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Madison Storrs

July 24, 2023

Degrees

2017, BA English, Florida State University

2021, MA English, North Carolina State University

 

Bio

Madison Storrs is a first-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literature, botany, and art of the long 19th century in Britain. In particular, she considers how women incorporated botanical studies into their writing and art practices. She is also interested in British Romanticism, ecocriticism, ontology, aesthetics, design, and visual culture.


Awards

Teaching Assistantship, First-Year Writing, North Carolina State University, 2020–2021.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Satoshi Ohnishi

July 20, 2023

Degrees

2018, BA Literature, the representative of the graduates, Waseda University

2020, MA Education, Waseda University

Bio

Satoshi Ohnishi is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.  His research focuses on the relationship between 19th-century American literature and visual media, including the camera obscura and early photographic media. Additionally, he is currently interested in the representation of aging in American literature and African American literature.


Awards

  • Okuma Memorial Scholarship, Waseda University, 2018
  • Fulbright Scholarship (Fulbright Foreign Student Program), the Japan-United States Educational Commission, 2023-2025
  • Graduate Tuition Incentive Scholarship, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2024–25

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Xochi-María Ramos-Lara

July 20, 2023

Degrees

2023, B.A. Gender Studies / English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

Bio

xochi-maría ramos-lara (she/they) is a doctoral student in english and comparative literature. her main research interest focuses on the (lacanian) subjectivity of gay latinx poets as they wrote during the american aids epidemic of the 80s and 90s, taking into account the presence of the hiv virus itself as an important character. besides this, x. is interested in non-white marxist critiques of the state, hegemonic ideologies, and culture; anti-white violent resistance via brown power (ex. the palestinian intifadas); queer performances of subversion in the american drag and ballroom scenes; and the power dynamics of bareback subculture in gay pornography.

outside of the academy, x. loves writing poetry, collective education on critical ethnic studies, participating in local political action, and going to gay clubs as a form of praxis.


Publications:

  • “i planted some lavender in my front yard saturday morning,” SAGE, 2024.
  • “afuera,” Screen Door Review, 2023.
  • “white mother,” Carolina Muse: Literary & Arts Magazine, 2023.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Rene Marzuk

July 19, 2023

Degrees

2023, MA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

2022, BA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Bio

Rene Marzuk is interested in exploring continuities across languages and cultures. He is particularly intrigued by literary articulations of marginalized identities and by literary instances of emergence, widely defined. He is drawn to intertextual approaches that reveal the production of knowledge as a collective endeavor spanning times, cultures, and disciplines.


Awards

William Neal Reynolds Fellowship within the Royster Society of Fellows, 2023-2028

Ruth Rose Richardson Award for Outstanding Record in the First Year of Graduate Study, 2024

Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2023


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Maggie Anne Miller

July 19, 2023

Degrees

2020, BA English, Dalton State College

2023, MA English, Georgia State University

Bio

Maggie is a second-year Ph.D student in English literature. Her interests lie in prosody, historical theology and philosophy, and the moral imagination of Early Modern English poets both Protestant and Catholic, namely Milton, Donne, Crashaw, Herbert, Southwell, and others.


Publications:

“‘Not a Chaos’: The Intentionality of Music in the Gothic Novel and Film,” SAMLA News 41 (2020): 9-13.


Awards

  • Julius Sylvester Hanner Memorial Fund, The University of North Carolina, Summer 2024
  • Jerry Leath Mills Research Travel Grant, Studies in Philology, Summer 2024
  • Travel Grant, Department of English and Comparative Literature, The University of North Carolina, 2024
  • Booker Fellowship, The University of North Carolina, Aug 2023 – May 2024
  • Undergraduate Student Essay Award, SAMLA ’91 Conference, 2019

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Christopher Catanese

April 26, 2022

Degrees

2013, M.A. English, Duke University

2008, B.A. English, Davidson College

Bio

I work on British and transatlantic literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic era, with an emphasis on poetry and genre. I am particularly interested in evolving systems of land use, in working-class writers and rural issues, commons and enclosures, and economic and agricultural history. I have published on Samuel Johnson, antiquarianism, and the mass reading public; on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, vitalism, and Romantic-era natural history, and my journal article on Robert Bloomfield, Wordsworth, and Romantic genre transformations won the 2016 Ralph Cohen Prize in New Literary History. I also publish poetry and literary translations, and I am coeditor of the small poetry press Golias Books.


Publications:

  • “Edward Rushton,” in Jackson Bibliography of Romantic Poetry, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson et al., University of Toronto.
  • “Patronage and Poetic Form: Henry Kirke White, Capel Lofft, and the Monthly Mirror,” in Henry Kirke White, 1785–1806, edited by Tim Fulford. Online, August 2022.
  • “Refinement and Romantic Genre,” New Literary History 48, no. 1 (2017). Winner of the 2016 Ralph Cohen Prize.
  • “Johnson, Warton, and the Romance Reader,” in Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle, edited by Anthony Lee (Bucknell University Press, 2019).
  • “Survival Narratives: The Georgic and the Romantic Genre-System,” in Narratives of Romanticism, edited by Sandra Heinen and Katharina Rennhak (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017).
  • Precious against a Precious Thing: Selected Poems of Michael Fieldselected, edited, and introduced by Christopher Catanese and Lawrence Giffin, preface by Stacy Szymaszek (Golias Books, 2019).

Awards

  • 2023. “Listening to the System: Genre in the D. K. Wilgus Papers.” Research grant, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
  • 2022–2023. “Land, Labor, Literature.” Public Humanities Incubator Award and Fellowship, Modern Language Association
  • 2022. Dahl Family Fellowship, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
  • 2016. Graduate Research Fellowship, 18th-century British paintings collections, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
  • 2016. Duke International Research Travel Award, University of Vienna, Austria
  • 2015–2016. William Preston Few Fellowship, Duke University
  • 2015. Six-Month Research Fellowship, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), Seminar für Englische Philologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
  • 2015. Duke International Research Travel Award, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
  • 2015. Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Summer Research Fellowship, Goethe-Institut Göttingen

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Izzy G. T. Howard

August 5, 2021

Degrees

2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Izzy (they/them) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. They study the relationship between the soul and body in medieval literary, aesthetic, and dramatic representations of Creation. Their dissertation, Made A Living Soul: Genesis and the Creation of the Soul in Medieval Devotional and Mystic Literature examines ideas of the soul as developed in early medieval Scholastic exegesis, and how these understandings of the soul are complicated and affirmed in medieval devotional and mystic texts.

In their research on the medieval soul and body, Izzy examines the language used to structure the corporeal, physical self and the sensing, feeling, and cognative self alongside theories of queer embodiment, affect, and representations.

Their broader interests include manuscript studies, medieval philosophy and theology, poetics, and literary criticism.


Publications:

With H.M. Cushman “Bodies on Display” in A Cultural History of Trans Lives in the Middle Ages (300-1445). Bloomsbury. Forthcoming.


Teaching Awards

Latina/o Studies Teaching Fellowship, UNC Latina/o Studies Program, 2022


Awards

Donald Howard Travel Scholarship, New Chaucer Society, 2024

Trans Travel Fund, Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, 2023

CARA Summer Scholarship, Medieval Academy of America, 2022

Internal:   

Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2024

Joseph Breen Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Dept. of English & Comparative Literature, 2023

Research Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2023

Travel Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate and Professional Student Government, 2023

Travel Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Dept. of English & Comparative Literature, 2022, 2024

First Class Honours in English Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 2020


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Amy Yue-Yin Chan

August 5, 2021

Degrees

2018, BA Classics, minors French & English, summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

I study classics and US poetry from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. One of the central concepts that I explore for my dissertation is the influence of Platonism on ideas of originality and individuality in the American poetic tradition. My study ranges from the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller to Walt Whitman to the belated Harlem Renaissance poet Melvin B. Tolson. An earlier version of this concept, entitled “Du Bois as the American Poet,” won the Graduate Student Conference Paper Award from the R. W. Emerson Society in 2023.
My interest in classical reception in US poetry first began in a modernism seminar that I took as a senior at Penn, and my interest in Plato began upon reading the Meno during a semester abroad at Cambridge.

Publications:

Scholarship:

  • “Review of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin 35.1 (2023), 19-20.

Poems et al.:

  • “On Hudson River.” Bayou (forthcoming).
  • My Mother Says.” Rattle 83 (2024).
  • Flux. BlazeVOX: Fall 2021, 412-18.
  • Lai-jee.” Indiana Review 43.1 (2021), 85-92.

Teaching Awards

  • Doris Betts Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2023

Awards

External:

  • Graduate Student Conference Paper Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, 2023
  • Dickinson Critical Institute Grant, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2022

Internal:

  • Bain Award (Excellence in Pre-1900 American Lit.), UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
  • Travel Grant, UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
  • Transportation Grant, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2022
  • Travel Award, UNC-CH Graduate & Professional Student Government, 2022
  • Booker Fellowship, UNC-CH DOECL, 2021
  • Inclusive Excellence Top-Up, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2021

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Elisabeth McClanahan Harris

June 15, 2021
Photo of Elisabeth McClanahan

Degrees

2019, MA English, George Washington University

2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University

Bio

Elisabeth is a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long 19th century and the health humanities. Her dissertation, “Power Play: Games, Jokes, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Asylum Narratives” investigates the modes by which asylum patients creatively contested medical authority through memoirs, exposés, poetry, and newspaper writing.


Publications:

  • “‘Send the little patient to the Hospital at once:’ Early Eugenics at the North Carolina State Hospital’s Epileptic Colony,” in The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19th Century, edited by Lucia Hodgson and Allison Giffen (Routledge, forthcoming in 2025). https://www.routledge.com/The-Biopolitics-of-Childhood-in-the-Long-American-19th-Century/Hodgson-Giffen/p/book/9781032563527
  • “Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene,” in 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.

Awards

  • Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024-2025
  • Eliason Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, UNC English Department, 2023
  • C. Hugh Holman Award for a dissertation in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2023
  • Dissertation Prospectus Fellowship, Wilson Library at UNC, 2022
  • Robert Bain Award for scholarship in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2021
  • Southern Futures Graduate Award, UNC Center for the Study of the American South, 2020
  • McCandlish Endowment Fellowship, GWU, 2017-2019

Colin Dekeersgieter

September 25, 2019

Degrees

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

 

Bio

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.


Publications:

  • Opium and Ambergris (Kent State University Press, forthcoming 2024)

Awards

  • Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Marilyn Chin
  • Goldwater Fellowship, New York University
  • Global Research Initiative Fellowship, New York University