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, Virginia Tech
2019, BA English, Virginia Commonwealth University
Kara Rush is a first-year Ph.D. student specializing in early modern literature. In particular, Rush is interested in how early modern author’s used nature, elements, and bodies to speak against political authority norms and to interrogate the parameters of British national identity. Other interests include adaptation studies, late medieval literature, post-colonial theory, and critical race studies.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Critical Race Studies | Drama | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Literature and History | Literature and Science | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Women Writers
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 English, North Carolina State University
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.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Disability Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature and History | Literature and Religion | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Pedagogy | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Social Justice | Southern Literature | Transatlantic Studies
2020, BA English and Visual Arts, University of Richmond
Carson Watlington is a PhD student in the department of English & Comparative Literature and the Graduate Assistant for Film Studies. Her work is rooted in 20th/21st century American Literature, with a particular attention to minority and ethnic texts.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Asian American Literature | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Digital Humanities | Film and Media Studies | Philosophy Of Language | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Visual Culture and Arts | Women Writers
2021, BA English, Centenary College of Louisiana
2021, BA French, Centenary College of Louisiana
Audrey Gibson is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is broadly interested in 19th and 20th century American literature, with particular emphasis on Southern and multiethnic writing. Her research is mainly focused on French-language poetry, particularly Afro-Creole literature and newspaper writing, situated in New Orleans during the Civil War and Reconstruction. This research explores the construction of identity and community through language, publication, education, religion, and political involvement.
Tempêtes et Éclairs: Poésies d’Adolphe Duhart, écrivain créole de la Louisiane by Adolphe Duhart, edited by Audrey J. Gibson, Éditions Tintamarre, 2022.
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Literature and History | Modernism | Pedagogy | Poetry and Poetics | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Social Justice | Southern Literature | Transatlantic Studies
2018, B.A. English Literature, Colorado Mesa University
2020, M.A. English, Colorado State University
I am a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. I research recent contemporary American literature from 2000 to present, and am absorbed by questions about mixed-race identity, and how multiethnic and multicultural subjects “rightly” identify themselves and are identified. I also examine what makes writing literary, who creates literature, and how digital media challenges and expands those definitions.
African American Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Creative Writing | Critical Race Studies | Digital Humanities | Digital Rhetorics | Disability Studies | Feminist Historiography | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Genre Theory | Latina / Latino Literature | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Media Studies | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Social Justice | Southern Literature | Women Writers
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, BA English Literature, University of Central Florida
Meleena (they/she) is a first-generation US-American and college graduate now working towards a doctoral degree in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Drawing from queer theoretical and environmental humanities frameworks, Meleena specializes in the portrayals of children’s narratives in contemporary Latinx literature.
Meleena hopes to unite their service work and their research by partnering with various organizations on and off campus to invigorate their pedagogy and foster more formidable local ties. They aim to create a space for meaningful experiences and mutual acknowledgment.
Fall 2021 Latina/o Studies Graduate Teaching Affiliate Fellowship
