Degrees

2019, BA English, Davidson College
2023, MA English, Georgetown University

Bio

Mitch Losito is a twentieth and twenty-first century and critical games scholar interested in thinking about how speculative fiction games, the people who play them, and their representations imagine alternative futures.

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Degrees

2021, BA in Comparative Literature with an emphsasis in World Literature, University of California Irvine
2021, BA in Philosophy, University of California Irvine
Cum Laude

Bio

Audrey is a first year PhD student from Los Angeles, California. Audrey currently focuses in visual and cultural studies with particular interest in representation of the body politic. Her past research has explored nationalism within American superhero comics, specifically within various Captain America series. In her research with the COMICS research team at the University of Ghent, she studied colonial imagery within tropes of the mythologized west and cowboy imagery in francophone comics, primarily focusing on Franco-Belgian publications from the 1940s to 1980s. Audrey intends to continue her work within visual narratives in her studies by analyzing what constitutes heroic bodies in media.

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Publications:

“Captain America: Disassembling Traditional Narratives” Johns Hopkins’ Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Journal

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Awards

Fulbright Fellowship Grantee 2022 – 2023
Phi Beta Kappa, University of California Irvine 2021
Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, University of California Irvine 2021

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, MA English, New York University

2016, BA English, University of California, Los Angeles

Bio

Celeste is a PhD candidate in UNC’s English and Comparative Literature Department. They work as a teaching fellow for the department and as a Project Assistant at The William Blake Archive. Their current research is on the British Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1901), Victorian Medievalism, and emerging Popular Genres in the late nineteenth century/turn of the twentieth century.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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), 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, Articulating Appalachia, argues that definitions of the region and its people are co-constructed across the 20th c. through both cultural representation (literature, film, music) and Regional and National projects for economic and social uplift.

He is currently a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a Senior Coordinator for the Critical Speakers Series, and a Board Member (2023-2026) for the Thomas Wolfe Society. He 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.

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Publications:

• “Darkness on the Edge of Town: Beat Subject Formation, Black Ontology, and Fugitivity as Gnosis in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” In This Country’s Hard on People: Cormac McCarthy and American Identity, edited by Vernon Cisney. Forthcoming.
• “Weird Object Relations, Ecology, and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris.” In New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy: Encountering The Passenger and Stella Maris, edited by Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore. Forthcoming.
• “A Literary Ménage à Trois: An Analysis of the Elizabeth Lemmon Collection on Thomas Wolfe, 1934-1935.” Forthcoming.
• “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 88, no. 2-3, 2023, pp. 157-170.
• “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review, vols. 44 & 45, nos. 1 & 2, 2020 & 2021, pp. 8-25.
• [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.
• “Raison d’être.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 9.
• “On Testing.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 23.

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Awards

• Graduate Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022-Present, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
• John R. Bittner Student Literary Prize, May 27^th 2023, Thomas Wolfe Society Conference.
• LSP Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program.
• Graduate Student Transportation Grant, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate School.
• Languages & Literatures Graduate Student Paper Award Recipient, February 23^rd 2023, 44^th Annual SWPACA Conference.
• 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award Recipient, November 12^th 2022, SAMLA 94.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2022, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• The Julian D. Mason Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies, April 29^th 2022, UNC Charlotte, English Department.
• Graduate Teaching Assistantship, Fall 2020-Spring 2022, UNC Charlotte, English Department.
• 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.
• Excellence in Philosophy Award, April 24^th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
• G. Byrns Coleman Award for Excellence in Religious Studies, April 24^th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
• University Honors, April 24^th, 2016, Wingate University.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2020, BA English/History, Mary Baldwin University

2018, AA Liberal Arts, Northern Virginia Community College

Bio

Antonia DiNardo is a fifth year PhD candidate in English literature. Her work is focused on mediations of the Middle Ages in modern popular culture from Tolkien to the The Witcher, utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing semiotics, genre theory, critical game studies, and reception studies. Her dissertation, “Imagining White Pasts: Fantasy and Far-Right Pseudo-History” explores the intersection of medievalist media and white nationalist discourse. Antonia has given talks and lectures on the fraught intersection of fantasy and conceptions of “historical authenticity,” on the co-opting of popular fantasy franchises as recruiting tools by far-right groups, on chivalric imagery in far-right identity construction, and on chivalric masculinities in Chaucer and Chretien de Troyes. 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. In 2024, she joined the team in the Greenlaw Gameroom, UNC’s first games-based teaching space.

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Awards

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

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

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 scholarship focuses on Russian and East European fiction. Her dissertation, “Intersecting Worlds: Animal Consciousness, Reality, and Imagination in Eastern European Fiction,” analyzes and historicizes the use of animal perspective in narrative fiction from the late 19th century to the contemporary period. Her fields of interest include animal studies, environmental humanities, cognitive narratology, and language pedagogy. She is proficient in Russian, Ukrainian, and German, having studied in Russia, Ukraine, and Latvia. She has taught Russian language, Russian and German culture, and ENGL 105.

 

 

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Teaching Awards

• Diane R. Leonard Award from the Department of English and Comparative Literature (for outstanding foreign language teaching by a Comparative Literature graduate student), 2022, 2024

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Awards

• Stephen F. Cohen–Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2024-25
• Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Russian) from UNC Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, 2023.
• Summer Research & Language Study Award from UNC Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, 2021
• Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Russian) from UNC Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, 2012

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

B.A. English, 2010, University of Delhi

M.A. English, 2012, University of Delhi

M.Phil, English Literature, 2014, University of Delhi

Bio

My research focuses on environmental justice in the Anthropocene. I am interested in the convergences in the fields of ecocriticism, post-colonial theory and global socioeconomics, to examine how the effects of climate change, displacement, toxic and electronic waste, and resource extraction are differentially experienced across the Global North and South. I am also interested reading in environmental advocacy through the the intersections between art and activism in grassroots movements. I study gobal anglophone literature, with a focus on environmental justice movements in India and the U.S.A.

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Teaching Awards

• LSP Graduate Student Affiliate Teaching Award, Fall 2021

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Awards

• Centre for the Studies of the American South Summer Fellowship, 2021

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2018, BA English, University of Tulsa

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student studying the overlap of friendship, loyalty, and virtue in Late Medieval Romance.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2015, MA English, Claremont Graduate University

2012, BA English Literature and Political Science, Loyola Marymount University

Bio

Eddie is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of British literature of the long eighteenth century, he has particular interests in: authenticity, experimentation with literary form and genre, the Gothic, the history of the novel, influences of popular culture, the material book, and narrative performance.

His dissertation project, entitled Creating Enchantment: a History of the Gothic and Inspiring Interactive Reading, explores the history of intellectual influences on the Gothic, the creative possibilities that writers have found in the genre, and how these writers subsequently experimented with the genre to create a particular reading experience. Bringing together archival research, narrative theory, reader-response theory, and sociological history of reading practices in the long-eighteenth century, he hopes to produce a project that examines how authorial innovation, alongside history of the material book—its paratextual elements, decisions made by publishers, and popular readership—have mediated interactive reading experiences of the Gothic novel in the long eighteenth century.

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Publications:

• Yang, Edward. “Conjuring Sympathy: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Inspiring Interactive Reading.” Critical Insights: Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. Amenia, Salem Press. (forthcoming 2024)
• Sullivan, Rory and Edward Yang. “Searching for Frankenstein: The Locales of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Then and Now.” 2018

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Teaching Awards

• Krista Turner Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2018.

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Awards

• English Teaching Assistant Award (Germany), The Fulbright Program, 2016-17.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2017, MA English, University of Virginia

2014, BA English, The College of William and Mary

Bio

Rory Sullivan studies late medieval English literature, art, and culture, and is completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches courses on speculative fiction, visual narrative, and composition, while also working at the Writing and Learning Center as a Writing Coach. Rory’s scholarly work is interested in the lived experiences and devotional practices of late medieval people. His dissertation, “The Virtual Imagination and the Self in Late Medieval England,” investigates the interactions between individuals and art objects, poems, performances, and manuscripts in order to understand how individuals cultivated devotional practices and experiences.

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Teaching Awards

• Erika Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2022

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Awards

• Breen Award for outstanding work in the field of Medieval Studies, 2019

• Balch Prize for a Masters Student in English, 2017

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume