2024 E-Newsletter - GRADUATE

Conferences and Talks

Trivius Caldwell

• (Forthcoming) “Paracritical Nas: Invisible Man’s Improvisation in Illmatic Spacetime.” American Language Association (ALA). Chicago, May 2024. “Counterpublic Discourse: Music that Marks Violence as an Evolutionary Event.”. Modern Language Association (MLA). Pennsylvania, January 2023.
• Talk: “Sound Subjectivity: Hermeneutics and Sensorial Listening.” Department of Social Sciences. The United States Military Academy at West Point, March 2024.
• Talk: “Tertium Quid: Tocqueville on Race.” University of Louisville, Guest Lecturer, November 2023.

Katherine Carithers and Kate Turner

•  "Towards a Transatlantic Gothic: Re-Reading Racial Capitalism in the Brontës through Faulkner. North American Victorian Studies Association Conference 2023, Indiana University Bloomington 

Hannah Jorgensen

• “The StoryGraph: Data-Driven Reading.” DH Approaches to the Arts of the Present, ASAP, October 2023.
• Talk: “Ethical Reading: The StoryGraph and Contemporary Book Reviewing.” Reader Studies in the Digital Age: Community, Diversity, and the Data of Literary Consumption Symposium, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, April 2024.

Tye Landels

• “Articulations of Collective Shame in Early British Abolitionism.” Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Greenville, SC: Furman University, February 29, 2024.

Abigail Rogers

• “‘Enough! the Resurrection’: Eschatological Foretastes in the Poetry of G.M. Hopkins.” Visions of the Afterlife Conference, Adam Mickiewicz University, Virtual Presentation, December 2023. 
• “‘Set Down / This’: Eliot’s Epiphanic Subtlety.” Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature, Waco, TX, September 2023.

Olivia Simoni

• “The Limitlessness of the Human Soul in Poe & O’Connor’s Death Narratives,” (Un)Limited, Duke University, North Carolina. 2024.
• “Baptized Imagination: C. S. Lewis and Flannery O’Connor,” C.S. Lewis: The Reenchanted Academic, University of Iasi, Romania. 2023.
• “The Liberator: A Political Pulpit for Radical Equality,” The Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival,  Jackson State University, Mississippi, USA. 2023.

Elizabeth Apple

• Dissertation Research Travel Fellowship, Domestic, Duke Graduate School

Trivius Caldwell

• Summer 2024: Leadership Facilitator, Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America (LEDA), Princeton University

Katherine Carithers

• Dissertation Research Travel Fellowship, International, Duke Graduate School

Kelsey Desir

• Anne Firor Scott Dissertation Fellowship, Duke Graduate School
• Summer Research Fellowships for Research on Women and Girls of Color, Duke Graduate School

Victor Jeong

• Bass Instructional Fellowship,  Instructor of Record, Duke Graduate School

Eun-hae Kim

• Bass Instructional Fellowship, Instructor of Record, Duke Graduate School
• Bass Instructional Fellowship, Digital Education Fellow, Duke Graduate School

Courtney Klashman

• Dissertation Research Travel Fellowship, International, Duke Graduate School

Tye Landels

• Myra and William Waldo Boone Fellowship, Duke Graduate School, for 2024/2025.
• Honorable mention for Graduate Essay Prize, Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies

Amber Manning

• Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Duke University Graduate School, 2024
• Thompson Writing Program Graduate Writing Fellowship, Duke University, 2023-2024
• Stephen J. Horne Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, Duke University, 2023
• Ernest Friedl Research Award, Department of Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies, Duke University, 2023

Britt Edelen and Savannah Marciezyk organized Unlimited, the first Graduate Student Conference hosted by the English Department, which took place February 16 and 17 of 2024.

The theme for the conference was limits, and the papers this theme from many theoretical, generic, historical, and linguistic angles. Joseph Albernaz (Columbia) presented the keynote lecture, titled Line, Lineament, Limit.

Trivius Caldwell

• (Accepted) Book Chapter: 2025 “Paracritical Nas: Listening to Rap Lyrics,” Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
• (Accepted) Book Chapter: 2025 “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education with Implications for Student Veterans,” Adult Higher Education Alliance

James Draney,

• “The Creep’s Dilemma: Novel Privacy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism”  “conditionally accepted” at PMLA.

Tye Landels

• Tye Landels, Isabel Bradley, Kelsey Desir, Grant Glass, Jane Harwell, Anya Lewis-Meeks, and Charlotte Sussman. “‘Died a Small Boy’: Re-Centering the Human in Geospatial Data from the Middle Passage.” archipelagos: A Journal of Caribbean Digital Praxis no. 7 (2023). <https://archipelagos journal.org/issue07/landels-etal-recentering.html>.

Amber Manning

• “Infinite History and the Feminist Mortal Body: Re-Reading Unending in Surge,” Thinking with The Poem, edited by Prof. Andrew Mossin, forthcoming from the Univ. of New Mexico Press.
• Co-author, “Reading the Online Writing Center: The Affordances and Constraints of WCOnline,” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 20, no. 2, 2023.

Abigail Rogers

• “‘—But Who Is That on the Other Side of You?’: Eliot’s Opaque Epiphanies.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Volume 27, Issue 2, April 2024, p. 88-104. https://doi.org/10.1353/log.2024.a923814
• “‘A Light in Sound, a Sound-like Power in Light’: Coleridge’s Phenomenal Invisible.” Literature & Theology, Volume 37, Issue 3, September 2023, pp. 199–215, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1093/litthe/frad017.

Ethan Barrett completed his BA in African-American Studies at Wesleyan. A Mellon Mays Fellow, he was also a co-founder of the Africana Research Collective at Wesleyan.  His interests lie in Global Black Studies.    Drawing on archival and ethnographic methods, his honors thesis, “’The Envisioned Self which is a Free Self”: Theorizing the Grammars of Liberation in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” focuses on the political and cultural history of Black South African liberation and/or freedom movements during and after apartheid.

Jay Butler comes to us with an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University and a BA from Appalachian State University.  His interests lie in the environmental humanities, with a particular focus on ecopoetics as both a method and object of study, as well as on Black studies. His writing sample, “Gyroscopoetics:  Navigating the Revived Lytic of Ed Roberson’s asked what has changed,” put Roberson’s ecopoetics in conversation with contemporary ecopoetic theory and practice.

Cyprene Caines earned a BA in Africana Studies and English from Brown University.  A Fulbright Research Grant Recipient and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, her interests lie in Black women’s writing, with a specific emphasis on the Caribbean and United States.  Her honors thesis examined how Black Caribbean women authors (specifically Jamaican-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson) take up processes of world-building and self-assertion through writing about kinship and cultural preservation. More recently, her Fulbright research at the University of the West Indies examines how Black Trinidadian women writers craft stories that reflect their specific cultural and social settings.

Spencer George has an MA in Folklore from UNC Chapel Hill and a BA from Barnard College in English and Human Rights.  Her interests lie in the environmental humanities and Southern Studies.  She’s a Carolina Public Humanities Maynard Adams Fellow and writer and host of Good Folk, a newsletter and podcast exploring artistry and community across rural America and the American South.  Her writing sample, “Where lies the Strangling Fruit,” looked at new gothic and apocalyptic narratives of environmental transformation in Jeff Vander Meer’s Annihilation. 

Lauren Hoaglund has an MAR in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School and Institute for Sacred Music and a BA in English and Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Washington and Lee University. Her interests focus on Reformation poets and authors in Britain who struggled to define their lyrical voices within their new religious context and the broader literary conversations of the time. Her writing sample examined the Scottish poet Elizabeth Melville’s “Meditation on Psalm 42.”

Cassandra Luca has a BA in English from Harvard and an MA from McGill University. Her work draws on methods from the digital humanities to explore how the novel form has changed in today’s self-referential media environment. Considering formal and narrative exchanges across media, she’s inspired to ask how TikTok and contemporary literature can illuminate patterns of lesbian "representation.” Her writing sample brought together digital and literary critical analysis to examine impact of twitter on the form of the novel in Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking about This and Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts.

Ananya Mohan earned a BA in English and Psychology from Emory University. She is interested in post-colonial literature and theory.   Her Honors Thesis, “Binaries of Reality and Unreality in Indian English Science Fiction,” considered two texts that criticize existing (mis)uses of technology by fictionalizing the “distant futures” they are set in. Her writing sample focussed on the problem of tourism, in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997).