Degrees

2021, BA English, Brenau University

Bio

Kaleigh Sullivan is a Master’s student and Graduate Research Assistant at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. She completed a bachelor’s degree at Brenau University (Gainesville, Ga) in 2021, where she majored in English and minored in biology. Following graduation, Kaleigh spent one year teaching the Fundamentals of English as an adjunct instructor at Lanier Technical College (Gainesville, Ga). Now, at UNC-CH, she continues to explore subjects of the Health Humanities and psychopathology through the Literature, Medicine, and Culture (LMC) Program and her assistantship in the HHIVE Lab.

Awards

Master’s Merit Assistantship, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, 2021 Outstanding Graduate of English, Brenau University, 2021

Degrees

2020, BA English, Indiana University

2020, BA Anthropology, Indiana University

2022, MA English, Syracuse University

Bio

My area of focus is on horror, race, gender, and sexuality and how the these intersecting ties are utilized within popular media throughout American history. Specifically within film, television, novels, and video games, I am interested in how these various mediums relay American history through a horror/gothic lens.

Degrees

2021, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College

Bio

First-year Ph.D. student 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, focusing on Southern literature and religion.

Degrees

2021, English BA, Minor in Communication, Texas A&M University at College Station

Bio

As a relatively new student to rhetoric and composition, my research interests are ever-evolving. My undergraduate thesis examined the implications of metaphor as used in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder treatment texts, which was a study intended to dissect language as a tool that demands authorial sacrifice. Here, I found a fascination with how meaning “seeps” from figures of speech in ways both beneficial and harmful to the reader, as well as for how engaging with language offers a view into a site of endless, yet interesting, compromises.

While my thesis oriented me within health and disability studies, my interests extend to digital rhetorics, game studies, technology discourse, and film and tv. Some topics in these fields that encapsulate my interests include the study of review scores as aggregated on websites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, observing the rhetorical nature of industry competition (MCU vs DCEU, XBox vs Playstation, Apple vs Samsung), and discussing accessibility in near-universal technologies like streaming services, smartphones, and gaming.

Awards

• Tarheel Writing Guide Professional Development Award
• Undergraduate Research Scholar, Texas A&M University
• 2021 Rhetoric and Discourse Studies Essay Contest Winner, Texas A&M University
• Gathright Phi Kappa Phi Dean’s Excellence Award Semi-Finalist

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

BA English, Andrews University

MA English, University of Oklahoma

Bio

I am currently interested in video game studies, digital rhetoric, and digitial composition pedagogy. My previous work looked at the horror video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and its uses of virtual spaces to generate affects of fear and anxiety. Currently, I’m interested in studying competitive e-sports titles such as League of Legends and Starcraft II to understand how their fast-paced forms of gameplay require and generate new forms of literacies.

Publications:

Lee, Charles (2021), ‘Running scared: Fear and Space in Amnesia: The Dark
Descent’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 13:1, pp. 93–112.

Degrees

2018, B.A. English Literature, Colorado Mesa University

2020, M.A. English, Colorado State University

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. I research recent contemporary American literature from 2000 to present, and am absorbed by questions about mixed-race identity, and how multiethnic and multicultural subjects “rightly” identify themselves and are identified. I also examine what makes writing literary, who creates literature, and how digital media challenges and expands those definitions.

Degrees

2019, BA Philosophy and Religious Studies, Manhattan College

2021, MA English and American Literature, New York University

2021, MLIS Rare Books and Special Collections, Long Island University

Bio

Tim Gress is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Fellow in the department of English & Comparative Literature. His research focuses primarily on the literary and cultural history of Britain during the 19th century, especially as it relates to the history of the book. Other interests include lesser-known woman writers of the late-Romantic and early-Victorian periods, the history and development of the novel in English, descriptive bibliography, and book collecting. Tim also works as a Graduate Assistant in the Rare Book Collection at Wilson Special Collections Library.

Publications:

• A Collector’s Zeal: Treasures from the DeCoursey Fales Collection at Manhattan College. (Riverdale, New York: Manhattan College, 2020).

Awards

• William T. Buice III Scholarship, Rare Book School, University of Virginia, 2020
• Director’s Scholarship, Rare Book School, University of Virginia, 2019
• Edward Branigan Scholars Grant for Research in the Humanities, Manhattan College, 2018

Degrees

2020, BA English, George Washington University

Bio

Ryan Carroll is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He is interested in information, documentary storytelling, and truth-telling in 19th-century British and Transatlantic literature. He works to read these issues in light of contemporary polycrisis, information overload, and activist action.

Outside of academia, Ryan writes on theology, particularly queer and liberation theologies. His work has been published by theology publications and the Jesuit Conference of Canada and North America.

Publications:

• “‘Looking together united them’: Communal and Multivalent Affect in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 97, spring-summer 2021.
• “The Pilgrim’s Book.” The Jesuits, https://www.jesuits.org/stories/the-pilgrims-book/, 2021.
• “Fragments of the Eschaton: Queer Christian Soteriology.” Macrina Magazine, https://macrinamagazine.com/issue-8-general/guest/2021/09/11/fragments-of-the-eschaton-queer-christian-soteriology/, 2021.
• “An Ongoing Revelation: Endings and Poetics of Missingness in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Gabriel García Márquez.” Portals: A Journal in Comparative Literature, 2020.

Awards

• 2022 Ruth Rose Richardson Award

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.

Publications:

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

Awards

• Phi Beta Kappa, Boston College, 2019

Degrees

2016, MA English, Loughborough University

2014, BA English, Loughborough University

Bio

Doug Stark is a Ph.D. candidate in the English program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research and teaching concerns twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, cultural theory, literature, film, art and new media – specializing in the history and theory of games. Doug’s dissertation, Gaming as a Way of Life: Towards a Biopolitics of Play, addresses a present phenomenon that confounds traditional theories that define play by its autonomy from everyday life, namely, a preponderance of the game structures that saturate our contemporary world purport to exercise proficiencies pertinent beyond the scene of play — such as the apps on our phones that offer points, dangle badges, and display leaderboards to motivate exercise, language-learning, task-management, and even sleeping. By way of chapters on the British Empire’s implementation of cricket to “civilize” the colonized, the video game’s derivation from military-industrial training tools, the quotidian practice amateur gaming entails, and the professional esport athlete’s regimen, the dissertation demonstrates that the organization of life by games is not novel and that the activity of play recurs in recent history as a central, often tacit, means of adapting players to new technologies, economies, and systems of governance. It argues that the common sense that play is “free” not only belies this operation of power but also precludes harnessing the life organizing propensity of games to inhabit the world differently. Doug’s writing appears in journals Extrapolation, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Post-45, Eludamos, Qui Parle and Leonardo, as well as edited collections Playing the Field and Encyclopedia of Video Games.

Publications:

• Stark, Doug. “Exercises in Humility: Gregory Bateson on Contingency, Croquet, and Revising Habits of Thought Through Play.” Leonardo, special section on “Indeterminacy After AI,” forthcoming 2022.
• Stark, Doug. “Better Problems: Neoliberalism, Strategic Achronicity, and the Experimental Games To-Be-Made.” A review essay concerning Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games (2020). Qui Parle, vol. 30, no. 2, December 2021, pp. 399-419, https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-9395334.
• Stark, Doug. Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology and Art of Gaming, 2nd ed., edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood Press, 2021, pp. 1104-1107.
• Stark, Doug. “Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy.”
  Eludamos, vol. 11, no. 1, 2020, pp. 125–144, https://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol11no1-8.
• Stark, Doug and Teresa O’ Rourke. “The Lost Futures of BoJack and Diane.” Post45, special cluster on Leaving Hollywood: Essays After BoJack Horseman, 2020, https://post45.org/2020/11/the-lost-futures-of-bojack-and-diane/.
• 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, https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw_00004_1.
• 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, https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2020.10.
• 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.

Awards

• Hobby Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2022
• IAH Grant, UNC/KCL “Media Aesthetics” Speaker Series and Working Group, Fall 2022
• Game Studies Research Award, DLC lab, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2022, Fall 2022
• Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Fellow, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2022
• IAH Grant, UNC/KCL “Digital Aesthetics” Speaker Series, Fall 2021
• Games and Cultures Humanities Lab Fellow, Duke University, 2019-2020
• Santander Postgraduate Scholarship, Loughborough University, UK, 2014-2016

Curriculum Vitae / Resume