Meet Our Students
Sarah Abolail
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Contemporary literature, critical theory, visual studies, narrative theory, transnational studies, trauma, historical erasure, temporality, representations of violence, witnessing, memory, Marxist theory and political economy.
Advisor(s): Michael Szalay
Elia Agudo
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: Identity, Queer Theory, African-American literature, Latinx literature, Gender and Sexuality, Afrofuturism, Harlem Renaissance
Advisor(s): Kyle Grady
Hannah Elizabeth Bacchus
Year Entered Program: Fall 2021
Research Interests: 20th century African American literature, contemporary African American literature, and Black diaspora literature
Advisor(s): Cole Morgan
Librecht Baker
Year Entered Program: Fall 2021
Research Interests: Rhetoric and composition, identity and language, Black feminist theory.
Advisor(s): Daniel M. Gross
Sheryl Barbera
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: 17th and 18th centuries, the early novel, and narrative theory
Advisor(s): Irene Tucker
Natalie Barman
Year Entered Program: Fall 2018
Research Interests: 20th century British literature, modernism, economics and language, ideology, Marxism, aesthetics, critical theory.
Advisor: Andrzej J. Warminski
Sharece Lia Boghozian
Year Entered Program: Fall 2021
Research Interests: Modernisms, Literature and Art, Art History, Postmodernism, Literary and Critical Theory, Poetry/Poetics, Avant-Garde, Rhetoric and Composition
Advisor(s): Virginia Jackson
Claire Burdick
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Poetics (historical, eco, necro); American and British Romanticism; Native American Literature; Settler colonialism; the American frontier; Performance studies; Feminist theory
Advisor(s): Virginia Jackson
Jiyon Byun
Year Entered Program: Fall 2018
Research Interests: Asian American literature, global studies, cultural studies, modernities, and women's writing.
Advisor: Joseph Jeon
Austin Carter
Year Entered Program: Fall 2014
Research Interests: 19th century American literature; domesticity and sentimentality; motherhood and maternity; feminist studies; affect theory
Advisor(s): Virginia Jackson and Rodrigo Lazo
Buddy Cassidy
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Performance, Early Modern poetry and drama, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, history of ideas, performance studies, poetry and poetics, prosody, horror film, long 18th C. British, American Romanticism, queer theory
Advisor(s): Julia Reinhard Lupton
Sophie Chabon
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Transatlantic modernism; postwar British and American fiction; the Cold War in literature and film; critical, literary, and narrative theory.
Advisor(s): Theodore Martin
Peter Cibula
Year Entered Program: Fall 2013
Research Interests: Early Modern Drama, Science Studies, and Posthumanism.
Advisor(s): Julia Reinhard Lupton
Megan Cole
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: transatlantic modernism and postmodernism; climate fiction, speculative fiction and science fiction; petromodernity; Marxist theory; literary journalism and literary nonfiction
Advisor(s): Annie McClanahan
Thomas Cosgrove
Year Entered Program: Fall 2016Advisor:
Research Interests: Early modern literature and culture, Critical Theory, Literary Theory, and Continental philosophy
Advisor(s): Julia Reinhard Lupton
Emily Dearborn
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: 20th and 21st century literature; genre theory; poetics; postmodernism; aesthetics; rhetorical studies; existentialism; queer theory; environmental narratives and food writing; autofiction; artists' books.
Advisor(s): R. Radhakrishnan
Stefanie Doucette
Year Entered program: Fall 2018
Research Interests: 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, literary theory, feminist studies, political economy, representations of labor/labor activism, testimonials, critical trauma studies and trauma narratives.
Advisor: R. Radhakrishnan
Allison Dziuba
Year Entered Program: Fall 2015
Research Interests: rhetoric and composition; feminist studies; critical pedagogy; literacy studies
Advisor(s): Daniel M. Gross
Juan Carlos Fermin
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Postcolonial theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, Marxism, world literature, Asian American literature, diasporas literature, speculative fiction
Advisor(s): Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan
Maureen A.J. Fitzsimmons
Select publications: “A Pilgrim's Staff Versus A Ladder of Contemplation: the Rhetoric of Agency and Emotional Eloquence in St. Ignatius' The Spiritual Exercises” in Traditions of Eloquence, edited by Cinthia Gannett and John Brereton; book review in Rhetorica on the Stephen J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson edited Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts
Research Interests: Rhetoric and Composition - composition historiographies and pedagogies; Jesuit pedagogy.
Advisor(s): Jerry Won Lee
Brian Flores
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Latino/a American Literature; Hemispheric American Studies; 20th and 21st Century American Literature, Transnational Identities; Cultural Studies
Advisor(s): Rodrigo Lazo
Sarah Goeppner-Kallungi
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Early Modern, Poetry/Poetics, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Advisor(s): Rebeca Helfer
Charles Gunn
Year Entered Program: Fall 2018
Research Interests: 20th and 21st century American literature; Science Fiction; Political Economy; Marxism; Critical University Studies; History of Criticism and Theory; Book History; Conservative Thought
Advisor: Theodore Martin
Meredith Harrell
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Early modern drama and women playwrights; early modern medicine, medical research and midwifery; law and literature; torture, imprisonment and punishment; gender and sexuality studies
Advisor: Julia Lupton
Toni Hays
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Asian American Literature; Contemporary American Literature; Contemporary British Literature; Representations of Mixed Race, Interracial Relationships, and Miscegenation; the Novel; Genre and Generic Criticism
Advisor(s): Christopher Fan
Amanda Hickok
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: 20th/21st-century American literature, poetry and poetics, & critical theory
Advisor(s): Oren Izenberg
Vincent Hiscock
Year Entered Program: Fall 2018
Research Interests: Poetry; modernisms; modern thought; intersections of literature, art history, film & media studies; the 20th century.
Advisor: Oren Izenberg
Rachel Hoffer
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: 19th Century British Literature, Romanticism, Law and Literature, "Fear" and Trauma Theory, Eco-pessimism, Critical Theory, Aestheticism, and Novel Theory.
Advisor(s): Jayne Lewis
Stephen Howard
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Poetry and Poetics; Critical Theory; Political Economy; Affect Theory; Memory; History of Literary Theory; Textual and Genetic Criticism
Advisor(s): Virginia Jackson
Kelana Celine Johnson
Year Entered Program: Fall 2021
Research Interests:
Advisor(s): Annie McClanahan
Jung Soo Lee
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: 20th & 21st C. American Literature, Postmodernism, Posthumanism, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Advisor(s): Theodore Martin
Chelsea Lee
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: My research interests focus mainly on early modern literature, specifically interdisciplinary work focusing on death, medicine, and the body as it relates to literature and how such things are portrayed in art, etc. This comes with an interest in the medical humanities. Recently my work has focused on death in early modern performance and how death influences identity during the period. Outside of the early modern period, I enjoy research in the 19th century as a whole.
Advisor(s): Elizabeth Allen
Tara Leederman
Year Entered Program: Fall 2012
Research Interests: Eighteenth century literature, ecocriticism, environmental science, medical science, ethics.
Advisor(s): Jayne Lewis
Jean Little
Year entered program: Fall 2017
Research interests: Victorian literature, history of mathematics and natural science, economics and literature, aestheticism, poetic form, and theory of the novel
Advisor(s): Andrea Henderson
Gema Ludisaca
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Cultural studies; Contemporary Young Adult Literature; Childhood Studies; Political Economy; Trauma; Horror and the Gothic
Advisor(s): Jonathan Alexander
Jan Leonard Maramot Rodil
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: 19th, 20th, and 21st century American Poetry, Queer Theory, Queer Archives, History of American Poetry and Poetics, History of Criticism, Lyric Theory, Queer Lyric/Lyric Queerness
Advisor(s): Virginia Jackson
Letizia Mariani
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: Twentieth and twenty first century poetry and poetics, transnationalism, multilingualism, modernism and postmodernism.
Advisor(s): Oren Izenberg
Patrick McBurnie-Nicolay
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: 20C American literature, Poetics, Modernism, Postmodernism, Affect studies, aesthetics, and critical theory
Advisor(s): Laura O'Connor
Louise McCune
Year Entered Program: Fall 2018
Research Interests: Contemporary American literature and culture; political economy; critical theory and pedagogy.
Advisor: Michael Szalay
Violet Erin Moon
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: Critical theory; liminal space and studies; postmodernism; metaphysics; hybridity; rhetorical studies
Advisor(s): Daniel M. Gross
Na'amit Nagel
Year Entered Program: Fall 2021
Research Interests: American Jewish literature, Immigrant literature, feminist studies, motherhood and maternity, 19th century British literature
Advisor(s): Irene Tucker
Sarah O'Dell
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Medical Humanities; Narrative Medicine; Memory and Narrative; 19th-20th British and American Literature, Mythopoeic Literature, The Inklings
Advisor(s): Jayne Lewis
Bridget O'Reilly
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Modernism, James Joyce, Genetic study of Joyce, 20th century British, American, Irish novel, 20th century Irish and American Drama, Irish post-colonial history, the Plays of Brian Friel
Advisor: Martin Harries
Shyam Patel
Year Entered Program: Fall 2014
Research Interests: 19th century British literature and criticism; politics and aesthetics in late Victorian culture; utilitarianism and historical progressivism; Marxism and eudaimonism; utopianism and community formation; rhetoric and performance; the history of literary criticism
Advisor(s): Andrea Henderson
Olivia Rall
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Early modern literature; political theology; religious studies; Shakespeare; Walter Benjamin; ceremony and ritual
Advisor(s): Julia Reinhard Lupton
Michelle Robertson
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Ecocriticism and Literature of the American West
Advisor(s): Andrea Henderson
Kathryn Schubert
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: Early modern literature and culture, early modern drama, Shakespeare, political theology, feminist theory, gender and sexuality, biopolitics, disability studies
Advisor(s): Julia Lupton
Leah Senatro
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Rhetoric and Composition; digital multimodality; technological literacy; first-year writing
Advisor(s): Daniel M. Gross
Dominique Shank
Year Entered Program: Fall 2019
Research Interests: Blackness, critical race theory, speculative fiction, metaphor theory, and performativity
Advisor(s): Joseph Jeon
Saiham Sharif
Year Entered Program: Fall 2021
Research Interests:
Advisor(s): Kyle Grady
Dalton Slavo
Year Entered Program: Fall 2017
Research Interests: Critical Theory; Rhetoric Studies and Theory; New Media Studies; Phenomenology; Digital Humanities; Virtual and Augmented Reality Technologies; Textual Criticism; and Composition Pedagogy
Advisor(s): Jonathan Alexander and Daniel M. Gross
Margaret Speer
Year Entered Program: 2015
Research Interests: Queer theory, the long Nineteenth Century, modernism, the Victorian novel, feminism, monstrosity and asceticism
Advisor: Andrea Henderson
Youn-Ju Suh
Year Entered Program: Fall 2021
Research Interests: 19th century British literature, fin-de-siècle literature and modernity, novel and narrative theory, psychoanalysis and affect theory, Marxist theory, and Empire studies
Advisor(s): Andrea Henderson
Franziska Tsufim
Year Entered Program: Fall 2015
Research Interests: Victorian literature; economics and literature; theory of the novel; realism; narrative theory
Advisor(s): Irene Tucker
Allie Harrison Vernon
Year Entered Program: Fall 2020
Research Interests: Contemporary American Literature and Culture, Political Economy, Racial Capitalism, Black Marxism, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Sports
Advisor(s): Christopher Fan
MacKenzie Weeks-Mahoney
Year Entered Program: Fall 2014
Research Interests: contemporary American literature and popular culture; vocality, polyvocality, and sound in the novel; critical theory; horror studies.
Advisor(s): Michael Szalay
Brandon Wild
Year Entered Program: Fall 2014
Research Interests: Nineteenth Century, American Literatures, Concepts of Race, Critical Historiographies, Print Cultures
Advisor(s): Virginia Jackson
