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.

Degrees

2020, BA English and Visual Arts, University of Richmond

Bio

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 20^th/21^st century American Literature, with a particular attention to minority and ethnic texts.

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?

Degrees

2020, BA English, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Izzy (they/them) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. They study the relationship between the soul and body in medieval literary, aesthetic, and dramatic representations of Creation. Their dissertation, Made A Living Soul: Genesis and the Creation of the Soul in Medieval Devotional and Mystic Literature examines ideas of the soul as developed in early medieval Scholastic exegesis, and how these understandings of the soul are complicated and affirmed in medieval devotional and mystic texts.

In their research on the medieval soul and body, Izzy examines the language used to structure the corporeal, physical self and the sensing, feeling, and cognative self alongside theories of queer embodiment, affect, and representations.

Their broader interests include manuscript studies, medieval philosophy and theology, poetics, and literary criticism.

Publications:

With H.M. Cushman “Bodies on Display” in A Cultural History of Trans Lives in the Middle Ages (300-1445). Bloomsbury. Forthcoming.

Teaching Awards

Latina/o Studies Teaching Fellowship, UNC Latina/o Studies Program, 2022

Awards

Donald Howard Travel Scholarship, New Chaucer Society, 2024

Trans Travel Fund, Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, 2023

CARA Summer Scholarship, Medieval Academy of America, 2022

Internal:   

Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2024

Joseph Breen Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Dept. of English & Comparative Literature, 2023

Research Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2023

Travel Award, UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate and Professional Student Government, 2023

Travel Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Dept. of English & Comparative Literature, 2022, 2024

First Class Honours in English Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 2020

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019, BA English Literature, University of Central Florida

Bio

Teaching Awards

Fall 2021 Latina/o Studies Graduate Teaching Affiliate Fellowship

Degrees

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

Bio

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.

Awards

• Hanes Graduate Fellowship, Rare Book Collection, Louis Round Wilson Library, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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

Degrees

2019, BA English and History, University of South Carolina Honors College

Bio

Rose Steptoe is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research examines the proliferation and aesthetics of body horror in contemporary feminist cinema. More broadly, her interests include genre and horror studies, feminist film theory, age and disability studies, and sound studies. She is also interested in the scholarly and pedagogical value of videographic composition. Read more at www.rosesteptoe.com.

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.

Publications:

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

Awards

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

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.