DOCTORAL CANDIDATES
english department
There are currently over 30 doctoral candidates in English at Boston College. Along with students in our M.A. program, doctoral students are the sponsors of a year-long colloquium in literary and cultural studies; they place representatives at our Graduate Student Association; and they teach regularly in the English department.
Doctoral Candidates at BC have provided their own listings below.
Rowena joined the English Ph.D. program at Boston College in 2011 and plans to focus on twentieth century American and contemporary transnational literature, looking particularly at the use and representation of environment and landscape within these literatures. She is especially interested in ecocritical approaches and in integrating theory from cultural geography (and other spatially oriented social sciences) into her work. Her secondary interests include urban studies, architectural theory, psychoanalytic theory, visual studies, Nordic studies and polar studies. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from The University of Oxford and an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies and Myth from The University of Essex, both in the U.K.
Katie is interested in nineteenth and twentieth and century American literature and culture. She holds an M.A. in English from Boston College and a B.A. from Columbia University where she majored in English and Comparative Literature. Katie spent time in motion picture production before her desire for a deeper understanding of the social interactions between media and culture led her back to the academy. She is currently working on her minor field exam titled “Class, Domesticity, and the American City: 1850-1930.”
Gene is an ABD Ph.D. Candidate who works in the fields of American studies, Southern studies, film, and rhetoric and composition. In his dissertation, which is scheduled for completion by December 2011, he is examining representations of southern chain gangs and convict labor in 20th century American literature and film. As a Ph.D. student at BC and an MA student at St. Louis University (2004), Gene has designed and taught courses on the relationship between cultural history and memory and issues involving the contemporary American family, as well as traditional composition courses and a first-year writing seminar. He has also taught British literature and urban studies as a teaching assistant. His two oral examinations at BC have focused on 20th century and contemporary American literature, African-American and other ethnic literatures, the essay, creative nonfiction, and memoir. Additionally, he has been active as an assistant director and co-director for Boston College's Biennial English Graduate Conference and a volunteer for the Office of Graduate Student Life in various ways. In addition to his MA, Gene holds a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University (1993), and he spent several years as a journalist writing for newspapers in North Carolina, Alabama, and St. Louis before pursuing his graduate degrees. Gene lives and believes in Dorchester with his incredible wife, Terri, and their two hilarious children, Declan and Greta.
Nick is a Ph.D. student at Boston College, completing an exam on Trans-Atlantic modernism. He has already completed an exam on the Literature of American Expansion. His main research interest is in how modernist texts incorporate texts from across the Atlantic in order to re imagine their own national, post colonial, or provincial space. He has taught courses in Exile, Literary forms that seem out of place, the Modern British Novel, and Modernism Across the Atlantic.
Matt completed his Bachelor's degree in French and English at Miami University (Ohio), and Master’s degree in English at Boston College.Before joining the graduate community at B.C., he taught high-school English for three years in central France. His research interests include late 18th- and 19th-century British travel writing, the history of the British and French slave trades, post-colonial theory, and the history of British imperialism. His dissertation, “Revolutionary Narratives, Imperial Rivalries: Britain and the French Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” considers England’s long imperial rivalry with France, and the ways in which Victorian writers reflected on that rivalry through the deployment of Romantic-era narratives of the French Revolution.
He has taught an elective course entitled“19th-century British Literature and Empire,” literature core classes on the theme of travel in literary works, as well as multiple sections of Boston College’s First-Year Writing Seminar. For the last five years, he has also served as a formal teaching mentor for new graduate student teachers in the First-Year Writing Program.
Matt is also interested in the relationship between archival research methods and literary studies. All of his undergraduate courses feature an archival component, and Matt has worked as an archivist since moving to Boston. He currently serves as the Archival Coordinator for the Boston Red Sox.
Kiara studies American literature with an emphasis on contemporary American fiction and literature of and about the American West. Broadly, she is interested in the environmental, cultural, and geopolitical intricacies of place and how these issues register as literary habits and tensions. In December 2010, she completed a doctoral exam entitled “Roaming and Reimagining the American West, 1970-2010” that interrogated how migration and mobility can act as vehicles for an amplified environmental consciousness, which in turn shapes a Western ecopoetics. Currently, she is at work on her second doctoral exam, “Writing the West: Cultural Politics, Labor, and the Land, 1850-1970,” which reads literature that grapples with the politics surrounding land management, ownership, and cultivation as a series of texts that respond to and disrupt racialized class and labor patterns.
Before coming to BC, Kiara earned a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MA from New York University. She has taught composition courses that focus on ethics and justice at both community college and BC. In the upcoming school years, she will teach literature courses at BC on environmental literature, the American novel, and the wild West in American fiction. She’s also really into her cats, horses, cooking, and generally anything that involves going outdoors.
Katherine received ABs in English and Psychology, as well as an MA degree in the Humanities (English), from the University of Chicago. Her current interests include 19th-century British and American literature, folk and fairy tales, short stories, body manipulation, and gothic literature. Katherine has completed a minor field exam entitled “Fairy Tales: ~1790-1890” and a major field exam entitled “Gothic, Fantastic, Realist Interactions in British Literature: ~1800-1900.” Along with teaching various courses at BC, Katherine created and co-organized with Professor Paul Lewis a bicentennial birthday celebration for Edgar Allan Poe in 2009 that led to Mayor Menino declaring January 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Appreciation Month, the naming of Edgar Allan Poe Square near downtown Boston, and a highly successful Boston Public Library exhibit on Poe curated by Professor Lewis. She also served as the Ph.D. chair of BC’s English Department Graduate Student Colloquium from 2009-2011, is a member of BC’s Graduate Student Association, and is the 2010-2011 president of BC’s Graduate AHANA.
Andrew A. Kuhn is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at Boston College, studying twentieth-century Irish literature and print culture. His current research is on the private press tradition in Ireland and the role of the material book in literary interpretation. Andrew received a MA in English Literature from the University of Kansas and a BA from Creighton University.
Deanna earned her BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MA in English from San Francisco State University. She also worked in athletic administration at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught high school English in the San Francisco Bay Area before beginning her Ph.D. at Boston College in 2010. Her research interests include travel, race, and gender in early modern literature, allegory, the representation of history in works of fiction, and the colonial relationship (and its repercussions) between England and Ireland from the sixteenth century to the present.
Dathalinn earned a BA from Hamilton College (2003) and taught high school English and Chemistry before beginning graduate school. Her interests include modernist periodical studies and print culture, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish literature, and regionalism. She is currently writing a dissertation that examines regional literary movements in Ireland and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, specifically through the lens of little magazines and literary journals.
Josh is a Ph.D. student whose interests include Victorian and Edwardian literature, 19th century anthropology, religion and literature, the history of science, Darwinism, and the history of the novel. He has completed field exams in the 19th-century British Novel and in the Crisis of Faith in 19th-century England. His dissertation focuses on human-animal encounters in the 19th century. Since 2009, Josh has served as the Managing Editor of Religion and the Arts. He is also co-chair of the Religion and Literature research collaborative. At BC, Josh has taught First-Year Writing Seminar (FWS), Literature Core classes on the intersection between science and the literary, as well as an elective course on social crisis in the Victorian novel. Before coming to BC, Josh taught high school English in Mount Kisco, New York. Josh graduated with a BA in English from Oberlin College(2002). This past spring (2010) Josh and his wife, Anique, celebrated the birth of their son, Isaac Laurent. He’s awesome.
Emma graduated summa cum laude from Kalamazoo College, where she majored in English and Classical Studies and minored in Theatre History. She has studied history, literature, and acting at The Athens Center and College Year in Athens in Greece and at Charles University in Prague.
At Boston College, Emma is concentrating on Early Modern and Restoration drama. She completed her first oral exam, "Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (1660-1737): Fashion, Gender, and Performance"in May 2010.
Emma has presented papers on drama and gender at NeMLA in Montreal, the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, and ATHE/AATE in New York City, among others.
Emma has served as a Boston College Writing Fellow and a TA for British Literature I and will be teaching First Year Writing in fall 2010. You can contact Emma at perryem@bc.edu and visit her website.
Alex is interested in the study of Post colonialism and Globalization. As a Ph.D. student at Boston College, he has taught undergraduate courses in literature (“Introduction to Literary Studies” and “Literary Themes”) and composition (“First-Year Writing Seminar”). He has worked as tutor and teacher in the Office of AHANA Student Programs and serves as mentor to teaching fellows in the First-Year Writing Seminar Program. Alex Puente received a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and an M.A. in Literature from the Ateneo de Manila University, a Jesuit university in the Philippines. As a Fulbright scholar, he received a second M.A. in English from Boston College. Before coming to BC, Alex taught high school and university level composition and literature for several years at the Ateneo de Manila. He also received a certificate in English Language Teaching and Teacher-Training from Lancaster University (U.K.), and he organized and facilitated teacher-training seminars in the Philippines.
Alex enjoys working with students and is deeply interested in spirituality and social action. At the Ateneo, he moderated a student group engaged in organizing urban poor communities in Manila. He is happily married to Maria Kathleen Puente and is proud father to their son, Francis.
Alex is a student of nineteenth and twentieth century English and American literature. He has published critical essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Geoffrey Hill, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Ernest Hemingway, and translations of the poetry of André Spire and Yves Nédonsel. He is currently at work on a dissertation about the poetry of Robert Lowell. Before coming to Boston College, he attended the State University of New York at New Paltz and the New School for Social Research-Eugene Lang.
Beth is a Ph.D. candidate whose interests include Victorian and Edwardian literature, 19th century psychological theory, theories of reading, and aesthetics. She has completed field exams in British literature from 1840 to 1930 and literary theory. Her dissertation focuses on the intersection between 19th century theories of the mind and literature, paying particular attention to the moral and aesthetic implications of such an intersection. She has an article forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture, and at BC, she has taught First-Year Writing Seminar (FWS), a literature core class, two semesters of Narrative and Interpretation, as well as an elective seminar on star-crossed lovers and the novel. Before beginning the PhD program at BC, she received her MA also at BC and her BA at Arkansas State University.
Rebecca's main interests are 20th century Irish literature,ethno musicology, cultural studies, trans-nationalism, and American studies. She has completed an MA exam on the intersections of musical and literary studies in contemporary Irish literature and is interested in issues of identity as expressed through these mediums. She has presented conference papers on Julia O'Faolain, James Joyce, and across study between Irish ethno musicology and literature. She has taught the Freshman Writing Seminar and currently works as an instructional assistant through the BC athletic program.
Alison’s interests are in eco criticism, American studies,trans-nationalism, and regional studies. She received an M.A. from Boston College and a B.A. from Colby College where she majored in English and minored in Environmental Studies. She has completed a minor field exam on material culture and nature in 1850s American literature and is currently working on a major exam in eco-criticism. Her main focus is on representations of nature in literary discourse that attempt to resist exploitation and com modification of land, animals,and people. Alison is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and has recently taught a course on Literature and Ecology.
Ben is a Ph.D. candidate with interests in Anglo-American modernism and post-colonial literature and is currently completing an exam in the Literature of the Pacific. Previously, he has taught literature-focused freshman writing sections of "Argument and Exposition," as well as serving as a writing tutor and one interesting time as an exam reader for the AP Literature exam. In the spring of 2010 he will be a teaching assistant for "Introduction to British Literature and Culture (II)." He has published a student essay in Charles Bressler's Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice and has presented on J.R.R. Tolkien at the PCA/ACA National Conference in Boston (April 2007). Ben holds a BA in English and Writing from Houghton College (2007) and an MA in English from the University of Tulsa (2009).
Alice holds a B.A. in English with a minor in Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. At BC, she is concentrating on early modern British literature and culture, specifically interested in gender studies, utopian writing, and science writing of the period. Alice completed a minor exam in early modern utopian writing in October of 2008 and a major exam covering the poetry, prose, and drama of 17th century literature in June of 2010.
At BC, Alice has taught the Freshman Writing Seminar and a Literature Core Course entitled "Literature, Science, and the Body." In the 2010-2011 school year, she will teach Studies in Poetry and an elective entitled" Imagining Places in the Early Modern World."
Alice is also the Co-Director of Boston College's Graduate Conference, to be held in March of 2011.
