Graduate Student Attendees

Graduate Student and Institution

Assignment

Day & Time

Jazmine Casas, University of Texas, Austin

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.

Reymundo Escobedo, Cornell University

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

Kelsey Jaye, Louisiana State University

Research Interests: My research focus is on women writers of Victorian literature and science fiction and the ways in which science and literature intersect, with special regard to ecological issues.

Andrea Lay, Indiana University

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

Research Interests: food studies, British Empire, imperial and national identities

Sara Leonard, Southern Methodist University

Research Interests: Nineteenth-century British literature, gender and sexuality, mimetic desire, homosociality, abortion narratives, and transatlantic print culture.

Ronny Litvack-Katzman, Harvard University

Research Interests: Literature and science; the nineteenth century novel; science fiction; genre studies; literary theory

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

Research Interests: 

My research project brings together Victorian writers, Chinese female modernists, and Virginia Woolf. I am interested in women’s life writings, temporalities, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Chinese literature, and the engagement between Bloomsbury modernists and Victorian realists.

Jessica Mundy, Texas Christian University

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

Reserach Interests: Early Modern Drama; Adaptation Theory; Ecocriticism; Digital Humanities; Undergraduate Research; Pedagogy

Jack Murphy, University of Texas, Austin

Research Interests: I am interested in the history of the novel and, particularly, its developments during the Romantic period, 1780-1830. My research focuses on how shifting conceptions of time interact with emergent ideas about narrative structure. These questions have led me to related social concerns regarding industrial capitalism and modern imprisonment: instantiating forces of a new temporal logic.

YoungHyun Na, Sungkyunkwan University

Research Interests: I am deeply interested in the Victorian era, particularly Charles Dickens's novels. Last year, I wrote a paper on Hard Times for a graduate seminar at Sungkyunkwan University. My thesis is that the circus functions not only as a critique of the middle class’s rigid utilitarian beliefs but also as a symbol of potential harmony between social classes, suggesting that the working and middle classes are, in some sense, destined to coexist in mutual understanding. Furthermore, I am committed to exploring the field of Digital Humanities. I aim to employ distant reading techniques to analyze Victorian novels from a macroscopic perspective, revealing patterns, trends, and insights that traditional close reading might overlook. By leveraging data-driven approaches such as topic modeling, word frequency analysis, and sentiment analysis, I hope to uncover new dimensions of meaning and contribute to evolving academic discourse on Victorian literature.

Seongkyun Park, Sungkyunkwan University

Research Interests: 

My research focuses on marginalised characters in Victorian literature, particularly how their body language expresses feelings of alienation. I am also interested in Disability Studies, especially the representation of disabled characters as the ‘other’ in literature.

Min Peng, Southern Methodist University

Research Interests: I earned my MA degree in China, focusing on contemporary African American literature, and my academic journey also took me to Ewha Womans University in South Korea, where I developed a deep interest in Asian American literature, particularly works by American authors of East Asian descent. Therefore, in my ongoing Ph.D. studies, I am keen on comparative race studies and aspire to explore both African American and Asian American literature in my future dissertation. During my coursework at SMU, I encountered several books that truly intrigued me and helped shape my academic interests. These include Julia H. Lee’s Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (2011), Caroline H. Yang’s The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form (2020), and Claire Jean Kim’s recent book Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World (2023), along with her racial triangulation theory – just to name a few. These works have inspired me both academically and personally, and I hope to contribute to these conversations and further advance these arguments in my dissertation. P.S. My research interests also align with the Dickens Project due to my broad interest in Chinese performance and presence in Anglo literature – in this case, allowing me to focus on the Victorian period. I have also come across two books that have truly inspired me: China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (2013) and China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690-1770 (2018).

Deborah Pileggi-Karrer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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

Research Interests: My dissertation project centers on the reception of Classical mythology in the works of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Despite the narrow focus of my project on these two Augustan authors, my research interests span both the theory of literary reception and the making of myths, each of which has wide-ranging relevance in literature.

Brittany Sanders, Texas Christian University

Research Interests: I study female sexuality and desire in Victorian literature. I'm particularly interested in marriage, motherhood, and punishments for the fallen woman in late-Victorian novels.

Aliza Theis, UC Berkeley

Research Interests: the transatlantic nineteenth-century historical novel, relations to landscape, and representations of coloniality

David Vaaknin, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Research Interests: My research interests include modernist, late modernist, and postmodern literature dealing with the connection between trauma and identity.

Eliza Alexander Wilcox, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Dissertation: "Between Femmes: A Literary History of Queer Feminine Embodiment"

Research Interests: EA Wilcox is a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, where they study the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their research interests include queer and trans theory, critical femininity studies, and disability studies.