Congratulations to Our New PhDs!
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Defended Dissertations:
Trivius Caldwell, Spring 2025, Beyond Trope and Into Speculative Space: The Music of Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Nasir "Nas" Jones
Kelsey Desir, Spring 2025, Discursive Bodies: Black Women, Healing, and the Poetics of Care
Hannah Jorgensen, Spring 2025, Somebody’s Story: Character after the Digital
Elizabeth Apple
“‘Dateless, indefinite endurance’: Melville at ‘The End’” Society of Nineteenth-Century
Americanists Biennial Conference, Pasadena, CA, March 2024.
Will Brewbaker
“‘FACT IS IS IS FABLE’: On James Merrill’s Ironic Belief, ”ALSCW Conference, Fall 2024.
Katherine Carithers
"The Brontëan Gothic and the Event of Desire," NAVSA Conference, Atlanta, September 2024.
Olivia Depue
“To Face Oneself: Doppelganger Encounters in Poe & Hawthorne,” 4th International Poe and Hawthorne Conference: Dis/embodiment, Université Paris Cité / Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / Sorbonne Université, France. 2025.
“Like A Bullet In The Side: Death & The Afterlife in Flannery O’Connor’s Stories,”. Flannery O’Connor’s 2nd Century: Looking Forward, Looking Back, GCSU, Georgia, USA. 2024.
“Charlotte Forten Grimké’s Poetic Correspondence in Antebellum America,” Epistolary Friendships Between Writers and Readers, Université de Haute-Alsace, France. 2024.
Britt Edelen
“Vers Libre, Vers Épuisé: Rimbaud, Long Poetry, and the Rhythms of Modernity,” International Colloquium on “the Modernist long poem and its discontents”. École Normale Supérieure, Paris.
Lauren Hoaglund
“O Loathe this lyfe and live with me: Elizabeth Melville’s Sacred Parody as Theological Interpretation” · March 2025 Panel Discussion: Resurrecting Early Modern Women
International Meeting or Conference NEMLA Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“To Some Pre-elect to others it doth denay: Calvinist Theology in the Language of Alchemy” · November 2024 LABRC Alchemy Conference, St. Anne's College, Oxford.
Tye Landels
“Coleridge, the Lyrical ‘We’, and the Poetics of National Shame.” Joint Annual Meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the International Conference on Romanticism. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, August 17, 2024.
Abigail Rogers
“Coleridge’s Epectatic Epiphanies.” The Friends of Coleridge Summer Conference, Grasmere, U.K., August 2024.
Damilare Bello was awarded the Julian Price Graduate Fellowship for AY 2025-2026 and the Graduate School Summer Research Fellowship for Research on Racism and Systemic Inequalities for summer 2025.
Tessa Bolsover was awarded a 3-month H.D. Fellowship at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for her project “The Acoustic Palimpsests of H.D. and Susan Howe,” to take place in early 2026.
Katherine Carithers was Curator of Record for the exhibit, "An 'Open Mesh of Possibilities': Thinking Queerness with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Archive" at Duke Libraries, running Feb 21-August 2, 2025. Online version of the exhibit is here https://library.duke.edu/exhibits/2025/Sedgwick
Olivia Depue received the Jason C. Courtmanche Memorial Grant ($800) in April 2025.
Britt Edelen and Savannah Marciezyk coordinated the second English Graduate Conference, which brought in 15 scholars from peer institutions across the country to present work on this year’s theme, the autos/self.
Maryn Gardner was a Poet-in-Residence at the 2024 Ecopoetics Workshop, organized by the Topological Poetics Research Institute and hosted at the Café Tío Conejo coffee farm in Manizales, Colombia.
Lauren Hoaglund won a Renaissance Society of America Scholarship to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) on social network analysis in 2025. She will also be a student summer fellow at the Wittenberg Center for Reformation Studies in July 2025.
Hannah Jorgensen will join the English Department at Texas Christian University as a tenure- track assistant professor in the Fall of 2025.
Anya Lewis-Meeks will begin a 2-year Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literary Arts at Brown University in Fall 2025. She will defend and graduate this summer.
Luoshu Zhang won the Katherine Goodman Stern Dissertation Fellowship for AY 25/26
Will Brewbaker
“Louise Glück’s Choral Theological Lyric” Christianity and Literature, Spring 2025.
(poem) “Two Weeks Old,” “St. Peter, Years Later,’ MARK, Spring 2025.
(poem) “Three Sonnets for the Slaughtered Innocents,” Christianity & Literature, Spring 2025.
(essay) “‘I belonged to the Lord’: On Spencer Reece’s Acts,” Commonweal, Fall 2024.
Tessa Bolsover’s first book of poetry, Crane, was just published by Black Ocean.
https://www.blackocean.org/catalog1/crane
A selection of her poems from a project called “Shone” appeared in the journal Annulet.
https://annuletpoeticsjournal.com/Tessa-Bolsover-from-SHONE
Jay Butler
(poem) "It's Going to Take," published in issue 18 of Screen Door Review
"Towards & Away from Nowhere: C.S. Giscombe's Geopoetics") published in Critical Humanities Journal
Britt Edelen
Review of Eric L. Santner. Untying Things Together, German Quarterly.
Review of Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús. Catastrophic Historicism, Oxford Literary Review Supplement.
Hannah Jorgensen
"Authentic Flesh, Digital Bits: How Contemporary Autofiction Negotiates Digital Literary Celebrity." Accepted for publication in Contemporary Literature.
Tye Landels
“John Newton, Collective Shame, and the Repentant Imagination of British Abolitionism.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 58, no. 4 (2025). (Accepted for publication and forthcoming.)
Luoshu Zhang, “Fungal Horror/Fungal Hope: the Zombie Apocalypse Narrative in M. R. Carey’s Hungry Plague Duology and Ling Ma’s Severance” Accepted for publication in American Literature.
Jac Arnade-Colwill earned a BA from Barnard College with a major in Comparative Literature and a minor in Philosophy and is currently a program coordinator for Duke’s Kenan Institute. Jac is interested the concept of “gender abolition” in speculative writing since the 1970s, including literary and theoretical or scholarly writing. An excerpt from Jac’s undergraduate thesis, “Behind Black Bars: Redaction as Dialect After Prison in Tazmamort and Felon,” served as their writing sample, and explores how redaction functions as a condition, tactic and style that shapes how writers give accounts of themselves after prison.
Jess Gallerie has a BA from Hunter College CUNY in English and Gender Studies and is finishing an MFA at UCF. As both a critic and a novelist, their focus is on the theory and practice of contemporary speculative fiction. Their writing sample, on Jan Carson’s The Firestarters, argues for the concept of “slipstream” as a way of getting at the relationship between the speculative and real in Carson’s novel.
Grace Gibson, BA Murray State, MA (in process) University of Tennessee, is interested in the long 18th century, the history of the novel, and in women’s writing in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Her writing sample combines digital and more traditional literary critical methods to examine the body as a textual object in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia.
Molly Hance earned her BA from Vanderbilt and is currently finishing an M.Div at Princeton Theological Seminary. She’s interested in deconstruction, the gothic and the theological imagination. Her writing sample brings these interests together in an analysis of Edgar Allen Poe’s resurrection tales, where she argues for the intimate connection between Poe’s theology and “his literary theory of meaning-making.”
Zimpande Kawanu has a BA from the University of Cape Town and an MA from Oxford University. His focus is on the role different kinds of narrative (archives, fiction, autobiography) play in understanding the unresolved and contested history of trauma and violence of apartheid South Africa. His writing sample brings together the novels Austerlitz, Foe, and There Was this Goat to show how the ethics and politics of witnessing cannot be separated from literary questions about writing itself.
Margaret Meehan has a BS in Computer Science from Cornell and an MA in English from McGill. She seeks to study narratives by examining how readers use and respond to them, thus reworking reader response criticism for a digital age. Her writing sample, “Hive-critiquing strategies: Viewer Response to HBO’s Euphoria,” makes use of traditional techniques like close reading, and digital techniques like natural language processing of a data-set of live-tweets of the show to examine how viewers form communities of feeling around character.
Katherine Reber, earned a BA in English and Drama from Kenyon College and an M.Phil from Cambridge University. She’s interested in modernism and theater, and in particular in anglophone women writers and the spaces their literary salons created for transgressive gender performance. Her writing sample, an excerpt from her M.Phil dissertation entitled “Staging New Lives: Woolf, Gender, and Anti-Theatricality” combines biographical, archival and historical research with literary analysis to examine Woolf’s approach to theater and performance.
