Degrees

2014, BA English and French Literature, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Bio

My research focuses on gender, sexuality, and sensuality in the cinemas of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora in France. I’ve taught a variety of courses, including French, Arabic, film, and queer literature and culture, and I have experience teaching ESL and English composition to non-native speakers. As a Comparative Literature student, I enjoy doing interdisciplinary work through different departments at UNC, including English and Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and African Studies.

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Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “Sensing and Self: A Haptic ‘Look’ at the Aesthetics of Women’s Labour in Contemporary Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French Diasporic Cinema.” French Screen Studies. Forthcoming.

Encyclopedia Articles

• “Al-Akharun (2006; Saba Al-Herz).” Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History. Howard Chiang, Anjali Arondekar, Marc Epprecht, Jennifer Evans, Ross G. Forman, Hanadi Al-Samman, et al, eds. (Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019).

Book Reviews

• Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Cinema, by Kaya Davies Hayon. Review of Middle East Studies, 2021.
• Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements, by Suzanne Gauch. Review of Middle East Studies, 2019.

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Teaching Awards

The Diane R. Leonard Award for Outstanding Foreign Language Instruction in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2019

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Awards

• Foreign Language Area Scholarship, African Studies: Standard Arabic and Moroccan Dialect in Fes, Morocco, Summer 2018.
• Foreign Language Area Scholarship, African Studies: Arabic, Summer 2016.

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Degrees

2014, BA English & Psychology, Wesleyan University

Bio

Rachel Warner is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research interests include twentieth-century American literature, women’s and gender studies, queer of color critique, and animal studies. She has completed two peer-reviewed publications: one explores Black feminist theories of embodiment and nature in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, forthcoming from Society & Animals; and the other offers an archival analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s brief tenure at UNC and NCCU, published by North Carolina Literary Review in May 2020. Rachel also co-directs the graduate working group Literature, Medicine and Culture Colloquium (LMCC) which explores topics in health humanities. Finally, Rachel regularly teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, LGBTQIA+ literature and culture, and the history of horror literature and cinema. She is currently working on her dissertation, a literary and cultural history of female masculinity in American modernism.

 

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Publications:

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Awards

Eliason Dissertation Summer Research Fellowship, 2020

MLA COVID-19 Emergency Grant, Modern Language Association, 2020

Graduate Student Travel Fund, ECL Department, 2020

Paul Green Prize, North Carolina Literary Review, 2019

Student Learning Circle Grant, UNC Center for Global Initiatives, 2019

Winchester Fellowship, Wesleyan University, 2018

Deborah W. Shelton Endowment for Graduate Travel Awards, ECL Department, 2018

Winchester Fellowship, Wesleyan University, 2017

Albrecht B. Strauss SAMLA Awards Fund, 2016

Graduate Student Travel Fund, ECL Department, 2016

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Degrees

• 2017, BA Critical Studies in English Cultures, Literatures, and Film, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire
• 2017, BA Latin American Studies, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire

Bio

emilio Jesús Taiveaho Peláez is a first-generation migrant and a PhD. student—in that order—through the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. As both poet and scholar, their work engages the intersection of aesthetic experience and political discipline, blending critical, creative, and archival inquiry. Focusing on 20^th-century hemispheric experimental poetry, their dissertation (tentatively titled Ojos de Hierba: Walt Whitman’s Children & the American Lyric) probes the shared literary and philosophical history of the Américas through the lens of Neobaroque aesthetics, tracing dissonant and dissident relations in the life and work of figures such as Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Néstor Perlongher, and Cecilia Vicuña. emilio’s first book of poetry, landskips (words are a hard look), a latinX exploration of the sonics and optics of our contemporary American Landscapes, is forthcoming through The Concern Newsstand.

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Publications:

• Taiveaho, Emilio Jesús. “Cartographies of Refuge, Music, and Survival: A Review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” Carolina Quarterly Online, 2018.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 8: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt. 1).” CQ Speaks Podcast, 25 February 2020.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 9: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt.2) ‘Christ in Alabama.’” CQ Speaks Podcast, 3 June 2020.

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Teaching Awards

• Latina/o Studies Teaching Grant – 2020

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Awards

• 2017 – Present: Mellon Fellow

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Degrees

2014, MA English, Florida Gulf Coast University

2011, BA English, Florida Gulf Coast University

Bio

I’m a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill studying medieval and early modern literature. I’m specifically interested in early modern encyclopedias, epistemology, and the history of science. I’m also interested in insects, gastropods, gender and sexuality, power dynamics, amphibians and amphibiousness, fungi, and the confluence of natural philosophy/magic/religion.

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Awards

• Folger Shakespeare Library Grant-in aid, After the Great Instauration taught by Reid Barbour, 2018
• Folger Shakespeare Library Grant-in aid, Introduction to English Paleography taught by Heather Wolfe, 2016
• Folger Shakespeare Library Grant-in aid, Scale of Catastrophe taught by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 2015

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