Graduate Students
Carolin Benack
Student
American literature; literary realism and naturalism; history of economics; novel theory; political philosophy
Devin Buckley
Student
Interests: Romanticism, Aesthetics, German Idealism, Phenomenology, Philosophical theology
Russell Coldicutt
Student
Russell Coldicutt is a third year in Duke’s Ph.D. program in English and works as an editorial assistant for NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Building from his interest in novel theory, cybernetics, and the philosophy of technology, Russell is beginning a dissertation on the infrastructures of the... Full Profile »
Jessica Covil
Student
Jessica Covil is a second-year PhD student of English at Duke University. Her research currently focuses on literary representations of community, belonging, and “home” in 20th-Century American Literature, and on connections between the poetic and the political, especially within... Full Profile »
James Draney
Student
20th and 21st century anglophone and American literatures; Marxism; media studies; phenomenology; history of the novel; philosophy and literature
Kevin Gallin
Student
Kevin Gallin is a PhD candidate in English at Duke University. His research interests include Global Modernism(s), the Contemporary Anglophone novel, Irish literature, literary cultures, and genre and novel theory. His dissertation project focuses on how and why Modernist narrative strategies... Full Profile »
Catherine Lee
Student
Romanticism; aesthetics; history and theory of the novel; history and theory of feeling; literature and science
Shirley Li
Student
B.A. Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2013M.S. Ed., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2016
Sonia Nayak
Student
My research combines the microeconomic vestiges of colonial capitalism, with a reengagement with psycho-affective pain in literature, or the microaggression, into what I call microcruelty—the interior, psychological and economic effects of repeated, minor cruelties— to help us see the... Full Profile »
Sasha Panaram
Student
Sasha Panaram is a PhD candidate in English at Duke University, where she studies conditions of belonging, creative expressions of loss, and enactments of fugitivity in black diasporic literature. Her dissertation explores fictional and critical renderings of the Middle Passage by black women in... Full Profile »
Claire Ravenscroft
Student
Claire Ravenscroft is a doctoral candidate in the department of English. Her research and teaching interests include energy, environment, contemporary fiction and film. Her dissertation, Fossil Capitalist Realism: Petrofiction, Climate Change and the Endless Twentieth Century, identifies the... Full Profile »
Kevin Spencer
Student
I graduated with a BA (hons) in English and an MA in English from the University of Alberta. I completed a second MA in Theory and Criticism at Western University in London, Ontario, the culmination of which was a thesis called "Swearing: Force and Language." In that thesis, I asked why and how... Full Profile »
Michelle Sroka
Student
Ph.D. Candidate in English, 2013-Present I specialize in the long eighteenth century in Britain and British Romanticism, with an emphasis upon labor, gender, and ecocritical concerns. My dissertation project, The Poetics of Labor, examines how laboring- and middle-class writers in Britain... Full Profile »
Jessica Stark
Student
Jessica Q. Stark is a PhD Candidate in English at Duke University, where she is studying the presence of community, collaboration, and popular culture across literary genres. Her dissertation project explores the intersections between modern to contemporary poetry and American comic books in... Full Profile »
Hannah VanderHart
Student
Office Hours: By appointment
Early Modern Studies. I work on gender and collaborative poetics in the seventeenth century, specifically the poetry of Philip and Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Katherine Philips and Mary, Lady Chudleigh.