Current Doctoral Students in Literature
Timothy Adams
Although born and raised in rural Michigan, I've lived most of my life in Brooklyn, NY. I completed a BA in German at Columbia University and an MA in English and Education at Brooklyn College. I came to the doctoral progam at Pitt in 2010 after teaching high school English in Brooklyn for a number of years. I'm interested in Medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic literatures as sources of modern notions of subjectivity and identity.
Sarah Bagley
I came to Pitt in 2005 from Reed College, where I worked on Joycean aesthetics. My dissertation investigates the role of nostalgia as a productive critical orientation in the work of Proust and Beckett. Other research interests include memory, temporality, metaphor, and intersections between science and the humanities. I have taught courses organized around science fiction, productive failure, nostalgia, and irony, and currently hold the position of Visiting Instructor in the English department.
Dan Barlow
Pitt’s emphasis on cultural and critical studies drew me in. Having completed a BA in American Cultures and Global Contexts at UC Santa Barbara and an MA in American Literature and Ecocriticism at San Diego State, I am particularly interested in culture as a sociopolitical domain and continue to study the ways in which migration narratives, histories of racialization, and musics of liberation might inform and invigorate conceptions of egalitarianism. Recently awarded the Kullman Prize, my essay about chain gang music and soundscape in southern narratives is forthcoming in The Southern Literary Journal.
Julie Beaulieu
"Originally from Maine, I started the PhD program at Pitt in 2006 and have since been pursuing research
in eighteenth-century literature and the history of sexuality. I am currently thinking through questions
of sex education, the role of the novel in the constitution of sexuality, and the role of novelistic
discourse in the history of sexuality. Along with these interests, my work explores questions of genre
(including differences among "histories," novels, prescriptive texts, and didactic fictions). I currently hold
an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship."
Nathaniel Heggins Bryant
I came to Pitt in 2008 after completing my MA in English at the University of Tennessee. My research interests are, broadly speaking, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literature, working-class literature, prison literature, and topics concerning criminality, penology, and white supremacy. I'm working on such topics as sympathy and Benjamin Rush’s plan for the modern penitentiary; the depiction of skinheads in Anglo-American film; and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a text about 'poor white trash' that coincides with the first eugenic family studies, among other projects. I hope to write a dissertation on twentieth-century US prison writing as a distinct kind of repressed intellectual labor.
Schuyler Chapman
I came to Pitt in 2007 after receiving my BA in English Literature from Hamilton College. Though my interests are varied, I have focused my studies over the past two years on the intersection between citizenship and nineteenth-century U. S. literature, exploring specifically the models of female citizenship represented in Antebellum women’s periodicals, the performativity of female citizenship in the early Republic, and, currently, the figure of the mutable citizen in the works of James Fenimore Cooper.
Kathleen Davies
I came to the doctoral program at Pitt after a decade of practicing law; I have a BA from Wells College and a JD from the University of Michigan. My research interests include early American literature, legal history, and the construction of the citizen as a legal concept and literary figure; drama, performance, and embodiment; and theories of privacy.
Carolyn Elliott
My dissertation investigates the relationship of literature to the soul as it is imagined in romantic aesthetics. I'm interested in the possibility of taking the notion of "soul" seriously in present-day literary-studies pedagogy. I did my undergraduate work in Creative Writing and English at Carnegie Mellon University. I’ve previously taught the courses Reading Poetry and Literature and the Contemporary.
Brad Fest
I am a PhD candidate studying nineteenth- through twenty-first-century American literature. I received my BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and completed an MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 2007. My primary focus of study is apocalyptic American literature, specifically how disaster has been constructed through representations of nuclear and information technologies. I am currently working on a dissertation entitled: "The Apocalypse Archive: American Literature and the Nuclear Bomb." Some of my other research and teaching interests include critical theory, poststructuralism, the long poem, postmodernism, the posthuman, science fiction, and archive theory.
Jessica Fitzpatrick
I earned a BA in both English (Creative Writing) and Anthropology at the University of Delaware, located in my home state. After graduation, I spent a year as a Response To Intervention elementary school reading tutor. Now that I am a PhD student at Pitt, I plan to continue my interdisciplinary examination of how narrative studies, women’s studies, and power dynamics react explosively in postcolonial literature.
Racheal Forlow
I came to Pitt in 2008 after completing a BA in English at SUNY Binghamton. My current work in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature explores the intersection of sublime aesthetics and constructions of eros. Broad questions of internality and externality, sense and reason, inform this project in historical context.
Amy Robin Hoffman
After receiving my BA from the University of Richmond, I completed fellowship-supported master’s degrees in English Literature (University of Connecticut) and Art History (University College London). The PhD program in literature now serves as my home base for interdisciplinary research in book history. My first year of study at Pitt was supported by a Provost’s Humanities Fellowship. My teaching and writing address representations of childhood, word and image studies, and Victorian literature, plus the occasional foray into horror. My dissertation focuses on nineteenth-century British alphabet books, with a foray into the work of the twentieth-century American artist Edward Gorey. I currently hold an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship.
Katie Homar
I am a PhD. candidate studying British Romantic literature. My dissertation, tentatively titled "Romantic Prose Declaimers," examines how William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and Charles Lamb appropriate rhetorical discourses, such as classical, parliamentary, and Scottish rhetorics, in order to define their position as prose authors. More broadly, I'm interested in the ways Romantic authors complicate an emerging nineteenth-century binary between "Literature" and "Rhetoric". My other academic interests include Chaucer, Bakhtin, the history of rhetoric, and the English country-house. I currently hold a Tobias Dissertation Fellowship.
Jessica Isaac
I began at Pitt in 2009, after finishing an MA at the University of Kansas. My interests keep me moving
between literature, composition studies, and childhood studies. I am currently working with the history
of the idea that children speak and write differently than adults, using a range of texts from 18th and
19th century America and Britain. I’m invested equally in the way adult-authored texts shaped
expectations for children’s expression, as well as the way child-authored texts reveal a struggle with
those expectations. In my teaching, I am particularly interested in the way a focus on reading and the
use of a wide-range of student proposed texts (literary and not) changes an introductory literature
course.
Matt Kelly
My academic interests focus on the intersection between religion, technology, and information
exchange in economic systems during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This research has allowed
me to draw from numerous critical, literary, and pedagogical fields, including post-structuralism,
Christian theology, evolutionary biology, viticulture, and open-source software. My nomadic wanderings
have placed me in Pitt by way of the San Francisco Bay Area, where I completed my BA in both English
and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Most recently, I earned my MA in English from Penn State, where I also
taught classes in composition, technical, and professional writing.
Matthew Kendrick
I came to Pitt from the University of Rochester, where I received an MA in English. Prior to that, I received a BA in English from the University of New Hampshire. My dissertation, “Rude Mechanicals: Staging Labor in the Early Modern English Theater”, explores the way the early modern theater mediates conflicting representations of labor. More broadly, my research attempts to situate drama in relation to early modern England’s turbulent socioeconomic context. I currently hold a Chambers Anderson Dissertation Fellowship. mjk51@pitt.edu
Katherine Kidd
I received my BA in Literature from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and came to the University of Pittsburgh in 2006 to work on an MA in Literature, which I earned in 2009. My areas of focus as a PhD student are representations of and writing by twentieth-century American working-class women. I am particularly interested in their grasps at and acquisitions of political agency through literary practice and how race and sexuality are engaged in these works. This interest extends to literature of the Global South as well. kag86@pitt.edu
Dan Kubis
My dissertation focuses on American literary criticism during the Culture Wars, roughly the 1980's and 90's. Central figures include Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Frank Lentricchia. Along with teaching Composition and Literature and Pitt, I also have experience teaching English language and literature abroad, in Poland and France.
Molly Nichols
I earned my BA in English from Columbia University. After teaching high school and managing an AmeriCorps program, I entered Pitt's PhD program in 2007. I am interested in the intersections between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, with a regional focus on the Caribbean. I enjoy teaching both literature and composition.
Elizabeth Oliphant
I began the PhD program in the fall of 2009, after completing a BA in English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. As an undergraduate, I became interested in nineteenth- century American literature, particularly domestic fiction and women’s writing that concerns the Civil War. I remain interested in nineteenth-century American literature, especially themes of gender and regional identity, and look forward to pursuing these interests here at Pitt.
Liam O’Loughlin
I began the PhD program here at Pitt after completing my BA at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I studied literature and philosophy. My primary interests are in postcolonial literature and theory, with a specific focus on “alternative” cosmopolitanisms within contemporary globalization and imperialism.
Kirsten Paine
I began the PhD program here at Pitt in 2011 after earning my BA at Baldwin-Wallace College and my MA at the University of Virginia. Broadly, I study nineteenth-century U.S. American literature, but most of my current preoccupations for research settle in and around nineteenth-century American women’s writing, conceptions and uses of violence in antebellum fiction (particularly where it concerns women), and the literature of the Civil War.
Kate Pendlebury
I am a fourth year PhD student in the children's literature program who has recently begun my
dissertation on philosophical material in Anglo-American children's books from Lewis Carroll's "Alice" stories up until the fantasy literature of the late twentieth century. I grew up in Johannesburg, and
earned my BA and MA at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa; my previous degree consisted
of a thesis in which I explored the interpretation of Edward Lear’s literary nonsense. In the future, I
hope to transition into multi-disciplinary research on childhood, involving working with, and activism on
behalf of, children.
Loring Pfeiffer
After earning a BA in English Literature at Swarthmore College, I took a few years off to teach and travel
before entering Pitt's PhD program in Literature. I am currently at work on my dissertation, "The Politics
of
Virtue: English Women Playwrights and the Staging of Desire, 1660-1737." Focusing on plays by Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, Delarivier Manley, Susanna Centlivre, and Eliza Haywood,
my dissertation examines the relationship between female dramatists' sexual and partisan politics and
argues for the importance of considering these writers' treatments of desire through both lenses. At
Pitt, I have enjoyed integrating my interests in gender and politics into my Composition and Literature
courses, including Seminar in Composition, The Dramatic Imagination, and Introduction to Shakespeare.
Amanda Phillips
After receiving an MA in English Literature from the University of Alabama, I relocated to Pittsburgh in the fall of 2009 to begin work on a PhD. My master's thesis examined constructions of masculinity in late-Victorian boys' adventure novels. I plan to continue working on children's literature, focusing particularly on intersections of childhood, gender, and empire in the nineteenth century.
Heather Sprong
I earned my BA in English and Political Science at Washington and Jefferson College (via University of London) and my MA in Literature here at Pitt. A few years later, I returned to Pitt to pursue a PhD in Literature, concentrating on the long nineteenth century. I am currently working on women’s travel writing produced in the nineteenth century, which touches on a variety of my interests – gender studies, feminist historiography, composition and rhetoric, Imperialism, visual representation and how these fields impact the writing and reading of texts. That said, my passion for Victorian novels is always at the forefront of my mind.
Swathi Sreerangarajan
I come here directly after earning an Masters from CIEFL, India. I'm currently into twentieth/twenty-first century English novels that represent issues of immigration and issues of womanhood: I'm specifically concerned with ways in which gender relations and ideologies are customized and reconfigured via marriage and migration in the narrative span of women protagonists. Writers that have so far interested me in this respect have been first-second generation immigrant writers of South Asian origin.
Clare Sigrist
My readings in postcolonial literature began at the University of Montana. There I found I was drawn to the study of watershed moments in history, particularly the world revolution of 1968, read as a radical imaginative response to modernization, as a questioning, often a challenge to modernity and the dominance of the American model. I explore 1968 through Gramsci, which is to say with an eye to hegemony at work in the Indian and American contexts under the sway of trade relations that produced the Green Revolution. Here at Pitt I continue to engage these questions and extend them to other geopolitical contexts.
Alexandra Valint
I am a PhD student studying Victorian literature, and I received my BA from the University of Virginia. I am working on my dissertation, tentatively titled “Collaboration and Contestation: The Victorian Multiple-Narrator Novel,” which looks at novels by Charles Dickens, Emily
Bronte, and Wilkie Collins, among others. My other academic interests include children’s literature, nineteenth-century American literature, and drama and musical theatre. I am currently a Lillian Lawler Dissertation Fellow.
Rebecca Wigginton
I came to Pitt in 2005 after I received my BA from the University of Kentucky, where I focused on English, History, and Gender Studies. I study nineteenth-century British literature, and my research interests include gothic depictions of humanness and individuality; monstrosity and gender; representations of illness in literature; and Victorian psychology. My dissertation concerns somnambulism in Victorian literature.
Alicia Williamson
Originally from northern Minnesota, I received my BA in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Puget Sound. I came to Pitt in 2006, holding a Provost’s Humanities Fellowship that year. I currently hold a Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship for work on my dissertation, which addresses novels—mostly domestic fiction published by mainstream presses—written by members of the Socialist Party of America during the Progressive era (1901 – 1917). Specifically, I am interested in how these texts illuminate the relationship between radical and popular, feminist and socialist imaginaries while participating in the articulation of emergent and reciprocal understandings of socialism and sexuality. I have taught courses on composition, critical reading, short stories, war literature, and modernism. My other academic interests include science fiction, children’s literature, social theory, and creative writing.
Hyo Kyung Woo
I began the PhD program at Pitt after completing my MA at Seoul National University, South Korea. My primary interests are in translation theories and translations of English literature in East Asia, with a specific focus on gender and Victorian literature.