Graduate Students
Rebecca Aberle
Ecocriticism and Environmental Justice; 20th and 21st Century American Literature; Poetry and Poetics; Craft Studies
Soomin Ahn
A second-year PhD student interested in the writings of displaced and oppressed communities, memoir, representations of crafts, and eco-criticism.
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, literary, 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, Omid holds an MA from Bristol University, UK and is currently a dissertation fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts. His work has appeared in/is forthcoming in ASAP/J, Chicago Review, Postmodern Culture, C21 Literature, and Annulet.
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.
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 Clements is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at Tufts University. He is the author of “Nonrelational Literature and Immanent Metaphysics: What Spinoza’s Nature has to Say About Beckett’s Form” (Beckett and Nature), “‘The Crimes of Love: Pierre Klossowski, Queer Theory, and the Modernist Novel” (Understanding Sade, Understanding Modernism), and is currently finishing a dissertation on the metaphysical assumptions of 20th-century Irish and British fiction with a focus on the issues of form, non-knowledge, and representation in the post-war novel. His teaching interests include literary modernisms, post-1945 and contemporary global Anglophone fiction, philosophy and literature, and the literature of radical politics. Before arriving at Tufts, he earned an MA in English from Boston College, an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a BA in Culture and Critical Theory from the Institute for Social Ecology at Burlington College.
Ryan Daubenmire
Ryan Daubenmire is PhD student from Northern California. Prior to attending Tufts, he received his BA from the University California, Berkeley and his MA 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.
Morgan Easterly
A third-year PhD student whose research interests include critical theory, postmodernisms, literature and philosophy, feminist studies, and film.
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.
Marcus Grant
Marcus Grant (he/him) is a first-year PhD student with an interest in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, spanning written texts, film, and video games. His work seeks to understand the ideas of the human versus the nonhuman other, and to critique long-standing widespread injustices that remain seeped in modern culture. Marcus’s “Classing Coraline” posits questions about the intersection of work and home within the horror genre in response to technological advances in the early twenty-first century. His thesis, “Free in Body and Spirit” examines women and children ghosts, who pointed to their objectification in order to rectify their own prejudiced histories. Marcus graduated with a BA in literary studies and creative writing from Eastern Connecticut State University before coming to Tufts.
Jordan Green
A PhD candidate specializing in British literature of the long eighteenth century. Jordan serves as a graduate instructor in the Tufts First Year Writing Program, while working as a co-chair of the Graduate Student Caucus and Newsletter editor for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Her dissertation identifies and examines obsessive modes of making character and constructing narratives in the early novel. 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.
Sarah Iuli
18th and 19th century British Literature, ecocriticism
Ketan Jain
A fourth-year PhD student and graduate instructor. Areas of interest include: queer theory, critical race theory, anti-colonial thought, planetary modernisms, South Asian literature and film.
Ciara Keogh
A third-year PhD student whose research interests include ecocriticism, poetry, and Black Women's literature and theory. She received a BA in English from Trinity University.
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.
Caitlin Lozada
A first-year PhD student whose research interests include 20th and 21st century popular fiction, media aesthetics, affect theory, and reader response. She received a BA in English from the University of Chicago where she completed her senior thesis "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Unraveling Discomfort and Pleasure in Mary Gaitskill’s Erotic Short Stories 'A Romantic Weekend' and 'Secretary'."
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.
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
Casey O'Reilly is a fifth-year PhD candidate specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first century British literature. Her scholarship focuses on affair narratives, novels of adultery, family abolition theory, Marxist theory, and queer theory. Her dissertation explores the ways in which affair narratives deconstruct and reconfigure modern notions of love, family, marriage, and monogamy. This fall she will be teaching a class called “Beyond Monogamy” for the Ex-College at Tufts. She holds a BA and an MA from the University of Vermont.
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 US. 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 has also taught 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, has published an essay “Trains, Strains, and Constraints” in a collection titled “The Rail, the Body and the Pen” (McFarland Press 2021), and was awarded runner-up in NeMLA’s Creative Writing Contest 2024. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Princeton University.
Vasantha Sambamurti
Vasantha Sambamurti is a writer, editor, translator and PhD student in English at Tufts University. Her research interests include identifying reciprocal creative practices across anglophone and post-colonial literature(s), transmedia studies, and the poetics of diasporic affect/embodiment. She is the Senior Editor for Transition Magazine based at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poetry, prose, and literary translations from French are featured in or forthcoming from: The Commuter by Electric Literature, Northwest Review, Exchanges: A Journal of Literary Translation, & elsewhere.
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 second-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.
Wenyuan "Iris" Wang
A third year PhD candidate who is interested in postcolonial and transnational literature, 20th and 21st-century American literature, and cultural studies. Her research delves into themes of immigrant identity, multiculturalism, cross-cultural dynamics, and the complexities of migration and diaspora. She received a BA in English from St. John’s University and a MA in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University (SUNY). Currently, she serves as an instructor in the First Year Writing program. In addition, she enjoys painting and jewelry making, and is interested in incorporating visual and material culture into her research.
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 PhD candidate whose research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature, affect theory, and memory studies. 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.