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Andrew Tran

October 10, 2022

Degrees

2016, BS, Princeton University

2020, MA, Duke University

Bio

My research deals with the aesthetics of self-disclosure, especially in its relationship to political crisis, and for the questions of affect, queerness, and repair.


Joshua Cody Ward

September 8, 2022

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), specifically Literature of the American South, of the Appalachian South, and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel. He is a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a Junior Coordinator for the Critical Speakers Series, the 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.


Publications:

  • “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.
  • “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review. Forthcoming.
  • “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review. Forthcoming.
  • [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.
  • Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
  • John R. Bittner Student Literary Prize, May 27th 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 23rd 2023, 44th Annual SWPACA Conference.
  • 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award Recipient, November 12th 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 29th 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 24th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
  • G. Byrns Coleman Award for Excellence in Religious Studies, April 24th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
  • University Honors, April 24th, 2016, Wingate University.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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.


Eleanor Rambo

November 10, 2021

Degrees

2020, MA English, Boston College

2016, BA English, Case Western Reserve University

Bio

I study twentieth-century American and Russophone literature, and I am also interested in urban studies. In my academic research I focus on things ranging from American movie musicals to postcolonial theory, and I write literary reviews of works in translation.


Teaching Awards

  • UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award

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.


Amy Yue-Yin Chan

August 5, 2021

Degrees

2018, BA Classics, minors French & English, summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

I study nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry and poetics, working at the intersection of the erotic and the philosophical. My dissertation (tentatively) examines lyrical representations of sex and desire as political allegory. I am particularly interested in considering the implications of possession, submission, and orgasm—in theme and as mimesis—for figuring the democratic subject.

I am currently at work on an essay investigating erotic apostrophe in Whitman’s poem “The Sleepers” in light of dominant-submissive power dynamics.

I am also currently at work on an essay considering the leveling of speaker-addressee hierarchies in Dickinson’s tropings on orgasm (in contribution to a long and rich feminist critical tradition).

And lastly, I have an article on retainer that makes a case for Du Bois as Emerson’s poet by attending to the moral-philosophical grounds of Emerson’s essay “The Poet.”


Publications:

Critical:

“Review of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin 35.1 (2023), 19-20.

 

Creative:

“My Mother Says.” Rattle 83 (2024).

Flux. BlazeVOX: Fall 2021, 412-8.

Lai-jee.” Indiana Review 43.1 (2021), 85-92.


Awards

External:

  • Graduate Student Conference Paper Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, 2023
  • Dickinson Critical Institute Grant, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2022

Internal:

  • Bain Award (Excellence in Pre-1900 American Lit.), UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
  • Travel Grant, UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
  • Transportation Grant, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2022
  • Travel Award, UNC-CH Graduate & Professional Student Government, 2022
  • Booker Fellowship, UNC-CH DOECL, 2021
  • Inclusive Excellence Top-Up, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2021

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Ryan Carroll

August 4, 2021

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 systems, documentary storytelling, and truth-telling in 19th-century British, American, and Caribbean narrative. He considers these issues in relation to data overload, aesthetics, and epistemological crisis.

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:


Awards

  • 2022 Ruth Rose Richardson Award

Jonathan Albrite

September 22, 2020

Degrees

2008, BA English, James Madison University

2020, MA English, James Madison University

Bio

I am a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC. I am currently at work on my dissertation, tentatively titled “No Judgment: The Aesthetics of Neutrality in the Postwar American Novel,” which examines the productive tension that arises between neutral narrators and snobby characters in the decades immediately following the Second World War. More broadly, my research concerns expressions of taste and aesthetic judgment in American literature and film as they relate to discourses on race, gender, sexuality, and class. I also work on topics, including climate change and posthumanist aesthetics, related to the environmental humanities, and have taught courses on contemporary literature, film, and composition.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Colin Dekeersgieter

September 25, 2019

Degrees

2012, B.A. English, University of Vermont

2014, M.A. Modern Literature, CUNY, Graduate Center

2017, M.F.A. Creative Writing, Poetry, New York University

 

Bio

Colin Dekeersgieter studies modern poetry, poetics, and aesthetics with a focus on domesticity. His work has appeared in the North American Review, Greensboro Review, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere.


Publications:

  • Opium and Ambergris (Kent State University Press, forthcoming 2024)

Awards

  • Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Marilyn Chin
  • Goldwater Fellowship, New York University
  • Global Research Initiative Fellowship, New York University