AY 2023 - 2024

PhD Candidates

Abigail Palmisano

• Program Area: Medieval Literature
• Research Interests: Medieval Angelology and Hagiography, Cognition, and Old English Language and Literature
• 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.

Aleks Galus

• Program Area: Contemporary American Literature
• Research Interests: Haunted Houses, Ghosts, and Narrative Theory
• Degrees: BA in Art and English from Elmhurst College (2010)

Courtney Walton

• Program Area: Modern Literature and Culture
• Research Interests: 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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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)
• Dissertation Summary: 
  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.

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Emily L. Sharrett

• Pronouns: she, her, hers
• Program Area: Early Modern Literature and Culture
• Research Interests: Environmental Humanities; Premodern Critical Race Studies; Classical Reception in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature, especially Shakespearean Drama; Premodern Women Writers; Performance Theory; Posthumanist Theory; Ecofeminist Theory
• Degrees: B.A. in English Literature and Political Science from Miami University of Ohio (2016); M.A. in English from Loyola University Chicago (2017)
• 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.

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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)
• Dissertation Summary: 
  My dissertation explores a specific type of early modern paratext that was directed at consumers and commonly labeled “To the Reader,” which arose after Caxton introduced England to the printing press in the late fifteenth century. Although largely untitled in the beginning, I argue that these devices provoked a burgeoning print tradition that diversified and eventually solidified by the early seventeenth century. I not only examine the prominent thematic concerns in paratexts of this nature but also attempt to establish a narrative about the evolution of this type of preface and postface in both epistle and verse form.  

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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)
• Dissertation Summary: 
  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)
• Dissertation Summary:
  Modernism’s Mythic Mothers: Queering Motherhood Through Classical Matrilineage
  I 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.

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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)

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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)
• 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

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

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)

Rebecca Dickman

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, Trauma Theory, Childhood Studies, 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)

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MA Students

 

Almudena Rincón Sáez

• Pronouns: she, her, hers
• Program Area: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature
• Research Interests: Women Studies, Feminist Theory, Modernism, Spanish Literature and Culture, Transnational Literature
• 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)

Eden Link

• Pronouns: she, her, hers, they, them, theirs
• Program Area: 20th-Century American Literature
• Research Interests: Jewish American Literature and Diaspora Studies
• Degrees: BA in English from Cleveland State University (2021) 

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
• 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)  

Melissa Martin

• Pronouns: she/her
• Program Area: Contemporary American Literature
• Research Interests: Queer theory, feminist theory, female gothic literature, queer and feminine trauma represented through haunted houses, Stephen King, the abject.
• Degrees: BA in English Secondary Education from Bradley 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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