Vanessa Aguilar (PhD 2023)
Dissertation: “Latinx Spiritualities Archived in Young Adult Speculative Fiction.”
Assistant Professor, New Mexico State University (2023)

Emily Yates (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “Something Rich and Strange: Estrangement and Adaptation in Shakespeare’s Romances.”
Lecturer, Clemson University (2023)

Christine Peffer
Associate Director & Managing Editor, Neworks, H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online (2022)

Hanan Aly (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “The Representation of Dispossession in the Diasporic Literature of the Middle East and Maghreb from the late 1950s to the present.”
Fixed-Term Assistant Professor in WRAC, James Madison at Michigan State University

Lance Conley (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “Lovecraft’s Wake: Pessimism and Contemporary Weird Fiction.”
Lecturer, Department of Liberal Arts, Kettering University (2022)

Marisa Mercurio (PhD 2023)
Dissertation: “What is the Law? What is a Lady?: The Female Detective in the Long Nineteenth-Century Novel.”
Editorial Coordinator, Michigan Publishing (2022)

Sandy Burnley (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “Critical Entanglements: Animals in Victorian Fiction.”
Assistant Professor, Center for Integrative Studies, Michigan State University (2022)

Kylene Cave (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “Investigating Cognition in Howard Engel’s Memory Book: Literary Interventions and Intercessions in Scientific Models of Memory.”
Assistant Professor of English, Andrews University (2022)

Asif Iqbal (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “Two Partitions: Postcolonial Culture and Nation in Bangladeshi and South Asian Anglophone Literatures.”
Visiting Assistant Professor in English, Oberlin College (2022)

June Oh (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “The Aging Mind and Body in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, 1680-1830.”
Assistant Professor, Department of Literatures and Languages, University of Texas at Tyler (2022)

Jess Travers (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “Queer Lessons in Subject Formation: Learning from AIDS & Sex.”
Communications Advisor, Michigan House Democrats (2022)

Justin Wigard (PhD 2022)
Dissertation: “Level 101: A Video Game About Video Games.”
Postdoctoral Fellow, Digital Viewing Lab, University of Richmond (2022)

Bria Harper (PhD 2021)
Dissertation: “#Blackgirlsouth: Mapping Blackgirl Quare Geographic Possibilities in the Literary Imagination.”
Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Wofford College (2021)

Briona Jones (PhD 2021)
Dissertation: “The Black Lesbian Has Decolonized Her Body.”
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut (2021)

Amrutha Kunapulli (PhD 2021)
Dissertation: “Situating Tamil Cinema.”
Visiting Assistant Professor in Film & Digital Media Studies, Department of English Language and Literature, Wofford College (2021)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies, Colby College (2022)

Mitch Ploskonka (PhD 2021)
Dissertation: ““We are the bad poor”: Grit Lit, Genre, and White Trash Identity.”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute (2022)

Zack Kruse (PhD 2020)
Dissertation: “Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity”
Assistant Professor, Fixed-Term, Department of English, Michigan State University (2020)
Assistant Professor of English, Albany State University (2021)

Anna Green (PhD 2020)
Dissertation: “The Aesthetics of Urban Precarity”
English Instructor, Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (2020)

Katherine Greulich (PhD 2020)
Dissertation: “Fieldwork: Ecological Pedagogy in Modern Fiction and Film
Academic Collaborations and Engagement Coordinator, Eli and Edythe” Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2020)

Sarah Panuska (PhD 2020)
Dissertation: “Other Camp: Rethinking Camp, the 1990s, and the Politics of Visibility”
Instructor, Office of the Provost, Michigan State University (2020)

Cody Mejeur (PhD 2019)
Dissertation: “Ludonarrative: Queer Experiences, Embodied Stories, and Playful Realities in Video Games”
Assistant Professor, Department of Media Study, The University at Buffalo (2021)

Garth Sabo (PhD 2019)
Dissertation: “Gut Feelings: Human Waste and Signs of Health in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature”
Assistant Professor, Fixed-Term, Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University

Jessica Kane (PhD 2019)
Dissertation: “Women Writing Men: Genre, Narrative Authority, and “Mind Writing,” 1752-1817”
Assistant Professor, Fixed-Term, Department of English, Michigan State University (2019)
Associate Director of Community-Engaged Learning, Albion College, Albion, Michigan (2020)

Sun Jai Kim (PhD 2019)
Dissertation: “Rereading “Misery”: Working-Class Women on the Move in British Novels from the 1850s to the 1890s”
Lecturer, English Literature, Chung-Ang University, Sungkyunkwan University, and Sangmyung University, Seoul, South Korea

Laura McGrath (PhD 2018)
Dissertation: “Middlemen: Making Literature in the Age of Multimedia Conglomerates”
Associate Director of the Literary Lab and Postdoctoral Fellow in English, Stanford University (2018)
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Temple University (2020)

David Watson (PhD 2018)
Dissertation: “Brooding on the Vast Abyss: The History, Theory, and Consequence of Alternative Fictional Worlds”
Adjunct Lecturer, Liberal Studies, Kettering University

Steven Ambrose (PhD 2017)
Dissertation: “Lesbians; How Novel”
Affiliated Faculty, Department of English, Emerson College, Boston Massachusetts

Erin Beard (PhD 2017)
Dissertation: “The Limits of Sympathy: Narrative Interventions in the Ethics of Philanthropy in the Late Victorian Novel and Philanthropic Organizational Texts”
Faculty Member, English, United World College, Dilijan, Armenia

Patrick Prominski (PhD 2017)
Dissertation: “Seasoning and Snakebites: Popular Authors and the Professionalization of the Physician on the American Frontier, 1815-1830” 
Adjunct Faculty, Department of English, Grand Rapids Community College

Jennifer Royston (PhD 2017)
Dissertation: “Poisoning the Viewer: The Status of Drama and Dramatists, Paintings and Painters in Renaissance England” 
Instructor, Department of English, University of Toledo 

Abdulhamit Arvas (PhD 2016)
Dissertation: “Traveling Sexualities, Circulating Bodies, and Early Modern Anglo-Ottoman Encounters”
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY (2016)
Assistant Professor, Department of Theater and Dance, University of California, Santa Barbara (2018)
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania (2020)

Stephen Grandchamp (PhD 2016)
Dissertation: “Accounting for Failure: Arresting Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1805 – 1891”
Visiting Assistant Professor of the Humanities, Department of Liberal Studies, Kettering University, Flint, MI (2016-17) 
Digital and Public Humanities Postdoctorate Fellow, University of Maine at Farmington (2018)
Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Illinois Wesleyan University, funded by the Mellon Foundation (2017-18)
Assistant Professor of Literature and Digital Humanities, University of Maine Farmington (2020)

Eunah Lee (PhD 2016)
Dissertation: “The Sensibility of the Adopted: Trauma and Childhood in the Contemporary Literature and Cinema of East Asia and Its Diaspora”
Assistant Professor Fixed-Term, Department of English, Michigan State University  

Lisa Barksdale-Shaw (PhD 2015) 
Dissertation: “Tainted Proofs: Staging Written Evidence in Early Modern Drama”
Erikson-Scholar-in-Residence, Erikson Institute for Education and Research at the Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, MA (2016)
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Arizona State University (2021)

Cajetan Iheka (PhD 2015)
Dissertation: “African Literature and the Environment: A Study in Postcolonial Ecocriticism”
Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies and Department of English, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Yale University (2019)

Hyunsoo Jang (PhD 2015) 
Dissertation: “‘I Question It Myself’: Mid-Victorian Novels’ Formation of Ethical Subjectivity and the Liberal Reform of Inheritance Laws”
Adjunct Faculty, Lorain County Community College, Elyria, OH

Faith Kirk (PhD 2015) 
Dissertation: “Troubled Vision: Interrogating the Visual Protocols of 20th Century Ethnographic Literary and Cinematic Travelogues”
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI 

Andrew Kranzman (PhD 2015)
Dissertation: “‘Pictures…of a Good Subject’: Friendship, the Commonwealth, and the Care of the Self in Early Modern Literature and Culture”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Modesto Junior College, Modesto, CA

Nicole McCleese (PhD 2015) 
Dissertation: “Masochistic Time: Narrative Delay, Historical Performativity, and Sadomasichism in Contemporary Literature”
Lecturer, Department of English Language and Literature, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI
Assistant Professor, Fixed-Term, Department of English, Michigan State University

Rituparna Mitra (PhD 2015)
Dissertation: “States of Affect: Trauma in Partition/Post-Partition South Asia”
Visiting Assistant Professor, James Madison College, Michigan State University

Connor Ryan (PhD 2015) 
Dissertation: “Lagos Never Spoils: The Aesthetics, Affect, and Politics of the City in Nigerian Screen Media”
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Michigan State University (2015)
Assistant Professor, Department of Film Studies, University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica (2016)

Kate Birdsall (PhD 2014) 
Dissertation: “Becoming a Better Me: The Co-Evolution of Contemporary American Memoir and Bestselling Self-Help Literature, 1952-2013” 
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University 

Michelle Kathleen Parke (PhD 2014) 
Dissertation: “‘Bold at the Desk and the Stove’: The Re-imagining of American Cuisine in the Work of M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child” 
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Carroll Community College, Westminster, MD 

Nels Olson (PhD 2014) 
Dissertation: “Revolutionary Nostalgia: The Search for Democracy in Antebellum American Romantic Histories”
Writing Mentor, Writing Center, Western Governors University, Salt Lake City, UT 

Shannon Sears (PhD 2014) 
Dissertation: “Vacancy: Mental Emptiness in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel”
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Michigan State University  

Timothy Bielawski (PhD 2013)
Dissertation: “States of Savagery: Cannibalism and the Political in Postwar Fiction”
Instructor, Department of English, University of Miami, Miami, FL 

Kathryn Caccavaio (PhD 2013) 
Dissertation: “Atlantic Moments: Mother/Child Relations and Hemispheric Migration in Late Twentieth-Century Narratives by New World Women Writers
Adjunct Professor, Department of English, Niagara County Community College, Sanborn, NY; Medaille College, Buffalo, NY 

Anna Feuerstein (PhD 2013) 
Dissertation: “Victorian Animal Subjects: Power, Alterity, and Animal Subjectivity in Victorian Literature and Culture”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Hawaii (2015)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 

Srijani Ghosh (PhD 2013) 
Dissertation: “From Chantilly Lace to Chanel: Commodity Worship in Chick Lit ” 
Lecturer, Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley (2015)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Michigan State University 

Geoffrey A. Johns (PhD 2013) Dissertation: “Deformed Subjects and Transgressive Bodies: Inwardness and Monstrosity in Early Modern Popular Culture”
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Michigan State University; 
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Alma College, Alma, MI 

Matthew Bowman (PhD 2012)
Dissertation: “Eat Me: An Un/(Re)-Materializing the Material On the Stage-A Study of the Cannibalistic Nature of the Theatre; Or, There is (No) Material; the Text and the Body are the Same” 
Faculty, English Program, Lansing Community College, Lansing, MI 

Sarah Hamblin (PhD 2012) 
Dissertation: “Screening the Impossible: The Politics of Form and Feeling in Second Wave Revolutionary Cinema”
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English / Film Studies, Loyola University, New Orleans, LA
Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA

Megan Inbody (PhD 2012) 
Dissertation: “Town/Gown Relations: The Forms and Functions of Female Gossip Communities and Networks in Early Modern Comedy”
Executive Director, Montcalm Area Reading Council, Greenville, MI (since May 2015)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Michigan State University 

Elizabeth Pellerito (PhD 2012) 
Dissertation: “Gothic Taxonomies: Heredity and Sites of Domestication in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction” 
Staff, Union of United Academics, University of Oregon (2015)
Organizer, Union of Non-Tenure Track Faculty, Michigan State University 

Jennifer Toms (PhD 2012) 
Dissertation: “Subject to the Nation: Official Nationalism, the Myth of the Island Nation and the Literature of Early Modern England”
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Michigan State University 
Lecturer, Department of English, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 

Inna Volkova (PhD 2012) 
Dissertation: “‘There is something in all this very like democracy’: Cultures of Political Discussion in the Victorian Novel”
Departmental Analyst, Office of the Attorney General, State of Michigan 

Candis Driver Smith (PhD 2011) 
Dissertation: “Bwana Asifiwe in the USA: Language and Identity in East African Christian Fellowships”
Visiting Lecturer in ESL, Department of Second Language Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 

Lauren Mason (PhD 2011) 
Dissertation: “Postcards from the Edge-City: Mass-Media and Photographic Images in Contemporary Novels of the Black Diaspora” 
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
Instructor of English and First-Year Experience Program, Armstrong Atlantic University, Savannah, GA  

Hugh O’Connell (PhD 2011) 
Dissertation: “International Nationalisms: Nation, World, Event in Postcolonial Anglophone and Postimperial British Literatures”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA (2016) 

Amrita Sen (PhD 2011) 
Dissertation: “Trading India: Commerce, Spectacle, and Otherness, in Early Modern England” 
Assistant Professor, English Department, Oklahoma City College, Oklahoma City, OK (now tenured) 

Aryn Bartley (PhD 2010) 
Dissertation: “Encountering Democracy: The Citizen-Witness in 20th Century U.S. Literature”
Faculty Instructor, Language, Literature, & Communication, Lane Community College, Eugene, OR 

Brian Holcomb (PhD 2010) 
Dissertation: “Between Word and Meaning: Wit, Modernism, and Perverse Narrative”
Specialist, Fixed-Term Faculty, Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University 

Brian Olszewski (PhD 2010)
Dissertation: “Formal Reactions: Play and the Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel”
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Michigan State University
Adjunct Faculty, Department of English, Radford University, Radford, VA 

Barbara Postema (PhD 2010) Dissertation: “Mind the Gap: Absence as Signifying Function in Comics”
Research Fellow, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada 

Michelle Veenstra (PhD 2010) 
Dissertation: “Travels with Einstein: The Uneasy Relativity of Modernist Travelogues”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Francis Marion University, Florence, SC 

Kristina Banister-Quynn (PhD 2009) Dissertation: “Gendered Moves: Mobile Subjects in Atlantic Rim Literature” 
Faculty, Department of English, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, Alma College, Alma, MI 

Huang-Hua Chen (PhD 2009) 
Dissertation: “The Other Enlightenment: Excess and the Epistolary Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century”
Assistant Professor, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan 

Melissa Fore (PhD 2009) 
Dissertation: “The Perfect Alibi: The Law and Social Taboo in Representations of Interracial Desire”
Assistant Professor, James Madison College, Michigan State University 

Maureen Lauder (PhD 2009) 
Dissertation: “Blind Spots and Sight Lines: Vision, Identification, and the Narrator Function”
Teach for America 

Parama Sarkar (PhD 2009) 
Dissertation: “Consuming India: Identity, Commodity, Culture and Indians in Britain”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Toledo, OH (now tenured) 

Inchol Yoo (PhD 2009) 
Dissertation: “Language, Knowledge, and Power: The Politics of Chaucer’s Translation”
Instructor, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea 

Kelly Battles (PhD 2008) 
Dissertation: “The Antiquarian Impulse: History, Affect, and Material Culture in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Literature”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Maryville College, Maryville, TN 

Emron Esplin (PhD 2008) 
Dissertation: “Racial Mixture and Civil War: The Histories of the U.S. South and Mexico in the Novels of Wiliam Faulkner and Carlos Feuntes”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 

Scott Henkel (PhD 2008) 
Dissertation: “Leaves of Grassroots Politics: Democracy, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, SUNY – Binghamton, NY 

Hilary Kowino (PhD 2008) 
Dissertation: “The Problem of Home and Space in African Literature: Reconciling Multiple Belongings and Unbelongings in the Global Age”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Minnesota – Duluth, MN (now tenured) 

Krishna Manavalli (PhD 2008) 
Dissertation: “Invented Traditions and Regional Identities: A Study in the Cultural Foundations of South India, 1856-1990s”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 

Kayode Ogunfolabi (PhD 2008) 
Dissertation: “History, Horror, Reality: The Idea of the Marvelous in Postcolonial Fiction”
Assistant Professor, Department of English, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV