Degrees

2016, MA English, University of Virginia

2013, BA English, University of California Berkeley

Bio

Stephanie Kinzinger is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and the Game Studies Initiative Project Manager in the Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab Gaming Initiative. She focuses on American literature, science, technology, and critical game studies and teaches courses in literature, video games, and multimodal composition and rhetoric. Broadly conceived, her research investigates experiments in the gamification of reality avant la lettre by considering select authors and game designers from the mid nineteenth century to the present who not only depict otherworldly fictions but also insist that such endeavors have the potential to make the world otherwise. Her dissertation –“Playing Reality: The Promise and Peril of Compositional Realities”– uses literary theory, play studies, and critical game studies to explore how the formal and political possibilities of video games are anticipated—and sometimes preemptively challenged—by American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and to interrogate how the limits and possibilities of contemporary experiments in Virtual Reality offer new vistas for potentially recodifying current social structures.

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Publications:

• “Embodied Cognition in Edgar Allan Poe: Eureka’s Cosmology, Dupin’s Intuition.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 1 December 2022; 77 (2-3): 124–144.

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Teaching Awards

• 2022 Professional Development Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Awards

• 2023 The James W. Gargano Award, for the outstanding article on Poe written in 2022, The Poe Studies Association
• 2023 John R. Bittner Award for Outstanding Work on a Dissertation in Literature, Popular Media, and Journalism, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Digital Dissertation Fellowship, Carolina Digital Humanities, Digital Innovation Lab (DIL), UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Excellence in Critical Game Studies Award, Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Thompson-Lumiansky Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2022 Humanities Initiative Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

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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