Graduate English Doctoral Alumni | Department of English

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2019
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Natalie Amleshi	Jed Esty	Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism and the Fiction of Social Form
Tim Chandler (COML)	Emily Steinlight	Vestures of the Past: The Other Historicisms of Victorian Aesthetics	Frontend Engineer, Qonto
Alex Eisenthal	Amy Kaplan	Non-Native Grounds: Jewish Writers in American Empire	Graduate Student in Psychology & Language Sciences, University College London
Mariah Min	Emily Steiner	Damned If You Do: Judas Iscariot and the Invention of Medieval Literary Character	Assistant Professor of English, Brown University
Chris Mustazza	Charles Bernstein	Speech Labs: Language Experiments, Early Poetry Audio Archives, and the Poetic Record	Co-Director of the PennSound Archive; Sr. Director of Academic Computing, Penn's School of Arts & Sciences
Eleni Palis	Timothy Corrigan	Theorizing Film Quotation: Re-Membering Classical Hollywood in Contemporary American Cinema	Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies, University of Tennessee
Keyana Parks	Salamishah Tillet	The Absurdity of Colorblindness: Post Blackness in Twenty-first Century African American Satire to Real(ly) Absurd: Post Black Paradoxes in African American Satire	Assistant Professor of English, UMass Boston
Ariel Resnikoff (COML)	Charles Bernstein	The Radical Afterlives of Yiddishland	Jewish Studies Teacher, Jewish Community High School of the Bay, San Francisco
Evelyn Soto	David Kazanjian	Beyond the Black Legend: Spanish-American Political Imaginaries in the U.S., 1800 - 1855	Assistant Professor of English, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Hao Jun Tam (Howie)	Josephine Park	Rewriting Vietnam: Forms of Nationhood in Diasporic Literature	Assistant Professor of English, Brandeis University
Orchid Tierney	Charles Bernstein	Materials Poetics: Landfills and Waste Management in Contemporary Literature and Media	Associate Professor of English, Kenyon College

2018
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Julia Cox	Salamishah Tillet	The Protest Song: Bridge Leadership, Sonic Innovation, and the Long Civil Rights Movement	Principal, Slalom, New York
Erika Smith Harman	Emily Steiner Rita Copeland	The Art of the Question in Late Medieval England
Melanie R. Hill	Herman Beavers Salamishah Tillet	Personified Preaching: Black Feminist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music	Assistant Professor of English, Rutgers University-Newark
Najnin Islam	David Kazanjian	Reading the Coolie: Race, Caste and Narratives of Asian Indentureship	Assistant Professor of English, University of Connecticut
Travis Chi Wing Lau	Michael Gamer Lance Wahlert	Prophylactic Fictions: Immunity and Biosecurity	Assistant Professor of English, Kenyon College
Sierra Lomuto	Emily Steiner	Exotic Allies: Mongol Alterity and Racial Formation in the Global Middle Ages, 1220-1400	Assistant Professor of English, Rowan University
Joan Lubin	Heather K. Love	Social Science Fictions: The Numeric Imaginary of Cold War America	Assistant Professor of English, Yale University
Clare Mullaney	Heather K. Love	American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text, 1858-1932	Assistant Professor of Disability Rhetorics, Clemson University
Sara Sligar	Jed Esty	Forms of Justice: The Rise of the Legal Procedural in the Age of Due Process, 1930-1980	Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of Southern California
B. Jamieson Stanley	Rita Barnard	The Global Environmental Novel and the Politics of Food	Associate Professor of English, University of Delaware
Sarah Wilma Watson	David Wallace	Women, Reading, and Literary Culture: The Reception of Christine de Pizan in Fifteenth-Century England	Communications Specialist, Strategic Planning and Internal Engagement, McKinsey & Co.
Omari Weekes	Thadious Davis	"On a Path of Decent Pleasures: Sex, Spirit, and Affect in Late Twentieth-Century African American Literature."	Assistant Professor of English, CUNY-Queens College

2017
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Jacqueline Marie Burek	Rita Copeland Emily Steiner	Mending a Broken Chain: Continuous History and Literary Form in England and Wales, 1125-1450	Associate Professor of English, George Mason University
Nesrine Chahine (COML)	Jed Esty	Marketplaces of the Modern: Egypt as Marketplace in Twentieth-Century Anglo-Egyptian Literature	Assistant Professor of English, Texas Tech University
Laura Finch (COML)	James English	Intimate Economies: Financial Citizenship and Literary Form in the Contemporary Novel	Assistant Professor of English, MIT
Chris Jimenez	James English	The Exploding Globe: Scale and Catastrophe in Contemporary Anglophone Literature	Associate Professor of English, Stetson University
Don James McLaughlin	Max Cavitch Heather K. Love	Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature	Associate Professor of English, University of Tulsa
Dianne Mitchell	Peter Stallybrass Zachary Lesser	Unfolding Verse: Poetry as Correspondence in Early Modern England	Assistant Professor of English, University of Colorado, Boulder
Kalyan Nadiminti	Josephine Park	Difficult Work: The Politics of Counter-Professionalism in Post-1945 Transnational American Fiction	Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University
Ana Schwartz	David Kazanjian Max Cavitch	Feeling Past Politics: Affection, Settlement, and the Disciplines of Civil Society in Early Anglo America, 1620-1682	Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin
Mary Zaborskis	Heather K. Love	Erotics of Education: Queering Children in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Boarding Schools	Assistant Professor of American Studies and Gender Studies, Penn State Harrisburg

2016
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Monika Bhagat-Kennedy	Ania Loomba	Imagining Bharat: Romance, Heroism, and Hindu Nationalism in the Bengali Novel, 1880-1920	Assistant Professor, Department of English, US Naval Academy
Ashley Chang	Josephine Park Charles Bernstein	Sensing Sounding: Close Listening to Experimental Asian American Poetry	Vanguard
Alexander Devine	David Wallace Emily Steiner	A Portable Feast: The Production and Use of the Thirteenth-Century Portable Bible 1200-1500	Sub-Librarian, The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Lydia Yaitsky Kertz	David Wallace Emily Steiner	Luxury, Aesthetics and Politics: The Social Lives of Medieval Romance	Assistant Professor of English, SUNY
Alice Tweedy McGrath	Toni Bowers	Patchwork Fictions: Imagining Intimacy Beyond the Marriage Plot	Digital Scholarship Specialist, Bryn Mawr College
Alan Niles	Peter Stallybrass	Making English Memorial Literatures, 1500-1700	Lecturer, History and Literature department, Harvard University
Kelly Mee Rich	Jed Esty Paul Saint-Amour	States of Repair: Institutions of Private Life in the Postwar Anglophone Novel	Associate Professor of English, Wellesley College
Gabriel Sessions (COML)	Jean-Michel Rabaté Paul Saint-Amour	To Feel Thought as Immediately as a Rose: Philosophy, Modernism, and Utopian Collaborations	Senior Copywriter, The Luxury Wordsmith
Laura Soderberg	David Kazanjian	‘Vicious Infants’: Antisocial Childhoods and the Politics of Population in Antebellum U.S. Literature	Assistant Professor, University of Southern Indiana
Christine Woody	Michael Gamer	Romantic Periodicals and the Invention of the Living Author	Associate Professor of English, Widener University
Jason Zuzga	Charles Bernstein	Uncanny World: Envisioning Nature in Documentary	Lecturer, University of Pennsylvania

2015
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Alyssa Connell	Toni Bowers Michael Gamer	Paper Kingdom: Travel Literature, Chorography, and the Writing of Britain, 1660-1770	Chief of Staff, Field Museum
Neşe Lisa Devenot (COML)	Charles Bernstein Michael Gamer	Altered States/Other Worlds: Romanticism, Nitrous Oxide, and the Literary Prehistory of Psychedelia	Senior Lecturer, Writing Program, Johns Hopkins University
Thomas Alan Dichter	Amy Kaplan	Violent Convictions: Punishment, Literature, and the Reconstruction of Race	Visiting Assistant Professor of Law Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College (2017-2018); Lecturer in English (starting spring 2018) and History and Literature (on leave 2017-2018), Harvard University
Jessica Hurley	Paul Saint-Amour	Ground Zero at the City on a Hill: Apocalypse and the Politics of Form in the Nuclear Age	Associate Professor of English, George Mason University
Aundeah Kearney	Thadious Davis	Ambitious Confusion: Recovering the Unthought in Contemporary Memorials to the Antebellum South	Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.
A. Yumi Lee	David L. Eng Josephine Park	Someone Else's War: Korea and the Post-1945 U.S. Racial Order	Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University
Clifford Mak (COML)	Jed Esty	Virtuoso Beasts: Modernist Fables and the Vitality of Style	Assistant Professor Queen College CUNY
J. Bret Maney (COML)	Rita Barnard	Novels Wrecked by Success: American Fiction and the Problem of the Good Life: 1890-1940	Assistant Professor at Lehman College, CUNY.
Amy Paeth	Bob Perelman	State Verse Culture: American Poets Laureate, 1945-2015	Lecturer in Critical Writing, The Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing
Daniel Snelson	Charles Bernstein Jean-Michel Rabaté	Variable Format: Media Poetics and the Little Database	Assistant Professor of English, UCLA
Emma Stapely	Amy Kaplan	Insurgent Remains: Afterlives of the American Revolution,1770-1820	Assistant Professor, University of California Riverside
Bronwyn V. Wallace	Margreta de Grazia	Intimate Exegesis: Reading and Feeling in Early Modern Devotional Literature	Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of York

2014
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Marina Bilbija	David Kazanjian	Worlds of Color: Black Internationalism and the Periodical in the Age of Empire	Assistant Professor of English, Wesleyan University
Beth Blum	Paul Saint-Amour	Proverbial Modernism: Difficult Literature and the Self-Help Hermeneutic	Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities, Department of English, Harvard University
Julius B. Fleming, Jr.	Thadious Davis	Staging Civil Rights: African American Literature, Performance, and Innovation	University of Maryland, Assistant Professor (20th-Century/African American Literature)
Emily C. Gerstell	Melissa E. Sanchez	Trafficking Women: Interest, Desire, and Early Modern English Drama	Associate, McKinsey and Company
Jungha Kim (COML)	David L. Eng	Trauma of Empire: Violence, Minor Affect, and the Cold War Transpacific	Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Seoul National University
Lucia Martinez	Peter Stallybrass	Making a Solemn Note: The Music and Meter of English Reformation Psalms	Reed College, Assistant Professor
Marissa Nicosia	Melissa E. Sanchez Zachary Lesser	Historical Futures in Seventeenth-Century Literature	Associate Professor, Penn State Abington
Vaclav Paris	Jean-Michel Rabaté	Everyday Epic: Evolution, Sexuality, and Modernist Narrative.	Associate Professor of English, CUNY–City College of New York
John Pollack	Peter Stallybrass	Native American Words, Early American Texts	Library Specialist, Public Services. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Katie L. Price	Charles Bernstein	'The Tangential Point': Pataphysical Practice in Postwar Poetry	Assistant Director for Co-Curricular Programming & Outreach, Swarthmore College
Philip Tsang	Jed Esty	Untimely Citizens: Late Realism in Twentieth-Century British Literature	Associate Professor of English, Colorado State University
Marie Turner	David Wallace Emily Steiner	Beyond Romance: Genre and History in England, 1066-1400	Director of the Rossell Hope Robbins Library and the Koller-Collins Center for English Studies at the River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester.
Sunny Chen Yang	David L. Eng	Fictions of Territoriality: Legal and Literary Narratives of US Imperial Contestation Zones, 1844-1914	Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston

2013
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Asma Al-Naser (COML)	Rita Barnard	Afterlives: Specters of the American Century in Post-WWII American and Arabic Literature	Assistant Professor at Vanier College, Montreal, QB.
Rachel Banner	David Kazanjian	Freedom's Bonds: Reconfiguring Formal Freedom in Antebellum U.S. Law and Literature	Assistant Professor, West Chester University
Claire M. L. Bourne	Zachary Lesser	'A Play and No Play': Printing the Performance in Early Modern England	Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University
Tekla Bude	David Wallace	Musica Celestis: Mystical Song in Late Medieval England	Assistant Professor of English, Oregon State University
Ashley L. Cohen	Ania Loomba Suvir Kaul	The Global Indies: Reading the Imaginative Geography of British Empire, 1763-1871	Associate Professor of English, University of Southern California
Jonathan Fedors	Bob Perelman	Modern American Poetry and the Protestant Establishment	Assistant Teaching Professor in English, Penn State University
David Gardner	Nancy Bentley	How Novels Act: The Dramaturgy of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction	Phillips Academy in Andover
Kara Gaston	David Wallace Rita Copeland	Chaucer's Formal Histories: Temporality and Intertextuality from the Italian Trecento to Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales	Assistant Professor; Graduate Faculty; Undergraduate Instructor (UTSC), University of Toronto
Grace Lavery (COML)	Paul Saint-Amour	Empire in a Glass Case: Japanese Beauty, British Culture, and Transnational Aestheticism	Associate Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Phillip Maciak	Amy Kaplan	Technologies of Belief: Christian Visions of U.S. Secularism, 1880-1930.	Senior Lecturer of English and American Culture Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
Simran Thadani	Peter Stallybrass	Penmanship in Print: English Copy-Books and their Makers, 1570-1763	Executive Director, Letterform Archive, San Francisco
Rafael Walker	Nancy Bentley Wendy Steiner	Realism after Liberalism: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel	Assistant Professor, Baruch College, City University of New York
Gregory Wolmart	Al Filreis	Styles of Anarchic Will in Cold War American Literature	Assistant Teaching Professor, Drexel University, Cinema and television; film history.

2012
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
David Alff	Toni Bowers	British Writing and the Culture of Projection: 1660–1790	Associate Professor, University of Buffalo
Suzanne L. Barnett	Stuart Curran Michael Gamer	Romantic Paganism: Ecstasy and Excess in the Shelley Circle	Manager, College Career and Success Program, Horizons Greens Farms Academy
Aliki Caloyeras	Bob Perelman	H.D.: The Politics and Poetics of the Maternal Body
Sarah Dowling	Charles Bernstein	Remote Intimacies: Multilingualism in Contemporary Poetry	Associate Chair of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Shonni Enelow (COML)	Charles Bernstein	Method Acting and the Limits of Identity in the Mid-century America	Professor of English, Fordham University
James J. Fiumara	Timothy Corrigan	Grotesque Attractions: Genre History, Popular Entertainment, and the Origins of the Horror Film	Assistant Professor - University of Colorado at Denver
Sarah Mantilla Griffin	Thadious Davis	'Hush Now Can You Hear It': Black Women's Sonic Literature
Katherine Bennett Gustafson	Stuart Curran Michael Gamer	Coming of Age in the Eighteenth-Century Novel	Associate Professor of English, Indiana University Northwest (18th-Century/Children's Literature)
Jennifer Jahner	David Wallace	Sacra Jura: Literature, Law, and Piety in the Era of Magna Carta	Professor, Cal Tech.
Myra Lotto	Stuart Curran Michael Gamer	The Rustic Mode in Britain, 1700-1900	Adjunct Assistant Professor, City University of New York–York College
Melanie Micir	James English	Public Lives, Intimate Archives: Queer Biographical Practices in British Women's Writing	Associate Professor of English, Washington University in Saint Louis
Christen Mucher	David Kazanjian	Antiquity, Prehistory, Culture: American Narratives of the Distant Past, 1787-1867	Smith College, American Studies
Courtney Rydel	David Wallace	Legendary Effects: Women Saints of the Legenda Aurea in England, 1260-1532	Assistant Professor, Washington College
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan	Thadious Davis	Interstitial Voices: The Poetics of Difference in Afrodiasporic Women's Literature	Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College
Christopher Taylor	David Kazanjian	Empire of Neglect: Caribbean Literature, British Liberalism, and New Works of Care, 1776-1888.	Assistant Professor, University of Chicago

2011
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Jarrett Anthony	Nancy Bentley	"Higher Laws: The Making of Religion in Antebellum American Literature"	House Assistant Dean of Flora Rose House, Cornell University
Julia Bloch	Bob Perelman		Director of the Creative Writing Program, University of Pennsylvania
Megan Cook	David Wallace	The Poet and the Antiquaries: Renaissance Readers and Chaucerian Scholarship	Assistant Professor, Colby College
Daniel DeWispelare (COML)	Michael Gamer	Textual Shibboleths: Anglophony, Authority, and Authenticity, 1753-1832	was Associate Professor of English, George Washington University (in memoriam: https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/in-memoriam/daniel-j-dewispelare)
Jonathan Scott Enderle	Michael Gamer	Novel Properties: Communication, Copyright and the British Novel, 1710-1774	was Digital Humanities Specialist, Penn Libraries (in memoriam: https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/in-memoriam/jonathan-scott-enderle)
S. Isabel Geathers	Thadious Davis	Tragedy's Black Eye: Theorizing the Tragic in Contemporary African American Literature	Senior Associate Director of the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) at Phillips Academy; Postdoctoral/ Teaching Fellow, Princeton University
Greta LaFleur	Max Cavitch David Kazanjian	American Insides: Popular Narrative and the Historiography of Sexuality, 1674-1815	Associate Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
Edward Lybeer (COML)	Rita Barnard	Transnational Modernism in the Americas: Mexican and US Culture in the 1920s and 1930s
William Nessly	Amy Kaplan	Rewriting the Rising Sun: Narrative Authority and Japanese Empire in Asian American Literature	Assistant Professor, West Chester University
Mearah Quinn-Brauner	James English	Recovering the Conflicts: Memoirs of the Late-Twentieth Century American Literary Academy	Assistant Director, Student Preparation, University of Chicago
Joshua Ratner	Max Cavitch	"American Paratexts: Experimentation and Anxiety in the Early United States"	William Penn Charter School (Philadelphia, PA)
Poulomi Saha	Ania Loomba	"Revolutionary Desires: Gender and National Attachment in Colonial and Postcolonial Bengal"	Associate Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Jill Shashaty	Amy Kaplan	As If: Utopian Desire and the Imagination of History in Nineteenth-Century America	Assistant Professor, Community College of Philadelphia
Lance Wahlert (BIOL)	Heather K. Love	The Clinical Gays and the Painful Reunion: Medical Spectatorship and Historiographical Practice in New Queer Cinema	Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Thomas Ward	Margreta de Grazia	Inside Voices of the English Renaissance	Associate Professor, US Naval Academy
Brandon T. Woods	Herman Beavers	Dangerous Accumulations: Representing Black Rage in the Protest Era, 1936-1945	Wilmington Friends School (Wilmington, DE), Director, QUEST Center

2010
Alumnus	Director(s)	Title of Dissertation	Where they are now
Todd Carmody	Heather K. Love	Intentional Communities: The Public Life of Race in American Literature, 1925–1961	Senior Strategist, Gemic Consulting
Urvashi Chakravarty	Peter Stallybrass	Serving Like a Free Man: Labor, Liberty, and Consent in Early Modern English Drama	Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto
John Connor	James English	Mid-Century Romance: Modernist Afterlives of the Historical Novel	Lecturer in Literature and Politics, Kings College University of London
Stephanie Elsky	Margreta de Grazia	Time Out of Mind: The Poetics of Custom and Common Law in Early Modern England	Associate Professor of English, Rhodes College
Anna Foy	John Richetti Suvir Kaul	Poetry and the Common Weal: Conceiving Civic Utility in British Poetics of the Long Eighteenth Century	Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama Huntsville
Sarah Kerman (COML)	Charles Bernstein	Speaking for Americans: Modernist Voices and Political Representation, 1910-1940	High School English Teacher & Department Chair, The Dalton School
Jeehyun Lim	Josephine Park	Between Foreigners and Citizens: Bilinguals in Asian American and Latino Literature, 1960–2000	Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin
Rachael Nichols	Amy Kaplan	The Human Animal: Tangles in Science and Literature , 1870-1920	Visiting Assistant Professor in English, Skidmore College; Visiting Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Emily Ogden	Nancy Bentley Amy Kaplan	The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784–1890	Associate Professor of English & Director of Graduate Studies, University of Virginia
Greg Steirer	James English Charles Bernstein	‘Raise the Black Flag’: The Neoliberal Aesthetic in 1970s Britain	Associate Professor, Dickinson College
Michelle Strizever	Charles Bernstein	Visible Texture: Artists' Books, 1960–2010	Archives Specialist, House Office of the Historian, United States House of Representatives