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

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.

Degrees

2021, MA English, Brigham Young University

2019, MA Library and Information Science, University of Iowa

2017, BA English, Brigham Young University

Bio

As a PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, Rachel studies British Victorian literature. Specifically, she is interested in ruins, material culture, and imperialism in the Victorian era, interests which were shaped by her studies in literary tourism and heritage in her MLIS degree. She plans to expand her studies in these topics by exploring print media and culture, industrialization, commodity culture, memory, and nostalgia in nineteenth-century Britain.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, MA English Literature, Virginia Tech
2015, BA English Literature and Education, Roanoke College

Bio

Anna Merz is a second year PhD student interested in literature of the long, undisciplined nineteenth century, Anna’s past research projects have centered literary depictions of Victorian education and childhood. Her early-stage dissertation research focuses on depictions and illustrations of “bad” children in Victorian literature, especially the ways in which “badness” as a label is often gendered and racialized.

At UNC, Anna works closely with the Jane Austen Summer Program, a public humanities outreach program, and in the William Blake Archive—a Digital Humanities project cataloguing Blake’s works.

Teaching Awards

• Richard Hoffman GTA Teaching Award for Excellence: Virginia Tech English Departmental Award, 2020
• Michael J. Sandridge Education Award for Excellence: Roanoke College, 2015
• English Department Teaching Award for Excellence: Roanoke College, 2015

Awards

• Caroline Pace Chermside Award for Best Master’s Thesis: Virginia Tech, 2020
• Dickens Universe Fellow, 2020
• Phi Beta Kappa, 2015
• Briethaupt Scholarship for the Scholarly Study of Literature: Roanoke College, 2014

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.

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, formally experimented with coordinating information 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:

• “Revision and the Politics of Truth-Telling in The Autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano.” Victorian Studies, forthcoming.
• “The Form of Information and Informational Form in The Woman in White.” Studies in the Novel, forthcoming.
• “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 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

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

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

2018, BA English & Computer Science, University of Virginia

Bio

DA Hall is an English & Comparative Literature PhD Candidate and Assistant Director of the Critical Game Studies Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Their dissertation centers questions of historical development of genre, queer narrative temporalities, and radical community meaning-making within a genealogy of Japanese video games. DA Hall has written and presented extensively on FromSoftware’s Soulsborne series, and is currently co-organizing a volume that explores Japanese video game perspectives on Western worlding as aesthetic navigations of the contested cultural situation of Japan in the wake of World War II. As Assistant Director of the Critical Game Studies Program, they have worked to build the Greenlaw Gameroom, a game-focused classroom which centers accessibility and critical pedagogy, as well as the proposed Critical Game Studies Minor within the English & Comparative Literature department.

Publications:

• Hall, DA, “A Beginner’s Guide to Painted Worlds: The Haunted Mansion, Dark Souls III, and the Playground of Interpretation,” Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association, 2024.
• Hall, DA, “The Fallen Leaves Tell a Story: Elden Ring and the Emergence of the Soulslike Genre,” New Formations of Game Genres, Approaches to Digital Game Studies, Bloomsbury Publishing, forthcoming.
• Hall, DA, and Jones, Nicholas, “A War Without End: Industrial Warfare and the Negation of Individual Agency in Edward Berger’s Im Westen nichts Neues” Screening War: Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front in Context, forthcoming.

Teaching Awards

• Guest Instructor Award, 2023 – Department of American Studies, UNC
• Critical Game Studies Award, 2021 – Department of English & Comparative Literature, UNC

Awards

• 2024 Institute for the Arts and Humanities – King’s College London Collaboration Grant
• 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities – Humanities Initiative Grant: “Integrating Storytelling & Critical Game Studies into the Curriculum.”
• 2019 Center for Faculty Excellence – Lenovo Instructional Innovation Grant

Curriculum Vitae / Resume