Degrees
2019, MA English, George Washington University
2012, BA Humanities, Columbia International University
Bio
Elisabeth is a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long 19th century and the health humanities. Her dissertation, “Power Play: Games, Jokes, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Asylum Narratives” investigates the modes by which asylum patients creatively contested medical authority through memoirs, exposés, poetry, and newspaper writing.
Publications:
- “‘Send the little patient to the Hospital at once:’ Early Eugenics at the North Carolina State Hospital’s Epileptic Colony,” in The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19th Century, edited by Lucia Hodgson and Allison Giffen (Routledge, forthcoming in 2025). https://www.routledge.com/The-Biopolitics-of-Childhood-in-the-Long-American-19th-Century/Hodgson-Giffen/p/book/9781032563527
- “Conversion and Countermemory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene,” in Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven, edited by Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Routledge, 2021.
Awards
- Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UNC Graduate School, 2024-2025
- Eliason Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, UNC English Department, 2023
- C. Hugh Holman Award for a dissertation in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2023
- Dissertation Prospectus Fellowship, Wilson Library at UNC, 2022
- Robert Bain Award for scholarship in 19th century American Literature, UNC English Department, 2021
- Southern Futures Graduate Award, UNC Center for the Study of the American South, 2020
- McCandlish Endowment Fellowship, GWU, 2017-2019