Category: Affiliated Graduate Teaching Fellows
Joshua Cody Ward
Joshua Cody Ward specializes in Literature of the American South, African American Literature, and Chicanx literature, especially across the 20th century. He is a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a member of the Thomas Wolfe Society Board of Directors (2023-2026), and on the planning committee for the 2024 Thomas Wolfe Society Durham, NC conference. He is also the Coordinator for CoLEAGS’s Graduate Lecture Series and a Junior Coordinator for the Critical Speaker Seri … Read more
Meleena Gil
Meleena (they/she) is a first-generation US-American and college graduate now working towards a doctoral degree in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Meleena has vested interests in queer theory and gender studies, environmental humanities, and disability studies. Drawing from a reproductive justice framework, Meleena specializes in the representations of children in contemporary Latinx literature. Meleena is a teaching fellow in DOECL and in Women’s and Gender Studies. They … Read more
Ryan Carroll
Ryan Carroll is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature and a Program Assistant with the Latina/o Studies Program. He researches nineteenth-century information culture and literary theory.
Anna Broadwell-Gulde
Anna Broadwell-Gulde (she/her) is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research examines the influence of portraiture—painting and photographic—on modernist innovations in representations of consciousness. Prior to joining the English department, Anna lived and taught English in northern Brazil, where she fell in love with the people, culture, and dance. Through the LSP grant, she devel … Read more
Chloe Hamer
Chloe Hamer is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research centers around questions of collective memory, class, and political resistance in postcolonial Caribbean literatures, with a specific focus on the relationship between anti-global capitalist activism and literary form. Chloe’s dissertation aims to explore depictions of labor in contemporary Haitian and Haitian diasporic novels, examining the ways in which these novels make use of … Read more
Eleanor Rambo
Eleanor Rambo is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she specializes in 20th and 21st-century American and Russian-language literature. Her work explores how literature functions as a marker of identity, as well as cultural and economic systems’ influence on the novel. Her writing has appeared in the publications World Literature Today and The Common, and she is currently the Managing Editor of The Carolina Quarterly.
emilio Jesús Taiveaho Peláez
emilio Taiveaho Peláez is an investigative poet and scholar based in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Their word-work emerges from flesh-eye experiences within the living archive of the North American landscape and seeks to grapple with the colonial legacies that shape this environment—from sidewalks to national parks to the common places of lyric poetry. Their dissertation, “The Mushrooms of Language: The Entangled Poetics of María Sabina, Anne Waldman, & Cecilia Vicuña,” probes experimental … Read more
Izzy Howard
Izzy Howard (they/them) researches ambiguous and deceptive language in Medieval literature and how this ‘promiscuity’ of meaning can be read as queer. Their readings focus on the textual body and its relation to the physical body: how the textual corpus compares to the physical corpus, and how this relationship between language, text, and body can be queered. Medieval theories of language and rhetoric inform their investigation, alongside structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. Their bro … Read more
Jo Klevdal
Jo Klevdal is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literatures where she studies 20th century literature. Her primary interests relate to various understandings of memory and their relationship to both language and image. For her current work, she examines the intersection of photography and literature in the early 20th century. Jo is originally from Colorado and holds a M.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Click here to check out Jo’s Writing in the Social Scienc … Read more
Krista Telford
Krista Telford is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill studying English Literature. She specializes in medieval literature and is particularly focused on religious texts. Her research examines prayer and depictions of the afterlife in medieval literature. She aims to take an interdisciplinary approach to her study of religious writings, considering the performative aspect of many poems and prayers and drawing on musicological research.
Krysten Voelkner
Krysten Voelkner is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her primary interests reside at the intersection of environmental humanities and contemporary Latinx literature. Recent publications of hers can be found in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, and Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which investigates the ways in which Latinx wri … Read more
Leslie Rowen
Leslie Rowen is a third year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. There, she focuses on 20th Century American Literature of War, especially soldier writings composed during wartime. In 2017, she received her B.A. in English and Spanish from Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. During her time at Bellarmine, she studied for a semester at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Quito, Ecuador, where she took classes in Spanish and Ecuador’s history. Between he … Read more
Lindsay Ragle-Miller
Lindsay Ragle-Miller is currently a first-year PhD student at the University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill, who teaches ENGL 105, the introductory composition course. In research, Lindsay is interested in Medieval Studies, particularly through the lenses of Disability Studies and Queer Studies. She earned a BA in English with Teacher’s Certification from Eastern Illinois University in 2009. Even then, Lindsay was interested in Medieval Studies, as one of the first students to earn an interdis … Read more
Mindy Buchanan-King
Mindy Buchanan-King (she/her) is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature at UNC Chapel Hill and is a teaching fellow. Mindy is originally from Virginia and received her B.A. from Emory & Henry College and her M.A. from the College of Charleston. Her master’s thesis focused on Edith Wharton’s use of Romanticism in conceptualizing the artistic self in Hudson River Bracketed. Her graduate research is currently focused on questions of photography and medicine in late 19th-/early 20th-century U. … Read more
Nikki Roulo
Nikki Roulo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses primarily upon early modern literature and in particular, the intersections of poetics and performance, the fool figure, ballads and politics. Click here to check out Nikki’s Writing in the Social Sciences Unit Assignment, focused on Latina/o cultural practices.
Rose Steptoe
Rose Steptoe is Ph.D. candidate, teaching fellow, and film scholar in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the intersection of feminist authorship and cinematic depictions of body horror. More broadly, she is interested in genre and horror studies, gender and sexuality, and sound studies.
Sejal Mahendru
My research focuses on environmental justice in the Anthropocene. I am interested in the convergences in the fields of ecocriticism, post-colonial theory and global socioeconomics, to examine how the effects of climate change, displacement, toxic and electronic waste, and resource extraction are differentially experienced across the Global North and South. I am also interested in studying environmental advocacy through the intersections between art and activism in grassroots movements. I study g … Read more
Thomas Eric Simonson
Thomas Eric Simonson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their research focuses primarily upon early modern literature, especially works engaging with concepts of cosmology at the intersection of literature and scientific writing. They also have interests in queer theory, film studies and visual art, and cultural studies.