Graduate Students
AY 2024 - 2025
PhD Candidates
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Abigail Palmisano
- Program Area: Medieval Literature
- Research Interests: Medieval Hagiography, Cognition, Old English Language and Literature, Middle English Language and Literature, Cognitive Linguistics, Vernacular Theology, and Book History
- Degrees: BA in English from Taylor University (2017); MA in English from Illinois State University (2019)
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Dissertation Summary:
My dissertation examines literary depictions of cognition throughout the English Middle Ages. I first examine how conceptual metaphors of movement in Latin texts are translated into metaphors of fixture in Old English. I connect these changes to distinctions in cultural epistemologies and wider matrices of conceptual metaphor which imagine fixture or enclosure as a form of proper religious and moral deportment. I then follow the inheritance of these ideas in Middle English and investigate the continuing evolution of vernacular epistemologies (and their religious implications) alongside classical, scholastic ones in writings of Julian of Norwich and Chaucer.
Anthony Shoplik
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary American Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Modernism, Literature and Identity, and Poetry and Poetics
- Degrees: BA in English from John Carroll University (2018); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2019)
- Dissertation Summary:
The Conservation of Races: Environment and Racial Formation in American Literature, 1880-1980: This dissertation seeks to examine a term, the “New American race,” and the model of racial identity that made the idea of an American race available to writers in the early twentieth century. I argue that in this period environmental thinking played a crucial and conceptually enabling role for the production and conservation of racial difference. Committed to the belief that environments were a critical component and agent of racial, cultural, and civilizational formation and maintenance, writers in this period transformed American environments, previously believed to be a racial liability (e.g., colonists’ fear of “Indianization”), into a racial resource.
Courtney Walton
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century African American Literature, Critical Race Theory, and Critical Whiteness Studies
- Degrees: BA in English and Secondary Education from Eastern Illinois University (2015); MA in English from Eastern Illinois University (2019)
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Dissertation Summary:My academic research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century African American literature. Specifically, my dissertation, Cyclical Matters: Black Labor, Temporality, and the Incomplete Reconstructions within African American Literature, examines black literature focusing on black workers during the first post-reconstruction to the First World War (1877-1914) and the second post-reconstruction to the end of Ronald Regan’s presidential term (1968-1989). I use critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, Black Marxism, and black temporality to aid in my exploration of the economic, social, and emotional effects relating to employment abuses that impact black workers during the first and second post-reconstructions. I find that my research into these two periods supported with my use of literary and sociological study provide significant steps into understanding how history and literary styles repeat themselves with slight modifications.
To view Courtney's LinkedIn, click here!
Danielle Nasenbeny
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: British Modernism, Victorian Literature, Ecology, Object Oriented Ontology, Animal Studies, and Digital Humanities
- Degrees: BA in English Writing from Dordt University (2013); MA in Literature from Northern Arizona University (2016)
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Vital Environs: Ecologies of Modernism and the Nature Tradition follows the ways British authors around the turn of the 20th century modified existing perceptions about “Nature” and the role of humanity within Nature. The dissertation investigates how this new understanding of Nature changes the land rhetoric of rural England, London urbanity, the seaside, and the Lakes District through cultural artifacts and the writings of Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, H. D., and Daphne du Maurier, among several others.
To view Danielle's professional website, click here!
Emily L. Sharrett
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Early Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Reception of classical rhetoric in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, especially Shakespearean poetry; Environmental humanities, especially ecofeminist approaches to literature; Performance theory; Literary theory
- Dissertation Summary:
In Eternal City, Earthly City: The Reach of Rome in Early Modern English Literature, Sharrett examines how the reception of Roman classic writings shaped debates about social ecology occurring on the stage and page in early modern England, especially in Shakespeare’s Roman plays and narrative poems. Sharrett concludes that these plays and poems interrogate and harness relationships among human and environmental forces in response to religious and secular writings from classical antiquity which had cast human relationships with the natural environment in political and ethical while occluding physical terms.
To view Emily's professional website, click here!
Emma Horst
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Transatlantic Studies, Aesthetics, Sentimentalism, Pre-Raphaelite Art, Sensation Fiction, and Aestheticism
- Degrees: BA in English and Secondary Education from Loras College (2016); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2020)
- Dissertation Summary:
My project traces sensational scenes and various visual modes of sensation within nineteenth-century British and American fiction by Julia C. Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Crafts, and Wilkie Collins. I argue that these authors complicate, expand, or criticize patriarchal ideas of idealized white womanhood in their works through their various appeals to visuality across their novels—from extended descriptions of women’s bodies in portraiture to characters’ use of visual artifice (cosmetics, wigs, false teeth, skin whitener). Although united by their aim to complicate and/or challenge the dominant patriarchal and racist ideas of womanhood, I aim to demonstrate how each work constitutes race and gender differently.
Jack O'Briant
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Contemporary Literature, and Religion and Secularity in Modernist and Postmodern Fiction
- Degrees: BA in Christian Studies from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (2014); MA in English from Azusa Pacific University (2019)
- Dissertation Summary:
My dissertation investigates the prominence of religious themes and ideas in the contemporary U.S. migrant novel, considering the relationship between these novels’ varying approaches to the fraught concept of identity — the marketplace demands for representation, the conceptual problematics of collective categorization, the political efficacy of group solidarity — and their approaches to the equally nebulous concept of religion — its colonial history, its liberatory potential, and its promises of transcendence. In doing so, I attempt to show how debates surrounding the status of identity in literary studies at the end of the twentieth century share meaningful structural contours with foundational questions about the status of religion in the secular academy at the turn of the twentieth century. I proceed to argue that contemporary U.S. migrant writers, well-versed in academic identity discourses, have often used religion in their works to reveal and, at times, subvert the constraints imposed by conventional Western academic frameworks for understanding and debating identity.
Joe Hansen
- Pronouns: he, him, his
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Queer Theory, the Gothic, and Ecogothic
- Degrees: BA in English with a Creative Writing emphasis from Carthage College (2020); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2021)
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Krislyn Zhorne
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Early Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Textual Criticism, Editorial Theory, Paratextual Studies, and Book History
- Degrees: BA in English from the Unversity of North Carolina, Wilmington (2014); MA in English from Morehead State University (2017)
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My dissertation explores a specific type of early modern paratext that was directed at consumers and commonly labeled “To the Reader,” which arose in England during the early sixteenth century. Although largely untitled at the outset, I argue that the inauguration of this device provoked a burgeoning tradition in print that diversified and eventually solidified by the end of the century. I not only examine the prominent discourses in and rhetoric of paratexts of this nature but also track the evolution of this type of preface and postface in both epistle and verse form.
To view Krislyn's professional website, click here!
Ray Kietzman
- Pronouns: they/them/their
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Research Interests: British and American Literature, Globalization, and Occult Studies
- Degrees: BA in Biblical Studies from Wheaton College (2014); MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University (2016); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2018)
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My dissertation is about the birth of American horror fiction in the long 19th century out of American Gothic fiction. I argue that horror, a genre marked by a fascination with themes of fear and revulsion, serves as a laboratory to explore the crises of categorization which erupt from the failure of Enlightenment ideals in the formation of American identity. My dissertation is primarily concerned with themes of gender and race, and with how the cluster of texts I read as early American horror fiction engage in the monsterization of the racial and gendered other.
Samantha Lepak
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Trauma Narratives
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Minnesota, Duluth (2014); MA in English from the University of Minnesota, Duluth (2018)
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Modernism’s Mythic Mothers: Queering Motherhood Through Classical MatrilineageI position this dissertation at the intersection of modern/contemporary literature, queer/feminist theory, and classics in the hopes of better understanding the spaces in which they meet, engaging with writers from the late modernist era to the present to highlight the connections between theories, themes, and practices of queerness from the modernists forward. Using the work of H.D. and writers following in her footsteps, I argue that exploring adaptations of Greek classics written primarily by female and gender-variant authors from the modernist era forward illuminates the extent to which the classics enables writers to think queerly. I argue instead for a palimpsestic model of lineage that follows women and mothers in order to queer the discourse with a subverted temporal perspective and focus.
To view Samantha's Taskstream, click here!
Victoria O'Dea
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Archive Studies, Affect Theory, Epistolary Studies, Material Culture Studies, Temporality, and Textual Studies
- Degrees: BA in English and History from the University of Virginia (2011); MA in English from University College London (2012)
To view Victoria's LinkedIn, click here!
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Xiamara Hohman
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, Transnational Theory, American Poetry in China, and Chinese-American Literature
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Dayton (2008); MA in English from the University of Dayton (2010)
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Dissertation Summary:In my dissertation, “China-making”: American Poetry and Chinese Mythology, I argue that by appropriating Chinese mythologies, U.S. writers and artists have colonized the imaginations of a generation of Americans and that we can see this payout in U.S. communities of Chinese immigrants, geopolitical relations, and literary trends. As I am defining it, a myth is a narrative that gives meaning to a lived experience. It explains what we commemorate and worship and renders meaningful both celebration and life. In the first half of my dissertation, I discuss the ways in which Chinese myths and cultural practices have been appropriated by American poets and artists of non-Chinese descent in order to contend with normative constructions of gender and femininity and racism against Black Americans. I then pivot to the ways in which American poets’ engagement with East Asian spiritual practices produced a cognitive disconnect that allowed the American readership to abstract itself from the plight of Chinese immigrants to the United States, even as it produced an interest in the literature, religion, and mythology of classical China.
To view Xiamara's Taskstream, click here!
PhD Students
Ashley Judy
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Early Modern Literature
- Research Interests: Arthurian Literature and Medieval literature, Shakespeare Studies, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe.
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2023)
Anna Parlato
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Gender Studies, Women Authors, Feminist Theory, Gothic and Horror Genre, Nineteenth-Century Fiction.
- Degrees: BA in English Literature from The University at Buffalo (2022)
Bella Fiorucci
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary American Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Poetry and Poetics, Prison Literature, and Temporality and Spatiality Narratives
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Florida (2024)
To view Bella's LinkedIn, click here!
Berenice Rodriguez
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Queer and Chicanx global feminist studies, Cultural alterity within Mexican indigenous history, Deconstructing and disrupting normalized teaching methodologies, and Pedagogical practices that speak to intersectional audiences
- Degree: BA in English with a minor in Gender and Women Studies and TESL from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2022)
Dan Cheung
- Program Area: 19th- and 20th-Century American Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Literary Realism and Naturalism, Poetry and Poetics, History of American Political Thought
- Degrees: BA in English from Allegheny College (2017); MFA in Fiction from the University of Oregon (2022)
Fatima Hasnain
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Memory Studies, Trauma Theory, Gender Studies, African-American Literature, and South Asian Literature
- Degrees: MA in English from University of the Punjab (2017); MPhil in English from Forman Christian College (A Chartered University) (2019)
Jack O'Briant
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Contemporary Literature, and Religion and Secularity in Modernist and Postmodern Fiction
- Degrees: BA in Christian Studies from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (2014); MA in English from Azusa Pacific University (2019)
Kandace Garcia
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: African American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Latinx Literature, Gender Studies, The Gothic, Horror Cinema, and Nineteenth-Century Literature.
- Degrees: BA in English from Lewis University (2024)
Kylie Lazzo
Rayne Broach
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Textual Studies, Digital Humanities, Genre Studies, and Literary Architecture
- Degree: BA in English and Creative Writing from State University of New York at Oswego (2019); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2023)
Rebecca Dickman
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Environmental Literature, Climate Fiction, Ecocriticism/Ecofeminism, and Posthumanism
- Degree: BA in English from Edgewood College (2024)
Marwa Nour
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature, African American Literature
- Research Interests: Contemporary Middle Eastern literature, Black Studies, Egyptian cultural studies, Arabic literature and issues of national identity, political expression and historical representation.
- Degree: BA in English from Indiana University Northwest (2014); MA in English from DePaul University (2020)
Nicole Salama
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Poetry and Poetics, Women and Gender Studies, Book History, and Textual Criticism
- Degrees: BA in English, Business, and Accounting from Baylor University (2021); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2022)
Will Sikich
- Pronouns: he/him/his
- Program Area: Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Fantasy, Medieval Folklore, Neopaganism, Occult Studies, and Film
- Degrees: BA in English and Creative Writing from Augustana College (2021); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2022)
Yasmeen Ayoub
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Temporality and Narrative Studies, the Southern Gothic, African American Literature, Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Critical Theory
- Degrees: BA in English Literature and Liberal Studies from Portland State University (2019); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2023)
To take a look at Yasmeen's website, please click here!
MA Students
Ama Castillo
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Feminism/Queer theories, Civil rights + BIPOC literature, precolonial literature, postcolonial literature, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Modernism, 1920's culture
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (2023)
Almudena Rincón
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature
- Research Interests: Genre Studies, Women Studies, Feminist Theory, Modernism, Spanish Literature and Culture, Transnational Literature, Romance
- Degrees: BA in English and Journalism from Loyola University Chicago (2019)
To view Almudena's LinkedIn, click here!
Alyssa Romero
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Feminist Pedagogy, Shakespeare, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Translation Theory, Rhetorical Analysis, Construction Grammar, Plath
- Degrees: B.A. in Secondary Education and English (expected May 2024)
Charlie Vigil
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: History and Literature of Science, Medicine, & Technology
- Research Interests: Locating the gaps in history through literature around the transference
and translation of knowledge across cultures (specifically regarding the colonial period)
and how relocating original stories can reconstruct modern notions of representation. Western medicine and how the scientific theory developed a new way of filtering information and setting standards for knowledge rendering certain
voices and stories to be invalidated or silenced. - Degrees: BA in English (expected May 2025)
Eden Link
- Pronouns: she/her/hers, they/them/theirs
- Program Area: 20th-Century American Literature
- Research Interests: Jewish American literature, Textual Studies, and Modernism
- Degrees: BA in English from Cleveland State University (2021)
Ella Barry
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Gothic literature, queer subtext, feminist retellings, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf
- Degrees: BA in English and Art History from Loyola University Chicago (expected 2025)
Haley Ramirez
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Renaissance and Medieval Literature
- Degrees: BA in English Literature from St. Edward’s University (2022)
Jamie Yu
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Contemporary Asian American literature, Asian transpacific cinema, contemporary Asian horror cinema, Korean cinema, literary trauma theory, psychoanalytic criticism, critical race theory
- Degrees: BA in Comparative Literature from University of Washington (2019), MA in Humanities from University of Chicago (2023)
Jeremy Schmid
- Pronouns: he/him/his
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Modernism (Post-modernism) Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Beckett, Nabokov, and Auden; Philosophical literature, Kafka and Camus
- Degrees: BAs in both English and History from UW-Madison (2012)
Maura Joyce
Melissa Martin
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Children’s literature (young adult & middle grade), queer studies, contemporary literature, horror in children’s lit, and ecocriticism
- Degrees: BA in English Secondary Education from Bradley University (2023)
Morgan Acord
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth Century Literature
- Research Interests: British Romanticism, Gothic Literature, Regency/Early 19th Century Literature, Emergence of the Victorian Novel, Sensation Fiction, British and American Abolitionist Literature, Intersectional Frameworks and Theory (Race, gender, class, sexuality), Feminist Theory
- Degrees: BA in English (Concentrations in Literature Criticism and Theory, Fiction, and Poetry) from Kalamazoo College
Morgan Stuckey
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: South Asian Literature, Latino/a Literature, and Contemporary African American Fiction
- Degrees: BA in English and Secondary Education from Loyola University (expected May 2026)
To view Morgan's LinkedIn, click here!
Nick Ruffo
- Pronouns: he/him/his
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Modernism, Gothic Literature, Post-Structuralism, Literary Critical Theory, and Film
- Degrees: BA in English from Butler University (2023)
Orion Elrod
Spencer Hatcher
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Literary - Southern Gothic, 20th Century, diarists/journalists, confessional writing
- Research Interests: Robert Hayden, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Yukio Mishima, Anais Nin
- Degree: BA in English from Agnes Scott College (2017 to 2021)
To see Spencer's LinkedIn, click here!
To see Spencer's website, click here!
Vonnie McClendon
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Medieval Literature, Literary Criticism. Women in Literature. African American Authors, Authors of Literature in Today's Culture
- Degrees: BA in Journalism: Magazine Program from Columbia College Chicago(2015), MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from Columbia College Chicago (2023)
AY 2024 - 2025
PhD Candidates
Abigail Palmisano
- Program Area: Medieval Literature
- Research Interests: Medieval Hagiography, Cognition, Old English Language and Literature, Middle English Language and Literature, Cognitive Linguistics, Vernacular Theology, and Book History
- Degrees: BA in English from Taylor University (2017); MA in English from Illinois State University (2019)
-
Dissertation Summary:
My dissertation examines literary depictions of cognition throughout the English Middle Ages. I first examine how conceptual metaphors of movement in Latin texts are translated into metaphors of fixture in Old English. I connect these changes to distinctions in cultural epistemologies and wider matrices of conceptual metaphor which imagine fixture or enclosure as a form of proper religious and moral deportment. I then follow the inheritance of these ideas in Middle English and investigate the continuing evolution of vernacular epistemologies (and their religious implications) alongside classical, scholastic ones in writings of Julian of Norwich and Chaucer.
Anthony Shoplik
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary American Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Modernism, Literature and Identity, and Poetry and Poetics
- Degrees: BA in English from John Carroll University (2018); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2019)
- Dissertation Summary:
The Conservation of Races: Environment and Racial Formation in American Literature, 1880-1980: This dissertation seeks to examine a term, the “New American race,” and the model of racial identity that made the idea of an American race available to writers in the early twentieth century. I argue that in this period environmental thinking played a crucial and conceptually enabling role for the production and conservation of racial difference. Committed to the belief that environments were a critical component and agent of racial, cultural, and civilizational formation and maintenance, writers in this period transformed American environments, previously believed to be a racial liability (e.g., colonists’ fear of “Indianization”), into a racial resource.
Courtney Walton
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century African American Literature, Critical Race Theory, and Critical Whiteness Studies
- Degrees: BA in English and Secondary Education from Eastern Illinois University (2015); MA in English from Eastern Illinois University (2019)
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Dissertation Summary:My academic research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century African American literature. Specifically, my dissertation, Cyclical Matters: Black Labor, Temporality, and the Incomplete Reconstructions within African American Literature, examines black literature focusing on black workers during the first post-reconstruction to the First World War (1877-1914) and the second post-reconstruction to the end of Ronald Regan’s presidential term (1968-1989). I use critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, Black Marxism, and black temporality to aid in my exploration of the economic, social, and emotional effects relating to employment abuses that impact black workers during the first and second post-reconstructions. I find that my research into these two periods supported with my use of literary and sociological study provide significant steps into understanding how history and literary styles repeat themselves with slight modifications.
To view Courtney's LinkedIn, click here!
Danielle Nasenbeny
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: British Modernism, Victorian Literature, Ecology, Object Oriented Ontology, Animal Studies, and Digital Humanities
- Degrees: BA in English Writing from Dordt University (2013); MA in Literature from Northern Arizona University (2016)
-
Vital Environs: Ecologies of Modernism and the Nature Tradition follows the ways British authors around the turn of the 20th century modified existing perceptions about “Nature” and the role of humanity within Nature. The dissertation investigates how this new understanding of Nature changes the land rhetoric of rural England, London urbanity, the seaside, and the Lakes District through cultural artifacts and the writings of Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, H. D., and Daphne du Maurier, among several others.
To view Danielle's professional website, click here!
Emily L. Sharrett
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Early Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Reception of classical rhetoric in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, especially Shakespearean poetry; Environmental humanities, especially ecofeminist approaches to literature; Performance theory; Literary theory
- Dissertation Summary:
In Eternal City, Earthly City: The Reach of Rome in Early Modern English Literature, Sharrett examines how the reception of Roman classic writings shaped debates about social ecology occurring on the stage and page in early modern England, especially in Shakespeare’s Roman plays and narrative poems. Sharrett concludes that these plays and poems interrogate and harness relationships among human and environmental forces in response to religious and secular writings from classical antiquity which had cast human relationships with the natural environment in political and ethical while occluding physical terms.
To view Emily's professional website, click here!
Emma Horst
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Transatlantic Studies, Aesthetics, Sentimentalism, Pre-Raphaelite Art, Sensation Fiction, and Aestheticism
- Degrees: BA in English and Secondary Education from Loras College (2016); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2020)
- Dissertation Summary:
My project traces sensational scenes and various visual modes of sensation within nineteenth-century British and American fiction by Julia C. Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Crafts, and Wilkie Collins. I argue that these authors complicate, expand, or criticize patriarchal ideas of idealized white womanhood in their works through their various appeals to visuality across their novels—from extended descriptions of women’s bodies in portraiture to characters’ use of visual artifice (cosmetics, wigs, false teeth, skin whitener). Although united by their aim to complicate and/or challenge the dominant patriarchal and racist ideas of womanhood, I aim to demonstrate how each work constitutes race and gender differently.
Jack O'Briant
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Contemporary Literature, and Religion and Secularity in Modernist and Postmodern Fiction
- Degrees: BA in Christian Studies from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (2014); MA in English from Azusa Pacific University (2019)
- Dissertation Summary:
My dissertation investigates the prominence of religious themes and ideas in the contemporary U.S. migrant novel, considering the relationship between these novels’ varying approaches to the fraught concept of identity — the marketplace demands for representation, the conceptual problematics of collective categorization, the political efficacy of group solidarity — and their approaches to the equally nebulous concept of religion — its colonial history, its liberatory potential, and its promises of transcendence. In doing so, I attempt to show how debates surrounding the status of identity in literary studies at the end of the twentieth century share meaningful structural contours with foundational questions about the status of religion in the secular academy at the turn of the twentieth century. I proceed to argue that contemporary U.S. migrant writers, well-versed in academic identity discourses, have often used religion in their works to reveal and, at times, subvert the constraints imposed by conventional Western academic frameworks for understanding and debating identity.
Joe Hansen
- Pronouns: he, him, his
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Queer Theory, the Gothic, and Ecogothic
- Degrees: BA in English with a Creative Writing emphasis from Carthage College (2020); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2021)
Krislyn Zhorne
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Early Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Textual Criticism, Editorial Theory, Paratextual Studies, and Book History
- Degrees: BA in English from the Unversity of North Carolina, Wilmington (2014); MA in English from Morehead State University (2017)
-
My dissertation explores a specific type of early modern paratext that was directed at consumers and commonly labeled “To the Reader,” which arose in England during the early sixteenth century. Although largely untitled at the outset, I argue that the inauguration of this device provoked a burgeoning tradition in print that diversified and eventually solidified by the end of the century. I not only examine the prominent discourses in and rhetoric of paratexts of this nature but also track the evolution of this type of preface and postface in both epistle and verse form.
To view Krislyn's professional website, click here!
Ray Kietzman
- Pronouns: they/them/their
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Research Interests: British and American Literature, Globalization, and Occult Studies
- Degrees: BA in Biblical Studies from Wheaton College (2014); MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University (2016); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2018)
-
My dissertation is about the birth of American horror fiction in the long 19th century out of American Gothic fiction. I argue that horror, a genre marked by a fascination with themes of fear and revulsion, serves as a laboratory to explore the crises of categorization which erupt from the failure of Enlightenment ideals in the formation of American identity. My dissertation is primarily concerned with themes of gender and race, and with how the cluster of texts I read as early American horror fiction engage in the monsterization of the racial and gendered other.
Samantha Lepak
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Trauma Narratives
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Minnesota, Duluth (2014); MA in English from the University of Minnesota, Duluth (2018)
-
Modernism’s Mythic Mothers: Queering Motherhood Through Classical MatrilineageI position this dissertation at the intersection of modern/contemporary literature, queer/feminist theory, and classics in the hopes of better understanding the spaces in which they meet, engaging with writers from the late modernist era to the present to highlight the connections between theories, themes, and practices of queerness from the modernists forward. Using the work of H.D. and writers following in her footsteps, I argue that exploring adaptations of Greek classics written primarily by female and gender-variant authors from the modernist era forward illuminates the extent to which the classics enables writers to think queerly. I argue instead for a palimpsestic model of lineage that follows women and mothers in order to queer the discourse with a subverted temporal perspective and focus.
To view Samantha's Taskstream, click here!
Victoria O'Dea
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Archive Studies, Affect Theory, Epistolary Studies, Material Culture Studies, Temporality, and Textual Studies
- Degrees: BA in English and History from the University of Virginia (2011); MA in English from University College London (2012)
To view Victoria's LinkedIn, click here!
Xiamara Hohman
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, Transnational Theory, American Poetry in China, and Chinese-American Literature
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Dayton (2008); MA in English from the University of Dayton (2010)
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Dissertation Summary:In my dissertation, “China-making”: American Poetry and Chinese Mythology, I argue that by appropriating Chinese mythologies, U.S. writers and artists have colonized the imaginations of a generation of Americans and that we can see this payout in U.S. communities of Chinese immigrants, geopolitical relations, and literary trends. As I am defining it, a myth is a narrative that gives meaning to a lived experience. It explains what we commemorate and worship and renders meaningful both celebration and life. In the first half of my dissertation, I discuss the ways in which Chinese myths and cultural practices have been appropriated by American poets and artists of non-Chinese descent in order to contend with normative constructions of gender and femininity and racism against Black Americans. I then pivot to the ways in which American poets’ engagement with East Asian spiritual practices produced a cognitive disconnect that allowed the American readership to abstract itself from the plight of Chinese immigrants to the United States, even as it produced an interest in the literature, religion, and mythology of classical China.
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PhD Students
Ashley Judy
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Early Modern Literature
- Research Interests: Arthurian Literature and Medieval literature, Shakespeare Studies, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe.
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2023)
Anna Parlato
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Gender Studies, Women Authors, Feminist Theory, Gothic and Horror Genre, Nineteenth-Century Fiction.
- Degrees: BA in English Literature from The University at Buffalo (2022)
Bella Fiorucci
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary American Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Poetry and Poetics, Prison Literature, and Temporality and Spatiality Narratives
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Florida (2024)
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Berenice Rodriguez
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Queer and Chicanx global feminist studies, Cultural alterity within Mexican indigenous history, Deconstructing and disrupting normalized teaching methodologies, and Pedagogical practices that speak to intersectional audiences
- Degree: BA in English with a minor in Gender and Women Studies and TESL from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2022)
Dan Cheung
- Program Area: 19th- and 20th-Century American Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Literary Realism and Naturalism, Poetry and Poetics, History of American Political Thought
- Degrees: BA in English from Allegheny College (2017); MFA in Fiction from the University of Oregon (2022)
Fatima Hasnain
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Memory Studies, Trauma Theory, Gender Studies, African-American Literature, and South Asian Literature
- Degrees: MA in English from University of the Punjab (2017); MPhil in English from Forman Christian College (A Chartered University) (2019)
Jack O'Briant
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Contemporary Literature, and Religion and Secularity in Modernist and Postmodern Fiction
- Degrees: BA in Christian Studies from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (2014); MA in English from Azusa Pacific University (2019)
Kandace Garcia
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: African American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Latinx Literature, Gender Studies, The Gothic, Horror Cinema, and Nineteenth-Century Literature.
- Degrees: BA in English from Lewis University (2024)
Kylie Lazzo
Rayne Broach
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Textual Studies, Digital Humanities, Genre Studies, and Literary Architecture
- Degree: BA in English and Creative Writing from State University of New York at Oswego (2019); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2023)
Rebecca Dickman
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern and Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Environmental Literature, Climate Fiction, Ecocriticism/Ecofeminism, and Posthumanism
- Degree: BA in English from Edgewood College (2024)
Marwa Nour
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth-Century Literature, African American Literature
- Research Interests: Contemporary Middle Eastern literature, Black Studies, Egyptian cultural studies, Arabic literature and issues of national identity, political expression and historical representation.
- Degree: BA in English from Indiana University Northwest (2014); MA in English from DePaul University (2020)
Nicole Salama
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Poetry and Poetics, Women and Gender Studies, Book History, and Textual Criticism
- Degrees: BA in English, Business, and Accounting from Baylor University (2021); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2022)
Will Sikich
- Pronouns: he/him/his
- Program Area: Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Fantasy, Medieval Folklore, Neopaganism, Occult Studies, and Film
- Degrees: BA in English and Creative Writing from Augustana College (2021); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2022)
Yasmeen Ayoub
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Temporality and Narrative Studies, the Southern Gothic, African American Literature, Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Critical Theory
- Degrees: BA in English Literature and Liberal Studies from Portland State University (2019); MA in English from Loyola University Chicago (2023)
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MA Students
Ama Castillo
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Feminism/Queer theories, Civil rights + BIPOC literature, precolonial literature, postcolonial literature, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Modernism, 1920's culture
- Degrees: BA in English from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (2023)
Almudena Rincón
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature
- Research Interests: Genre Studies, Women Studies, Feminist Theory, Modernism, Spanish Literature and Culture, Transnational Literature, Romance
- Degrees: BA in English and Journalism from Loyola University Chicago (2019)
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Alyssa Romero
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Feminist Pedagogy, Shakespeare, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Translation Theory, Rhetorical Analysis, Construction Grammar, Plath
- Degrees: B.A. in Secondary Education and English (expected May 2024)
Charlie Vigil
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: History and Literature of Science, Medicine, & Technology
- Research Interests: Locating the gaps in history through literature around the transference
and translation of knowledge across cultures (specifically regarding the colonial period)
and how relocating original stories can reconstruct modern notions of representation. Western medicine and how the scientific theory developed a new way of filtering information and setting standards for knowledge rendering certain
voices and stories to be invalidated or silenced. - Degrees: BA in English (expected May 2025)
Eden Link
- Pronouns: she/her/hers, they/them/theirs
- Program Area: 20th-Century American Literature
- Research Interests: Jewish American literature, Textual Studies, and Modernism
- Degrees: BA in English from Cleveland State University (2021)
Ella Barry
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Gothic literature, queer subtext, feminist retellings, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf
- Degrees: BA in English and Art History from Loyola University Chicago (expected 2025)
Haley Ramirez
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Renaissance and Medieval Literature
- Degrees: BA in English Literature from St. Edward’s University (2022)
Jamie Yu
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
- Research Interests: Contemporary Asian American literature, Asian transpacific cinema, contemporary Asian horror cinema, Korean cinema, literary trauma theory, psychoanalytic criticism, critical race theory
- Degrees: BA in Comparative Literature from University of Washington (2019), MA in Humanities from University of Chicago (2023)
Jeremy Schmid
- Pronouns: he/him/his
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Modernism (Post-modernism) Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Beckett, Nabokov, and Auden; Philosophical literature, Kafka and Camus
- Degrees: BAs in both English and History from UW-Madison (2012)
Maura Joyce
Melissa Martin
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Contemporary Literature
- Research Interests: Children’s literature (young adult & middle grade), queer studies, contemporary literature, horror in children’s lit, and ecocriticism
- Degrees: BA in English Secondary Education from Bradley University (2023)
Morgan Acord
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Nineteenth Century Literature
- Research Interests: British Romanticism, Gothic Literature, Regency/Early 19th Century Literature, Emergence of the Victorian Novel, Sensation Fiction, British and American Abolitionist Literature, Intersectional Frameworks and Theory (Race, gender, class, sexuality), Feminist Theory
- Degrees: BA in English (Concentrations in Literature Criticism and Theory, Fiction, and Poetry) from Kalamazoo College
Morgan Stuckey
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: South Asian Literature, Latino/a Literature, and Contemporary African American Fiction
- Degrees: BA in English and Secondary Education from Loyola University (expected May 2026)
To view Morgan's LinkedIn, click here!
Nick Ruffo
- Pronouns: he/him/his
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Modernism, Gothic Literature, Post-Structuralism, Literary Critical Theory, and Film
- Degrees: BA in English from Butler University (2023)
Orion Elrod
Spencer Hatcher
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Literary - Southern Gothic, 20th Century, diarists/journalists, confessional writing
- Research Interests: Robert Hayden, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Yukio Mishima, Anais Nin
- Degree: BA in English from Agnes Scott College (2017 to 2021)
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To see Spencer's website, click here!
Vonnie McClendon
- Pronouns: she/her/hers
- Program Area: Undecided
- Research Interests: Medieval Literature, Literary Criticism. Women in Literature. African American Authors, Authors of Literature in Today's Culture
- Degrees: BA in Journalism: Magazine Program from Columbia College Chicago(2015), MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from Columbia College Chicago (2023)