Graduate Students
Rebecca Aberle
Ecocriticism and Environmental Justice; 20th and 21st Century American Literature; Poetry and Poetics; Craft Studies
Soomin Ahn
A first-year PhD student interested in the writings of displaced and oppressed communities and environmental literature. With a BA in English and a minor in Environmental Studies from Brandeis University, Soomin works to connect her understanding of the humanities with relevant STEM topics. When not working toward her degree, Soomin runs a small knitting pattern business, fostering a community of politically active fiber artists.
Inayah Avant
Inayah’s research interests include 20th century African American literature, Southern Studies, and ecocriticism.
Gia Bacchetta
A third-year PhD student specializing in nineteenth-century American literature. She holds a BA in English and Spanish from Vanderbilt University.
Omid Bagherli
A PhD candidate specializing in late-twentieth and twenty-first century literature, with interests in psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical theory. His dissertation focuses on the representation of historical recovery and redress in contemporary non-fiction and film, paying special attention to the work of Saidiya Hartman, WG Sebald, and Rebecca Solnit among others. A Fulbright student, he holds an MA from Bristol University, UK. His work is forthcoming in C21 Literature and Postmodern Culture.
Andy Bainbridge
Andy Bainbridge (she/her) is a first-year PhD student. She received a BA in English from the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she received her MA in Early Modern Studies from the University College London. Andy's general research domain is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture.
Ginde Baker
A first year PhD student interested in 19th century British literature and Black literature in North America and the Hispanic Caribbean. She completed her thesis, "The Birth and Adolescence of a Movement: Negritud Literature of Puerto Rico" at Union College (NY) in 2023 where she received her BA in English and Spanish.
Jacob Cartwright
19th century British and American Literature, Print Culture, Literature and Science.
Neela Cathelain
Theory of the novel, migration, transnational literature
Kyung Seo Chung
A third-year PhD student whose research interests include long eighteenth century British literature, cultural analysis, materialism, mobility, objects, and space.
Charles Clements
Charlie’s dissertation, “Literature Without Relation: Immanence and Expression in Modernity and its Aftermaths” explores the metaphysical assumptions of 20th-century Irish and British fiction with a particular emphasis on the issues of form and non-knowledge. His other interests include Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, women in surrealism, occultism and epistemology, sexuality and transgression, the grotesque, and Samuel Beckett.
Ryan Daubenmire
Ryan Daubenmire is a first-year PhD student from Northern California. Prior to attending Tufts, he received his B.A. from the University California, Berkeley and his M.A. from the University of Chicago. His interests lie at the intersection of cognitive literary studies, the medical humanities, neuroaesthetics, and trauma and affect theory. His research centers around literature's ability to communicate subjective states of mind, connecting with readers and eliciting various physiological responses in the brain. Moving forward, he aims to explore the reciprocative relationship between literature and the brain: how literary devices—particularly metaphor—allow for the expression and conveyance of trauma, as well as how the brain correspondingly facilitates these mechanisms.
Paul Driskill
Paul received his MA from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2017. He is interested in how nineteenth-century British literature and science represented humans and non-human animals. His dissertation considers how mixed-species individuals embodied anxieties about the post-Darwinian status of humans.
Nina Francisco
Nina Francisco is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the English department. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century literature, history and theory of the novel, archival studies, genre studies, and theories of reading.
Jordan Green
A PhD candidate specializing in British Romantic literature. Her research interests include medicine and literature, affect theory, madness and nervous disorders, and women’s writing, particularly how Romantic conceptions of obsession shape the construction of character. In 2022, she received the Edna Steeves Prize for her paper “Reading the Performing Body: Lady Delacour’s Theatrical Knowledge in Belinda” at the annual NEASECS conference. She currently serves as co-chair of the Graduate Student Caucus for NASSR. She holds a BA and MA from the University of Alabama.
Gursheen Guron
Gursheen Guron (she/her) is a PhD candidate specializing in British literature within the long 19th century. Her research interests include spatial analysis, marginalization and liminality, gender and sexuality, imperial archives, and postcolonial studies. She holds a BA from the University of California, Riverside.
Allison Hanna
A writer and educator who is most animated by critical pedagogies, the intersections of scholarship and activism, and walking in the woods. Allison has previously served as a graduate instructor in the Tufts First Year Writing Program, and currently teaches American literature courses in Boston. Their research is focused on uncovering the roots of today’s era of mass incarceration through American literature. Allison’s forthcoming dissertation “Antebellum Carceral: imagining confinement and freedom before abolition” concerns the maintenance of carceral power embedded in a selection of nineteenth-century American texts that have been critically identified as broadly emancipatory.
Hannah Herndon
A writer and educator whose interests include multiethnic American literature, sexual violence, sound studies, girlhood studies, and anti-racist writing pedagogy. Hannah works as the Writing Resources Specialist at Tufts’ Student Accessibility and Academic Resource Center, where she tutors writing, teaches writing pedagogy, and directs the Writing Fellows Program. Her dissertation, “Listening to Survivors: Multiethnic American Women’s Writing about Sexual Violence (1797-2019), focuses on the long history of rape culture in the United States as manifested and resisted through language, sound, and the politics of listening. Most recently, her writing has been published in #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Assault and Rape Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
Sarah Iuli
18th and 19th century British Literature, ecocriticism
Ketan Jain
A third-year PhD student who is interested in the intersections between longing, desire, and identity. His research interests include critical theory (queer, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial) and 20th-21st century global anglophone literature. He received a BA Hons. in English from Ashoka University in Delhi. Apart from academia, he also works with arts and media approaches for social/political impact in South Asia.
Ciara Keogh
A second-year PhD whose research interests include ecocriticism, poetry, and Black Women's Literature. She received a BA in English from Trinity University. Currently she is serving as a social outreach co-chair for the Tufts English Graduate Organization.
Spencer Lane
A fourth-year PhD candidate studying the form and function of literatures of the American West, asking how representations of the Western landscape participated in and justified westward expansion in the long nineteenth century. His research interests include ecocriticism, new materialisms, narratology, critical theory, and American studies more broadly. He received a BA from Concordia University, Irvine, in 2016 and an MA from Portland State University in 2020.
Jessica Maloney
Jessica Maloney is a PhD candidate whose research interests include medieval literature, Arthuriana and chivalric romances, ecofeminism, folklore, interconnecting ecologies, and rhizomatic epistemologies.
Kara McCabe
Kara has her BA and MAT from Union College (NY) and her MA from Middlebury College (VT). Kara teaches courses on gender, eroticism, and monstrousness at Tufts University, Emerson College, and Boston College. Her research focuses on how and where occult knowledge appears in texts during the early modern period. Her dissertation, titled "Staged Magic: Dramatizations of Early Modern Witchcraft," argues that women's epistemologies are corrupted through dramatizations of witchcraft. Kara's other research interests include theories of disgust, the body and maternity, and cultural criticism.
Roshad Meeks
A literary critic and educator, questions of literary figuration and ecocriticism in African American literature animate his work on the page and in the classroom. His dissertation, "Black Nature: A Poetic Study of African American Nature Writing in the Black Arts Movement," supervised by Jess Keiser, focuses on black writers' rhetorical response to nature and the broader ecological vision communicated in 20th century African American literature. He is an inaugural WISE Distinguished Graduate Fellow at Worcester State University, and his writing appears in POETRY and Black Perspectives. He has served as a Graduate Student Representative for Tufts's Academic Committee and Juneteenth Committee. He is a member of the National Council for Black Studies and Assoc. for the Study of African American Life and History.
Lee Nevitt
The 19th-Century American Novel, Queer Theory, Regional Literatures, Sex and Sexuality, Architecture, and Cinema Studies
Iriowen Ojo
Iriowen Ojo is a second-year PhD student whose research interests include psychology, memory, trauma, and nostalgia, along with race, gender, and sexuality studies. She received a BA in comparative literature from Harvard in 2019.
Casey O'Reilly
Victorian Literature, Gothic Literature, feminist theory, queer theory
Emily Palermo
A PhD candidate whose scholarship centers on the intersections of affective and eco-critical approaches to contemporary literature, with a particular interest in works from the American South. In addition to her work as a Program Associate in the Office of Scholar Development at Tufts, Emily also teaches writing and literature courses at Tufts and Boston College. Her dissertation—How to Feel Southern: Mapping Affective Geographies of the American South—examines the triangulation of affect, history, and land in cultivating attachments to the South across the collective imaginary of the U.S. She has a forthcoming publication in Mississippi Quarterly, entitled “‘Even in a place of sorrow, even in a place of joy’: Intersections of Blackness and Southernness in the Works of bell hooks and Honoreé Fanonne Jeffers.”
Ben Papsun
A PhD candidate with interests that include literary and critical theory, jazz studies and improvisation, race, and discourses of rationality. He received a BA in English from Vassar College with minors in music composition and philosophy, and an MPhil in English from Cambridge University.
Taylor Parrish
Contemporary Anglophone and Environmental Literature, Ecocriticism, & Food Studies
Genesis Perez
A second-year PhD student whose research interests include postcolonial literature, specifically those of the Latin American diaspora and African diaspora. She is especially interested in exploring questions related to genre, myth, and folklore. Genesis received a BA in English Literature from Drew University where she completed a thesis titled “The Representation of Native Americans in Film: Focalization, Political Economy, and Anachronistic Space.” She is currently serving as one of the TEGO Social-Outreach Co-Chairs for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Zoë Perot
PhD candidate specializing in American and British modernist literature who is interested in the intersections of psychology and literature, transatlantic discourse, and theories of the self. Zoë also teaches in the Tufts First Year Writing Program. The working title for her dissertation is “when mind prints upon mind: Modernist Distant Intimacies and the Creation of Parasocial Readers.” She was awarded the Deans Innovation Summer Fellowship (2023) to conduct archival research at the British Library, and has published an essay “Trains, Strains, and Constraints” in a collection titled The Rail, the Body and the Pen: Essays on Travel, Medicine and Technology in 19th century British literature (McFarland Press 2021). She holds a BA in Comparative literature and Creative Writing from Princeton University.
Miguel Rivera
A PhD candidate specializing in Black American literature, critical theory, and film studies. Miguel has also written widely on popular culture and film. His dissertation takes as its subject the work of Black American authors from the 19th century onward and Black Caribbean authors from the 20th century onward and considers their relationship to their contemporary political movements. Miguel works extensively with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, evinced in recent publications featured in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society as well as the Palgrave Lacan Series' Lacan and the Environment. You can find his more informal writing weekly on Substack.
Rahul Sen
Rahul Sen (he/him) is a third-year PhD candidate whose research interests include queer theory, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and cinema studies. He received a BA in English from Presidency College (Kolkata) and MA from Delhi University. His dissertation explores the queer relationship between “form” and “enjoyment” in 20th and 21st century cultural productions. In 2023, he co-edited an anthology with Koyote Millar titled “Queers in Quarantine” which was published by Mohini Books, Norway.
Jem Shin
A first-year PhD student whose research interests include 20th-century literature, modernism, and queer theory. They received a BA in English and Economics from Wesleyan University with a senior thesis titled "Finding A Queer Time and Place: Coming of Age and Coming Out in the Twentieth-Century Bildungsroman."
Nicola Solly
A PhD candidate specializing in mad studies and feminist criticism with a focus on twentieth-century Western literature. Her dissertation, Textual Healing focusses on writing as a form of therapy. She holds a BA in English from Queen Mary University of London.
Bailey Spencer
A PhD candidate interested in 20th-century and contemporary American poetry. She received an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA in English from Boston College. She serves as an instructor in the First Year Writing program.
Bekah Waalkes
A PhD candidate who specializes in contemporary literature, theories of reading, and cultural criticism. Bekah serves as a graduate instructor in the Tufts First Year Writing Program and is affiliated faculty at Emerson College. She regularly reviews books for national publications, including recent reviews in The Washington Post, Cleveland Review of Books, and The Brooklyn Rail. Some of her essays have appeared in Avidly, Post45, Los Angeles Review, and Electric Literature, where she served as an editorial intern in 2022. Her dissertation project, “Simultaneous Fictions: Reading Form and Attention in the Contemporary Novel” examines the limits of contemporary discourse on focus and distraction, considering how these concerns about readerly immersion come to work on the form of 21st century novels.
Wenyuan "Iris" Wang
Transnational literature; post-structuralism; post-colonialism; multiculturalism/cross-cultural; migration and diaspora studies; multi-platform works
Brandon Wernette
BA and MA from New York University. Research interests: British Romanticism; aesthetics; negativity; lyric theory; poetry and poetics; critical theory; post-structuralism and deconstruction; sound studies; William Wordsworth
Gillian Wood
A third-year PhD student whose research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature, affect theory, and the aesthetics of memory. She received a BA in English Literature from Williams College and, prior to a return to graduate school, held a brief career in undergraduate admission. She has served as a Graduate Student Organization representative and currently serves as a Graduate Research Fellow for the Africana Center.