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. My research interests largely revolve around animal studies and how literature has shaped historical developments in human-animal relations. At UNC, I have taught classes on poetry, animals in popular literary genres, science writing, and composition, and I have also gained extensive experience working as a graduate writing coach at the UNC Writing Center. As a scholar and a teacher, I am driven by a deep interest in interdisciplinary thinking and how written words actively shape our lived experiences in the world.

In my dissertation project, “‘If You Are Always Kind’: Animals and Becoming Human(e) in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature,” I demonstrate how materials written for and by children were historically significant in the development and consolidation of “humane” values that continue to shape our present moment. My project foregrounds how these materials racialized and gendered different animal species to generate a “humane” discourse that fueled the emergence of animal welfare initiatives. While I focus on these developments in the United States, I also consider the transnational and transatlantic dimensions of the animal welfare movement. As a scholar, much of my methodology is grounded in working with archival materials, and I have held research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society in the course of working on this project. In considering many materials that have been forgotten today but which circulated widely in the nineteenth century, I shed new light on works that—like “Mary’s Lamb” (1830), which I quote in the first part of my title—continue to shape human behavior towards animals from a young age.

In my future work beyond this current project, I’m interested in how literary representations of animals influenced the development of veterinary science as a distinct medical field from the early 1700s up until 1879, when the first public college of veterinary medicine was founded in the United States. I am also more broadly interested in the history of public education in the United States.

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Publications:

• “Black Cats and White Women: Animal Autobiography and the Shaping of Race, Species, and Gender,” has been accepted for publication in American Literature contingent upon review of final revisions (as of October 2023)
• “‘Our School House is the Universe’: Henry David Thoreau as Radical Educator,” forthcoming in the new proposed Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau (2025)
• “A Posthumous Life: Thoreau and the Possibilities of Posthuman Biography,” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, Vol. 27, 2019
• Review of Antoine Traisnel’s Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) for Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology (Winter 2022, Vol. 30, No. 1)
• 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)

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Teaching Awards

• Krista Turner Award for Excellence in Student Support for Spring 2022, UNC Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
• Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, UNC Chancellor’s Awards, 2022

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Awards

• Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, Spring 2024, The Graduate School, UNC
• Lapides Fellowship in Pre-1865 Juvenile Literature and Ephemera, 2023-2024, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA
• Andrew Oliver Research Fellowship, 2022-2023, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston MA
• Dissertation Research Fellowship, Summer 2022, UNC Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
• Robert Bain Award for Excellence Achieved by a Second-Year Student in Pre-1900 American Literature, 2018, UNC

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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 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.

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Publications:

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

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Awards

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

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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.

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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

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Awards

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

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Degrees

2018, BA English, Davidson College

Bio

Erin Piemont studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States poetry with a special interest in intersections between poetry and the visual arts. Her research explores art-historical considerations of self-portraiture as an alternative to the literary-critical category of lyric.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, B.A. English modified with Philosophy, minor in Ethics, Dartmouth College

Bio

Carly Schnitzler is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow studying digital rhetoric and computational arts and poetics.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College

Bio

Emma is a Comparative Literature student interested in ancient Greek philosophy.  Her work explores the relationship between philosophy and poetry in Plato and Aristotle.  She is also interested in language, specifically metaphor and simile.

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Degrees

2014, BA English, Brigham Young University

2017, MFA Creative Writing, Colorado State University

Bio

Kylan Rice studies nineteenth and twentieth-century American poetry and poetics.

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Publications:

Books:

• An Image Not a Book (Free Verse Editions, forthcoming 2023)
• Primer, co-authored with Dan Beachy-Quick (Free Poetry Press, 2023)
• Incryptions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021)

Anthologies:

• Southern Lights: 75 Years of the Carolina Quarterly, co-edited with Sophia Houghton and Daniel Wallace (UNC Press, forthcoming 2023)

Articles:

• “‘Bird, Jewel, or Flower?’: On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry,” ELH (forthcoming)
• “A ‘Correspondence of Eyes with Eyes’: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Empathy, and Literary Naturalism,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 20, no. 3, December 2020, pp. 179 – 205.
• “‘In Couples, In Small Companies’: On Robert Duncan and Sentimental Modernism.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, & Theory, vol. 76, no. 2, Summer 2020, pp. 87-113.
• “‘Some Other’s Text’: Dan Beachy-Quick, Moby-Dick, and the Poetics of Reading.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, June 2019, pp. 83-103.
• “‘Light—enabling Light’: Emily Dickinson and the Apparatus of the Poet’s I.” Women’s Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2018, pp. 317-332.

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Teaching Awards

• Student Undergraduate Teaching and Staff Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2023.

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Awards

• Lyle V. Jones Dissertation Fellowship, awarded within the Royster Society of Fellows, 2022-23.
• Graduate Student Fellowship, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2023
• Early Stages Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Summer 2021
• Bain Award for outstanding academic performance in the second year of graduate study, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019
• Ruth Richardson Award for outstanding academic performance in the first year of graduate study, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Tulsa

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student studying the overlap of friendship, loyalty, and virtue in Late Medieval Romance.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, M. A. Pennsylvania State University

Bio

I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research focuses primarily upon early modern literature and in particular, the intersections of poetics and performance, the fool figure, ballads and politics. My dissertation, “Changeling Humorists: The Speech Acts of the Early Modern English Fool,” traces the intellectual history of the fool figure through the seventeenth century. It explores how the fool democratizes an access to public voice and transfers a form of sovereignty to its audience. Currently, I am also editing Robert Armin’s Quips upon Questions for Digital Renaissance Editions.

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Publications:

• Robert Armin, Quips upon Questions, in Digital Renaissance Editions. University of Victoria.
• Review of Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare, Technicity and the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020. In Shakespeare Quarterly (forthcoming).
• Review of Henze, Catherine. Robert Armin and Shakespeare’s Performed Songs. New York: Routledge Press, 2017. In Renaissance Quarterly. 71 No. 4 (2018): 1554-1555.
• Review of  Marno, David. Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. In Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18 No. 2 (2018): 175-177.

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Teaching Awards

• 2020 Latina/o Studies Teaching Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Awards

External 

• 2020       UCLA Clark Library/Center for Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Studies Predoctoral Fellowship
• 2019       Conference Bursary, British Shakespeare Association
• 2018       Jerry Leath Mills Research Travel Fellowship, Studies in Philology
• 2018       Conference Bursary, British Shakespeare Association
• 2018       NEMLA Graduate Student Travel Grant

Internal

• 2021       Howell-Voitle Award for Dissertation in Early Modern English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2021       Department of English and Comparative Literature Summer Dissertation Fellowship,  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2021       Medieval and Early Modern Summer Research Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2020       Eliason Dissertation Research Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2020       Medieval and Early Modern Society Travel Grant, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2019       The Graduate and Professional Student Federation Travel Grant, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2018       Travel Grant, Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 2017       Wilma Ebbitt Fellowship in Rhetoric, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume