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Isabel Spencer Landis Doss

July 24, 2024

Degrees

2024, M.A. English, University of Georgia

2020, B.A. English cum laude, Willamette University

Bio

Spencer Doss is a PhD student and teaching fellow in UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. She studies nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on Victorian women writers and their responses to patriarchal authority. Spencer’s master’s thesis, “Styling Society: Medicine, Art, and Sarah Grand’s New Women,” investigates how male characters in Grand’s oeuvre view women with a gaze that is at once aestheticizing and anatomizing. This phenomenon demonstrates the convergence of the institutions of art and medicine at the fin-de-siècle, with artists and doctors alike appraising women according to a patriarchal style that emphasizes their physical form, or bodies, over their subjective content, or their identities. Much of her research has centered understudied nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century feminist authors, including Catherine Carswell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, H.D., and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In addition, Spencer is intrigued by how Victorian medical models manifest in the novel and their capacity to pathologize female bodies, especially in Gothic and sensation fiction.

As an instructor of writing, Spencer is passionate about establishing a classroom environment where students are empowered to explore and define their identities as writers. Her background as a writing center consultant informs her approach to instructor-student communication, which prioritizes one-on-one conferencing in addition to an interactive classroom model. Courses she has taught have involved the interplay of public and private memory and fictional texts that define and redefine the natural, from Beowulf to the present.


Awards

  • Christy Desmet Memorial Fund Award, University of Georgia, 2024
  • Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, inducted 2024
  • Research Out of State Tuition Award, University of Georgia, 2022
  • English Department Honors, Willamette University, 2020
  • John Dryden Award, Willamette University, 2020

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Faith Rush

July 22, 2024

Degrees

2021, MA English, Winthrop University

2020, BA English, Winthrop University

Bio

Faith Rush is a PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is a two-time graduate of Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. During her time there, she became interested in 19th and 20th-century American Literature with an emphasis on Black Southern writers. Faith’s research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to analyze literature’s role in forming and reforming the Black identity. Unpacking well-known and lesser-known works by Black authors, she argues for their insertion into the racialized American literary canon.

Her current research interest is the first-known African American novelist Hannah Crafts and her autobiographic novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative. She hopes to further comprehend Crafts’s literary contributions to American literature and advocate for her placement within academic discourse.


Publications:

  • Lift Up. (Rock Hill: The Anthology: Winthrop University Arts & Literary Magazine, 2021).
  • Mama Said. (Rock Hill: The Anthology: Winthrop University’s Arts & Literary Magazine, 2021).
  • Death of Divorce. (Rochester Hills: Oakland Arts Review, 2020).
  • Songs for the People: Music’s Recreation of the Black Identity in the Works of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. (Rock Hill: Showcase of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors, 2020).

Anna Blackburn

July 31, 2023

Degrees

2023, BA English, Washington and Lee University

Bio

My research focuses on the relationship between fear, colonialism, and the Gothic genre. I am interested in how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British texts use Gothic conventions to stoke fear of colonized peoples as well as how more recent postcolonial texts reclaim these conventions to criticize colonialism. I have studied the role of spirituality in the colonial and postcolonial Gothic, including British portrayals of Obeah and other Afro-Caribbean spiritualities. More recently, I have been interested in how the Gothic intersects with travel writing.


Awards

  • Travel Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2024
  • Sidney M. B. Coulling Prize for Best Senior Work, Washington and Lee University
  • Catherine Houston Campbell Scholarship in English Literature, Washington and Lee University
  • Jean Amory Wornom Award for Distinguished Critical Writing, Washington and Lee University
  • Sidney M. B. Coulling Prize in English, Washington and Lee University

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Dana Maller

October 6, 2022

Degrees

2019, BA in English Literature, Georgia College & State University
2021, MA in English Literature, University of Maryland, College Park

Bio

Dana Maller is a PhD student studying European Modernism. Her interests lie in the image, form, and affect.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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), and specifically Literature of the American South, the Appalachian South, and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel, though he is also an avid scholar of Cormac McCarthy and of Thomas Wolfe. His prospective dissertation, Articulating Appalachia, argues that definitions of the region and its people are co-constructed across the 20th c. through both cultural representation (literature, film, music) and Regional and National projects for economic and social uplift.

He is currently a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a Senior Coordinator for the Critical Speakers Series, and a Board Member (2023-2026) for the Thomas Wolfe Society. He is an occasional Reviewer for the The Cormac McCarthy Journal. As a junior scholar, his work has been accepted or published in several journals and essay collections, and he has presented his work at over 20 academic conferences.


Publications:

  • “Darkness on the Edge of Town: Beat Subject Formation, Black Ontology, and Fugitivity as Gnosis in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” In This Country’s Hard on People: Cormac McCarthy and American Identity, edited by Vernon Cisney. Forthcoming.
  • “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.
  • “A Literary Ménage à Trois: An Analysis of the Elizabeth Lemmon Collection on Thomas Wolfe, 1934-1935.” Forthcoming.
  • “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 88, no. 2-3, 2023, pp. 157-170.
  • “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review, vols. 44 & 45, nos. 1 & 2, 2020 & 2021, pp. 8-25.
  • [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.
  • Travel Grant, Fall 2023, 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 StudiesApril 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

Angelique Bassard

August 22, 2022

Degrees

2013, BA English, Wake Forest University

2020, MEd Curriculum and Instruction, Virginia Commonwealth University

Bio

Angelique Bassard is a second-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the English and Comparative Literature program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her Bachelor of Arts degrees in English from Wake Forest University and a Master of Education from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research area is American Literature throughout the Long Nineteenth Century, with special interest in Postbellum African American Literature, Southern Writers, Reconstruction, the memory and haunting of the slave past, and Southern realism and romanticism.

Currently, she is researching NC-born black writer Jack Thorne, pseudonym of David Bryant Fulton, and his use and subversion of Southern romance in his 1901 novel, Hanover; or the Persecution of the Lowly: A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. 


Awards

  • Lee Green Award, UNC Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023
  • Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC Chapel Hill, 2023

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.


Lara Nicole Pur

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2020, BA English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Bio

Lara Nicole Pur is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature studying woman-written sensation novels of 19th century Britain. More specifically, she is interested in feminist commentary and resistance within sensation novels. She often finds herself examining questions regarding the so-called “girl of the period,” women’s joy and pleasure, and bodily autonomy.


Awards

  • Dahl Family Fellowship

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Rachel Rackham

August 3, 2022

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

Anna Merz

March 16, 2022

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