2019, BA English, Georgia College & State University
2021, MA English, University of Maryland
Dana Maller is a PhD student in the English Department. Her interests include postcolonial literature and theories of the body, body materialism, and phenomenology.
Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | The Novel
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 and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel.
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
2013, BA English, Wake Forest University
2020, MEd Curriculum and Instruction, Virginia Commonwealth University
My interests include Postbellum African American literature from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century (1870s-1910s), Southern black writers, and speculative fiction.
African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | Critical Race Studies | Southern Literature | The Novel
2021, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College
First-year Ph.D. student 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, focusing on Southern literature and religion.
2021, MA English, Brigham Young University
2019, MA Library and Information Science, University of Iowa
2017, BA English, Brigham Young University
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.
Aesthetics | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | Digital Humanities | History of the Book | Literature and History | Narrative Theory | The Novel | Travel Writing | Visual Culture and Arts
2020, MA English Literature, Virginia Tech
2015, BA English Literature and Education, Roanoke College
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.
British Literature from 1660 to 1789 | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | Critical Race Studies | Depictions Of The Child | Digital Humanities | Literature and Education | Narrative Theory | Pedagogy | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | The Novel | Transatlantic Studies | Women Writers
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 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
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.
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, documentary storytelling, and truth-telling in 19th-century British and Transatlantic literature. He works to read these issues in light of contemporary polycrisis, information overload, and activist action.
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 | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | 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 | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | The Novel | Transatlantic Studies
2019, MA English, George Washington University
2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University
Elisabeth studies 19th century American literature and medicine, focusing on how changing theories of mental illness and its treatment were encoded in congregate care institutions over the course of the century. Her research, which draws on a varied archive of patient memoirs, journalistic exposes, and fictional depictions of congregate care, investigates entanglements of race, gender, and disability in questions of mental healthcare.
“Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven, edited by Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Routledge, 2021.
African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Depictions Of The Child | Disability Studies | History of the Book | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Poetry and Poetics | Southern Literature | The Novel | Women Writers
