PhD Student Profiles

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Degree(s) earned and location

PhD – In progress, currently studying at the University at Albany (SUNY) Expected graduation – May 2014

MA – English Language and Literature
Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, 2008
Thesis: “‘We then talked of me’: Boswell’s Engaging Selfhood” directed by Dr. Alfred Lutz; Dr. Carl Ostrowski, second reader

BA – English Language and Literature, Philosophy
Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, 2002 

Research Interests

The long/transatlantic eighteenth century, twentieth/twenty-first-century American poetry

Select Publications 

BOOK CHAPTERS

“Adam Smith on History and Poetry” in The Oxford Adam Smith Handbook, published by Oxford University Press (forthcoming in 2012).

REVIEWS

Abbott, Steven. Gore Vidal: A Bibliography, 1940-2009, in Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 105.1 (March) 2011: 91-3.

Hagstrom, Jack W. C. and Bill Morgan. James Ingram Merrill: A Descriptive Bibliography in Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 105.1 (March) 2011: 97-9.

Shevlin, Eleanor F., ed. The History of the Book in the West: 1700-1800 in Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America (forthcoming in June 2012).

Select Conference Presentations 

“Community, Romance, and the Novel in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society conference at the University of South Carolina, Columbia SC, 12-15 April 2012 (forthcoming). 

“‘If we shed any tears, we carefully conceal them’: Adam Smith’s Masculinities,” Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference: Hamilton, Ontario Canada, 26-29 October 2011.

 "Sir, we know our men": James Boswell's Fashionable and Multifarious Character(s)," Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference: Buffalo, NY 21-23 October 2010.

 “‘No One Ever Made a Bargain in Verse’: Aspects of Adam Smith’s Theory of Poetics in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,” Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton NJ, 24-27 June 2010.

 “‘Intertainment’ Versus ‘Fact’: Form and Content in Adam Smith’s Poetics,” Smith in Glasgow ’09 conference: Glasgow, Scotland, 1 April 2009.

TEACHING

English 144 – Reading Shakespeare at the University at Albany (SUNY): Spring 2012
English 144 – Reading Shakespeare at the University at Albany (SUNY): Fall 2011
Writing Center Graduate Advisor at the University at Albany (SUNY) – Spring 2011
English 205Z (TA) – Introduction to Writing at the University at Albany (SUNY): Fall 2010
Guest lecturer, English 3210 – Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, Alexander Pope and the concept of taste at Middle Tennessee State University: Spring 2009.
English as a Second Language at the Spring Hill Public Library: 2006-2009.

Email address: [email protected]

HU 370

Position: Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

B.A. summa cum laude (2011) and M.A in English Literature (2015) from San Francisco State University. 

Andrew currently teaches courses on film & literature. His interdisciplinary research interests include: 20th century literature and film, critical theory, black studies, translation, phenomenology, and Marxism. He is currently completing research in the fields of Marxist aesthetics, translation, and the essayistic across mediums; as well as, authors studies with a focus on essayistic modes in Baldwin, Baraka, Benjamin and Moten. 

Andrew’s pedagogical research focuses on liberatory praxis that draws from bounded ethic theories of the other (Freire and hooks) to examine and challenge the critical nexus between oppressed/privileged subjectivities/bodies and structures of power, in the hope of a transformative classroom/consciousness.

Courses at UAlbany:
AENG 121: Reading Literature – African American Tradition
AENG 223: Short Stories -  James Baldwin: contemporaries and influence
AENG 240z: Representations of (dis)ability in America
AENG 243: Film/Literature - Essay Form and Essay Film
AENG 243: Film/Literature - (Anti)Racist Lenses

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HU 386

Position: Lecturer, PhD Candidate
Email: [email protected]

Her current research focuses on print culture in 19th-century America and how the circulation of print materials not only forms but also questions the dynamics within communities and envisions alternative ways of relationality. She is particularly interested in understanding the interaction between print materials and the reader’s subjectivity with the methodology informed by the concept of radical democracy. The authors addressed in her research include Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Lydia Maria Child, and Walt Whitman.

She presented at the International Edgar Allan Poe Conferences in 2009 and 2015.

Courses taught include AENG110 Writing and Critical Inquiry in the Humanities, AENG223 Short Story, AENG240Z American Experiences, and AENG261 American Literary Traditions both face-to-face and online.

HU 391

Position: Doctoral Candidate & Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

MA, BS, Long Island University

Nicole is a Queer Modernist who works closely with 19th and 20th century American, British, and French literature. She is deeply invested in the work of Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, the Brontës, Willa Cather, Oscar Wilde, and Djuna Barnes. Currently, Nicole is at the early stages of writing her dissertation, which is a project that examines the narratological strategies employed in queer modernist transnational literature.

In early 2018, Nicole’s critical essay, “Unspeakable Horror: Outing Syphilis in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” was featured as a chapter in Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present, published by Palgave-Macmillan.

She holds a Master’s in English and a Bachelor’s in Secondary English Education from Long Island University, Post Campus in Brookville, NY. Nicole’s areas of interest expand beyond her concentration, and she often teaches courses that allow her to share that knowledge with her students.

At UAlbany, Nicole teaches Postcolonial Literary Traditions, with a focus on third-wave feminist perspectives on marriage, motherhood, and education (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Buchi Emecheta); she also teaches Literature and Film. Courses for Literature & Film include: The Art of Longing and Melancholy: Various forms of “Waiting,” which is grounded in the Barthesian concept of “Waiting” (from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments) and urges students to consider how longing, melancholy, and nostalgia inform the subconscious and thus affect how love happens in uneven measures between two people; another course is Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll, which considers American culture and politics of the late 1940s through the 1950s as a way to contextualize the “moment” of writing and analyze “perversion,” drug culture, mental health treatment, and the “party” lifestyle. Nicole also teaches first year writing classes at UAlbany. At LIU Post, Nicole is a lecturer for the Hutton House Continuing Education program as well as an adjunct professor in the English Department. She has served as the English and Reading instructor for the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) at LIU Post since 2014.

Outside of the university setting, Nicole is an Elite Level private tutor for Atrium Educational, LLC, based out of Syosset, NY. To balance the rigors of academia, Nicole participates in daily High Intensity Interval Training; she also enjoys baking, cooking, and binge-watching comedy sitcoms like The Office, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 30 Rock, and Arrested Development.

HU 361

Position: Ph.D. Candidate
Email: [email protected]

Master of Arts in English: Wayne State University – May 2012

Research Interests: Marxism, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, Neoliberalism, African-American literature

Courses Taught

At UAlbany: AENG 110z, AENG 121, AENG 144, AENG 223, AENG 240, AENG 243
At Joliet Junior College (Joliet, IL): Eng 098, Eng 099, Eng 101

Publications

• Forthcoming: Article: “Super Deluxe Whiteness: Privilege Critique in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout” symploke. “Oceania in Theory” – December 2018

• Forthcoming: Contribution: “Whiteness” - The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory – Bloomsbury 2018

• Book Review: Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe. Printed in Socialism and Democracy, Volume 31, Issue 3, 2017: “Capitalism Today: Crisis and Response”

• Book Review: Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies ‐ by Twinam, Ann. Printed in Bulletin of Latin American Research, Volume 36, Issue 2, 2017: “Student Movements and Political Change in Contemporary Latin America”

Conferences

• Seminar Presentation: “Super Deluxe Whiteness: Privilege Critique in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, March 2018

• Conference Presentation: “Making the Status Quo Badass Again: Kid Rock, Donald Trump, and the Commodification of White Masculinity,” 15th Annual UAlbany English Graduate Student Conference: The Badass, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, March 2017

• Symposium Presentation: “The Romance of the Masses: Revolutionary Critique in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World,” CLR James Now!, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, November 2016

• Reading Group Participant: “Dispossession, Exclusion, Exploitation: Selections from the Grundrisse,” The Institute on Culture and Society: Dispossession, Exclusion, Exploitation, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 2016

• Reading Group Participant: “Commercial, Merchant’s, and Finance Capital,” The Institute on Culture and Society: Capital: The Basement Tapes, Georgetown University, Washington DC, June 2015

• Conference Presentation: “Structural Whiteness and Nonwhite Bodies in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,” Spaces and Flows: International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, October 2012

Position: Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

B.A. English, B.A. Asian Studies Japanese Language, and Minor in Philosophy from William Paterson University (2015), M.A. English Literature from Clemson University (2019). 

Julie is interested in the differences between Eastern and Western ideologies in regard to how memory relates to personal identity. Her current research focuses on the works of Henry David Thoreau, particularly the Journal, and Thoreau’s work on translating Eastern texts for The Dial. She is interested in the philosophical concepts of non-action, non-being, and nothingness, and how these concepts have been constructed in Western and Eastern ideologies and languages. Julie’s Master’s Thesis focused on Thoreau’s definition of self-improvement, arguing that it centers on potentiality and a surrender to being in a constant state of flux rather than the achievement of a fully refined self. 

Position: PhD Student; Student Media Advisor, University of Vermont
Email: [email protected]

As president of College Media Association, Chris leads a national organization of 700 college media advisers who seek to develop strong, student-led media programs at colleges and universities across North America. In his day job, he advises news, radio and video student media at the University of Vermont, where he also teaches storytelling and media law.

Chris has helped his newspaper and radio students win their first national awards, including the Newspaper Pacemaker and Online Pacemaker, long considered the Pulitzer Prize of collegiate journalism. As a member and then chairman of CMA's Committee for First Amendment Advocacy for more than a decade, he led a team of advisers who fight for free-speech and free-press rights at colleges and universities from coast to coast.

He is a former newspaper reporter, returned Peace Corps volunteer, fiction writer, news junkie, radio DJ and Doctor Who geek. He is working toward his PhD in English and resting up as he leisurely ponders running his second marathon.

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Position: PhD Candidate, Lecturer in English
HUM 339
Email: [email protected]

Elaina Frulla specializes in early American literature and culture. Her dissertation examines American literary representations of foreign and accented speech in the 18th Century and early 19th Century. Recently, Elaina has both published and publicly lectured on James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels. 

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Email: [email protected]
Degrees:
MFA University of Maryland College Park
BA University of Massachusetts Boston

Biography

Carissa Halston is the author of Emergency Exit, a novella published through The Massachusetts Review. Her fiction has also been published in The Normal School, Longform Fiction, and Fourteen Hills, among others. She’s received honors and grants from The Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, The Writers’ Room of Boston, The Wesleyan Writers Conference, and elsewhere.

In addition to writing, Halston is the Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal apt, and she runs the award-winning independent press Aforementioned Productions. She was also the Prose Editor for the 78th issue of AGNI.

Degrees

MFA - University of Maryland
BA - University of Massachusetts Boston

Research and Teaching Interests

Contemporary U.S. fiction, Critical Race Feminism, Race and ethnicity studies, Black Feminist Rhetoric, Surveillance studies, Multimodal rhetoric.

Courses Taught

At University at Albany
Incarcerated Womxn - Fall 2020
The Black Feminist Rhetoric of Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer - Spring 2020
Writing Race and Gender - Fall 2019
Autofiction: Studies in Writing about Texts (Teaching Assistant for Aashish Kaul) - Spring 2019

At University of Maryland
Writing Fiction. Fall 2014, Spring 2015
Academic Writing. Spring 2014, Fall 2014

Guest Lectures
"Writing and Editing." Literary Publishing - Undergraduate Course. Associate Professor Eric Keenaghan. University at Albany. (Spring 2019)

"Fictionalizing Disease." The Language of Illness - Undergraduate Course. Lecturer Aaron Devine. University of Massachusetts Boston. (Summer 2016)

"Writing and Editing." Creative Writing - Undergraduate Course. Assistant Professor Susan McCarty. Salisbury University. (Spring 2015)

"Hearing Voices: Writing Dialogue." Creative Writing - Undergraduate Course. Lecturer Krysten Hill. University of Massachusetts Boston.  (Spring 2013)

"Writing and Editing." Boston Writing Now - Undergraduate Course. Associate Professor Chris Walsh. Boston University. (Fall 2012)

"Online/Print Hybrid Editor." Literary Editing and Publishing - Graduate Seminar. Associate Professor Askold Melnyczuk. University of Massachusetts Boston. (Spring 2011) 

Position: PhD Student/ GTA/ Secretary - EGSO (2020-2021)
Email: [email protected]

• Ph.D – English (Literature), University at Albany, SUNY. (In progress)
• MPhil – English Literature, Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan. (2013)
• B.A Hons – English Literature, Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan. (2011)

Zahra Hamdani is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of English at University at Albany, SUNY. Her research interests include contemporary Global Anglophone Literature, particularly South Asian Diasporic fiction. She is interested in the application of the concept of Biopolitics to contemporary South Asian diasporic literature in order to understand the woes of the first and the second-generation immigrants. Hamdani has previously worked on Orientalism, Neo-Orientalism, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, and Postcolonial Biopolitics. 

Research Interests:
African American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Biopolitics, Diaspora Literature, Feminist Theory and Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Conference Presentations:
• “Symbiosis vs Hybridity: Symbiotic relationships in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and US Internal Colonialism”
PAMLA 2015
Teaching Profile:
Lecturer of English language and Literature 
Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan. (2013 – 2020)

Courses taught:

• Introduction to African Literature
• Literature of the Americas
• Subcontinent Novel
• South Asian Short Stories 
• Introduction to American Poetry
• Introduction to Classical and Romantic Poetry
• English Core I, II, III

Visiting Research Scholar
Arizona State University, USA. (Jan – May 2015)
    Description:

• Faculty Exchange Program between Kinnaird College for Women and Arizona State University. Funded by the US Department of State. 
• The theme of the program was: Contemporary US Literature and Theory.

Visiting Lecturer
Lahore School of Economics, Pakistan. (Jan – June 2020)
    Course(s) taught:

• Academic Writing

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Position:  Graduate Teaching Assistant, Vice-President EGSO
Email: [email protected]

As a young scholar and researcher, Farhana is interested in studying material objects, and their socio-political representation in Postcolonial and 20th Century American Literature. Subscribing to philosophies of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory(ANT) and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), she advocates for a radical democratic view of the world where objects are recognized as social actants and granted with rightful political agency. She is also a keen observer of human-object interactions and the impacts of objects on human emotion, memory, and identity. Her research area is ultimately interdisciplinary and regularly crosses between literary studies and social science. 

Currently, at UAlbany, she teaches a course titled: “American Experiences Through Objects and Bodies” which encourages students to critically approach American history and experiences of different ethnic, racial, and religious groups in America through analyzing a series of cultural objects and portrayals of human bodies found in literary texts, artworks, photographs, and other media contents. Her teaching goal remains to help students recognize the latent power of objects and human bodies to symbolize personal and communal freedom in societies through inquiring into contemporary socio-political events.

Before coming to the United States., she worked as a Lecturer and taught courses such as Introduction to College Composition, 19th-Century Poetry, and Early American Literature at East-West University, Bangladesh. She also made four academic paper presentations at national and international conferences. 
 

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Originally from Cali, Colombia, Verónica Jordán-Sardi immigrated to the United States with her immediate family as a young teen fleeing sociopolitical unrest. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and French from the University of Florida, an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. Her work can be found in Columbia Journal, Litro Mag (UK), Cleaver Magazine and Comparative Literature Commons. 

Email: [email protected]

Anastasios is working on extinction, oceans, and Michael Jackson. Recent writing appears online at jubilat, Adjacent Pineapple, Recliner, BOMB, and the Iowa Review.

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HU 388

Position: Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

MFA in Poetry, MA in English Literature - Rutgers University-Newark

Kevin Kilroy is a doctoral student studying the relationship between literature, composition, and academic writing practices. He is the current co-editor of Barzakh Magazine, and he has previously served as the EGSO President, on the EGSO Conference Committee, and as a member of the GSA Judicial Board. Prior to joining UAlbany, he earned MA and MFA degrees from Rutgers University-Newark and spent the better part of a decade teaching literature and English composition. Kevin has presented papers at the CCHA, ACLA, and IAFOR national and international conferences, and he will be presenting work at the upcoming 2021 MLA conference. 

Email: [email protected]

Degrees:
Ph.D. in progress, University at Albany, SUNY
M.A., English, Texas A&M University
B.A., English, Hanbat National University 

Research Interests:
19th- and 20st-century literature and culture, Modernism, Film studies, Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Biography:
Gunok Kim is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research, broadly stated, explores the late nineteenth and the twentieth century literature, Modernism, media and film studies, particularly modernism and its historical, sociological, and philosophical contexts in Great Britain, and the relationship between literature and visual culture. She is currently teaching the first-year writing course, ENG110Z: Writing and Critical Inquiry. 

Teaching Experience:
ENG110Z: Writing and Critical Inquiry, University at Albany, SUNY (2020 Fall)
 

HU 391

Position: Lecturer
Email: [email protected]

ABD University at Albany, SUNY (2018)
MA William Paterson University (2013)
BA Shippensburg University (2010)

Postmodern American Literature, New Sincerity American Literature, Film, Writing Pedagogy

E. C. Koch is a doctoral candidate at the University at Albany, SUNY. His dissertation project seeks to plot the transition from postmodern to New Sincerity literature, concentrating on the work of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Don DeLillo, and Colson Whitehead.

Courses Taught

AENG 272: Media, Technology, and Culture
AENG 240Z: The Literature of September Eleventh
AENG 110Z: Writing and Critical Inquiry in the Humanities

Position: PhD Student
Email: [email protected], [email protected]

Noah is a part-time PhD student with a concentration in Writing Studies. His interests include academic and creative writing pedagogies, faculty development and collaboration, and working with multilingual writers. He is a full-time Assistant Professor of English at Hudson Valley Community College, where he teaches courses in composition and works as an academic advisor. He was the winner of the 2016 Phyllis Hurd Liston Poetry Prize from the University at Albany and the American Academy of Poets, and his poems have been published in 32 Poems, Verse Daily, West Texas Literary Review, Storm Cellar, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. 

Email: [email protected]

Tim Laberge is a doctoral student interested in modernisms/postmodernisms and the way they intersect with, are informed by, and are shaped by postcolonial traditions. Additional interests include the Novel, questions of genre (particularly science fiction), film history, and the way cinema re-focuses and challenges literary ideals. Prior to joining the SUNY Albany English Department, Tim was part of the adjunct faculty at SUNY Schenectady where he taught College Composition; he was also a community development planner and grant writer for a civil engineering firm. 

Email: [email protected]

PhD – In progress, studying at the University at Albany, SUNY
M.A. – English, University at Buffalo, SUNY (2019)
B.A. – English/Combined Degree, University at Buffalo, SUNY (2018)
A.A. – Liberal Arts and Sciences, Niagara County Community College (2016)

Research Interests:
Native American Indigenous Studies (NAIS), 19th Century American Literature, Historiography, Colonial/Post-Colonial Studies, Folklore, Poetry, Creative Writing

Teaching Experience:
Instructor: University at Albany, SUNY (2020-present)
AENG 240z – American Experiences
 

Writing Center (HU 140)

Degree(s) earned and location:
BA English, Seoul National University
MA English Language Education, Seoul National University

MA Thesis: “Logic of Puritan Community and Family in Hawthorne’s Short Fictions” (2015)

Research Interests:
Early American Literature; 19th-century American Literature; Ecocriticism; Comparative/Intercultural Studies (Writings of American Missionaries in North-East Asia)

Email: [email protected]

MFA in Fiction Writing, University of Alabama
BA in English, DePauw University

Email: [email protected]
Degrees:

PhD – In progress, University at Albany (SUNY) 

Expected graduation – August 2019

MA – English Language and Literature 

Salahaddin University, Arbil-Kurdistan Region, IRQ, 2009

Thesis: “The Concept of Immigration in novels of Husam Barzingji and Henry James: A Comparative Study” directed by Dr. Ismael Fahmi

B.A. – English Language and Literature 

Salahaddin University, Arbil-Kurdistan Region, IRQ, 2006

Research Interests

-      Victorian Studies

-      Modern Theories of Emotion

-      The Concept of Immigration in Literature

-      Immigration, Identity and Modernity

-      The Concept of Trauma of War and Genocide in Novels

-      Comparative Literature in Kurdish and English Literature

Languages 

Kurdish (native), Farsi and English (fluent), Arabic and Turkish (speaking, writing, reading)

Translation and interpretation skills (English-Farsi-Kurdish)                                               

Published Essays

-      “Imagination, Novel, and Daily Life”. 23 Magazine (A Kurdish Local Literary Magazine) – Erbil. Vol. 1, Feb. 2011

-      “The Concept of Immigration in Literature”. 23 Magazine (A Kurdish Local Literary Magazine) – Erbil. Vol. 3, May, 2011

Academic Activities 

-      Participating in University at Albany, Humanities Department Conference“Poetics of Displacement” – Nov. 2016

-      Team Working Workshop 2012 – CLAD Center (Soran University and College Plymouth St Mark & St John)

-      Participating in Doctoral Research Development in University of Nottingham – Malaysia and UK Campuses 2010-2011 (Two Years DelPHE Program)

Teaching Experiences

Asst. Instructor:   Undergraduate courses in English Grammar, Translation, Victorian Novel                                     Salahaddin University, IRQ: Oct. 2006 - July 2008

Asst. Instructor:   Undergraduate courses in Literary Criticism, Victorian Novel         

Soran University, IRQ:Oct. 2009 - May 2014 

HU 353

Position: Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: [email protected]

MA in English, University of Maine (2018)
BA in English, Kent State University (2016)

Interests

Marxism, feminist and queer theory, U.S. AIDS narratives and media, twentieth century American literature.

Courses Taught

AENG 243: Literature and Film
AENG 272: Media, Technology and Culture

[email protected]

HU 388

Position: Graduate Teaching Assistant and Chair, 17th Annual UAlbany EGSO Conference
Email: [email protected]

ABD--University at Albany, SUNY (2020)
M.A. in English--University at Albany, SUNY (2010)
B.A. in English--East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2008)

Research Interests

• Biopolitics and Race, Genres of the Human, Postcolonial Theory, Gender and Queer Theory, Memory and Trauma Theory, Affect Theory, and Feminist Theory. My dissertation project examines the conceptual and theoretical role of race in the construction of the human as a political subject through selected literary works on political trauma fiction of the 20th and 21st century. 

Courses Taught

• AENG 297: Postcolonial Literary Traditions
• ANEG 240z: American Experiences—Immigration and Citizenship
• AENG 270: Living Literature: Challenges in the 21st Century—Women of Color Feminist Writings on Slavery and Colonialism

Conference Presentations 

• Panel Chair, “Race, Human, and the Genres of the Human” at NeMLA Convention, March 2020, Boston 
• Conference Chair, "Race: Embodying Academia",17th Annual UAlbany English Graduate Student Organization Conference, April 2019, UAlbany. Conference URL: http://egsoalbany.weebly.com/conference.html

HU 369

Email: [email protected]

BA – Liberal Arts, Eugene Lang College at The New School

MFA – Fiction, The City College of New York

Interests

Creative Writing, Historical Fiction, Genre Fiction, 20th and 21st Century American Fiction.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“‘We Ain’t a Christian Outfit’: Protestantism and Secularism in the Formation of the Popular Western Novel” – Western American Literature, forthcoming 2019

Recent Fiction Publications

"Not for Nothing," J Journal: New Writing on Justice, 2020
“Shalom Bayit” – Glimmer Train, 2019
“Coywolf” – Tikkun, February 2018

Books

The Sea Beach Line: A Novel (Fig Tree Books, 2015)

Teaching at UAlbany

AENG 102: Introduction to Creative Writing
AENG 240: American Experiences
AENG 243: Film and Literature: The WesternAENG 302: Creative Writing: Narrative Prose

Email: [email protected]

BA Philosophy (magna cum laude), Stony Brook University

Research Interests

Twentieth/Twenty-first Century World Anglophone Literature; Literature and Empire; Global Modernisms; Cultural and Critical Theory; Postcolonial Literature and Theory. Secondary areas include: Feminist Theory and Women’s Literature; Creative Writing (non-fiction prose and poetry)

Publications

2017 - “Characters of Finance” GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine
2016 - “How to Ask a Feminist to Do the Dishes” Blindfield: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry.
2015 - “The Losses” (poem). Barzakh.
2011 - “Base/Superstructure” in The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Wiley-Blackwell Publishers) Eds. Michael Ryan and Gregory Castle. 
2007 - “High Ceilings, Seductive Shrines: Inside Starbucks.” Techknowledgies: New Imaginaries in the Humanities, Arts, & TechnoSciences. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Conference Presentations

2018 - “Capital and the Caves: Accumulation and Violence in Forster’s A Passage to India.” Northeast Modern Language Association. Pittsburgh, PA.
2016 - “The Booker Prize and Violence.” World Literature and Dissent, English Colloquium. University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
2013 - “Complicity, Colonialism and the Failure of Bourgeois Ethics in Orwell’s Burmese Days.”American Comparative Literature Association. Toronto, Canada.

Fellowships and Awards

John Woods Scholarship, Prague Summer Program, 2010
Philip Hurd List Poetry Prize, 2010 Honorable Mention
School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, Tuition Scholarship, 2007

Select Teaching Experience

ENG 368: Global Women Writers of the 20th and 21st Centuries
ENG 240: Rewriting America: Literature and Culture after 9/11

ENG 205: Introduction to Writing in English Studies 
 


HU 353

Position: Ph.D. Student & Teaching Assistant
Email: [email protected]

Annika is a Creative Writing PhD student and a Teaching Assistant. Her interests include memory studies, literary trauma theory, German poetry of the early 20th century, (de)construction of national identity, ecopoetics and children’s literature. 

Position: Ph.D. Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

My experience with the Bureau of Land Management and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy shifted my professional/academic interests towards conservation and environmental literature. Being involved in silviculture, waste-management, and sustainable farming, these involvements outside the normalized ecocidal tendencies of contemporary culture established an appreciation for ecological-living, and influenced my decision to begin a doctoral program at UAlbany. Examining the frames of invisibility surrounding the physical waste of our American population, my research explores how our ungrieving complacency within the Anthropocene continues through ideological perversions of our material/non-material cultures. Hoping to trace the shifting depictions of trash, excrement, and animal production/slaughter throughout American literature—and to analyze its cultural movement from open arenas to delimited spheres of apprehension within the contemporary—my work explores the current hiddenness surrounding these social products and practices, and reveals the cultural consequences of our misapprehensions. From depictions of excess and animal life within the 19th century poetry of Walt Whitman to Cormac McCarthy’s portrayal of waste and animal slaughter in his contemporary south-western novels, my research details the development of these structures of invisibility through America’s evolving literary interpretations, and reveals how their formation allows our ever-increasing violence towards the natural world to continue without grievability. 

HU 365

Position: PhD Fellow/ Secretary - English Graduate Students Organization (2018-2019)
Email: [email protected]

• PhD – In progress, currently studying at the University at Albany, SUNY.
• MA – English Language and Literature (Concentration in Literature), Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea (2015).
• BA – English Language and Literature, German Language and Literature (double major), Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea (2013).

Research Interests

African American Literature, Multi-Ethnic Literature, Critical Race Theory, Black Ontology, The Black Atlantic, Postcolonial Studies, Memory Studies, Women of Color Feminism

Conference Presentations

• “Cinematic Gaze and Performative Subversion of Racial Embodiment in Django Unchained.” NeMLA, Boston. March 2020.
• “The Sovereign Power and Racialization of Bodies in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” NeMLA, Boston. March 2020.
• “(Un)Seeing the Instructor’s Race: Challenges and Opportunities.” NWSA, San Francisco. November 2019.
• Panelist, “Working in The English-speaking Academia as a Postcolonial Experience: Exclusion and Linguicism Faced by Xenophone Scholars” Roundtable. NWSA, San Francisco. November 2019.
• “Women and Sexuality in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” NeMLA, Washington D.C. March 2019.
• “‘This is Not a Story to Pass On’: Unsettling Continuous Collectivity of Memory in Beloved.” NeMLA, Washington D.C. March 2019.
• “Race, Identity and Diaspora in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” ELLAK, Daejeon, South Korea. December 2016.
• “Inter/Intra-Racial Relations in Don Lee’s Yellow: Stories.” ELLAK, Busan, South Korea. December 2015.
• “L’s Function in Toni Morrison’s Love.” ELLAK, Seoul, South Korea. November 2014.

Publications

• “Sovereignty, Biopower, Immunity: Racialized Bodies in Robinson Crusoe.” English21 Vol. 33.1, March 2020.
• “‘You Couldn’t Overcome the Hatreds of Countries or Race’: Color Consciousness and Pan-Asian Solidarity in Don Lee’s Yellow: Stories.” Journal of English and American Studies Vol. 14, February 2016.
• “Between Narrator and Character: L’s Function in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Journal of English and American Studies Vol. 13, December 2014.

Teaching Experience

Instructor: University at Albany, SUNY (2018-)

• AENG 272 Media, Technology & Culture: Challenges in the 21st Century—Black Bodies on Screen and Page: Afro-Pessimism and Afro-Futurism (Fall 2020)
• AENG 261 American Literary Traditions: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom (Spring 2020)
• AENG 240z American Experiences: Black Lives Now (Fall 2019, Recipient of the StAR Grant)
• AENG 121 Reading Literature: Literary Representations of Slavery (Spring 2019)
• AENG 240z American Experiences: Marginalized Voices in American Literature (Fall 2018)

Lecturer: Far East University, South Korea (2016-2017)
• Introduction to English Composition
• Advanced English Composition

HU 366

Email: [email protected]

Ph.D., English, SUNY Albany (in-progress)
MA, English, SUNY New Paltz (2016) 
B.A., English, B.A. Journalism, SUNY Purchase (2006) 

Audrey Peterson-McCann is a Ph.D. Candidate with a focus in Victorian literature, including both the novel and narratives written for children. Her research areas are animal studies, childhood studies, and ethics, and her dissertation will examine the concatenation of child and nonhuman animal figures in Victorian culture and literature. Most recently she has taught AENG 121 “Reading Literature” and AENG 242 “Science Fiction” at UAlbany. 

 [email protected]

LI 094E

Position: Lecturer, EOP Department and PhD Candidate in English
Email: [email protected]
MFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts

As a poet, former Hip Hop artist, scholar, and social activist, Victorio Reyes Asili focuses his research towards expanding established conceptions of literary poetics to broaden the representation of marginalized voices and the work of artists that utilize poetry as a platform for questioning stations of power. Arguing that Hip Hop is the most widely disseminated formal verse form of contemporary times, his dissertation examines Hip Hop poetics through four interpretive angles: tradition, form, tone, and medium. As a result of his research in Hip Hop, Reyes Asili is a regular presenter at national academic conferences. He is also the winner of the 2018 Phyllis Hurd Liston Prize presented by The Academy of American Poets. His creative work has been published in a wide range of literary journals including The Acentos Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, Word Riot, and Obsidian. His poetry on Hip Hop and other matters has been anthologized in the following collections: It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip Hop,Black Lives Have Always Mattered, andChorus—A Literary Mixtape.  Reyes Asili brings his research into the classroom and has taught multiple courses on the relationship between Hip Hop and literature. He has also taught introductory courses in composition and creative writing, as well as advanced courses in African American literature and poetry. 

Recent Publications

“Ebonics 2000.” Obsidian:Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora,vol. 44.1.June 2018. Print.
“From ‘The Tales of Happiness Santiago’ An Excerpt.” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets. August 2018. Web.
“An Open Letter to the 45th President : #3amcantsleep.” Inauguration Day Poem,Gramma Poetry. January 2017. Web. 

“Insufficient.” Black Lives Have Always Mattered Anthology. New York: 2Leaf Press, 2017. Print.

“Ají Dulce.” Pilgrimage Magazine. Spring 2017. Print. 

“Crown Me #5.”It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip Hop. Ed. PJ Williams and Jason McCall. Minor Arcana Press2016. Print.

“Rant” and “Rant II.” Gramma Poetry.November 2016. Web.

“Winding.” Future Perfect: Picturing the Anthropocene, Poetically. The University at Albany Art Museum. November 2016. Web. 

Recent Conference Presentations

‘“The Poetics of Hip Hop Composition,’ Hip Hop Magic.” Conference on College Composition and Communication.March 2019, Pittsburgh, PA.

“Working Toward Social Justice: Embracing Intersectionality and Advocacy.” 25thDiversity Conference. University at Albany.

“Occult Poetics. Conjuring the 4thVoice to Compose Viable Futures.”Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference. March 2019, San Antonio, TX.

“Have I Said Too Much? The Professor/Student Relationship.” Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference. March 2019, San Antonio, TX.

‘“Step Off – Uncovering the Tone of Oppositionality in Hip Hop Poetics,’ Poetics—‘high’ and ‘low’--of the Neoliberal Era.” College Language Association Conference. March 2018, Chicago, IL.

 “Tuesday's I'm the Teacher, Wednesday's the Student: The Shift from Student to Professor and Back Again.” Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference. March 2018, Tampa Bay, FL.

 “How to Survive a Trump Presidency—Reading the Literary Badassery of Julia de Burgos.” The English Graduate Student Organization Conference. April 2017, University at Albany. 

“Releyendo a Julia de Burgos en la época de Trump y ‘La Promesa’" Middle Atlantic Council Of Latin American Studies Conference. March 2017, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

“The Written Orality of Hip Hop Lyricism.” Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference.February 2017, Washington DC.

“The World Turned Upside Down: Hamilton, An American Musical.” Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference.February 2017, Washington DC.

Office: HU 393
Position: Doctoral Candidate and Lecturer
Email: [email protected]

Degree[s] earned                                               

MA in English, University of Rochester (2011)
BA in History, Bates College (2009)

Research Interest

Shakespeare studies and Shakespeare on screen

Dissertation

“The Role of Film and Television in American Shakespeare Studies: 1940s to 1990s.” (In-Progress)

Teaching

AENG 357: Studies in Drama – Classics of Western Drama course.
AENG 355: Studies in Film – The 1930s Shakespeare Talkies course.
AENG 355: Studies in Film – Shakespeare on Film course.
AENG 346: Studies in Shakespeare – Cross-dressing in the Comedies
AENG 295: Classics of Western Literature course.
AENG 291: British Literary Traditions I course.
AENG 243: Literature and Film – Shakespeare on Film course.
AENG 243: Literature and Film – 1990s Shakespeare Teen Flicks course.
AENG 205Z: Introduction to Writing in English Studies course.
AENG 144: Reading Shakespeare course.
AENG 121: Reading Literature course.

Email: [email protected]

Position: GA/Instructor

Sudarshan Ramani graduated from SFSU with an MA in English Literature in 2018. His MA Thesis was "MIMESIS, ROMANCE, NOVEL: REPRESENTATION OF MILIEU IN THE MONK AND NOSTROMO". He completed his BA in English Literature in India, at Jai Hind College, Mumbai, in 2007. He is currently the Instructor of AENG 121 - Reading Literature - "Criminals, Rogues, Outlaws in Fiction".  Between his BA in 2008 and his immigration to USA in 2016, he spent several years as a published film critic in India. He worked as a reviewer for The Asian Age between 2015 and 2016, and as a film editor for Projectorhead Magazine. His articles have been printed in publications such as "La Furia Umana" (a bilingual Italian-English publication), Economic and Political Weekly, while his biography of director William A. Wellman appeared in Routledge Publications' Fifty Hollywood Directors edited by Yvonne Tasker. 

He's interested in history, literature, cinema, with a special focus on literary topics that break the boundaries of periodization. He's especially interested in the dialogue between English Literature and Continental Literature, on the development of the genre fiction -- i.e. the historical novel, the gothic novel, and the influences literature has taken from other art forms. 

[email protected]

[email protected]

HU 367

Position: PhD Candidate
Email: [email protected]

Caitlin Scheufler is a PhD candidate at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She studies speculative realism, new materialism, and the eighteenth-century novel. She also likes science fiction. Most recently, Caitlin presented her paper "Hutcheson's Passions and Sterne's Ringing Voice" at the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society 31st Annual Conference, Networks of Enlightenment, in Glasgow, Scotland. She teaches Writing and Critical Inquiry, Reading Literature with a focus on counterculture, and Science Fiction courses at the University at Albany. 

HU 374

Position: Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: [email protected]

Yolande Schutter is focusing her research on Francophone Algerian poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries, Translation Studies, and Postcolonial Theory. Her poetry and her translations have been featured in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature, Eleven Eleven, Rattapallax, and CELAAN Revue du Centre d’Études des Littératures et des Arts d’Afrique du Nord. She was co-Editor of the University of Oxford book Marivaudage: théories et pratiques d’un discours.

Degree(s) earned and location

BA The Evergreen State College, M.A. Carnegie Mellon University

Research Interests

20th Century American Literature, History of Criticism and Theory, The American University, Aesthetics and Politics

Select Publications

"Mind in its Purest Play: Imagination, Politics, and Reading" in Conference Proceedings of "The Natural History and Reading" UW 2010.

“Review: Life, Literature, and Modernity”. in MLN Vol. 124 Num. 5, 2010.

3 Poems published in The Monongahela Review Issue 3, Winter 2009
(www.monreview.com)

Select Conference Presentations

“Why I (Still) Read Poetry”
Carnegie Mellon University: LCS Colloquium Roundtable: Defend Your
Studies! April 1st, 2010

“Allegorical Desire and the Repression/Representation of the Real.”
SUNY Stony Brook: Graduate Conference: The Desire for
Representation/The Desire of Representation, February 21st, 2009

“Troublesome Symbols, or Reading as Hawthorne Asks Us To.”
Stockholm University: Metaphor Festival September 18-19th, 2008

“Problems of Belief and Authority in Hawthorne’s Salem: A Pragmatic Approach.”
University of Washington: Graduate Conference: Transcendentalism in
America, Spring 2006

Select Fellowships and Awards:

Raymond Williams Fellowship in Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon, 2008-2009

Email:
[email protected]

[email protected]

 [email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

HU 377

Position: Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

Janna Urschel is a PhD student in Creative Writing. She is especially interested in literatures that play with nonanthropocentrism and in activating the narrative prospects afforded by new materialist theories, such as the work of Timothy Morton and Graham Harman in object-oriented ontology, Jane Bennett's vital materialism, and Bruno Latour's actor-network theory. Janna is presently at work on a short story cycle that opens the door to a fictional practice of entering into “assembly” with the nonhuman.

She serves as Prose Editor for Barzakh Magazine and coordinator of the Creative Professionalization Colloquium. She has taught courses in First-year Composition, First-year Collegiate Seminar, Writing for Critical Inquiry, American Experiences, and Creative Writing.

[email protected]

HU 365

Position: PhD Candidate, EGSO President 2018-2019
Email: [email protected]

A passionate educator and researcher, Kasey Waite is interested in the formation of the novel, the post-secular turn, and aesthetics of sympathy/pity in 18th century British literature. Her dissertation attempts to situate a new reading of the 18th century British novel which seeks to situate its secularity and sacredness equally. Her recent publications include "The Spark of Kindness: The Rhetoric of Abolitionist Action in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" in the Rocky Mountain Review of Literature and a translation of “Wulf and Eadwacer” in the Metamorphosis Journal of Literary Translation. Additionally, she has presented multiple papers at NEMLA, PAMLA and other national conferences. Some of her courses taught in residency include: Reading Literature, American Experiences and Science Fiction. Kasey served as EGSO President 2018-2019. 

BA in English Literature, University at Albany

Research interests

Medieval Drama and Performance, Middle English Literature, Theories of Space, Writing Pedagogy

Dissertation Title:
“Christ at the Gates of the Minster: Drama and Civic Space in Later Medieval York”

Select Publications

“Julie Taymor's Titus: Visualizing Shakespeare's Language and Ideas on Screen,” in
In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008.

Select Conference Presentations

“Representing Civic Identity through Visual Performance: Later Medieval York, Its
Visual and Performance Arts,” CEMERS Conference, Binghamton University,
SUNY, October 2006

“Space and Cultural Performance in York,” International Medieval Congress, Western
Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2005

“Civic Space and Its Influence on Received Meaning in Medieval Drama,” CHATS
Conference, University at Albany, Albany, NY, April 2005

Select Awards

Conference Travel Award, Department of English, University at Albany, Spring 2005
Graduate Student Organization Travel Award, University at Albany, Spring 2005
Teaching Assistantship, English Department, University at Albany, 2001-5

Select Teaching Experience

ENG355: Shakespeare on Film
ENG291: British Literary Traditions
ENG346: Shakespeare’s Power Plays
ENG 422: Literature of the Earlier Renaissance

[email protected]

HU 361

Position: Co-Assistant Director of the University Writing Center and Lecturer/ Ph.D Candidate
Office: (518) 442-4095
Email: [email protected]

BA summa cum laude (2008) 
MA in English Literature (2010), East West University, Bangladesh

Sarah Zahed is a doctoral candidate in Modern Israeli and Palestinian Literature, postcolonial, comparative, and world literature. Currently, she is working on her doctoral dissertation titled “Contrapuntal Aesthetics: Reading Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish Together.” Her research interests include contemporary Hebrew and Arabic writing specific to Israel/Palestine; the modern Arabic and Hebrew renaissance movements; the revision of Modern Hebrew and Palestinian literary history (Haskalah, Nakba to present) particularly as a critique of western modernity. Sarah is interested in the politics of transnational and cross-cultural circulation of literature, specifically of Israel/Palestine. Following the legacy of Edward Said, intellectually and theoretically, Sarah seeks to advocate for the Palestinian cause and demonstrate contrapuntal research to enable literary coherence and newer interpretation of Israel/Palestine conflict based on humanistic ideals and ethical responsibilities.

Teaching profile

Sarah is the co-assistant director of the University at Albany’s Writing Center. 
As a Lecturer, she teaches courses titled Reading Literature: Introduction to Contemporary Israeli and Palestinian Literature, Living Literatures: Ingathering of the Exiles—political experiences of the 21st century, World Literature and Short Stories. Sarah’s teaching objective is to initiate conversations about what we understand as the canon of texts, and extend that understanding to equip ourselves with a perspective, a methodology, or a way of reading literature that transcends national boundaries and opens new modes of understanding.