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Charlotte Scott

February 14, 2025

Degrees

2o21, BA Comparative Literature and Psychology, Haverford College

2024, MPhil English Literature, Trinity College Dublin

Bio

Charlotte Scott (she/her) is a first year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. After graduating from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Charlotte spent two years as a psychology research assistant at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She then studied modern and contemporary English literature in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin.

Charlotte’s research interests bring together comparative literature and psychology, focusing particularly on 20th and 21st century speculative fiction. She is curious about the potential of speculative/non-realist literature to represent experiences of marginalization and to imagine and create a more just future.


Publications:

“Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Science and Technology in the United States.” Haverford College: Lutnick Library. Exhibition catalogue. 2021. https://ds-omeka.haverford.edu/writing-the-modern-world/exhibits/show/writing-the-modern-world/introduction


Awards

  • Haverford College Augustus Taber Murray Fellowship, 2024
  • Phi Beta Kappa, 2020

Valerie Burgess

August 7, 2024

Degrees

2021, BA English, University of Southern California (with Honors)

2021, BA Cognitive Science, University of Southern California

Bio

Valerie Burgess is a first-year Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a dual Bachelors of Arts in English and Cognitive Sciences. While delving into two distinct fields, she developed an interest in the representation of mental health and feminine labor in women’s writings.

Her current research interest is investigating the intersection of psychology and literature to shed light on the depiction of mental illness in 20th—and 21st-century American Literature. Furthermore, she plans to engage in the Department’s interdisciplinary Health Humanities consortium to increase public engagement in the humanities and foster meaningful conversations across disciplines.


Awards

May 2021, Renaissance Scholar, University of Southern California


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Isabel Spencer Landis Doss

July 24, 2024

Degrees

2024, M.A. English, University of Georgia

2020, B.A. English cum laude, Willamette University

Bio

Spencer Doss is a PhD student and teaching fellow in UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. She studies nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on Victorian women writers and their responses to patriarchal authority. Spencer’s master’s thesis, “Styling Society: Medicine, Art, and Sarah Grand’s New Women,” investigates how male characters in Grand’s oeuvre view women with a gaze that is at once aestheticizing and anatomizing. This phenomenon demonstrates the convergence of the institutions of art and medicine at the fin-de-siècle, with artists and doctors alike appraising women according to a patriarchal style that emphasizes their physical form, or bodies, over their subjective content, or their identities. Much of her research has centered understudied nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century feminist authors, including Catherine Carswell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, H.D., and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In addition, Spencer is intrigued by how Victorian medical models manifest in the novel and their capacity to pathologize female bodies, especially in Gothic and sensation fiction.

As an instructor of writing, Spencer is passionate about establishing a classroom environment where students are empowered to explore and define their identities as writers. Her background as a writing center consultant informs her approach to instructor-student communication, which prioritizes one-on-one conferencing in addition to an interactive classroom model. Courses she has taught have involved the interplay of public and private memory and fictional texts that define and redefine the natural, from Beowulf to the present.


Awards

  • Christy Desmet Memorial Fund Award, University of Georgia, 2024
  • Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, inducted 2024
  • Research Out of State Tuition Award, University of Georgia, 2022
  • English Department Honors, Willamette University, 2020
  • John Dryden Award, Willamette University, 2020

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Faith Rush

July 22, 2024

Degrees

2021, MA English, Winthrop University

2020, BA English, Winthrop University

Bio

Faith Rush is a PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is a two-time graduate of Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. During her time there, she became interested in 19th and 20th-century American Literature with an emphasis on Black Southern writers. Faith’s research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to analyze literature’s role in forming and reforming the Black identity. Unpacking well-known and lesser-known works by Black authors, she argues for their insertion into the racialized American literary canon.

Her current research interest is the first-known African American novelist Hannah Crafts and her autobiographic novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative. She hopes to further comprehend Crafts’s literary contributions to American literature and advocate for her placement within academic discourse.


Publications:

  • Lift Up. (Rock Hill: The Anthology: Winthrop University Arts & Literary Magazine, 2021).
  • Mama Said. (Rock Hill: The Anthology: Winthrop University’s Arts & Literary Magazine, 2021).
  • Death of Divorce. (Rochester Hills: Oakland Arts Review, 2020).
  • Songs for the People: Music’s Recreation of the Black Identity in the Works of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. (Rock Hill: Showcase of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors, 2020).

Jenny Horton

July 24, 2023

Degrees

2019, B.A. English, Clemson University

2023, M.A. English, Wake Forest University

Bio

Jenny is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her scholarship focuses on the rhetoric of health and medicine and bodily rhetoric. She is particularly interested in the language surrounding the treatment of mental and physical health disorders affecting women and the related ways in which women use writing to assert autonomy in literary and popular culture contexts.

Jenny worked as a writing tutor for many years while completing her undergraduate and master’s degrees in English, and now she enjoys helping college students hone their reading and writing skills as an English 105 teaching fellow.


Awards

  • Erika Lindemann Ph.D. Fellowship in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, 2024
  • Graduate Assistant of the Year Award, Wake Forest University Writing Center, 2023

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Madison Storrs

July 24, 2023

Degrees

2017, BA English, Florida State University

2021, MA English, North Carolina State University

 

Bio

Madison Storrs is a first-year PhD student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literature, botany, and art of the long 19th century in Britain. In particular, she considers how women incorporated botanical studies into their writing and art practices. She is also interested in British Romanticism, ecocriticism, ontology, aesthetics, design, and visual culture.


Awards

Teaching Assistantship, First-Year Writing, North Carolina State University, 2020–2021.


Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Andreley Bjelland

August 15, 2022

Degrees

2020, MA English, Texas Christian University

2019, BA English, Texas Christian University

Bio

Andreley Bjelland is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period. Her dissertation explores representations of children and crime in early modern English literature, drama, pamphlets, and ballads.


Teaching Awards

  • PIT Journal and Conference Curricular Innovation Award, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2024
  • Erika Lindemann Award for Demonstrated Excellence in Teaching, UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2023

Awards

  • Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024
  • Medieval and Early Modern Studies Small Research Grant, UNC MEMS, 2023
  • Druscilla French Graduate Student Excellence Award, UNC Graduate School, 2021

Lexi Toufas

August 15, 2022

Degrees

2022, BA English, University of Virginia

Bio

Lexi is a third-year PhD student interested in the transmission and reception of early Christian figures, texts, and theologies in the early modern period.


Teaching Awards

  • Krista Turner Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence, 2024

Awards

  • Hanes Graduate Fellowship at the Wilson Library, 2023
  • Travel Award from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, UNC-CH, 2024
  • Robert M. Kingdon Prize, Sixteenth Century Society, 2024

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Lara Nicole Pur

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2020, BA English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Bio

Lara Nicole Pur is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature studying woman-written sensation novels of 19th century Britain. More specifically, she is interested in feminist commentary and resistance within sensation novels. She often finds herself examining questions regarding the so-called “girl of the period,” women’s joy and pleasure, and bodily autonomy.


Awards

  • Dahl Family Fellowship

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Krista Wiese Telford

August 3, 2022

Degrees

2022, BA English, Meredith College

Bio

Krista Telford is a second-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research examines forms of prayer in medieval and early modern literature as well as the impact of form on medieval depictions of the afterlife. She aims to take an interdisciplinary approach in her research, considering the performative aspect of many poems and prayers and drawing on musicological research. Krista’s recent and ongoing work includes a project exploring resistance to transcendence in the ending of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which examines Chaucer’s reading of Boethius, and a paper exploring the polyphonic and dialogic nature of Francesco Suriano’s underexamined 15th century treatise on the Holy Land, Il trattato di Terra Santa e dell’Oriente.


Awards

  • Fall 2022-Present Graduate Teaching Fellow, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English and Comparative Literature
  • 2024 GPSG Travel Award, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate and Professional Student Government
  • 2024 AI. Curricular Excellence Award, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
  • 2024 Breen Award for Outstanding Work in Medieval Studies, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
  • 2024 Donald R. Howard Travel Scholarship, The New Chaucer Society
  • 2024 LSP Teaching Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program
  • 2023 Travel Grant, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature
  • 2023 Ruth Rose Richardson Award for outstanding performance in the first year of graduate
    study, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of English & Comparative Literature

Curriculum Vitae / Resume