Graduate Student Attendees

Graduate Student and Institution

Assignment

Day & Time

Maria Al-Raes, Cornell University

Research Interests: Maria Al-Raes is a PhD Candidate in the Literatures in English Department at Cornell University. Her research interests concern nonprogressive notions of development in nineteenth-century British fiction and the queer departures of Victorian novels of development.

Micaela Anderson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Research Interests: Micaela Anderson’s research explores nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on British Romanticism and women’s literature, examining how gender and genre intersect within the literary culture of the period.

Spencer Armada, UC Santa Cruz

Dissertation: "Sound, Selfhood, and the Social: Aurality and Narrative in the English Long Eighteenth Century"

Research Interests: Spencer Armada investigates 17th & 18th-Century English; the novel; subjectivity; ethics; and sound studies.

Anne Boylan, Indiana University

Research Interests: Anne Boylan is a PhD candidate in Victorian literature also working and studying to become an archivist. She is passionate about the public humanities, preserving history, and increasing access to archives for researchers of all experience levels.

Jaden Brumage, UC Los Angeles

Research Interests: Jaden Brumage investigates nineteenth-century British literature, focusing on the novel, narrative theory, and the representation of consciousness, particularly at the intersection of psychology and psychoanalysis.

Jazmine Casas, University of Texas, Austin

Research Interests: Jazmine Casas is a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary interests are in critical pedagogical approaches to film and the Victorian novel.

Anya Eastman, Royal Holloway, University of London

Dissertation: "Memorialisation and Continued Curation: Locating Dickens, Eliot and Wilde in an Evolving Heritage Sector"

Research Interests: Anya Eastman considers the way in which Dickens, Eliot and Wilde have been memorialised in the heritage sector, with consideration to how they informed their respective posthumous representations, as well as how changing societies have edited and reframed their legacies.

Huw Edwardes-Evans, Rice University

Research Interests: Huw Edwardes-Evans's doctoral research explores the relationship between Anglophone poetry and transatlantic ceramic industry from 1750 through the nineteenth century, investigating how the work of poets, designers, and manufacturers - like Anna Seward, William Blake, Lady Templetown, and the Wedgwood firms - advances different and competing ideas of what earth is, might be, or should be.

Reymundo Escobedo, Cornell University

Research Interests: Reymundo Escobedo is a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Their research focuses primarily on British nineteenth-century literature, the Victorian novel, Chicanx/Latinx philosophies, decoloniality, and affect studies. They seek to pair British nineteenth-century literature with Chicanx/Latinx philosophies, to construct a relationship between brown readers and the English nineteenth-century canon.

Ariane Farris, UC Santa Cruz

Research Interests: Ariane Farris is a PhD student in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on representations of bodily difference: scars and disfigurements as forms of inscription.

Jennifer Heine, University of Southern California

Dissertation: "Fits and Starts: Absent Minds and Speaking Bodies in the Victorian Novel"

Research Interests: Jennifer Heine's dissertation takes the issue of narrated and narrating bodies as its starting point in order to posit broader questions about fictional characters and the limitations of narrative. She is particularly interested in how characters disappear.

Kelsey Jaye, Louisiana State University

Research Interests: Kelsey Jaye investigates women writers of Victorian literature and science fiction, focusing on the intersections of science and literature, with particular attention to ecological issues and the ways these fields inform each other.

Andrea Lay, Indiana University

Dissertation: "Alimentary Practices in Late-Victorian Imaginations of the Embodied Empire"

Research Interests: Andrea Lay’s work explores food studies in relation to the British Empire, examining how imperial and national identities are constructed and negotiated through culinary practices and representations in literature and culture.

Meg Lebow, Indiana University

Research Interests: Meg Lebow works primarily on adapting and performing classical texts (primarily Shakespeare and Dickens) with young actors ages 6-18

Sara Leonard, Southern Methodist University

Research Interests: Sara Leonard studies nineteenth-century British literature with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, mimetic desire, homosociality, abortion narratives, and transatlantic print culture, analyzing how these themes intersect and circulate across literary forms and historical contexts.

Ronny Litvack-Katzman, Harvard University

Research Interests: Ronny Litvack-Katzman’s research engages with literature and science, the nineteenth-century novel, and science fiction, employing genre studies and literary theory to investigate how scientific ideas and literary forms interact and evolve within and across these genres.

Xi "Bonnie" Liu, Royal Holloway, University of London

Research Interests: Xi "Bonnie" Liu’s research connects Victorian writers, Chinese female modernists, and Virginia Woolf, focusing on women’s life writings, temporalities, and the interplay between nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Chinese literature, particularly the engagement of Bloomsbury modernists with Victorian realists.

Lauren Lovings-Gomez, Rice University

Dissertation: "Materiality, Innovation, and Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century Britain"

Research Interests: Lauren Lovings-Gomez studies British, French, and American art of the long nineteenth century, focusing on Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, the Arts & Crafts Movement, women artists, gender representation, and material culture, exploring how artistic movements and gender intersect across transatlantic contexts.

Rachel McCoy, Ohio State University

Dissertation: "Culture-Texts and Affects: Why We Still Read Victorian Novels Today"

Research Interests: Rachel McCoy researches nineteenth century British literature and their modern adaptations and merchandise using a combination of affect, adaptation, and narrative theory.

Jessica Mundy, Texas Christian University

Dissertation: "'The Isle is Full of Noises': Understanding Audience Perceptions of Shakespeare Adaptations through Characters as Biosensors'

Research Interests: Jessica Mundy explores early modern drama through adaptation theory, ecocriticism, and digital humanities. Their work emphasizes innovative pedagogical approaches and undergraduate research, examining how technology and theory reshape the study and teaching of early modern texts.

Jack Murphy, University of Texas, Austin

Research Interests: Jack Murphy investigates the history of the novel during the Romantic period, focusing on how changing conceptions of time influenced narrative structure. Their work also considers the social implications of industrial capitalism and imprisonment as forces shaping new temporal logics in literature.

Seongkyun Park, Sungkyunkwan University

Research Interests: Seongkyun Park examines marginalized characters in Victorian literature, focusing on how body language conveys alienation. Their work draws on Disability Studies to analyze the representation of disabled characters as the ‘other’ and explores broader questions of difference and inclusion in literature.

Min Peng, Southern Methodist University

Research Interests: Min Peng’s research engages comparative race studies, focusing on African American and Asian American literature, particularly works by American authors of East Asian descent. They also explore Chinese presence in Anglo literature, with interests spanning Victorian literature, racial triangulation, and cross-cultural literary encounters.

Deborah Pileggi-Karrer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Dissertation: "Mythical Metaphor and Reception Tradition in the Works of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope"

Research Interests: Deborah Pileggi-Karrer’s dissertation examines the reception of Classical mythology in the works of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Their broader interests include literary reception theory and the cultural processes involved in myth-making across literary traditions.

Gabriela Pires, San Francisco State University

Research Interests: Gabriela Pires investigates print culture and food studies of the long nineteenth century, analyzing the intersections of literature, history, and everyday life through periodicals, cookbooks, and domestic texts to reveal cultural and social dynamics of the period.

Kelsey Rall, Vanderbilt University

Dissertation: "Genres of Nineteenth-Century Single Women and the Global Anglophone World"

Research Interests: Kelsey Rall explores nineteenth-century women’s literature, focusing on how single women characters shape narrative communities. Their work employs queer and gender theory to reconsider the boundaries of national and transnational belonging within these literary texts.

Corey Risinger, New York University

Dissertation: "Archival Living: Recording Self and Sensation in the Long-Nineteenth Century"

Research Interests: Corey Risinger’s research spans affect theory, feminist theory, archival theory, material culture, and spatial theory, with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. They investigate how emotion, space, and materiality inform literary and archival practices.

Brittany Sanders, Texas Christian University

Research Interests: Brittany Sanders examines female sexuality and desire in Victorian literature, with particular attention to marriage, motherhood, and the consequences faced by fallen women in late-Victorian novels, exploring how these themes shape narratives of gender and morality.

Cassandra Schifman, Rutgers University

Research Interests: Cassandra Schifman studies contemporary literature, new media, and genre fiction, with a focus on queer theory and the interplay between popular literary forms and twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics. They are also interested in adaptation as a means of re-engaging with texts from the long nineteenth century.

Mary Shannon, UC Los Angeles

Research Interests: Mary Shannon examines nineteenth-century British and Irish literature through the lenses of environmental humanities and landscape studies. Their work explores literary and visual genres across imperial geographies, focusing on land dispossession, protest, and the cultural transformation of nature and history under empire.

Erin Temple, Ohio State University

Dissertation: "The Seeds of Revision: Neo-Victorian Transmedia Adaptation in the 21st Century"

Research Interests: Erin Temple’s research centers on the Victorian novel, narrative theory, and adaptation studies, with particular interest in transmedia adaptation and neo-Victorianism, exploring how Victorian narratives are reimagined across contemporary media forms.

Aliza Theis, UC Berkeley

Research Interests: Aliza Theis investigates the transatlantic nineteenth-century historical novel, focusing on representations of landscape and coloniality, and examining how these narratives shape and reflect cultural and historical relationships across geographic boundaries.

Efi Turnip, San Francisco State University

Dissertation: "The Unnameable: Samuel Beckett and the Failures of Language"

Research Interests: Efi Turnip's research focuses on modernist and postmodern poetry and poetics, narratology, phenomenology, dada/surrealism, language poetry, and the works of William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Leslie Scalapino, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

David Vaaknin, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Research Interests: David Vaaknin explores modernist, late modernist, and postmodern literature, with a particular focus on the relationship between trauma and identity, analyzing how literary forms engage with psychological and existential questions.

Molly Young, University of Pennsylvania 

Dissertation: "Desiring the Everyday in Victorian Literature"

Research Interests: Molly Young researches the history of the novel, literature and philosophy, and film and visual studies, exploring how narrative forms and visual culture intersect and evolve across literary and philosophical traditions.