Degrees

2023, BA English, Washington and Lee University

Bio

My research focuses on the relationship between fear, colonialism, and the Gothic genre. I am interested in how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British texts use Gothic conventions to stoke fear of colonized peoples as well as how more recent postcolonial texts reclaim these conventions to criticize colonialism. I have studied the role of spirituality in the colonial and postcolonial Gothic, including British portrayals of Obeah and other Afro-Caribbean spiritualities.

Awards

• Sidney M. B. Coulling Prize for Best Senior Work, Washington and Lee University
• Catherine Houston Campbell Scholarship in English Literature, Washington and Lee University
• Jean Amory Wornom Award for Distinguished Critical Writing, Washington and Lee University
• Sidney M. B. Coulling Prize in English, Washington and Lee University

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, Nicholls State University

2022, MA English, University of New Orleans

Bio

Shelby is a doctoral student and teaching fellow at Chapel Hill focusing in Rhetoric and Composition. Primarily, she works to develop interdisciplinary pedagogical research on writing transfer with an emphasis on first-year composition practices.

Years as a student of literature led to Shelby’s passion for British Romanticism, especially the work of Blake. During her graduate studies, she developed an interest in Blake’s use of the Bible and concentrated on how biblical notions manifest and evolve in his writings and philosophies.

Degrees

2020, MA English, Texas Christian University

2019, BA English, Texas Christian University

Bio

Andreley Bjelland is a PhD student and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period.

Awards

• Druscilla French Graduate Student Excellence Award, 2021

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, University of Virginia

Bio

Lexi is a second-year PhD student interested in the reception and evolution of early Christian figures, texts, and theologies in the early modern period. She is also interested in the studies of natural philosophy and natural sciences in that historical window.

Awards

• Hanes Graduate Fellowship at the Wilson Library, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2022, BA English, Meredith College

Bio

Krista Telford is PhD student in the English and Comparative Literature department at UNC Chapel Hill with a focus on medieval literature. She is interested in antifeminist representations of tropes and myths in medieval literature, the authors that lived and wrote contrary to such representations, and the ways Christian and pagan theology interact with portrayals of women in medieval literature. Krista received her BA in English from a historically women’s college and credits her unique undergraduate experience with sparking her interest in early women’s writing and feminist theory.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.