English PhD Students

Kayla Adgate is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she specializes in British literature of the long eighteenth century. Her research interests include animal studies and the environmental humanities. She is currently completing her dissertation, titled “Horse Racing and Biopolitics in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century” under the direction of Dr. Richard Barney. She teaches courses in literature and the environmental humanities such as “The Gothic Anthropocene” (ENG 226), “British Literary Traditions II: Imagining “Nature” from the Restoration through the Modern Period” (ENG 292), “Animals in Children's Literature” (ENG 359) and “The Posthuman and the Short Story” (ENG 223). In addition, she also teaches composition courses in the Writing and Critical Inquiry program such as “The Ecological Dystopia” and “Nature Writing” (ENG 110Z). She also works as an Assistant Director in the University at Albany Writing Center.

Andrew Butt is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he specializes in transatlantic modernist literature and German intellectual history. His primary area of expertise is in the modernist novel, and he has additional expertise in the Frankfurt School, pessimism, affect theory and the historical development of the horror genre. He is currently completing his dissertation “‘To become interesting:’ An Approach to Affect and Reason in Modernist Literature” under the direction of Dr. Paul Stasi. He teaches courses in transatlantic modernism, horror/science fiction, and writing, such as “Science Fiction: From Weird and Inner Space” (ENG 242), “The [Horror] Short Story” (ENG 223), and “Reading Literature: Fiction and Philosophy” (ENG 121). He was awarded the 2018 President’s Medal for Outstanding Student from SUNY Buffalo State University during his time as an EOP student. He has published a book review in Walt Whitman Quarterly and has presented on the works of H.P. Lovecraft at the International Gothic Association’s 2019 “Gothic Terror, Gothic Horror” conference in Romeoville, Illinois.

Graduate Assistant

BA English, BA Asian Studies Japanese Language, and Minor in Philosophy from William Paterson University (2015), MA 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.

PhD Candidate, Lecturer in English

HUM 339

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. 

PhD Student, GTA, Secretary EGSO (2020-2021)

• PhD – English (Literature), University at Albany, SUNY. (In progress)
• MPhil – English Literature, Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan. (2013)
• BA 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

Minji Huh is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University at Albany, SUNY, specializing in eighteenth-century British literature. Her research focuses on the British Enlightenment and Romanticism, specifically examining their engagement with the history of medical science and environmental knowledge. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Precarious Environment: Medico-Ecological Politics in Eighteenth-Century Writings, 1700–1830,” under the supervision of Professor Richard Barney. Her teaching portfolio spans the medical and environmental humanities and postcolonial studies, including “AI and the Postcolonial Cyborg in Literature” (ENG 242), “Narratives of Immunity and Community” (ENG 271), and “Postcolonial Literary Traditions” (ENG 297). In 2026, she was awarded the Graduate Research Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) for her essay, “Biopolitics, Racialization, and Frankenstein,” and was nominated for the Spark Award for excellence in first-year teaching. Her published work includes “A Physiological Approach to Frankenstein: A Variation on the Gothic Sublime” in The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture and “Embodied allegory in Sorry to Bother You: art, performance and movement in neoliberal capitalist ruins” in JUMP CUT: A Review of Contemporary Media. Additionally, she has contributed book reviews to leading journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Configurations.

Graduate Teaching Assistant, Vice-President EGSO

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.

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 BA in English Literature and French from the University of Florida, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa, and an MFA 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. 

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

Graduate Assistant

HU 388

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.

Gunok Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research focuses on late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone literature, with a particular emphasis on modernism. Her primary area of the intersections of media technology and media theory and mediation, examining how literary texts register shifts in perception, language and cultural imaginaries. Under the direction of Dr. Paul Stasi, she is working on her dissertation which examines techno-mediated literary imagination in modernist fiction. She teaches courses in modernist literature, such as “Media, Technology and Challenges in the 21st century” (ENG 272). 

Hanbyul Kim is a Ph. D. student in English at the University at Albany, SUNY. His research interests include modern and contemporary poetry, environmental humanities and postcolonial literature. His work examines how poetry and landscape register memory, displacement, colonial history and ecological vulnerability, with particular attention to non-Western poetry and postcolonial ecocriticism. He teaches Reading Literature (AENG 121) and has experience as a Writing Center tutor. His teaching emphasizes close reading, student voice and literature as lived experience.

Timothy Laberge is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he specializes in twentieth-century American literature. His primary expertise is the post-45 American novel, with additional interests in Marxist theories of literature, ecology and dispossession, novel form, postcolonialism and film. He is currently completing his dissertation, titled “Dispatches from a Dying World: Nature & the Postmodern American Novel (1977-1997),” under the direction of Professor Paul Stasi. The dissertation advances eco-Marxist readings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon. He teaches courses in American literature and culture as well as global Anglophone literature, such as “Frontier Fictions” (ENG 261), “Class, Race, & Gender in the American Novel” (ENG 271), “The Persistence of Empire” (ENG 297) and “Reflections on American Horror Media” (110). 

Writing Center HU 140

Degrees:

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)

Graduate Teaching Assistant

HU 353

Degrees:

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

Courses Taught:

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

Faezeh Mohajeri is a Ph.D. student in English at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research engages biopolitics, environmental humanities, affect theory and nonhuman studies, with a recent focus on slimy marine creatures in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature. She teaches courses in global and American literature and culture, including World Literature: Animals, Environment, and the Human Imagination (ENG 222) and Living Literature: Challenges of the 21st Century (ENG 270), and has also worked as a Writing Center tutor. Her works have appeared in Primerjalna književnost, Comparative Literature: East & West, Anglo Saxonica, and Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. She is the author of “Thinness as the Object of Happiness: Mimetic Desire and Eating Disorder in Carmen Machado’s ‘Eight Bites’,” forthcoming in Journal of Food, Culture & Society.

[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    

PhD Student & Teaching Assistant

HU 353

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. 

PhD Fellow, Secretary, English Graduate Students Organization (2018-2019)

HU 365

• 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

Aaron Puerzer is a Ph.D. student at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he specializes in post-45 American literature. His research interests center on archival theory, especially in the historical narratives of postwar and postmodernist literature. He currently teaches “Reading Literature,” (ENG 121), an introductory course with a particular focus on literary connections in Albany. He also has experience as a Writing Center tutor.

Sudarshan Ramani is a PH. D candidate in English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he specializes in the History of the Novel, from the 18th Century to early 20th Century Modernism. He has additional expertise in Cinema, Comparative Literature and Writing and Critical Inquiry. He is currently completing his dissertation, titled “Modernism and Romance: Within Empire, Amidst Exile" under the direction of Professor Paul Stasi. He has taught courses on Satire, Adaptation of Literature into Film, “Criminals in Literature and Film”, Global Modernism. He has published articles of film and literary criticism on “William Wellman” (Fifty Hollywood Directors, Routledge, 2014) “Tea, Roti, or Butter: A sentence from Finnegans Wake” (Living in Languages, Vol. 1, 2021), as well as articles for Economic & Political Weekly, The Asian Age newspaper and online journals such as La Furia Umana and Projectorhead.

Megan Wilson is a Ph. D. candidate in English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she studies American poetry and poetics in the second half of the twentieth century. Her research areas include experimental and feminist poetics. She teaches both reading courses, such as “Reading Literature” (ENG 121), and creative writing courses, including “Intro to Creative Writing” (ENG 102z) and an upper-level workshop, “Creative Writing - Poetry” (ENG 302z).