Degrees

2022, BA English, Belmont University

2024, MA English, Wake Forest University

Bio

Holly (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, with a focus in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. Her primary interests are in disability studies, the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), health humanities, and composition pedagogy.

Recently, Holly’s research has focused on the discursive construction of psychiatric diagnoses and neurodivergent identities. Her first refereed article, forthcoming in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, investigates so-called “Aspergian” positionalities as ideal products of the technocapitalist dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.

In composition studies, Holly focuses on writing transfer, writing in the disciplines (WID), and writing about writing (WAW). She has a particular interest in the interpersonal dynamics of writing instructors and students, with a focus on the impact of these dynamics on student perceptions of competence and confidence in writing tasks. Through her work as a Writing Center tutor in her Master’s program, Holly developed specialties in working with students who self-identified as neurodivergent and/or learning disabled. As a Teaching Fellow, Holly strives to use those pedagogical strategies to create learning opportunities that are accessible and equitable for a diverse population of students.

Publications:

• Thompson, Holly. “‘Demi-autistic, genetically speaking’: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and the ‘Aspergian’ Loop.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. In press.

Awards

• Erika Lindemann Fellowship, 2025
• Gordon A. Melson Outstanding Master’s Student Award, Wake Forest University, 2024
• Richter Scholarship Travel Fund, Wake Forest University, 2023
• James and Sarah King Writing Award, Belmont University, 2022

Degrees

2024, Honors BA English Literature and Philosophy, Marquette University

Bio

Margarita Buitrago is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She focuses on Anglo-French-Iberian medieval literature and is especially interested in allegories and travel literature. Her research explores how the role of vernacular texts, history, translation, and visual culture shaped medieval transnational identities. 

In addition to medieval studies, Margarita is also interested in pedagogy, the digital humanities, and the history of the book. Currently, she works in writing center research and as an editorial assistant at the William Blake Archive. 

Publications:

(co-author) Eugenia Afinoguénova and Margarita Buitrago, “Child Refugees and the Transnational Iconographies of a Better Future During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2025).

Awards

• Doctoral Merit Fellowship, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (2024)
• Outstanding English Major Award, Marquette University Department of English (2024)
• Undergraduate Research Assistantship, Marquette University (2024)
• Honors Research Fellowship Award for Summer 2023, Marquette University Honors Program (2023)

Degrees

2018, BA English, Nicholls State University

2022, MA English, University of New Orleans

Bio

Shelby is a Rhetoric and Composition Ph.D student, teaching fellow, and writing program assistant. She develops interdisciplinary research on writing transfer and hopes that one day her work results in a transfer pedagogy for first-year courses. Years of teaching writing in different learning settings led to Shelby’s interest in writing transfer, so at the core of her work as a Ph.D. student is a desire to help student writers develop confidence and experience long-term success in diverse writing contexts. Recently, Shelby’s research has intersected with embodiment theory. In relation to her primary topic, she explores embodied cognition, embodied pedagogy, visual pedagogy, disability studies, instructional design, memory processes, and metacognition.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

MA in Literature, Wayne State University, April 2020

BA in English, with Teacher’s Certification, Minor: Medieval Studies, Eastern Illinois University, cum laude, with University Honors, May 2009

Bio

Originally from central Illinois, Lindsay is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow focusing on post-conquest (c. 1100-1300) medieval literature.  Previous research has focused on food in medieval literature, early modern broadside ballads, and perceptions of mental illness in medieval Europe.  Currently, Lindsay is working on sorrow as an affect in later medieval dream visions. Outside of medieval literature, Lindsay is also interested in teaching pedagogy and taught high school English and special education before returning to academia.  She has also worked extensively with a group of instructors at UNC who design coursework focusing on publication in the PIT Journal.

Publications:

Miller, Lindsay, Sarah Chapman and Lynn Losh 2019. Going beyond Lear: Performance and Taming of the Shrew. Dividing the Kingdoms:Interdisciplinary Methods for Teaching King Lear to Undergraduates: Performance: Wayne State University. https://guides.lib.wayne.edu/folgerkinglear/performance

Ragle-Miller, Lindsay et. Al. The Warrior Women Project: Wayne State University. https://s.wayne.edu/warriorwomen/

Teaching Awards

Erika Lindemann Teaching Award in Composition and Literature, 2024

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, MA English, Texas Christian University

2019, BA English, Texas Christian University

Bio

Andreley Bjelland is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period. Her dissertation explores representations of children and crime in early modern English literature, drama, pamphlets, and ballads.

Teaching Awards

• PIT Journal and Conference Curricular Innovation Award, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2024
• Erika Lindemann Award for Demonstrated Excellence in Teaching, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023

Awards

• Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024
• Medieval and Early Modern Studies Small Research Grant, UNC MEMS, 2023
• Druscilla French Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Graduate School, 2021

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

BA English, Andrews University

MA English, University of Oklahoma

Bio

I am currently interested in video game studies, digital rhetoric, and digitial composition pedagogy. My previous work looked at the horror video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and its uses of virtual spaces to generate affects of fear and anxiety. Currently, I’m interested in studying competitive e-sports titles such as League of Legends and Starcraft II to understand how their fast-paced forms of gameplay require and generate new forms of literacies.

Publications:

Lee, Charles (2021), ‘Running scared: Fear and Space in Amnesia: The Dark
Descent’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 13:1, pp. 93–112.

Degrees

2010, B.A. (Hons) Literae Humaniores, University of Oxford

2018, M.A. Ancient Greek and Latin, Boston College

Bio

Everett Lang studies Ancient Greek and Latin literature, primarily from the Roman Imperial period, and its later reception in Early Modern Britain and northern Europe.

Degrees

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

Bio

Antonia DiNardo is a fifth year PhD candidate in English literature. Her work is focused on mediations of the Middle Ages in modern popular culture from Tolkien to the The Witcher, utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing semiotics, genre theory, critical game studies, and reception studies. Her dissertation, “Imagining White Pasts: Fantasy and Far-Right Pseudo-History” explores the intersection of medievalist media and white nationalist discourse. Antonia has given talks and lectures on the fraught intersection of fantasy and conceptions of “historical authenticity,” on the co-opting of popular fantasy franchises as recruiting tools by far-right groups, on chivalric imagery in far-right identity construction, and on chivalric masculinities in Chaucer and Chretien de Troyes. In 2023, she held the Hanes Graduate Fellowship, studying the annotations and marginalia of C. S. Lewis’ personal collection of medieval and early modern texts. In 2024, she joined the team in the Greenlaw Gameroom, UNC’s first games-based teaching space.

Awards

• Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Rare Book Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume