Degrees

2021, BA English, Centenary College of Louisiana

2021, BA French, Centenary College of Louisiana

Bio

Audrey Gibson is a first-year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is broadly interested in 20th century American literature, with particular emphasis on Southern and multiethnic writing. Her previous research has focused on French-language poetry, particularly Afro-Creole literature, situated in New Orleans during the Civil War and Reconstruction. This research explored the construction of identity and community through language, publication, education, religion, and political involvement.

Degrees

2021, BA English, University of Virginia

Bio

Josy is interested in satire and parody in poetry, film, and television.

Awards

Mellon Fellowship, 2021-2026

Degrees

2018, BA Classics, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

Awards

• Booker Fellowship, 2021
• Inclusive Excellence Top-Up, 2021

Degrees

2019, MA English, George Washington University

2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University

Bio

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.

Publications:

“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.

Awards

• Robert Bain Award for scholarship in American Literature, UNC English Department, 2021
• Southern Futures Graduate Award, 2020
• McCandlish Endowment Fellowship, 2017-2019
• PEO Continuing Education Grant, 2018

Degrees

2016, MA English, University of Missouri at Columbia

2014, BA English (French minor), Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge

Bio

I am a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long nineteenth century with a focus on critical animal studies, histories of natural science, and poetics. In my dissertation project, “The Call of Kind”: Humanizing the Animal in American Literature, 1830-1918, I am exploring the connections between literary genres and the emergence of the modern pet industry from Sarah Josepha Hale’s 1830 poem “Mary’s Lamb” to the establishment of the Jack London Club by the Massachusetts SPCA in 1918. I consider how poetry, pet autobiographies, and fiction were all primary means through which writers humanized animals during this period, thereby influencing material changes that were made to improve animal welfare; I postulate that works now deemed “literary” accounted in large part for the rise in pet-keeping as an industry and in modern veterinary practices. With my focus on humanization and animal welfare, I wish to build upon and complicate recent posthumanist-driven arguments in the field of American literary studies as I investigate the poetics of domestic animal care.

In my future work, I am interested in exploring how we might connect the field of critical animal studies with modern veterinary science; I thus wish to connect theory with practice with respect to animal care. I would ultimately like to develop ways for placing literary studies and veterinary science into more direct conversation with one another in a manner that is similar to, yet different from, the medical humanities.

Publications:

“A Posthumous Life: Thoreau and the Possibilities of Posthuman Biography,” The Concord Saunterer Vol. 27, 2019 (roundtable article from MLA 2019)

Review of Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life for the Emerson Society Papers (Fall 2018, vol. 29, no. 2)

Online Review of LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations for The Carolina Quarterly (March 2019)

Online Review​ of Caleb Johnson’s ​Treeborne: A Novel f​or ​The Carolina Quarterly ​(September 2018)

Online Review​ of Filip Springer’s ​History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town​ for ​The Carolina Quarterly ​(April 2018)

Awards

Robert Bain Award for Excellence Achieved by a Second-Year Student in Pre-1900 American Literature, 2018

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019: B.A. English, Hampshire College.

Bio

Bailey Fernandez is a literary critic and scholar primarily working within the British Romantic period, though he is interested in contemporary literature as well. His thematic interests consist primarily in aesthetics, the philosophy of language, and the formal interchanges between literature, art, and music.

In addition to his scholarship, he also engages in editorial work.  He is a project assistant at The William Blake Archive and an associate editor at the Carolina Quarterly. In his spare time, he writes music and poetry.

Publications:

“Sun Cycle: A Review” Carolina Quarterly no. 69, vol. 4 (Summer 2020)

Awards

Digital Innovation Lab, 2019-20

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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 is a poet and Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature invested in modern poetry, poetics, and (neuro)aesthetics. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Green Mountains Review, The Worcester Review, and elsewhere.

Awards

• Goldwater Fellowship, New York University, 2017

Degrees

2019, MA in English, Wake Forest University

2017, BA in English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Bio

Thomas Eric Simonson divides his time between literature of the early modern era, especially drama, and 20th century transatlantic studies and literary theory.

Degrees

2016, BA English, Rhodes College

2019, MA English, University of Alabama

Bio

I specialize in literature, religion, and politics from 1550-1640, with expertise in lyric, dramatic, and narrative poetry from Chaucer to Milton (including Shakespeare). In addition to secondary competency in literary prose from 1500-1800, and special familiarity with the work of Laurence Sterne, I have taught courses on literature for primary and secondary schools, universities, continuing education programs, and correctional education programs. 

My dissertation will evaluate the political gist of English literary depictions of Julius Caesar in the context of more radical political theory

Awards

Mellon Fellowship (2019-2024)
Ruth Rose Richardson Award (2020)

Degrees

2016, M.F.A. Poetry Writing, University of North Carolina — Greensboro

2008, B.A. English, University of Virginia — Charlottesville

Bio

Abigail studies contemporary multiethnic literatures, with a focus on TV, film, music videos, and digital media. She holds an MFA in poetry writing and has taught courses in composition, American literature, and contemporary poetry.

Publications:

• “Blue can be a place/ please can it be a place” finalist for 2015-2016 Mid-American Review James Wright Prize, Vol 36, no. 2 (spring 2016).
• “somebody or other pretended a revelation” in Prairie Schooner, vol. 90, no. 3 (fall 2016).
• “and while he told the sands of his hour-glass, or the throbs and little beatings of his watch” in Bayou Magazine, vol. 65 (fall/winter 2016).
• “The library of July” in CALYX, vol. 29, no. 1 (winter 2016).
• “Two Face reads that batman has returned” in Barrow Street, (winter 2014).

Awards

• Humanities for the Public Good, Professional Pathways Award, project developing curricula for UNC correctional education courses, summer 2018
• Richard Bland Fellowship, Center for the Study of the American South, summer 2017