2018, MA English, New York University
2016, BA English, University of California, Los Angeles
Celeste is a graduate student in UNC’s English and Comparative Literature Department. They work as a teaching fellow for the department, an assistant at The William Blake Archive, and for the Jane Austen Summer Program. Celeste is currently interested in exploring ideas of apocalypse and ruin in the Long Nineteenth-Century.
2022, MA English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
2016, BA Religious Studies, Wingate University
A North Carolina native, Joshua Cody Ward joined the program in Fall 2022. His field is Modern and Contemporary American literature broadly (1900-Present), and specifically Literature of the American South, the Appalachian South, and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel, though he is also an avid scholar of Cormac McCarthy and of Thomas Wolfe. His prospective dissertation will engage with Articulations of Appalachia, both scholarly and literary, centering on the political and aesthetic stakes of defining the Southern Appalachian range across the 20th century into the contemporary.
He is currently a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a Junior Coordinator for the Critical Speakers Series, a Graduate Lecture Series coordinator, and a Board Member (2023-2026) for the Thomas Wolfe Society. He is also on the committee for the 2024 Durham, NC conference for the Thomas Wolfe Society, and is an occasional Reviewer for the The Cormac McCarthy Journal. As a junior scholar, his work has been accepted or published in several journals and essay collections, and he has presented his work at over 20 academic conferences.
African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Creative Writing | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Film and Media Studies | Genre Theory | Latina / Latino Literature | Literature and Philosophy | Modernism | Posthumanism | Science Fiction | Southern Literature | The Novel
BA English, Andrews University
MA English, University of Oklahoma
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.
Lee, Charles (2021), ‘Running scared: Fear and Space in Amnesia: The Dark
Descent’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 13:1, pp. 93–112.
Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Digital Rhetorics | Media Studies | Pedagogy | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy
2019, BA English, Mount Holyoke College
My scholarly interests naturally converge around questions of trauma, ethics, affect, and divergent subjectivities in narratives of resistance and reconciliation. My work is grounded in an intersectional feminist hermeneutic lens to explore the role of gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism in texts by contemporary American multiethnic women writers. I am also interested in speculative imagery and it’s significance in illuminating historically silenced facets of subjectivity. Psychoanalytic criticisms surrounding haunting and trauma, in conjunction with an exploration of queer women’s psyches as sites for potential violence or intimacy are also uniquely compelling to me. My work asks how/why ‘deviant affects’ are labeled as such, and why the burden of silencing those affects largely falls on “marginalized” folks, i.e. queer and trans women of color?
African American Literature | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Social Justice | Women Writers
2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University
2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College
Toni DiNardo is a fourth year PhD student in the department of English and Comparative literature. Once described by a colleague as a “medievalismist,” her work is predominantly concerned with the mediation of medieval thought and constructions of the middle ages in modern genre fantasy. She is particularly interested in the use of what Umberto Eco called “the Middle Ages as pretext” as a backdrop for the construction and sustenance of socio-political identities, from bucolic queer medievalisms to white nationalist idealization of a putatively ethno-nationalist Middle Ages. Toni has given talks on the fraught intersection of fantasy and conceptions of “historical accuracy” and on the co-opting of popular fantasy franchises as recruiting tools by far-right groups, and 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.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | Children’s Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Disability Studies | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Historiography | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Genre Theory | Irish Literature | Literature and Education | Literature and History | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Media Studies | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Science Fiction | Social Justice | Visual Culture and Arts | Women Writers
2008, BA English, James Madison University
2020, MA English, James Madison University
I am a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC. I am currently at work on my dissertation, tentatively titled “No Judgment: The Aesthetics of Neutrality in the Postwar American Novel,” which examines the productive tension that arises between neutral narrators and snobby characters in the decades immediately following the Second World War. More broadly, my research concerns expressions of taste and aesthetic judgment in American literature and film as they relate to discourses on race, gender, sexuality, and class. I also work on topics, including climate change and posthumanist aesthetics, related to the environmental humanities, and have taught courses on contemporary literature, film, and composition.
Aesthetics | African American Literature | American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Disability Studies | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Posthumanism | Queer Theory | Southern Literature
2016, MA English, University of Missouri at Columbia
2014, BA English (French minor), Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge
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.
American Literature from 1789 to 1900 | American Literature to 1900 to the present | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | British Literature from 1900 to the Present | Children’s Literature | Comparative Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | History of the Book | Literature and Education | Literature and History | Literature and Science | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Poetry and Poetics | Posthumanism | Science Writing | Transatlantic Studies
2018, MA English, Wake Forest University
2016, BA English, Drexel University
Krysten Voelkner is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her primary interests reside at the intersection of environmental humanities and contemporary Latinx literature. Recent publications of hers can be found in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, and Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which investigates the ways in which Latinx writers experiment with aesthetics of horror, dread, anxiety, and other ‘bad’ affects associated with the climate crisis. In this regard, she hopes to explore the affective ecologies of Latinx environmental literature and film as they offer ways of thinking within and beyond the Anthropocene.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | Comparative Literature | Contemporary American Literature | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Latina / Latino Literature | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Science | Literature of the Americas | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Posthumanism | The Novel | Transatlantic Studies
2016, MA English, Loughborough University
2014, BA English, Loughborough University
Doug Stark is a media and game studies scholar completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At UNC, he works for the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab as the Game Research Coordinator and teaches courses on film, video games, comics, digital media, and writing. Primarily, Doug’s research concerns twentieth and twenty-first century forms of play and game, treating them as both expressions of contemporary social conditions and means of adapting to our technocultural environments. His dissertation – “Playing with Habit: The Biopolitics of Games Under Neoliberalism” – addresses the power games exercise over life by examining the habits they promote in colonial, military, managerial, and entertainment contexts. Find his forthcoming and published work in journals Extrapolation, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Post-45, Eludamos, Qui Parle, Leonardo, and Configurations, and in edited collections Playing the Field, Encyclopedia of Video Games, and Depictions of Power.
2016, M.A.T. Secondary English Education, Duke University
2013, M.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures, UNC-Chapel Hill
2011, B.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures, UNC-Chapel Hill
Jessica’s research focuses on late 19th and early 20th century Russian and German fiction, with special interests in the depictions of animals and death in literature. Key authors for her include Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Mann. She has been studying Russian since 2007 and has studied in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. She has taught Russian language courses and TA’d for Russian and German culture courses in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, as well as tutors for the new UNC Russian Flagship Program.
Comparative Literature | Literature and History | Literature and Philosophy | Modernism | Narrative Theory | Posthumanism | The Novel
