DOCTORAL CANDIDATES

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 here.

Natasha Baafi

Natasha is a first-year PhD student who is interested in 20th century American literature and culture, 20th century and contemporary Black literature and culture, conscious or "Rasta" reggae music, and Black postmodern fiction. Natasha holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Rutgers University (2000) and an MA in English education from Columbia University (2002). Natasha taught middle school English and U.S. history and high school English for several years before pursuing a graduate degree at BC.

Maureen Benes

Lori Bennett

Wendy Cannella

Sara Choi

Trevor Dodman

Trevor is currently completing his dissertation, "Lingering Wounds, Broken Places: Locating Sites of Loss in World War I Fiction," an exploration of representations of physical and psychic wounding in fiction by British and American authors. Trevor's major interests include modernist fiction, gender studies, trauma theory, and twentieth-century war literature; he has completed a major field exam in early twentieth-century British and American fiction, along with minor exams entitled "Nineteenth-Century Masculinities in the British Novel" and "Constructing Genders and Sexualities." While pursuing his degree at Boston College, Trevor has designed and taught an upper-level elective, a mid-level historical survey course, and several introductory-level core curriculum courses, including a First-Year Writing Seminar. Originally from Carlisle, Ontario, Trevor received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College and his Master of Arts degree from Carleton University in Ottawa. In between these degrees he spent a year and a half teaching ESL in Japan. Other interests include film, contemporary Canadian fiction, and ice hockey."

Matthew Freedman

Jaime Goodrich

Jaime Goodrich is currently finishing her dissertation, "Early Modern Englishwomen as Translators of Religious Literature 1500-1641," which focuses on the ways in which women used translation to craft public voices that nevertheless met contemporary standards of female chastity. In 2007, Jaime was awarded several grants that allowed her to conduct archival research related to her dissertation, including an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship, a Renaissance Society of America Research Grant, and the Catholic Record Society's Andrew C. Duncan Catholic History Trust Grant. Jaime's major interests include early modern literature, early modern women writers, the classical tradition, Shakespeare, and Spenser. At Boston College and Wheelock College, Jaime has taught a number of courses ranging from remedial grammar to composition to introductory literature to upper-level electives on sixteenth-century literature. She earned a bachelor's degree in English and classics at Smith College.

Gene Gorman

Gene is a third-year PhD student interested in American Studies and rhetoric and composition. His academic interests include 20th century and contemporary American literature and culture, creative nonfiction, memoir, pedagogy, and film. He is currently focusing his attention on the relationship between memory and American racial and ethnic identities and issues related to home and the American family. Gene holds a bachelor's degree from Duke University (1993) and an MA from St. Louis University (2004) and spent several years as a journalist writing for newspapers in North Carolina, Alabama, and St. Louis. He also worked in marketing and public relations and taught high school before coming to BC.

Nikhil Gupta

Nick is a fourth year PhD student at Boston College, completing an exam on Trans-atlantic modernism. He has already completed an exam on the Literatures of American Expansion. His main research interest is in how modernist texts coopt texts from across the Atlantic in order to reimagine their own national, postcolonial, or provicial space. He has taught courses in Exile, Literary forms that seem out of place, the Modern British Novel, and Modernism Across the Atlantic.

Matthew Heitzman

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 trade, post-colonial theory and gender studies. He has taught sections of the First-Year Writing Seminar (FWS), Lit. Core classes on travel in literature, as well as Narrative and Interpretation. This year he will teach an elective course on 19th century British imperialism.

Alisa Marko Iannucci

Alisa is working on her dissertation, "Early American Cosmopolitans: Antebellum Writer-Travelers and Cross-Cultural Exchange."  She has completed exams in ecocriticism and American literature, and taught Narrative and Interpretation, 
American Literary History I, an elective on American travel writing, and two core courses at BC. She is also a guide at Herman Melville's
Arrowhead in Pittsfield, MA and has served as a council member for the New England American Studies Association. Alisa earned her undergraduate degree in English and Anthropology at the University of Virginia and taught for two years in the Peace Corps.

Craig Kasprzak

Craig previously attended Fordham University in Bronx, New York, where he received both his bachelor's and master's degrees, and taught writing and critical reading for the Higher Education Opportunity Program. Presently, he teaches a section of the First-Year Writing Seminar, and works additionally as an individual writing tutor at BC's Academic Development Center, where he has served since arriving in Chestnut Hill. His current research concerns literary manifestations of African-American social consciousness in the mid-20th century, and his dissertation will likely explore the coordinates at which sport and urban struggle intersect during the same period. Craig currently lives and teaches in New York while taking baby steps toward the completion of his dissertation on the cultural work of mid-20th century integration narratives. He also administers the Boston College Online Writing Lab (OWL) from afar.

http://www2.bc.edu/~kasprzcr/

Katherine Kellett

Katherine specializes in early modern literature, and her interests include performance studies, queer theory, and gender studies. At Boston College, she has designed and taught introductory courses such as Freshman Writing Seminar and Studies in Poetry as well as upper-level electives like Early Women Writers and Shakespeare. She has also served as a teaching assistant in the survey course, Introduction to British Literature & Culture I. At Framingham State College, she has designed and taught Literary Study, an introductory course for English majors.

She currently works as a writing tutor at Framingham State's academic support center. Katherine’s publications include "Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s /The Convent of Pleasure/" in /Studies in English Literature 1500-1900/ and "The Lady’s Voice: Poetic Collaboration in Milton’s /Mask/" in /Milton Studies/ (forthcoming). She is working on a dissertation that examines representations of the female body in early modern England.

Jason Kerr

Colleen Lannon

Colleen is currently working on a dissertation that examines Victorian negotiations of economic changes in mid nineteenth-century novels. Her other interests include the m odernist novel, Victorian literature and culture, literature and economics, and British financial history. She has completed exams on nineteenth-century British fiction, the rise of the novel, British modernist fiction, and James Joyce's Ulysses. Colleen received her bachelor's degree in English Literature and Language from Harvard University, and co-founded a publishing company that focused on emerging trends in management theory and organizational learning. She lives with her husband and son in a 23- family "eco-village" located on an historic working farm in Hartland, VT.

Timothy Lindgren

http://www2.bc.edu/~lindgret/

Anne Malchodi

Anne is a first-year student studying early modern British literature and culture. Specifically, she would like to focus on early modern women writers and representations of women in literature from the time period. After graduating from Boston College in 2004, Anne taught high school English for three years.

Catherine Michna 

Patrick Wynn Moran

Dathalinn O'Dea

Dathalinn O'Dea is a second-year doctoral candidate at Boston College. She holds a B.A. in English from Hamilton College (Clinton, NY) and spent three years teaching high-school English and Chemistry in Rhode Island before entering the BC graduate program. Her academic interests include 19th- and 20th-century Irish literature, postcolonial studies, politics and criticism, and Modernism.

Joshua Olivier Mason

Josh is a second-year Ph.D student concentrating in 19th Century British Literature. Josh recently completed his minor exam entitled "The Contact Zone between Evolution and Religion in Victorian England" and his research interests include 19th and early 20th century fiction, memoir, evolutionary theory, the history of science, biblical criticism, and Jewish Studies. After completing a B.A. in English at Oberlin College, Josh spent four years teaching English and Composition at an Independent School in New York State.

Lorenzo Alexander Puente

Alex is interested in the study of Postcolonialism 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.  Alex is happily married to Maria Kathleen Puente and is  proud father to their son, Francis.

Nicolas Parker

Nick did graduate work on James Joyce and William Golding at the University of Leeds (UK) before coming to Boston College to pursue an MA and then PhD. His interests are in twentieth century British fiction, particularly Joyce, Orwell, Greene an d Golding, along with some less popular writers such as Phyllis Bentley, Ann Bridge and C.E. Montague. He has given papers on Joyce, Golding and the film The Ring. He has taught on "the urban" in Anglophone prose, popular American cinema, "the nation" in British fiction, as well as TAing surveys of British Literature and Culture, and teaching composition. Nick co-founded the Boston College Graduate Colloquium, bringing together the graduate community with faculty, and now in its fourth year. He is curre ntly working on his dissertation on challenges made to the validity of the British Nation by writers located inside the national auspices.

Jamin Rowan

Jamin is currently finishing his dissertation, "Urban Sympathy: Reconstructing an American Literary Tradition." His study counters traditional images of and critical approaches to the city as a socially hostile environment by piecing together more hopeful depictions of its social possibilities by urban intellectuals, including Stephen Crane, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling and Jane Jacobs. Jamin has presented his work at the annual conventions for the American Literature Association, Modern Language Association and American Studies Association. His teaching and research interests include: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature; Urban Literature and Culture; Literary Nonfiction; American Studies; Literature and the Environment; and Composition.

Thomas Simons

Thomas R. Simons earned his M.A. from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he was a teaching fellow, and his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.  His academic and research interests center around poetry and non-fiction prose in 18th and 19th Century English Literature – with particular concentrations on Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, and Walter Pater. His work often pursues an interdisciplinary focus on connections between literature and philosophy – primarily German Idealism, Existential Phenomenology, Philosophical Hermeneutics, and Literary Anthropology.  His publications include “Coleridge Beyond Kant and Hegel: Transcendent Aesthetics and the Dialectic Pentad” in Studies in Romanticism; "Prometheus and the Process of Individuation: A Jungian Reading of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound” in JUNG: The e-Journal of the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies, and his poetry has appeared in fait accomplit: The Literary Miscellany of the Comparative Literature Association of the University of Alberta.  At present, he is working on his dissertation: “Being and the Imaginary: An Introduction to Aesthetic Phenomenology and English Literature 1738-1889.”

Chad Stutz

Chad’s primary interest is in the intersection of religion and literature, especially in nineteenth-century Britain. Specific interests include the relationship between aesthetics and faith, the interaction of Romanticism and religion, spiritual autobiography, the history of nineteenth-century theology, and C.S. Lewis. He has taught courses on the tradition of spiritual autobiography, representations of evil, and faith and doubt in Victorian literature and culture. He is currently at work on his dissertation, "Anglo-American Evangelicalism, Art, and the Aesthetic: 1830-1900," a study that seeks to reassess the state of aesthetic theory among nineteenth-century evangelicals as represented in a variety of denominational periodicals.

David Tennant

David Tennant is a fifth-year PhD student in English. His BA is in Literatures-in-English, with a minor in linguistics, from UC San Diego. His area of concentration is the Early Modern period in England, primarily the works of Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton. His focus is on poetry and poetics with an emphasis on Cognitive approaches to literary text. Tennant is also interested in historiography, particularly in relation to Shakespeare’s history plays. Other areas of interest include the poetry of Emily Dickinson and political criticism.

Ann Tressler

Nirmal Trivedi

Nirmal's interests are in American Studies, 19th century American literature, and postcolonial theory. She received a B.A, from the University of California at Irvine in Comparative Literature. He has published articles and reviews in borderlands, Journal for Asian American Studies, H-Net and taught courses in World LIterature, Non-Fiction, Cultures of Imperialism, and First-Year Writing. His dissertation is on the figure of the war correspondent in American culture, from the Mexican War until the Spanish-American War. He writes a blog at http://bostoncoop.net/~ntrivedi/wordpress/ and be contacted at trivedni AT bc DOT edu.

Rebecca Troeger

Rebecca's main interests are 20th century Irish literature, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, transnationalism, 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 a cross study between Irish ethnomusicology and literature. She has taught the Freshman Writing Seminar and currently works as an instructional assistant through the BC athletic program.

Alison VanVort

Alison’s interests are in ecocriticism, American studies, transnationalism, 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 ecocriticism. Her main focus is on representations of nature in literary discourse that attempt to resist exploitation and commodification 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.

Alice Waters

Alice Waters: Alice is a first-year student in the program. She holds a B.A. in English with a minor in Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is concentrating on early modern British literature and culture, specifically interested in gender studies, utopian writing, and science writing of the period. Alice is currently working on an exam exploring utopian and dystopian writing from the early modern period through the eighteenth century. She is also interested in science fiction studies.

Amy Witherbee