2016, BS, Princeton University
2020, MA, Duke University
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.
2022, MA English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
2016, BA Religious Studies, Wingate University
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.
African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Creative Writing | Genre Theory | Latina / Latino Literature | Literature and Philosophy | Modernism | Poetry and Poetics | Posthumanism | Science Fiction | Southern Literature | The Novel
2021, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College
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.
2020, MA English, Boston College
2016, BA English, Case Western Reserve University
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.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Film and Media Studies | Modernism | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Social Justice | The Novel
2019, BA English, North Carolina State University
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.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Disability Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature and History | Literature and Religion | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Pedagogy | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Social Justice | Southern Literature | Transatlantic Studies
2018, BA Classics, minors French & English, summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania
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.”
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.
External:
Internal:
2020, BA English, George Washington University
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.
Aesthetics | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | British Literature from 1900 to the Present | Comparative Literature | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Media Studies | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Philosophy Of Language | Queer Theory | The Novel | Transatlantic Studies
2008, BA English, James Madison University
2020, MA English, James Madison University
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.
Aesthetics | African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Disability Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Southern Literature
2015, BA English, Davidson College
2018, MA English, New York University
I like to read and write about transatlantic literature of the long nineteenth century and modernism.
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
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.
