Degrees

2019, BA English, Davidson College
2023, MA English, Georgetown University

Bio

Mitch Losito is a twentieth and twenty-first century and critical games scholar interested in thinking about how speculative fiction games, the people who play them, and their representations imagine alternative futures.

Degrees

2021, BA in Comparative Literature with an emphsasis in World Literature, University of California Irvine
2021, BA in Philosophy, University of California Irvine
Cum Laude

Bio

Audrey is a first year PhD student from Los Angeles, California. Audrey currently focuses in visual and cultural studies with particular interest in representation of the body politic. Her past research has explored nationalism within American superhero comics, specifically within various Captain America series. In her research with the COMICS research team at the University of Ghent, she studied colonial imagery within tropes of the mythologized west and cowboy imagery in francophone comics, primarily focusing on Franco-Belgian publications from the 1940s to 1980s. Audrey intends to continue her work within visual narratives in her studies by analyzing what constitutes heroic bodies in media.

Publications:

“Captain America: Disassembling Traditional Narratives” Johns Hopkins’ Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Journal

Awards

Fulbright Fellowship Grantee 2022 – 2023
Phi Beta Kappa, University of California Irvine 2021
Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, University of California Irvine 2021

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, BA English, University of Florida

2021, MA English, University of Colorado Boulder

Bio

My scholarship explores how trauma, mental illness, and suicide affect intrafamilial and interpersonal relationships. Working with representations of the American generational family in popular media, I examine the ways by which narrative-based signifying practices in contemporary American culture harness generic discourses of horror and its adjacent genres to reify interpersonal trauma through depictions of extreme violence and negative affect.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Florida

Bio

Kyle Cunningham is a doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill. His research explores the intersections of platform studies, fan studies, and narrative and literary theory, focusing on how communities reproduce themselves through digital communication infrastructures. He is particularly interested in tracing the organizational logics and discursive practices of online communities that develop around decentralized, peer-produced narratives and hermeneutic practices.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA Literature, the representative of the graduates, Waseda University

2020, MA Education, Waseda University

Bio

Satoshi Ohnishi is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.  His research focuses on the relationship between 19th-century American literature and visual media, including the camera obscura and early photographic media. Additionally, he is currently interested in the representation of aging in American literature and African American literature.

Awards

• Okuma Memorial Scholarship, Waseda University, 2018
• Fulbright Scholarship (Fulbright Foreign Student Program), the Japan-United States Educational Commission, 2023-2025
• Graduate Tuition Incentive Scholarship, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2024–25

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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

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

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 candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He researches information theory and narrative aesthetics in 19th-century British and American literature. He studies how narrative texts, including sensation novels, encyclopedic fictions, epic poems, slave narratives, and undercover journalistic writing, engaged with the phenomenon of information overload, experimenting with information in aesthetic form to produce intense affective responses, like anxiety, thrill, dread, amusement, despair, and exultation.

Ryan also writes in public outlets on topics including contemporary literature, translation, sitcom family politics, liberation theology, and more.

Publications:

• “The Form of Information and Informational Form in The Woman in White.” Studies in the Novel, forthcoming.
• “Informatics.” Victorian Poetry, forthcoming.
• “Revision and the Politics of Truth-Telling in The Autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano.” Victorian Studies, 66.3, Spring 2024.
• “Is the Information Age a ‘Crisis of Narration’?” Review of Byung-chul Han trans. Daniel Steuer, The Crisis of Narration. NCR, September 2024.
• “The Future Isn’t Now: Impossible Action in Political Scholarship.” Lateral, 13.1, Spring 2024.
• “A Translation the Size of the World.” Review of Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey and Olga Tokarczuk trans. Croft, The Books of Jacob. Public Books, April 2024.
• “‘Looking together united them’: Communal and Multivalent Affects in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 97, Spring-Summer 2021.
• “The Pilgrim’s Book.” The Jesuits, 2021.
• “Fragments of the Eschaton.” Macrina Magazine, 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.

Teaching Awards

• 2024-25 Writing Program Instructor Wellness Support Award
• 2024 AI. Curricular Excellence Award
• 2023 Earl Hartsell Award for Excellence in Teaching

Awards

• 2024 Eliaison Early Stages Departmental Dissertation Fellowship
• 2023 North American Victorian Studies Association Sally Mitchell Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper
• 2022 Ruth Rose Richardson Award for First-Year Achievement

Degrees

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

Bio

Antonia DiNardo is a fifth year PhD candidate in English literature. Her work is focused on mediations of the Middle Ages in modern popular culture from Tolkien to the The Witcher, utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing semiotics, genre theory, critical game studies, and reception studies. Her dissertation, “Imagining White Pasts: Fantasy and Far-Right Pseudo-History” explores the intersection of medievalist media and white nationalist discourse. Antonia has given talks and lectures on the fraught intersection of fantasy and conceptions of “historical authenticity,” on the co-opting of popular fantasy franchises as recruiting tools by far-right groups, on chivalric imagery in far-right identity construction, and on chivalric masculinities in Chaucer and Chretien de Troyes. In 2023, she held the Hanes Graduate Fellowship, studying the annotations and marginalia of C. S. Lewis’ personal collection of medieval and early modern texts. In 2024, she joined the team in the Greenlaw Gameroom, UNC’s first games-based teaching space.

Awards

• Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Rare Book Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume