Seth Hunter Koproski

Seth Hunter Koproski is a fifth year doctoral candidate, currently writing his as-of-yet-untitled dissertation revolving around the question "Did medieval people believe in dragons?". His work examines concepts of belief, animality, wonder, and ethnicity across early medieval Britain and Ireland, working particularly on the Latin Physiologus and the Old English poetry of the Exeter Book. He is the recipient of the Michelle Sicca Grant for International Travel, the Truman S. Capote PhD Writer's…

Stephen Kim

Stephen K. Kim graduated in August 2020. He completed graduate minors in Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and American Studies. During his time at Cornell, he has had the fortune to work with the Asian American Studies Program, the Knight Institute, the West Campus House System, and the Intergroup Dialogue Project. Since graduating, he works with the Intergroup Dialogue Project as a curriculum specialist and lecturer. His proudest graduate school achievement is adopting a cat.

Laura Francis

Laura Francis

Pichaya Damrongpiwat

My work engages the fact and consequences of gendered violence on women’s writing and literacy, theories of affect and materialism, and critical reading in the long-eighteenth century, including British, Transatlantic, and early American literature. I maintain active interests in postcolonial and decolonial studies, animal studies, critical theory, and cross-cultural poetics.

My undergraduate teaching has focused on contemporary multiethnic American fiction and poetry, race, gender,…

Amber Vasquez

Katherine Thorsteinson

Katherine Thorsteinson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Cornell University where she is writing her dissertation “Narratives of Disposability: agency, ontology, ethics.” She completed her BA (Hons) in English and philosophy at the University of Toronto, followed by an MA in English at the University of Manitoba where she defended her thesis "National Roots and Diasporic Routes: Tracing the Flying African Myth in Canada." She has published in the journals Writing From…

Brianna Thompson

Brianna Beverlee Thompson received a B.A. in English from the University of Nevada-Reno in 2009, an M.A. from the University of Virginia in 2014, and a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University in 2021. She was born in Denver, Colorado and calls rural Nevada home.

Thom May

Matthew Kilbane

Matt Kilbane was the 2020-2021 Joseph F. Martino ’53 Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching at Cornell University, where he has recently completed his PhD in the Department of Literatures in English. He works at the intersection of literary and media studies, with a special focus on modern and contemporary poetry in the U.S., and the relation of literature to music. His research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Yale’s Beinecke Library, and Cornell’s Society…

Amelia Hall

Amelia Hall received her PhD from Cornell in May 2020, and specializes in nineteenth century British literature. Her dissertation, “Epigraphic Encounters and the Origins of the British Novel,” uncovers the crucial role that chapter epigraphs played in the evolution of the English novel’s form and develops a new theory for reading this structurally significant paratext. Drawing our attention to epigraphs’ profoundly expressive non-semantic qualities, including size, attribution, aggregation,…

Gabriella Friedman

Gabriella Friedman works at the crossroads of Black studies, Indigenous studies, and contemporary literature.

Her dissertation argues that Indigenous and Black speculative fiction reconfigures the conventions of the historical novel to generate decolonial and abolitionist historicizing practices. Chapters on Colson Whitehead, Blake Hausman, and Octavia Butler demonstrate how non-realist tropes make the histories of antiblackness and settler colonialism tangible so that readers encounter the…

Marquis Bey

Marquis Bey is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow and PhD candidate in the English department at Cornell University. His work, broadly speaking, concerns Black Feminist Theorizing, Transgender Studies, Critical Theory, and Contemporary African American Literature. More specifically, he thinks and writes about Black feminist critiques of gender; fugitivity and its relation to Blackness; and trans theory as a mode of disrupting hegemonic gender, particularly as it relates to feminist Blackness…

Kristen Angierski

An environmental humanist, Kristen studies how literature is responding to, negotiating, and shaping the current ecological crisis. Her dissertation considers how the rhetoric of "extinction" is funneled through individual bodies in contemporary climate change fiction, centering characters-- from mothers to ecological martyrs to ecoterrorists-- who make choices based on a sense of species membership: a "population identity." Outside of her dissertation, Kristen is interested in and teaches…

Elizabeth Alexander

Mariana Alarcon

Katherine Waller

Ben Tam

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Ben Tam received his B.A. at The University of Hong Hong and an M.A. at Georgetown University before coming to Cornell. His dissertation, Modernism in Love, identifies a radical transformation in the delineation of love in the first half of the twentieth century. Concentrating on the work of D. H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene, it argues that romantic love arises in these authors’ work not in the conventional pattern that constitutes the “…

Sara Schlemm

Jonathan Reinhardt

Jonathan Glenn Reinhardt is the Joseph F. Martino '53 Lecturer (Postdoc) at Cornell University. He specializes in Early Modern British literature and culture. His research focuses on the relationship between literature, information science, and espionage. Jonathan's dissertation was titled “Political Secrecy and Theatricality in Marlowe and Shakespeare.” It traces the Early Modern history of the concept of data through Renaissance drama, using the example of secret intelligence.Jonathan has taught courses on Shakespeare and philosophy; utopias; sonnets; literary depictions of the desire to be like gods, in surveys ranging from ancient literature to contemporary fiction; the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as literature; mystery fiction; and a special topics course on espionage, literature, and cinema. He has published on the concept of bardic voice, and has several articles forthcoming on Early Modern British literature, heterodox theologies, and the history of science and information. Jonathan is a House Fellow at Alice H. Cook House, Cornell University, and was the Huntington Library Visiting Fellow at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in 2018.

Zachary Price

Zachary Price is a Lecturer in the English Department after having completed his PhD in May 2019. He works in cinema studies with a focus on medical humanities, and his research specializes in medical aesthetics of the body and narratives of bodily transformation in horror and science fiction films. In his dissertation, Molecular Terror: Medical Vision, Biopolitics, and Visceral Effects in Contemporary Film, he investigates how special effects portraying the inside of the body produce new conceptions of interiority that flatten psychology onto cellular processes. The digital revolution in special effects over the last twenty years has created photo-realistic images of previously inaccessible spaces and scales of the body; however, these images require the narratives in which they appear to restructure questions of gender, identity, and violence at a new molecular scale. His dissertation explores the consequences of a molecular understanding of the body and expands on special effects scholarship through theories of molecularization by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Nikolas Rose.
He has published in Horror Studies on bodily manipulation in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, and in Screen on flat affect and post-industrial vampires. He has offered courses in both the English department and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program including “Short Stories: Horror Films,” “Mystery in the Story,” “Queer Cinema,” “Sickness and Cinema,” and “Addictive Media.” He currently serves as the graduate representative for the Media, Science, and Technology Scholarly Interest Group at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Nasrin Olla

Nasrin Olla is a South African scholar who specializes in African and African diasporic literature, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. Nasrin completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her PhD in English literature and languages at Cornell University. She is currently working on her first book project, Reaching for Opacity, which engages anew with the theme of alterity across a range of contemporary African and African diasporic literature. In 2020, …

Matthew Kibbee

James Ingoldsby

David Cosca

Abram Coetsee