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Celeste Seifert

October 5, 2022

Degrees

2018, MA English, New York University

2016, BA English, University of California, Los Angeles

Bio

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.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Joshua Cody Ward

September 8, 2022

Degrees

2022, MA English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2016, BA Religious Studies, Wingate University

Bio

A North Carolina native, Joshua Cody Ward joined the program in Fall 2022. His field is Modern and Contemporary American literature broadly (1900-Present), specifically Literature of the American South and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel.


Publications:

  • “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review. Forthcoming.
  • “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review. Forthcoming.
  • [album] The Boron Heist. Ridin’ Rough. Mystery School Records, April 6 2019.
  • “Light and Darkness, Sight and Blindness: Religious Knowledge in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.Wingate Research Review, issue 8, Fall 2016, pp. 87-106.

Awards

  • Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
  • Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022-Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill.
  • LSP Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program.
  • Graduate Student Transportation Grant, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate School, “‘Writing around the edges of things’: On the Lighthouse in American Literature and in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.”
  • 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award, November 12th, 2022, SAMLA 94.
  • Travel Grant, Fall 2022, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department, “Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed, and Black Women’s Writing in the 1980s: Perceptions versus Reality” & “Urban Fantasy and the Dickensian in Alex Pheby’s Mordew.”
  • The Julian D. Mason Award for Excellence in Graduate StudiesApril 29th, 2022, UNC Charlotte English Department.
  • Graduate Teaching Assistantship, Fall 2020-Spring 2022, UNC Charlotte.
  • Wittliff Collections William Hill Research Award, 2021-2022, Texas State University, For archival research conducted July 2021 in the Cormac McCarthy Papers and Woolmer Collections.
  • Anne Newman Graduate Student Travel Grant, Fall 2021, UNC Charlotte, “Is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon A Modernist Novel.”
  • Excellence in Philosophy Award, April 24th, 2016, Wingate University Religious Studies Department.
  • G. Byrns Coleman Award for Excellence in Religious Studies, April 24th, 2016, Wingate University Religious Studies Department.
  • University Honors, April 24th, 2016, Wingate University.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Charlie Lee

September 23, 2021

Degrees

BA English, Andrews University

MA English, University of Oklahoma

 

Bio

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.


Publications:

Lee, Charles (2021), ‘Running scared: Fear and Space in Amnesia: The Dark
Descent’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 13:1, pp. 93–112.


Sarah Lofstrom

August 9, 2021

Degrees

2019, BA English, Mount Holyoke College

Bio

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?


Anthony DiNardo

September 28, 2020

Degrees

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

Bio

Toni DiNardo is a third year PhD student in the department of English and Comparative literature. A “medievalismist,” in the words of one colleague,” Toni’s work is predominantly concerned with the reception of medieval thought and perceptions of the Middle Ages as they have been mediated in modern genre fantasy. In particular, they explore the ways in which various audiences attempt to recuperate the Middle Ages through fantasy in order to construct and sustain identities, from queer rehabilitation of the medieval to white nationalist idealization of the Middle Ages as a putative ethno-nationalist paradise. They are also interested in the subjective experience – particularly among queer players – of the tabletop fantasy role-playing game. Other interests include the role of sexuality in Jacobean historiography, the queerness of faith in Donne’s ouevre, and anything to do with Margery Kempe.


Jonathan Albrite

September 22, 2020

Degrees

2008, BA English, James Madison University

2020, MA English, James Madison University

Bio

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.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Karah M. Mitchell

July 13, 2020

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. In my dissertation project, “If you are always kind”: Animals and Becoming Human(e) in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature, I am exploring the influence of children’s literary texts upon the development of humane education and animal welfare initiatives in the United States. I investigate how these texts were foundational in establishing definitions of the “humane” that are still very much present with us today.

In my future work, I am interested in exploring how we might connect the field of animal studies with modern veterinary science; I thus wish to connect theory with practice with respect to animal care. I am also more broadly interested in efforts to incorporate humane education within educational curriculums.


Publications:

  • “‘Our School House is the Universe’: Henry David Thoreau as Radical Educator,” forthcoming in the new proposed Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau (2024)
  • “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)

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

Awards

  • 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

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Krysten Voelkner

October 28, 2019

Degrees

2018, MA English, Wake Forest University

2016, BA English, Drexel University

Bio

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.


Publications:

  • “Vectors and Vermin: Gendered Violence and the Role of Insects in the Arthropoetics of Natalie Scenters-Zapico.” Chiricú Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2022.
  • “Another Way of Seeing: Ecological Existentialism in Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’.” The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2021.
  • “Memory, Temporality, and Communal Realization: Reading the Nomadic Subject in Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2020.

Teaching Awards

  • UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (UNC Latina/o Studies Department), Spring 2022
  • Erika Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition in English 105 (UNC Department of English), Fall 2021.
  • UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (Fall 2020)

Awards

  • UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, Summer 2022
  • Nominee: David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies, 2021
  • Ruth Rose Richardson Award for outstanding record in the first year of graduate study, (UNC Department of English), 2019-20
  • H. Broadus Jones MA Student Award for Excellence in English (Wake Forest University Department of English), Spring 2018

Doug Stark

July 1, 2019

Degrees

2016, MA English, Loughborough University

2014, BA English, Loughborough University

Bio

Doug Stark is a Ph.D. candidate in the English program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research and teaching concerns twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, cultural theory, literature, film, art and new media – specializing in the history and theory of games. Doug’s dissertation, Gaming as a Way of Life: Towards a Biopolitics of Play, addresses a present phenomenon that confounds traditional theories that define play by its autonomy from everyday life, namely, a preponderance of the game structures that saturate our contemporary world purport to exercise proficiencies pertinent beyond the scene of play — such as the apps on our phones that offer points, dangle badges, and display leaderboards to motivate exercise, language-learning, task-management, and even sleeping. By way of chapters on the British Empire’s implementation of cricket to “civilize” the colonized, the video game’s derivation from military-industrial training tools, the quotidian practice amateur gaming entails, and the professional esport athlete’s regimen, the dissertation demonstrates that the organization of life by games is not novel and that the activity of play recurs in recent history as a central, often tacit, means of adapting players to new technologies, economies, and systems of governance. It argues that the common sense that play is “free” not only belies this operation of power but also precludes harnessing the life organizing propensity of games to inhabit the world differently. Doug’s writing appears in journals ExtrapolationJournal of Gaming & Virtual WorldsPost-45EludamosQui Parle and Leonardo, as well as edited collections Playing the Field and Encyclopedia of Video Games.


Publications:

  • Stark, Doug. “Exercises in Humility: Gregory Bateson on Contingency, Croquet, and Revising Habits of Thought Through Play.” Leonardo, special section on “Indeterminacy After AI,” forthcoming 2022.
  • Stark, Doug. “Better Problems: Neoliberalism, Strategic Achronicity, and the Experimental Games To-Be-Made.” A review essay concerning Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games (2020). Qui Parle, vol. 30, no. 2, December 2021, pp. 399-419, https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-9395334.
  • Stark, Doug. Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology and Art of Gaming, 2nd ed., edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood Press, 2021, pp. 1104-1107.
  • Stark, Doug. “Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy.”
    Eludamos, vol. 11, no. 1, 2020, pp. 125144, https://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol11no1-8.
  • Stark, Doug and Teresa O’ Rourke. “The Lost Futures of BoJack and Diane.” Post45, special cluster on Leaving Hollywood: Essays After BoJack Horseman, 2020, https://post45.org/2020/11/the-lost-futures-of-bojack-and-diane/.
  • Stark, Doug. “Reimagining Play with Lewis Carroll’s Croquet.” In Media Res, March 2020, http://mediacommons.org/imr/content/reimagining-play-lewis-carroll%E2%80%99s-croquet.
  • Stark, Doug. “Unsettling Embodied Literacy in QWOP the Walking Simulator.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, vol. 12, no. 1, 2020, pp. 49–67, https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw_00004_1.
  • Stark, Doug. “‘A More Realistic View:’ Reimagining Sympoietic Practice in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series,” Extrapolation, vol. 61, no. 1-2, 2020, pp. 151–171, https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2020.10.
  • Stark, Doug. “Ludic Literature: Ready Player One as Didactic Fiction for the Neoliberal Subject.” Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies, edited by Sascha Pöhlmann, De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 153-173.

Awards

  • Hobby Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2022
  • IAH Grant, UNC/KCL “Media Aesthetics” Speaker Series and Working Group, Fall 2022
  • Game Studies Research Award, DLC lab, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2022, Fall 2022
  • Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Fellow, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2022
  • IAH Grant, UNC/KCL “Digital Aesthetics” Speaker Series, Fall 2021
  • Games and Cultures Humanities Lab Fellow, Duke University, 2019-2020
  • Santander Postgraduate Scholarship, Loughborough University, UK, 2014-2016

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Jessica Ginocchio

October 16, 2018

Degrees

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

Bio

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.

 

 


Awards

  • UNC CSEEES Summer Research & Language Study Award, 2021
  • FLAS Fellowship, Summer 2012 (Russian)