University of Pennsylvania where her research concentrations included the ancient novel and its reception, gender and queer theory, and psychoanalysis. Her published work has examined the formation of gendered subjectivity in the ancient novel through the framework of Freud’s female Oedipus complex, and she continues to investigate the ways in which contemporary theory might enrich our reading of ancient literature.

Publications:

“Gender Constitution and Reversible Potentiality: The Making of the Masculine Subject in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 33, no. 1.

Awards

Recipient of the 2022 Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities Grant by the Society for Classical Studies for the project “Mythic Women / Modern Incarnations,” a public art installation and lecture deepening local engagement with feminist approaches to the Classics.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, BA English, Florida State University

2021, MA English, North Carolina State University

Bio

Madison Storrs is a first-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literature, botany, and art of the long 19th century in Britain. In particular, she considers how women incorporated botanical studies into their writing and art practices. She is also interested in British Romanticism, ecocriticism, ontology, aesthetics, design, and visual culture.

Awards

Teaching Assistantship, First-Year Writing, North Carolina State University, 2020–2021.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2023, B.A. Gender Studies / English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

xochi-maría ramos-lara (she/they) is a doctoral student in english and comparative literature. her main research interest focuses on the (lacanian) subjectivity of gay latinx poets as they wrote during the american aids epidemic of the 80s and 90s, taking into account the presence of the hiv virus itself as an important character. besides this, x. is interested in non-white marxist critiques of the state, hegemonic ideologies, and culture; anti-white violent resistance via brown power (ex. the palestinian intifadas); queer performances of subversion in the american drag and ballroom scenes; and the power dynamics of bareback subculture in gay pornography.

outside of the academy, x. loves writing poetry, collective education on critical ethnic studies, participating in local political action, and going to gay clubs as a form of praxis.

Publications:

• “i planted some lavender in my front yard saturday morning,” SAGE, 2024.
• “afuera,” Screen Door Review, 2023.
• “white mother,” Carolina Muse: Literary & Arts Magazine, 2023.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2023, MA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

2022, BA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Bio

Rene Marzuk is interested in exploring continuities across languages and cultures. He is particularly intrigued by literary articulations of marginalized identities and by literary instances of emergence, widely defined. He is drawn to intertextual approaches that reveal the production of knowledge as a collective endeavor spanning times, cultures, and disciplines.

Awards

William Neal Reynolds Fellowship within the Royster Society of Fellows

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, BS, Princeton University

2020, MA, Duke University

Bio

My research deals with the aesthetics of evolving beliefs and contingent worldviews that permeate the everyday ambiguities in modern and contemporary fiction.

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), and specifically Literature of the American South, the Appalachian South, and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel, though he is also an avid scholar of Cormac McCarthy and of Thomas Wolfe. His prospective dissertation will engage with Articulations of Appalachia, both scholarly and literary, centering on the political and aesthetic stakes of defining the Southern Appalachian range across the 20th century into the contemporary.

He is currently a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a Junior Coordinator for the Critical Speakers Series, a Graduate Lecture Series coordinator, and a Board Member (2023-2026) for the Thomas Wolfe Society. He is also on the committee for the 2024 Durham, NC conference for the Thomas Wolfe Society, and is an occasional Reviewer for the The Cormac McCarthy Journal. As a junior scholar, his work has been accepted or published in several journals and essay collections, and he has presented his work at over 20 academic conferences.

Publications:

• “Darkness on the Edge of Town: Beat Subject Formation, Black Ontology, and Fugitivity as Gnosis in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” In This Country’s Hard on People: Cormac McCarthy and American Identity, edited by Vernon Cisney. Forthcoming.
• “Weird Object Relations, Ecology, and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris.” In New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy: Encountering The Passenger and Stella Maris, edited by Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore. Forthcoming.
• “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 88, no. 2-3, 2023, pp. 157-170.
• “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review, vols. 44 & 45, nos. 1 & 2, 2020 & 2021, pp. 8-25.
• [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.
• “Raison d’être.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 9.
• “On Testing.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 23.

Awards

• Graduate Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022-Present, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
• John R. Bittner Student Literary Prize, May 27^th 2023, Thomas Wolfe Society Conference.
• LSP Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program.
• Graduate Student Transportation Grant, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate School.
• Languages & Literatures Graduate Student Paper Award Recipient, February 23^rd 2023, 44^th Annual SWPACA Conference.
• 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award Recipient, November 12^th 2022, SAMLA 94.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2022, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• 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, English Department.
• 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.
• 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

2021, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College

Bio

Doctoral student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.

Degrees

2022, BA English, Meredith College

Bio

Krista Telford is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is specializing in medieval literature and is particularly focused on religious writings. Her research examines forms of prayer in medieval and early modern literature as well as the impact of form on medieval depictions of the afterlife. She aims to take an interdisciplinary approach to her study of religious texts, considering the performative aspect of many poems and prayers and drawing on musicological research. Krista’s recent and ongoing work includes a project exploring resistance to transcendence in the ending of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which examines Chaucer’s reading of Boethius, and a paper exploring the polyphonic and dialogic nature of Francesco Suriano’s underexamined 15th century treatise on the Holy Land, Il trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, MA English, Georgetown University

2016, BA English, Sewanee: The University of the South

Bio

I am a first-year PhD candidate and TA in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. Prior to entering the program, I earned my MA in English from Georgetown (2018), and my BA in English from Sewanee: The University of the South (2016). From 2017 to 2019, I pursued a long-term archival research project at Yale University, supported by grants from The Cosmos Club Foundation and Georgetown University. My current research interests include 19th century American literature; literature of the sea; ecocriticism; literary theory; and philosophy.

Publications:

• Catlett, Beverley. “WH Auden’s On This Island: The Phenomenology of Apocalyptic Revelation at the Point of Epiphany.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 22.3 (2020): 185-205.
• Catlett, Beverley. “Madness as Prophecy in Dystopia: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, and Heller’s Satire of Wartime Insanity.” Janus Head 16.1 (2018): 173-225.

Awards

• 2017 Cosmos Scholar Grant Recipient, The Cosmos Club Foundation (Washington, DC)
• The Andrew Nelson Lytle Prize for Excellence in English and Southern Studies, Sewanee: The University of the South (2016)

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Isabel (they/them) is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina. Their research examines representations of embodiment and the soul in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin religious texts, considering how structures between the corporeal, physical self and the sensing, feeling, and immaterial self can be read alongside theories of queer embodiment, affect, and representations.

In this framework, Isabel is concerned with how language informs depictions of physical and metaphysical identity and how these identities are often unsettled and displaced through language. In their reading of queerness in medieval texts, Isabel desires to experiment with how we recognize and interpret ‘queerness’ not as a fixed phenomenon, but an amalgamation of acts, events, and performances in dialogue with identity-formation.

They are currently working on two projects: one entitled ‘I kan nat glose’: Queering Illegible Signification in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale,’ which analyzes the infamous pear tree sex scene in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale as a culmination of unintelligible semiotic exchanges of letters and of sexual organs, and the other, “Needle as Queer Instrument of Authorship in Chrétien de Troyes Yvain,” which considers the implications of the textile worker as auctor.

Awards

• Joseph Breen Award, UNC Chapel Hill Department of English & Comparative Literature, 2023
• Research Grant, UNC Chapel Hill Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2023
• Travel Award, UNC Chapel Hill Graduate and Professional Student Government, 2023
• Travel Grant, UNC Chapel Hill Department of English & Comparative Literature, 2022
• CARA Summer Scholarship, Medieval Academy of America, 2022
• First Class Honours in English Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 2020

Curriculum Vitae / Resume