Home
About
Graduate Students

Graduate Students

Literature Graduate Students

Abdul Aijaz

Graduate Student

aaijaz@indiana.edu

My research explores different ideas of water and rivers in the Indus Basin. Using postcolonial ecocritical and new materialist theories, I try to understand the simultaneous instantiation of the Indus rivers as gods and machines in colonial and postcolonial India and Pakistan while also asking the crucial questions of knowledge production and power relations on local and global scales. By using fiction, folklore, and scientific texts together, the research destabilizes the fact-fiction and word-world binaries to make the deity in the machine visible. Interests are: Postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, vital materialism, south Asian literature.

Richard Allberry

Graduate Student

rallberr@indiana.edu

Richard Allberry is a PhD student studying Victorian literature and culture. Before joining the graduate program at IU, he studied English at the Community College of Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island. His primary research interests are cultural attitudes surrounding and literary representations of gambling in the Victorian novel and evolutionary theory's influence on novelistic form. His dissertation aims at once to account for the ostensible Victorian aversion to and marginalization of gambling through contemporaneous cultural anxieties surrounding changing, slippery conceptions of causality, and to examine the formal affordances these conceptions made available to novelists such as George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot.

Sami Atassi

Graduate Student

shatassi@iu.edu

A native of Houston, Sami H Atassi is a PhD candidate in English Literature, with PhD minors in Comparative Literature and Arabic Language. Sami's primary research is on the aesthetic use of terror in American satires written during the antebellum period. Covering a range of topics from the remediation of blackface in Get Out to allegorizing Poe's dark political humor in war-torn Syria, his essays can be found in Post Colonial Interventions, Studies in American Humor, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, among others.

Shataparni (Titir) Bhattacharya

Graduate Student

shabhat@iu.edu

Shataparni, who usually goes by Titir, is an international student from Kolkata, India, who is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature and is also an Associate Instructor of Composition at IU. She holds a BA and an MA in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is interested in women's writing, queer writing, and the gothic, with a soft spot for horror narratives and the supernatural. She is also interested in medieval and pre-modern death cultures and Restoration theatre. Before starting her PhD, she was a freelance copyeditor with Penguin Random House India. In her spare time, she enjoys eating good food, drinking colourful beverages, reading in the sun, painting, watching TV shows, or missing her cat back home in India.

Amber Bowes

Graduate Student

arbowes@iu.edu

Amber Bowes studies in Indiana University’s English Department PhD Program. She is especially interested in masculinity as written by long 18th century and 19th century women writers, and has recently become more interested in reception history and archival work. Before coming to IU, Amber taught in the public school system. Now, she loves her job at Indiana University’s rare book library, where she helps researchers handle old manuscripts and editions.

Anne Boylan

Graduate Student

anboylan@iu.edu

Anne Boylan is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Victorian literature with interests in gender, sexuality, and cultural studies. She is currently working on a dissertation on manifestations of liberal gender ideology in Victorian literature and its persistence in Western neoliberal feminism. She is currently managing editor of Victorian Studies and has worked as manuscript assistant at the Lilly Library since 2018. She received a B.A. from Bard College in 2013 and before coming to IU she was marketing manager for Boston Review.

Jordan Bunzel

Graduate Student

jbunzel@indiana.edu

Jordan received his B.A. in English literature with a correlate in classics at Vassar College. He is a Literature M.A./Ph.D. student interested in nineteenth-century novels, classics, disability studies, and embodiment. Currently, Jordan studies depictions of the classicist’s body in late Victorian works by Mary Augusta Ward and George Gissing.

Sam Chirtel

Graduate Student

schirtel@iu.edu

Sam is an MA/PhD student, science fiction writer, and former biophyicist. His research will probably focus on late twentieth century and early twenty-first century British and American science fiction, particularly space-noir, the Singulatiy, and cosmic horror, but who can predict the future? He is also developing an interest in Victorian Spiritualism to round things out. Before coming to IU, Sam received a B.A. in Biophysics from The John Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The University of Colorado Boulder. A lifelong animal lover, Sam dreams about the giant squid, misses the moose in Colorado, and is the proud parent of a three-year-old American Bulldog named Panda Bear.

Kyung Cho

Graduate Student

kyuncho@iu.edu

Kyung Cho is a Literature Ph. D student and an early modernist. Before studying at IU, she has a B.A. and M.A in English Literature from Ewha Womans University in South Korea. Her primary research interest is English Renaissance drama, with a focus on questions of gender and sexuality approached from a new historicist sensibility informed by current work on embodied emotion, affect, and bodily expression. She aims to pursue further studies in the materiality of emotions in English Renaissance dramas, particularly how affective expressions and bodily presentations are interwoven with early modern political discourse.

Abby Clayton

Graduate Student

aclayto@iu.edu

Abby Clayton is a PhD student specializing in Victorian studies and nineteenth century transatlanticism. She is particularly interested in the formation, dissemination, and interrelation of British and American national and/or imperial identities during the nineteenth century She grounds her study of these cultural exchanges in the media, travel, and personal and public heritage practices of the period.

Thade Jude Correa

Graduate Student

tcorrea@iu.edu

My scholarly interests are centered on modern/contemporary poetry and poetics, with emphases on poetic thought, literature and cognition / embodiment, and the interrelationships among the arts and critical theory. I am also a writer--of poetry, primarily--and a musician and composer. A previous graduate of IU Bloomington (B.A. in English & music, 2006) as well as University of Chicago (M.A., 2010) and University of Notre Dame (M.F.A. in Creative Writing / Poetry, 2013), I taught English classes at IU Northwest in Gary in addition to private music lessons before returning to IUB's English Department in 2021.

Raheem Elmore

Graduate Student

rtelmore@iu.edu

I am a dual Ph.D. student in the departments of English and African American and African Diaspora Studies. I specialize in African American Literature and 20^th and 21^st century American Literature. I received my B.A. in English: Pre-Education from the Ohio State University and my M.A. in English: Teaching from the University of Dayton. I am a former k-12 educator. My research is interested in examining relationships between and developments in multicultural and Black-centered educational models. I am interested in understanding how literature choices, pedagogical approaches, and literary interpretations influence the teaching and learning experiences of educators and students in the English and Language Arts classrooms at k-12 schools that implement culturally sustaining and multicultural pedagogies.

Zachary Engledow

Graduate Student

zacclift@iu.edu

Zachary Engledow is a native of Alabama where he received an Honors B.A. in English Literature from the University of Montevallo. While at Montevallo, he completed an Honors thesis exploring moments of beheading, penetration, and castration as queer, suggesting that the medieval romance is in itself a queer genre. He is a medievalist in the M.A./Ph.D. program and his research interests include: medieval romance, queer theory/history, and the relationship between modern queer identity and the medieval past. He is also interested in exploring Germanic and North Sea literature and culture in relation to queerness and transmission.

Maggie Ephraim

Graduate Student

mephraim@iu.edu

Maggie Ephraim’s research focuses on women who resist gender roles and social convention in literature of the British Isles. She is an English Literature Ph.D. student who earned her B.A. in English from DePauw University in 2021, where she also completed a minor in Ancient Greek. Maggie’s current research focuses on how stories change—or don’t change—through translation, time period, and adaption.

Samuel Evola

Graduate Student

sevola@iu.edu

Samuel Evola specializes in Victorian fiction as a student in the M.A./Ph.D. program. He received a B.A. and M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame, and is a former high school teacher. His research interests include narrative theory, cognitive science, and the social and moral changes that accompanied industrialization.

Maggie Gilchrist

Graduate Student

magilch@iu.edu

Maggie Gilchrist is a PhD student specializing in late medieval literature. Her work primarily deals with representations of death and the (un)dead, especially with regards to the ways in which dead and dying bodies convey meaning to and for the living. In addition, her research explores the corpse as a site for working through both personal and cultural traumas.

Lindsay Gill

Graduate Student

lg8@iu.edu

Lindsay Gill is a PhD student in English and Medieval Literature. She has an MLitt from the University of St Andrews in Medieval English, after which she taught at Tougaloo College. She is interested in how language, literature, and material objects (such as manuscripts) develop out of cultural and historical forces across a dynamic space and time. Her research critically examines intersections and mutuality through feminist, post-colonial, and materialist theory. She likes long walks and a spontaneous road trip.

Tess Given

Graduate Student

tjgiven@iu.edu

Tess J Given is a PhD student of English literature and associate composition instructor. They graduated Grinnell College with a BA in Biology and English, and have a MA from the University of Kentucky in English. They focus on cyborg studies of the transatlantic eighteenth century and contemporary SF genre, focusing on reproduction and futurity through the lens of queer theory, new materialisms, and trans- and post-humanisms. They try to bridge contemporary theoretical conversations with texts across their archive, and with their pedagogical practice.

Helen Gunn

Graduate Student

gunnhe@iu.edu

Helen Gunn is an English PhD student specializing in modern drama. Her interests include theories of temporality, language, and trauma, along with playwrights such as Beckett and Churchill. Before attending IU, she earned her BA from Rice University and her MA from Boston College.

Sami Heffner

Graduate Student

srheffne@iu.edu

Sami Heffner received her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, where she majored in English as well as History. She is now an MA/PhD student with interests mostly to do with the poetry of the long nineteenth century, ranging from William Blake to Wilfred Owen. She also likes to think about homesickness, nostalgia, and feelings of displacement as they developed throughout the nineteenth century, with a particular interest in how war plays a role. She also likes to think about how texts can be queered, and the role poetry played in a century that would become dominated by the novel.

Zoë Henry

Graduate Student

zlhenry@iu.edu

Zoë Henry is a BIPOC writer and doctoral candidate in English at Indiana University, where she researches global modernism, Black studies, and the history of psychology. Her work has appeared in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany and is forthcoming (in 2022) in Modernism/Modernity Print Plus and the Henry James Review. Her public-facing writing has been featured in national publications including Slate, HuffPost, and CNBC.

Zoë has presented papers at two consecutive MLA conventions, and has given guest lectures at Tulane University and California State University Fresno. In November 2022, she will lead a seminar at the Modernist Studies Association conference, entitled “Transracial Circuits, Transnational Modernism,” alongside Brown University’s Kevin Quashie. She has received numerous grants and travel awards to support her research, including a Carnegie Travel Fund and a New York State Summer Writers fellowship. In addition to her scholarship, Zoë has taught numerous undergraduate writing-intensive classes, including a self-designed course on representations of Blackness in U.S. popular culture, from Spike Lee to Kara Walker and Ta Nehisi-Coates. She can be reached at zlhenry@iu.edu, or on Twitter @ZoeLaHenry.

Milo Hicks

Graduate Student

milohick@iu.edu

Milo Murphy Hicks is a PhD candidate in English, with a minor in Cognitive Science, who studies 20th and 21st century writing that exists at the limits of genre. Their master’s work at McGill University was in British modernism but has recently shifted to a Post45 American context with the stories of Diane Williams and other writers influenced by Gordon Lish. Milo's research is informed by the phenomenology of reading; consciousness, affect, perception, and sensation; philosophies of mind, language, and embodiment; the unit of the sentence in short stories; as well as formal experimentation. Milo is also part of Fritz Breithaupt's Experimental Humanities Lab.

Benjamin Hiskes

Graduate Student

bhiskes@iu.edu

Ben Hiskes is a joint PhD student in English literature and Cognitive Science. His research focuses on the seventeenth century, particularly on wonder as both a historical concept and cognitive process. Currently, he is trying to connect renaissance poetry and modern models of creativity and curiosity to come to ecological and historically-relevant understandings of the processes of discovery and invention. He is part of the Experimental Humanities Lab at Indiana University, where he conducts research on the psychology of narrative.

Benjamin Hoover

Graduate Student

bhhoover@iu.edu

Ben comes to the English PhD program from Southern California, where he received his MA from California State University, Long Beach and his BA from the University of California, Riverside. He works on medieval English and Scottish literature with particular focuses on chivalric romances, Chaucer, outlaw narratives and how some or all of these intersect with notions of masculinity, violence, and theories of space and place.

Wenona Jonker

Graduate Student

wjonker@iu.edu

Wenona is a student in the MA/PhD program in English. Her current field of study is British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but she is keeping herself open to the digressions of graduate school. Before coming to Indiana University, Wenona earned her BA in English with a minor in Plant Science from Louisiana Tech University. She has spent multiple summers working as assistant field manager and intern on small farms focused on biointensive and no-till methods, thinks there are few things quite as delightful as an aquarium or a daiquiri on a humid summer night, and often wonders about the inner lives of river otters and cuttlefish. These affinities coalesce⁠ (alongside an early-childhood awareness of the delicacy and vulnerability of ecologies⁠ along the coastline of her home state of Louisiana⁠) into an interest in the environmental and aquatic humanities, climate justice, and literary encounters with the other-than-human world.

Hoi Na Stephanie Kung

Graduate Student

hkung@indiana.edu

My research examines the intersections between embodiment and citizenship in twentieth-century century African American and Asian American literature. Drawing upon affect theory, theory of the senses and critical race theory, I investigate the ways in which embodied subjects maintain desire, attachment, and sense of belonging to the national body-politic in the face of ongoing material, political, and psychic exclusion. I am also interested in considering alternative models of citizenship that do not deny and disavow embodied existence, but turn to embodied acts as contestations of exclusion. My research also asks after the political significance of American ethnic texts beyond their representative value. To this end, I attend to ethnic texts with modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in order to explore how the materiality of sights and sounds of a text can express political agency and resistance.

Ryan Lally

Graduate Student

rlally@iu.edu

I am a Literature M.A./Ph.D. student with a B.A. in English from Samford University. My research interests include genre conventions in twentieth century American poetry, with a particular focus on odes. Prior to enrolling at IU, I was a Writing Coach and developmental English lab instructor at Southern Union State Community College in Opelika, Alabama.

Yi-Chen Andrea Lay

Graduate Student

yilay@iu.edu

Yi-Chen Andrea Lay is a Literature Ph.D. student and an aspiring Victorianist. Prior to studying at IU, she received a B.A. and an M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University. Her research generally concerns Victorian material culture and ecology, with particular focus on how they influence narrative form. She is also interested in agency, network, and modes of collaboration between the human and the nonhuman.

Sarah Le

Graduate Student

hble@indiana.edu

I focus primarily on 16th and 17th century British drama and poetry, with emphasis on texts that deal with intersecting issues of colonialism, race, gender/sexuality, subjecthood, power, and agency. I am also interested in pop culture Shakespeare and theories of adaptation, cultural commodities, performance, and visual culture.

Evan Leake

Graduate Student

ejleake@iu.edu

Evan Leake is a PhD student specializing in nineteenth century American literature. He is specifically interested in how war narratives contribute to discourses of national identity, democratic unity, and historical progress, as well as how mass media and visual technologies influence literary representation. His broader interests include cultures of imperialism, postcolonialism, and archival research. Prior to attending IU, Evan graduated from West Point and served as an air and missile defense officer in the U.S. Army.

Jaehoon Lee

Graduate Student

jle30@iu.edu

I’d like to consider myself a close-listener. I love reading and listening to texts—especially poetry and popular music—that either theorize about sound on the page, or do so by physically emitting sounds. Theory or theorizing is thus core part of my work; sound studies and psychoanalysis, among other theoretical disciplines, inspire and inform, guide and shape my listening habits. I’m currently interested in how sound plays human as much as human plays sound, creating a kind of feedback loop that goes out of sync with the normative time and space. I hold a bachelor’s in English Education and a master’s in English Literature, both from Seoul National University.

Rebekah Lippens

Graduate Student

rlippens@iu.edu

Rebekah Lippens is a medievalist interested in women's religious texts, hagiography, and medical writings. She also works on late medieval manuscript culture. Before coming to IU, she received an MPhil in medieval literature from the University of Cambridge and a BA in English and Religious Studies from the University of Chicago.

Jennifer Lopatin

Graduate Student

jlopatin@iu.edu

Jennifer Lopatin is a PhD candidate with a focus on medieval literature. Her dissertation explores the figure of the prophetic madman in the woods in premodern literature to think about categories of knowledge and authority. Her broader research interests include include Arthurian and Celtic literatures, wise fools, nonlinear temporalities, and prophecy. At IU, she has taught numerous composition courses, including self-designed ones exploring the figures of the witch, the pirate, and King Arthur.

Sara Loy

Graduate Student

sarloy@iu.edu

Sara Loy is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature with a minor in Rhetoric/Composition. A Victorianist, her dissertation is tentatively titled, “Practice Imperfect: Agential Repetition in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature” and examines the ways in which nineteenth-century childhood agency was figured as an ongoing, constitutive act. In her time at Indiana University, she has been Book Review Editor for Victorian Studies and an associate instructor of composition. Further interests include vampires and popular culture, writing pedagogy, and feminist theory.

John Manley

Graduate Student

jomanley@iu.edu

I'm a doctoral candidate in English at IU-Bloomington. Though my studies primarily center on modern/contemporary poetry and poetics, I also read and write about the relationship between rhetoric and critical theory, the history of Anglo-American philosophy, and narratology. Before arriving at IU, I took an MA in English Literature at Marquette University (2015). My hobbies include long walks in the snow, unnecessarily complex board games, and pick-up hockey.

Carolyn Marino

Graduate Student

capmarin@iu.edu

Carolyn Marino is an English Literature M.A./Ph.D. student and the 2020-2021 Renaissance Studies fellow. Prior to attending IU Bloomington, she earned her B.A. in English Literary Studies with a minor in Religious Studies from Bucknell University. Her undergraduate honors thesis explored the conditions for martyrdom exacted through “self-homicide” in John Donne’s Biathanatos. Her primary research interests include metaphysical poetry, early modern drama, and religious tracts and publications.

Jesse Matlock

Graduate Student

jedmatlo@iu.edu

Jesse Matlock is a Literature PhD student with a primary interest in metafiction. He earned his BA in English from Henderson State University and his MA in English from Arkansas State University. In addition to teaching First Year Composition at A-State, he served as editor for, and contributed to, the latest (3rd) edition of A-State's First Year Composition text, and worked as an embedded writing tutor for the College of Engineering. His MA thesis concentrates on metafiction as a rhetorical narrative technique, analyzing its use across the mediums of literature, comic books/graphic novels, drama, and film. His PhD studies continue in the area of metafiction, toward an ontology informed by metafiction's metaphysical implications. He is also told by his wife that he buys too many comic books.

Chris Mendez

Graduate Student

cjmendez@iu.edu

I am a Literature M.A./ PhD student minoring in Gender Studies. I received my BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. My research interests include Latinx literature, queer theory, and media studies. I study depictions of urban space, gentrification, and displacement in US Latinx literature, film, and television. I am interested in how Latinx authors manage displacement for Latinx subjects by using the formal elements of the text to create a groundedness of space and self.

Robert Metaxatos

Graduate Student

rmetaxa@iu.edu

Robert Metaxatos is an MA/PhD student whose scholarship works to develop connections between contemporary Anglophone literature and biopolitical theory. His interests in this area span the neoliberal politics of Empire; the socio-historical construction and maintenance of racial boundaries; medico-legal encounters of sex/gender transgressive people; and relations between technology, humans, and animals. Before coming to IU Robert completed a BA in English and Sociology at William & Mary, where he specialized in globalization and gendered work.

Sean Mier

Graduate Student

smier@indiana.edu

Sean Mier received his MA in English from University of Colorado-Boulder and is currently pursuing a PhD with emphases in Victorian literature and studies in the history of the book. His past work has considered the intersection of nineteenth-century print technologies and conventions with more embodied modes of communication, like handwriting.

Grace Miller

Graduate Student

gvmiller@iu.edu

Grace Miller is a PhD student who studies contemporary English Literature, specifically through the theoretical lens of the posthuman. Before attending IU, she earned a BA in English and a BA in Economics with a focus on Behavioral Cognition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Grace’s scholarly interests can usually be found in the blurry intersection of narrative, culture, and digital media; her current research is grounded in the materiality of embodiment—especially as it intersects with narratives of belonging, both on- and off-line.

Chelsey Moler Ford

Graduate Student

cmoler@indiana.edu

Chelsey Moler Ford is a M.A./Ph.D student specializing in eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature. She currently serves as the Assistant Managing Editor of Victorian Studies. Her interests include theories of trauma and violence, narratology, the rise of the novel, amatory fiction, and women’s literature of the eighteenth century. Chelsey has taught several first-year composition courses centered on feminism, race, and gender.

Lydia Nixon

Graduate Student

lydnixon@iu.edu

Lydia Nixon is a PhD student specializing in 20th-21st century American literature with a minor in Critical Race and Postcolonial Studies. Before coming to IU, she completed her BA at Morningside College, taught high school English in the US and English as a foreign language in Japan, and then earned her MA at Angelo State University. She studies ecologies and identity-making in the context of the Anthropocene, particularly looking at anti-colonial alternatives to mainstream American environmental literature and theory. Related interests include bioregionalism and place studies, Native American literature and Indigenous theory, speculative fiction, and environmental justice.

Blake Overman

Graduate Student

blover@iu.edu

Blake is a PhD student in Literature specializing in Victorian literature. He obtained his BA in English Education (6-12) and MA in English from Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. He studies monster literature, typically texts that span the long nineteenth century. Through examining these works using intersecting theoretical lenses such as queer theory, affect theory, and narratology, he hopes to further interrogate what it means to be a monster; particularly how monsters might act as agents of empathy for the identities they represent. Adjacent interests include the grotesque and horror and giallo films of the 70s & 80s.

Sarah Parijs

Graduate Student

slparijs@iu.edu

Sarah Parijs is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in American literature with a minor in Literature and Science. Her dissertation traces the emergence of Gaia theory from nature writing in the American nineteenth century to postmodern science fiction through occult forces in allegory. She argues that the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, Walt Whitman, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leslie Marmon Silko, and N. K. Jemisin fail to imagine earth’s animacy through allegory by erasing difference in a unified globe, but that this failure intimates the potential to recycle brokenness and different kinds of environmental flourishing. At Indiana University, she has taught a range of classes including First-Year Writing on issues of environmental collapse, mechanical identity, and sea monsters as well as insect alterity in Introduction to Fiction.

Maddie Parker

Graduate Student

mp13@iu.edu

I am an M.A./PhD candidate and a fellow of Indiana University’s Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. While I focus primarily on the poetry and prose of the Romantic era, I am also interested in exploring how eighteenth-century events like the French Revolution shaped the ideologies of Europe’s literati. This correlation between literature and political thought encourages my further interest in the expatriations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European writers to the new milieu of early America.

Sarah Pedzinski

Graduate Student

spedzins@iu.edu

Sarah Pedzinski is a PhD candidate who studies dragons in early medieval literatures. Her dissertation focuses on dragons and natural histories in the Beowulf manuscript. Sarah is also a full-time Instructional Consultant at the IU Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning where she helps faculty develop curricula that emphasize inclusive learning and student agency.

Sarah Petras

Graduate Student

sgpetras@iu.edu

Sarah Petras is pursuing a dual master’s degree in English literature and Library Science with a focus on early modern women’s literature and manuscript culture. Her work primarily deals with representations of gender performativity, sexuality, and consent in the 16th and 17th centuries, and interrogates the intentional absence of marginalized voices in the archive. Using feminist, queer, and critical race theories in combination with the history of the book, she seeks to uncover the lives and stories told in the margins of preserved ephemera, and question what is or is not assigned value in the creation of special collections.

Alp Eren Pirli

Graduate Student

alppirli@iu.edu

Alp Eren Pirli is an MA/PhD student specializing in nineteenth and early-twentieth century American prose fiction. He is interested in the boundaries of genre as defined by sociocultural, historical, and material contexts, as well as a range of authors from Horatio Alger Jr. to Edith Wharton. He holds a BA in English from Boğaziçi University, Turkey.

Joshua Pontillo

Graduate Student

jpontill@iu.edu

Joshua Pontillo is a literature MA/PhD student in IU’s English program with a BA in English and religious studies from UNC-Chapel Hill. He is interested in medieval literatures of the North Atlantic, especially those of Insular Europe, as well as ecocriticism.

Brian Pulverenti

Graduate Student

bpulvere@iu.edu

Brian Pulverenti is a M.A/Ph.D. student studying Victorian literature. Prior to this, he earned his MA in Classical Studies from the University of Notre Dame where he wrote his MA thesis entitled “Posthumanism in Odysseus’ Apologoi.” During his time there, he taught classes on both Latin and Ancient Greek. At Indiana University, his research considers Victorian reception of the classical world with a particular emphasis on the epic tradition more broadly.

Joshua Rawleigh

Graduate Student

jrawleig@iu.edu

Joshua Rawleigh is a literature PhD student. He received his BA in History from Gordon College and his MSt by Research from the University of Edinburgh. His research tends to focus on the intersection between religion and literature in the long nineteenth century. In particular, he has written and taught on the Scottish author George MacDonald, patristic theology, Tennyson’s poetics, and hermetic philosophy as ways to understand nineteenth-century British society’s complex relationship with the past.

Mikaela Renshaw

Graduate Student

mrenshaw@iu.edu

Mikaela Renshaw is currently pursuing her PhD in English Language and Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is particularly interested in the qualities of kingship and heroism, particularly in the romance and epic genres.

Nicole Rizzo

Graduate Student

nrizzo@iu.edu

Nicole Rizzo is an M.A./Ph.D. student focusing on 20^th and 21^st century American and British literature, modernism, and postmodern drama. Her research interests include trauma studies, disability studies, gender & sexuality studies, queer theory, critical race theory, and performance studies. She received her B.A. in English with a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Boston University and is an alumna of the Kilachand Honors College. Nicole is especially interested in the intersection of social activism and art as well as in how interdisciplinary collaboration can be generative for feminist discourse and action around social justice issues.

Matthew Robinson

Graduate Student

mjr1@iu.edu

Matthew Robinson is a PhD student with interests in 20th-century American poetry. Particularly, he researches queer poets’ relationships to visual culture, transnational aesthetics, and the historical avant-garde.

Eric Rosenbaum

Graduate Student

esrosenb@indiana.edu

My research is in late 19th and early 20th century American literature. I am especially interested in the sociology of literature, or how literary genres target and help to cohere different kinds of social groups. Authors I focus on include Herman Melville, Maria Ruiz de Burton, William James, Frances E.W. Harper, Mark Twain, and Frank Norris.

Kate Rutherford

Graduate Student

kruther@iu.edu

Kate Rutherford is a PhD student primarily interested in 20th-century/contemporary science fiction and dystopian literature. Her other related interests include posthumanism and media studies. Kate holds a BA in English: Secondary Education with minors in History: Secondary Education, Theatre, and Global & International Studies from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI and a MA in English from Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. During her undergraduate studies, Kate studied abroad at the University of Cambridge and Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. Outside of work and school, Kate enjoys travel, fashion, fitness, theatre, live music, and anything adventurous.

Sushmita Samaddar

Graduate Student

ssamadd@iu.edu

Sushmita Samaddar is a PhD candidate in Literature specializing in Ecocriticism. Her research focuses primarily on identifying how ecoanxiety manifests in minority identities, and her inquiry approach is staunchly interdisciplinary. She holds an MA in Poetry and Poetics from the University of York, UK (2018), and a BSc (Hons) in Economics from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata, India (2014).

Sarah Schmitt

Graduate Student

sjschmit@iu.edu

Sarah J. Schmitt is a PhD student working on both seventeenth- and nineteenth-century literature. She is the current Assistant Book Review Editor at Victorian Studies. Before coming to IU, Sarah received her MA from Michigan State.

Devan Schnecker

Graduate Student

dlschnec@iu.edu

Devan Schnecker is pursuing a PhD in English Literature here at Indiana University with a minor in Gender Studies. Her main area of focus is the British Romantic novel, but broadly she is interested in 18th and 19th century British Literature by and/or about women and women’s experience. She is particularly interested in the portrayal and exploration of gender and sexuality in such novels, along with related questions surrounding space, place, and embodiment within an 18th and 19th century framework of colonialism and imperialism. Before coming to IU, Devan received her BA in English Literature and Anthropology from the Honors College of Florida Atlantic University, and her MA in English Literature with a concentration in British and Irish Literary Cultural Studies from Florida State University.

Anushka Sen

Graduate Student

senan@iu.edu

Anushka's research focuses on patterns of dwelling, movement, and belonging in relation to animal presence in modern/ist literature. Her work engages theories of territory, migration, race, and labour, tying these strands together through the appearance and perception of animals in shared spaces. Her teaching experiences span Composition and Poetry, where she has facilitated discussion and writing on topics such as the refugee experience, Afrofuturism, metamorphosis, and challenging the natural-unnatural binary. She has used different media (film, music videos, podcasts) alongside literary texts in her teaching. An international student from Kolkata, India, Anushka translates from Bengali to English and has participated at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Conference and at the Bread Leaf Writers Conference. Anushka's original nonfiction and poetry have also been published in The Dalhousie Review, Eunoia Review, Popula, and Hopscotch Translation, among others.

Evan Sennett

Graduate Student

evjasenn@iu.edu

Evan Sennett specializes in nineteenth-century literature in the United States, with a special interest in the theme of place-making literature. He often uses twentieth-century nature writings as a way to envision dialogues across time. He is also a filmmaker, usually turning to Kentucky as a setting.

Katie Shy

Graduate Student

kshy@iu.edu

I am an M.A./Ph.D. candidate focusing on 20th century British literature. Before coming to Bloomington, I completed a B.A. in English and Classics at Yale. Over the next few years, I am excited to spend time with modernist novels and realist novels, particularly exploring the depiction of domestic life, family relations, and women writers.

Ellen Stenstrom

Graduate Student

ekstenst@iu.edu

Ellen Stenstrom is a Ph.D student focusing on Post-1945 literature. She earned her BA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio with double majors in Literature and Creative Writing and minors in Rhetoric and Education before coming to IU. Her general research interests include experimental fiction, postmodernism, classroom pedagogy, and narrative theory, extending more specifically into mental illness narratives, trauma theory, memory, autofiction, and metafiction. She is also involved in the Experimental Humanities Lab at Indiana University and is currently serving as an Associate Director of Composition. Ellen can most often be found camped out in a coffee shop, library, or in front of a fireplace - reading, writing, learning about teaching, and listening to classical music.

Kortney Stern

Graduate Student

ksstern@iu.edu

Kortney Stern (Ksstern@iu.edu) is a proud first-generation college student, pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at Indiana University. Her academic career began at Diablo Valley Community College and has taken her to San Francisco State University (B.A. in English Literature) and Mills College (M.A. in English Literature). Currently, Kortney is working on a dissertation on sound and silence in which she argues that many characters found across late medieval texts have been deemed "silent" or "marginal" too quickly. By reading texts with our literary eyes and ears, Kortney argues that we can learn to hear the ways in which queer and female characters do, in fact, vocalize through "sonic expressions" of their own design, proving that even those on the supposed margins can make sonic utterances that carry and combat traditional and often exclusionary modes of linguistic meaning making and communication.

Jordan Strauch

Graduate Student

jdstrauc@iu.edu

Prior to coming to IU, Jordan received his BA in English from Sonoma State University. He is an MA/PhD student specializing in post-1945 American literature, particularly New Wave science fiction, through the theoretical lens of nonhuman alterity. He is interested in theories which investigate the construction of and relationships between the human, the nonhuman, and everything in between, such as posthumanism, thing theory, ecocriticism, and animal and monster studies. By reading science fictional novels, films, and performances through these lenses, his work aims to understand how the borders of the human and the other-than-human become contested ontological zones in precarious times and places. Jordan is also interested in emerging aesthetic categories which parody, disrupt, or otherwise problematize domestic senses of place such as analog horror, solarpunk, speculative ecologies, and liminal spaces.

Emma Swidler

Graduate Student

eswidler@iu.edu

Emma Swidler is a Ph.D. candidate focusing on British literature of the long eighteenth century and its modern-day reception. She is particularly interested in Jane Austen and in considering Austen’s reception history as well as Austen's own historicist techniques. Emma is fascinated by the intersection of literature, narratives of British identity, and how women writers of the long C18 challenged ideas of Britishness. Before coming to IU, Emma received her B.A. in English at Lawrence University.

Gregory Tolliver

Graduate Student

gretolli@iu.edu

Gregory Tolliver is a doctoral candidate in English Literature. His dissertation explores relationships between nature, "kynde," and sexuality in Late Middle English poetry. Gregory's research interests include courtly and devotional poetry, ecocriticism, literary space/time, and queer theory.

Colby Townsend

Graduate Student

colbtown@iu.edu

Colby is an MA/PhD student specializing in English literature of the long eighteenth century. He received two honors bachelor’s degrees in comparative literature and religious studies from the University of Utah and a master’s degree in history at Utah State University. His work explores the development of biblical studies from the Renaissance to today and the ways that the Bible, religion, politics, and society influence the production of new literature. He is deeply interested in the ways that readers engage with their texts as material objects. This has led him to analyze the texts of early American religious groups, like Mormonism, in the context of the development of the critical study of the Bible, the development of the novel, and the print culture of the long eighteenth century in both Great Britain and North America.

Mary Helen Truglia

Graduate Student

mtruglia@indiana.edu

Mary Helen Truglia is a PhD Candidate in Literature and a departmental Teaching Fellow, focusing on Early Modern English women's writing with an interdisciplinary minor in Renaissance Studies. Her dissertation examines the interplay of gender and genre, using feminist and queer theory to investigate these intersections in Early Modern lyric poetry, prose romance, & epics. In addition to her undergraduate teaching, she also served as an Assistant Director of Composition from 2017-2019, and currently serves as the Assistant Director of Writing Tutorial Services. Her other academic interests and specialties include poetry and poetics, the epic and romance tradition, Shakespeare, Milton, gender and women's studies, writing and composition studies, student annotation patterns, WPA, teaching composition, and teaching Early Modern literature.

Laura Tscherry

Graduate Student

tscherry@iu.edu

Laura Tscherry is a PhD Candidate in English literature with a minor in Cultural Studies/Art History. Their research examines representations of communal spaces in modernist and mid-century novels. Specifically, they are interested in what happens to the intimacy and privacy of the home space when it becomes the site of not-quite-intentional collectivity, as well as in the strategies that people build to endure the difficulty, even horror, of human interrelation in communal spaces. In addition to their undergraduate teaching, they also serve as Assistant Director of Composition.

Megan Vinson

Graduate Student

mevinson@iu.edu

I am a PhD candidate in early modern literature. My dissertation project looks at representations of women in major writers of the period and explores how they are embedded in concepts of female choice. My project is also interested in the intersection between temporal and material entanglement, and how the two are enmeshed with early modern representations of female desire. I have a book review of Melissa Sanchez's Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition in the Sixteenth Century Journal. I also have an article on William Harvey & queer birds under review with the Ben Jonson Journal. Additionally, I teach a first-year writing course and tutor a mix of undergraduates and graduates at IU's writing center. When not teaching or writing, I love hiking with my dogs, reading Stephen King books and playing a lot of video games.

Erin Walden

Graduate Student

erwalden@iu.edu

Erin Walden is an MA/MLS student interested in Victorian poetry, queer theory, excess, and the temporal changes that accompanied industrialization. She also looks at how the works (especially letters and zines) of marginalized writers have been (self-)published, distributed, and preserved. Previously, Erin studied Biochemistry and English at Brown University.

Denny Weisz

Graduate Student

daweisz@iu.edu

Denny specializes in mid-late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American fiction. Their interests include elocution and voice culture, particularly as these relate to racialized and gendered embodiment; discourses of orthography, typography, and dialect; and textual depictions of speech and language disorders and disfunction. They are currently Assistant Managing Editor for the journal Victorian Studies.

Rhetoric Graduate Students

Montgomery Quaid Adams

Graduate Student

mqadams@iu.edu

Quaid Adams is a PhD student of Rhetoric and Composition and is also pursuing an MA in Folklore and Ethnomusicology here at IUB. He received his BA in Secondary English Education and Folklore/Mythology from the University of Kentucky, and an MA in English from the University of Louisville. His research interests lie at the intersection of Rhetoric and Folklore concentrating on “otherness,” ethnography, and the role legend plays in our construction of time/space and our relationship to the world around us. Along these same lines, Quaid is also interested in Composition Studies and how ethnography and folklore can be used as an incredibly impactful resource within the writing classroom, particularly in first year writing courses.

Annamarie Carlson

Graduate Student

anlcarl@iu.edu

Annamarie Carlson is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric. They have earned a BA in English, a BA in Theatre (with an emphasis in performance), and an MA in English Literature from Northern Arizona University. Annamarie’s scholarly interests can usually be found at the blurry intersection of narrative, culture, and media, all broadly conceived. To put it another way, they are fascinated by the interplay of the stories we tell, the technologies used to tell them, and the relationship of stories and technologies with whatever it is we mean when we say “culture”. They have a creative as well as an academic interest in podcasting, audio fiction, and videogames. Increasingly, Annamarie has been troubled by how we construct the “future,” particularly in relation to space travel and colonization.

Sarah Fischer

Graduate Student

samafisc@iu.edu

Sarah is interested in the study of writing as a general field of research, with fundamental interests in better understanding how writing works, how writing is taught, and how both are systemized in academia (from writing programs to writing centers to institutional writing expectations/standards). But at the root of her interest is a focus on the materiality of people—our physical bodies, our constructed identities, our lived experiences, and our ever-changing environments. She believes the study of embodied writing processes necessitates an ethics of inclusivity, which accounts for as many ways of knowing, sensing, and being as possible. When she is not working, she enjoys eating dessert, watching reality TV, and making art.

Kaylie Fougerousse

Graduate Student

kefouger@iu.edu

Kaylie Fougerousse (foo-jeh-roo) is an English PhD student and associate instructor studying the psychology of language and communication in rhetoric and composition studies. Her current scholarship focuses on the intersectionality of abstractions, class studies, intellectual history, compromise aesthetics, and decolonial rhetoric in the United States. In her teaching and research, she explores the potential of rhetorical sovereignty, the evolution of culturally-responsive pedagogy, the colonial politics of recognition, and the transformative power inherent in all the “scapes” (landscapes, mindscapes, dreamscapes, songscapes, namescapes, etc.).

Millie Hizer

Graduate Student

amhizer@iu.edu

Millie Hizer is a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition. Her dissertation examines how disabled students and faculty in higher education navigate academic ableism through embodied, rhetorical tactics of resistance. She is the winner of the 2021 Virginia La Follette Gunderson Rhetoric Award and has presented her research at conferences such as the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference. Millie has also published her writing in enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture and has forthcoming pieces in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and Spark: A4C4 Equality Journal. Her work has also been featured on disciplinary podcasts such as Tell me More! and Pedagogue.

Eryn Johnson

Graduate Student

erynjohn@iu.edu

Eryn is a PhD student studying rhetoric and composition. She came to IU with a background in literary studies and communication studies. Eryn’s current research interests include the intersection of rhetoric and ethics as it comes to bear upon the narrative paradigm (and vice versa) and the role that ethics plays in rhetoric as a teaching tradition.

Chad Kuehn

Graduate Student

ctkuehn@iu.edu

Chad comes to Indiana University from St. Cloud State University in central Minnesota where he earned M.A. degrees in TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language), and in Writing Studies and Rhetoric, and where he taught as an adjunct in the English for Academic Purposes program. Chad is currently an English PhD student with a concentration in Rhetoric. He is interested in discourses of privilege and how they shape agency in hegemonic relationships. He aspires to effect change in how all parties more generously engage in conversations of privilege, and its dismantling.

Sarah Lawler

Graduate Student

salawler@iu.edu

Sarah Lawler is a PhD student of English in rhetoric and an associate instructor for speech and composition. She graduated with a BA in English Education from the University of North Dakota in 2014; in 2021, she received an MA in English with a Literacy and Rhetorical Studies minor from the University of Minnesota Duluth. In the years between these degrees, she taught English language arts in middle and secondary school settings. As a scholar and researcher, she is interested in environmental rhetoric, especially as it pertains to land equity and land-use ethics. In “Field Mice,” one of her recent publications by ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment, she explores the perniciousness of modern agribusiness as extensions of colonialism and capitalism. Currently, her work considers rhetorical ecologies of climate justice for human and more-than-human communities displaced by the climate crisis.

Benjamin Luczak

Graduate Student

bluczak@iu.edu

Benjamin Luczak is a Rhetoric PhD student whose scholarly interests include the rhetoric of space and public memory as well as theories of the public sphere. He received an MA in English with a composition emphasis from the University of Missouri-Saint Louis.

Peyton Lunzer

Graduate Student

pllunzer@iu.edu

Peyton is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric interested in life writing, ecocomposition, and blended scholarship. Her dissertation, “Stories We Call Home,” uses ecological thinking and life writing practices to build pedagogy grounded in personal stories. She teaches classes about place, wilderness, climate writing, identity, and global stories. Peyton currently lives in Laramie, Wyoming.

Chaim McNamee

Graduate Student

mcnameek@iu.edu

Chaim (he/him and they/them) is a PhD student in rhetoric with a minor in religious studies. His broad areas of interest include critical animal studies, new materialism(s), and Jewish rhetorics. Any time not occupied with working, teaching, and cooking is spent tattooing out of his home studio.

Jason Michálek

Graduate Student

jasomich@iu.edu

Jason Michálek entered IU’s doctoral program in rhetoric in the fall of 2018. His research interests have been historically broad with a BA in English language & literature and linguistics from Grand Valley State University, and an MA in American Studies from The George Washington University. His dissertation project takes up a local controversy concerning transient residents without residence as a foundation for troubling rhetorics of belonging and alienation.

S. Fain Riopelle

Graduate Student

sriopell@iu.edu

Fain Riopelle is a Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric path, coming from an English M.A. program at the University of Virginia, and before that from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. His research focuses on cognitive theories of composition and the implications of such theories for the ways we teach writing, especially at the first-year college level. He is particularly interested in the dispositions and habits of mind that students bring to the writing process, and in bringing the research of cognitive science to bear on the matter of how students think about what writing is and how it works. Also, his last name is pronounced "Ree-oh-pell."

Laura Rosche

Graduate Student

lrosche@iu.edu

Laura Rosche is a PhD candidate in English, with a concentration in Rhetoric. Her dissertation examines the rhetorical strategies women use when narrativizing their experiences as survivors of sexual violation. By prioritizing diverse female voices, Rosche's research focuses broadly on the enactment of feminist ethos, the development of rhetorical listening skills, and the theorization of empathetic communicative practices. Other interests include composition pedagogies, digital rhetorics, and autobiographical rhetorics.

Kelsey Taylor

Graduate Student

krt3@iu.edu

Kelsey Taylor is a PhD student in Rhetoric. She received her M.A. in English Literature from the University of Georgia. Her research interests lie within rhetorical economies, particularly how class and labor work within a neoliberal, late capitalist society. She is also interested in how contemporary literature portrays and is constructed by such paradigms.

Joseph Vuletich

Graduate Student

jvuleti@iu.edu

Joseph Vuletich is a PhD student in English, focusing on the rhetoric of science and technology. His research examines how positionality shapes our perceptions of what counts as knowledge and who counts as knowers. At least that’s what he’s telling himself for the moment. He’s also interested in humor, affect, and first-person narrative (even when he writes in the third person;) as technê in the rhetorical sense – techniques for crafting relationships. When he’s not busy playing with words and encouraging students to do likewise, he enjoys walking, hiking, and playing at the park with his wife and son.

M.F.A. Graduate Students

Jacie Andrews

Graduate Student

jacjandr@iu.edu

Jacie Andrews is a poet from Springfield, Arkansas with an interest in poems that work as an un-ing, poems that hold questions as a form of caretaking. She is the author of the chapbook Sweetwork, and her writing can be found in The Red Wheelbarrow, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2021 New Millenium Writing Award, a finalist for the 2022 NORward prize, and a top ten applicant of the Mountain Words Writer-In-Residence program. She currently serves as an Associate Poetry Editor of Indiana Review and can be found drinking various juices on her porch swing.

Nina Boals

Graduate Student

nboals@iu.edu

Nina Boals is a first-year M.F.A. candidate in poetry from Sun Prairie, WI. She received her B.A. in English and social welfare with a certificate in environmental studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was poetry editor of The Madison Review. She was a finalist for the 2022 Palette Emerging Poet Prize. In her writing, she is searching for a language of compassion to explore mental health and complex family dynamics.

Kat Carlton

Graduate Student

carltokm@iu.edu

Kat Carlton is a poet who places home in Colorado and California. Before becoming an M.F.A. candidate at Indiana University she earned her B.A. in English literature and creative writing at the University of Colorado Denver, and worked with social justice initiatives for sexual education, assault prevention and care. As a writer she is interested in prodding traditional forms and playing to surrealism as she explores womanhood, ancestry, the body as container, connection and surveillance.

Meredith Carroll

Graduate Student

merecarr@iu.edu

Meredith Carroll is an MFA candidate in fiction. Originally from the Chicago suburbs, she received her BA in History from Grinnell College in 2016. Her work, which includes memoir and poetry as well as fiction, explores how characters navigate and define themselves by memory, loss, and the natural world.

Ray Chen

Graduate Student

rayjchen@iu.edu

Ray Chen is a writer who was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan and raised in San Jose, California. He is currently a first-year candidate in IU's MFA program in fiction. He is invested in exploring the lives of transnational Taiwanese people, interrogating US immigrant identities, and excavating the possibilities of intimacy within capitalist and racial alienation.

Ezra Fox

Graduate Student

ezraxfox@iu.edu

Ezra Fox is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry. In their writing, Ezra is curious about “impermanence,” and “non-duality,” specifically, how it pertains to their subjects of lineage, queerness, and spirituality. Ezra’s poems are in or forthcoming in Poiesis, Glassworks Magazine, Sagebrush Review, Slipstream Press, and elsewhere. Apart from writing, Ezra is in the daily practice of reconnecting with their inner child: doing cartwheels, jumping rope, and sharing tea with the beloveds they have been lucky enough to come to know.

Kourtney Jones

Graduate Student

joneskou@iu.edu

Kourtney Jones is a poet and artist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. They graduated from Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne in 2015 with a B.A. in Linguistics, a minor in Women’s Studies, and a Teaching English as a Second Language certificate. Kourtney has taught English both in and outside of the States. She can be found typing in public spaces from a typewriter with her performance poetry project known as The Poem Market. Kourtney is the author of the poetry chapbook The Mug Drops. Her current work explores the intersections of languages and dreams, the transmission between the dead and the living, and poetry as a practice for collective liberation.

Gen Kwon

Graduate Student

yaekwon@iu.edu

Yaerim Gen Kwon is a prose writer from Seoul, South Korea. She is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction at Indiana University in Bloomington. Her short story won first prize in the National Society of Arts & Letters 2022 for Literature and received the Holl Merit and Jones Merit Awards. She received fellowships from NYS Summer Writers Institute and Indiana University. In her former life, she worked in media in Seoul, San Francisco, and Rabat.

Wenxi Li

Graduate Student

wl48@iu.edu

Wenxi Li is an MFA candidate in Fiction from Sichuan, China. She received her B.A. in English from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. In her writing she likes to experiment with genres and languages, to see how form and content might crash into each other in unexpected ways within the space of one coherent piece of writing. In her free time she enjoys walking, biking, and swimming in lakes.

Jess Masi

Graduate Student

jesumill@iu.edu

Jess Masi is a Two-Spirit storyteller, farmer, and futurist from Indianapolis, IN. They are a second year MFA candidate in Fiction, but often find their work transcending the taxonomies of genre and form. Their stories are interested in metamorphosis and the creation of ambiguous utopias, indigenous futurisms, and systems of transformative and restorative justice. Their work is rooted to and in relation to the soil and plants and mycelial canals that connect us all. They are a wandering hobbyist with a current focus on amateur foraging, and are still on the hunt for the elusive pawpaw fruit. They serve as the fiction editor for Indiana Review. They are an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

David Park

Graduate Student

dp44@iu.edu

David Park is an MFA candidate in poetry. He received his bachelor's in English at the University of Puget Sound with an emphasis in creative writing. Born in Korea and raised in Hawaii, his work is invested in the legacy of the Korean war, diaspora studies, postmemory, and trauma theory. A film he enjoys is Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Tyler Patton

Graduate Student

typatt@iu.edu

Tyler Patton is a writer from Portland, Oregon. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 2012 and then lived in San Francisco for ten years. His work explores the insufficiencies of identity and identity politics. You'll probably see him biking around town.

Natalya Pomeroy

Graduate Student

natpomer@iu.edu

Natalya Pomeroy is an MFA candidate in fiction. Originally from Texas, she earned her BA in English - Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is interested in fantastical elements and speculative work, worldbuilding through mannerisms and aesthetics, and bicultural characters. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Space City Underground, Houston History Magazine, and Study Breaks Online. When she isn't writing, she is probably gardening or taking care of her two black cats with her partner.

Tyler Raso

Graduate Student

tyraso@iu.edu

Tyler Raso is a poet, essayist, and multimedia artist with several hometowns. After graduating from Kenyon College with degrees in English and Religious Studies, they taught cooking and creative writing in Chicago Public Schools. Their recent writings center on the queer childhood, portals, mirrors, rebirth, and unnamed intimacies. You can find some of their poetry in POETRY, DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, and they are the author of the chapbook In my dreams/I love like an idea, winner of the 2022 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest.

Danielle Richardson

Graduate Student

dansrich@iu.edu

Danielle Richardson is an MFA candidate in Fiction at IU Bloomington. She was born and raised in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin and earned her BA in English (Creative Writing) with a minor in Film Studies from Florida State University. Her writing typically uses magical realism to explore matriarchy and Black girlhood.

Sophie Stein

Graduate Student

sfstein@iu.edu

Sophie Stein was born in Chicago and is currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University, where she received the Ross Lockridge, Jr. Award for best short story. Her short fiction has won awards from Third Coast, The Hypertext Review, and december magazine; her work has also appeared in Electric Literature, The Briar Cliff Review, The Tangerine, and elsewhere. She earned her M.A. in creative writing from University College Cork and her B.A. from Northwestern University, where she was the serial recipient of the Edwin L. Shuman Award for best short story. She is at work on her first novel.

Teja Sudhakar

Graduate Student

tsudhak@iu.edu

Teja Sudhakar is a first year MFA candidate in Poetry. She was born in Chennai, India, but lived in Lexington, Kentucky for the majority of her life. Teja earned their B.A. degrees in Psychology and Gender & Women’s Studies from the University of Kentucky. In her creative work, Teja explores diaspora, belonging, intergenerational womanhood, homemaking, and faith. She is the author of the chapbook Looking for Smoke, a collection of docupoetry entailing the experiences of first-generation immigrant women living in Kentucky. When they are not writing, Teja enjoys making Spotify playlists, calling her friends back home, and attempting to invent recipes.

Dereka Thomas

Graduate Student

djt4@iu.edu

Dereka Thomas is a queer Black writer from Fairburn, Georgia. She is currently earning both her MFA in Creative Fiction Writing and her MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University at Bloomington. Prior to this, she completed her Bachelor of Arts in English: Creative Writing at Colorado College. In her writing, Dereka enjoys exploring the nuances of the Black experience as it relates to gender, sexuality, religion, and romance. Dereka has previously been published in Nectar Poetry, You Might Need To Hear This, and Silver Rose Magazine. Dereka is the winner of the 2021 JuxtaProse Fiction contest and a finalist in the 2022 Hemingway Shorts Contest, and has work forthcoming or published with both. Dereka is also a Hurston/Wright Fellow and an Anaphora Fellow.

Bernardo Wade

Graduate Student

wadeb@iu.edu

Bernardo Wade is a writer/artist from New Orleans. He holds BAs in English and Philosophy from the University of New Orleans. He currently serves as Associate Editor of Indiana Review, is a Watering Hole Fellow, and moonlights as an equity and justice advocate. He has words in or forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, Southern Humanities Review, Salt Hill Journal, Yemassee, the minnesota review, and others.

Eszi Waters

Graduate Student

sarwater@ius.edu

Eszi Waters is a writer and artist from southern Indiana. They are currently a second-year candidate in the MFA Poetry program. Their poetry and nonfiction projects are concerned with the inevitable collisions and echoes between the natural world and our interior lives, fragmentation, loss, lineage, and memory. They are also interested in satire, irony, and the supernatural in their work. Eszi's small-run chapbook, They Offer You a Name Then Take It From You, was published by a small local press. Their chapbook-length poem, woman's voice absent, was published by alla testa press, in Louisville, KY. Eszi's work can be found at Cathexis Northwest Press, Limestone Post, and elsewhere. Eszi is a parent of a fourth grader, and they live in a little yellow house.

El Williams III

Graduate Student

ew11@iu.edu

El Williams III is a St. Louis native and graduate of the University of Missouri, where he received his B.A. in English with a minor in Black Studies. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ploughshares, River Styx, Shenandoah, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem, Community of Writers, Tin House, and the Watering Hole. Currently, he is a dual MFA/MA candidate in poetry and African American & African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. He is an Associate Instructor and previously served as the Creative Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review.

Gisselle Yepes

Graduate Student

gyepes@iu.edu

Gisselle Yepes is a 23-year-old Puerto Rican and Colombian storyteller from the Bronx. They are currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University, where they have received the Bertolt Clever Poetry Prize and the Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing. Gisselle is a 2022 Tin House Scholar. Their poem “Not an Ode to April 22nd, 2019” won The Missouri Review’s 2021 Poem of the Year. They are an alum of Tin House Summer Workshop, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Anaphora Writing Residency, and DreamYard's Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium 2021.Their poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, The Academy of American Poets, The Missouri Review, iō Literary Journal, Voicemail Poems, and PALABRITAS. Their film has appeared in GIPHY.

Cindy Yu

Graduate Student

yuci@iu.edu

Cindy Yu is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction. She was born and raised in Texas but has spent most of her adult life on the west coast. She studied computer science, earth systems, and creative writing at Stanford University. In her stories, she is drawn to topics related to family, class, and alternative ways of knowing. In her free time, she enjoys visiting urban green spaces and spending time with her dog Maya.