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Valerie Burgess

August 7, 2024

Degrees

2021, BA English, University of Southern California (with Honors)

2021, BA Cognitive Science, University of Southern California

Bio

Valerie Burgess is a first-year Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a dual Bachelors of Arts in English and Cognitive Sciences. While delving into two distinct fields, she developed an interest in the representation of mental health and feminine labor in women’s writings.

Her current research interest is investigating the intersection of psychology and literature to shed light on the depiction of mental illness in 20th—and 21st-century American Literature. Furthermore, she plans to engage in the Department’s interdisciplinary Health Humanities consortium to increase public engagement in the humanities and foster meaningful conversations across disciplines.


Awards

May 2021, Renaissance Scholar, University of Southern California


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Steve Henry-Liu

July 19, 2024

Degrees

2023, BS English and Environmental Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Bio

Steve is a PhD student researching conviviality, energy, and degrowth. His research revolves around how the humanities can be applied as a force for social change. In particular, he’s been working to develop pathways for individuals and communities to move away from violent patterns of capitalist extraction and accumulation.


Anna Blackburn

July 31, 2023

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

Andreley Bjelland

August 15, 2022

Degrees

2020, MA English, Texas Christian University

2019, BA English, Texas Christian University

Bio

Andreley Bjelland is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period. Her dissertation explores representations of children and crime in early modern English literature, drama, pamphlets, and ballads.


Teaching Awards

  • PIT Journal and Conference Curricular Innovation Award, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2024
  • Erika Lindemann Award for Demonstrated Excellence in Teaching, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023

Awards

  • Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024
  • Medieval and Early Modern Studies Small Research Grant, UNC MEMS, 2023
  • Druscilla French Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Graduate School, 2021

Brennan Jones

August 15, 2022

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.


Lexi Toufas

August 15, 2022

Degrees

2022, BA English, University of Virginia

Bio

Lexi is a second-year PhD student interested in the transmission and reception of early Christian figures, texts, and theologies in the early modern period.


Teaching Awards

  • Krista Turner Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence, 2024

Awards

  • Hanes Graduate Fellowship at the Wilson Library, 2023
  • Travel Award from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, UNC-CH, 2024
  • Robert M. Kingdon Prize, Sixteenth Century Society, 2024

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Krista Wiese Telford

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2022, BA English, Meredith College

Bio

Krista Telford is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 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 in her research, 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.


Awards

  • Fall 2022-Present Graduate Teaching Fellow, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English and Comparative Literature
  • 2024 GPSG Travel Award, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate and Professional Student Government
  • 2024 AI. Curricular Excellence Award, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
  • 2024 Breen Award for Outstanding Work in Medieval Studies, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
  • 2024 Donald R. Howard Travel Scholarship, The New Chaucer Society
  • 2024 LSP Teaching Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program
  • 2023 Travel Grant, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
  • 2023 Ruth Rose Richardson Award for outstanding performance in the first year of graduate
    study, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Cate Rivers

September 24, 2021

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.


Izzy G. T. Howard

August 5, 2021

Degrees

2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Izzy (they/them) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. They study the relationship between the soul and body in medieval literary, aesthetic, and dramatic representations of Creation. Their dissertation, Made A Living Soul: Genesis and the Creation of the Soul in Medieval Devotional and Mystic Literature examines ideas of the soul as developed in early medieval Scholastic exegesis, and how these understandings of the soul are complicated and affirmed in medieval devotional and mystic texts.

In their research on the medieval soul and body, Izzy examines the language used to structure the corporeal, physical self and the sensing, feeling, and cognative self alongside theories of queer embodiment, affect, and representations.

Their broader interests include manuscript studies, medieval philosophy and theology, poetics, and literary criticism.


Publications:

With H.M. Cushman “Bodies on Display” in A Cultural History of Trans Lives in the Middle Ages (300-1445). Bloomsbury. Forthcoming.


Teaching Awards

Latina/o Studies Teaching Fellowship, UNC Latina/o Studies Program, 2022


Awards

Donald Howard Travel Scholarship, New Chaucer Society, 2024

Trans Travel Fund, Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, 2023

CARA Summer Scholarship, Medieval Academy of America, 2022

Internal:   

Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2024

Joseph Breen Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Dept. 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 Dept. of English & Comparative Literature, 2022, 2024

First Class Honours in English Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 2020


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Elisabeth McClanahan Harris

June 15, 2021
Photo of Elisabeth McClanahan

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.


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 19th 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.

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