PhD Student Profiles

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HU 370

Position: Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

B.A. summa cum laude (2011) and M.A in English Literature (2015) from San Francisco State University. 

Andrew currently teaches courses on film & literature. His interdisciplinary research interests include: 20th century literature and film, critical theory, black studies, translation, phenomenology, and Marxism. He is currently completing research in the fields of Marxist aesthetics, translation, and the essayistic across mediums; as well as, authors studies with a focus on essayistic modes in Baldwin, Baraka, Benjamin and Moten. 

Andrew’s pedagogical research focuses on liberatory praxis that draws from bounded ethic theories of the other (Freire and hooks) to examine and challenge the critical nexus between oppressed/privileged subjectivities/bodies and structures of power, in the hope of a transformative classroom/consciousness.

Courses at UAlbany:
AENG 121: Reading Literature – African American Tradition
AENG 223: Short Stories -  James Baldwin: contemporaries and influence
AENG 240z: Representations of (dis)ability in America
AENG 243: Film/Literature - Essay Form and Essay Film
AENG 243: Film/Literature - (Anti)Racist Lenses

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HU 386

Position: Lecturer, PhD Candidate
Email: [email protected]

Her current research focuses on print culture in 19th-century America and how the circulation of print materials not only forms but also questions the dynamics within communities and envisions alternative ways of relationality. She is particularly interested in understanding the interaction between print materials and the reader’s subjectivity with the methodology informed by the concept of radical democracy. The authors addressed in her research include Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Lydia Maria Child, and Walt Whitman.

She presented at the International Edgar Allan Poe Conferences in 2009 and 2015.

Courses taught include AENG110 Writing and Critical Inquiry in the Humanities, AENG223 Short Story, AENG240Z American Experiences, and AENG261 American Literary Traditions both face-to-face and online.

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HU 361

Position: Ph.D. Candidate
Email: [email protected]

Master of Arts in English: Wayne State University – May 2012

Research Interests: Marxism, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, Neoliberalism, African-American literature

Courses Taught

At UAlbany: AENG 110z, AENG 121, AENG 144, AENG 223, AENG 240, AENG 243
At Joliet Junior College (Joliet, IL): Eng 098, Eng 099, Eng 101

Publications

• Forthcoming: Article: “Super Deluxe Whiteness: Privilege Critique in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout” symploke. “Oceania in Theory” – December 2018

• Forthcoming: Contribution: “Whiteness” - The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory – Bloomsbury 2018

• Book Review: Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe. Printed in Socialism and Democracy, Volume 31, Issue 3, 2017: “Capitalism Today: Crisis and Response”

• Book Review: Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies ‐ by Twinam, Ann. Printed in Bulletin of Latin American Research, Volume 36, Issue 2, 2017: “Student Movements and Political Change in Contemporary Latin America”

Conferences

• Seminar Presentation: “Super Deluxe Whiteness: Privilege Critique in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, March 2018

• Conference Presentation: “Making the Status Quo Badass Again: Kid Rock, Donald Trump, and the Commodification of White Masculinity,” 15th Annual UAlbany English Graduate Student Conference: The Badass, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, March 2017

• Symposium Presentation: “The Romance of the Masses: Revolutionary Critique in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World,” CLR James Now!, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, November 2016

• Reading Group Participant: “Dispossession, Exclusion, Exploitation: Selections from the Grundrisse,” The Institute on Culture and Society: Dispossession, Exclusion, Exploitation, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 2016

• Reading Group Participant: “Commercial, Merchant’s, and Finance Capital,” The Institute on Culture and Society: Capital: The Basement Tapes, Georgetown University, Washington DC, June 2015

• Conference Presentation: “Structural Whiteness and Nonwhite Bodies in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,” Spaces and Flows: International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, October 2012

Position: Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

B.A. English, B.A. Asian Studies Japanese Language, and Minor in Philosophy from William Paterson University (2015), M.A. English Literature from Clemson University (2019). 

Julie is interested in the differences between Eastern and Western ideologies in regard to how memory relates to personal identity. Her current research focuses on the works of Henry David Thoreau, particularly the Journal, and Thoreau’s work on translating Eastern texts for The Dial. She is interested in the philosophical concepts of non-action, non-being, and nothingness, and how these concepts have been constructed in Western and Eastern ideologies and languages. Julie’s Master’s Thesis focused on Thoreau’s definition of self-improvement, arguing that it centers on potentiality and a surrender to being in a constant state of flux rather than the achievement of a fully refined self. 

Position: PhD Candidate, Lecturer in English
HUM 339
Email: [email protected]

Elaina Frulla specializes in early American literature and culture. Her dissertation examines American literary representations of foreign and accented speech in the 18th Century and early 19th Century. Recently, Elaina has both published and publicly lectured on James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels. 

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Position: PhD Student/ GTA/ Secretary - EGSO (2020-2021)
Email: [email protected]

• Ph.D – English (Literature), University at Albany, SUNY. (In progress)
• MPhil – English Literature, Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan. (2013)
• B.A Hons – English Literature, Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan. (2011)

Zahra Hamdani is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of English at University at Albany, SUNY. Her research interests include contemporary Global Anglophone Literature, particularly South Asian Diasporic fiction. She is interested in the application of the concept of Biopolitics to contemporary South Asian diasporic literature in order to understand the woes of the first and the second-generation immigrants. Hamdani has previously worked on Orientalism, Neo-Orientalism, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, and Postcolonial Biopolitics. 

Research Interests:
African American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Biopolitics, Diaspora Literature, Feminist Theory and Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Conference Presentations:
• “Symbiosis vs Hybridity: Symbiotic relationships in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and US Internal Colonialism”
PAMLA 2015
Teaching Profile:
Lecturer of English language and Literature 
Kinnaird College for Women, Pakistan. (2013 – 2020)

Courses taught:

• Introduction to African Literature
• Literature of the Americas
• Subcontinent Novel
• South Asian Short Stories 
• Introduction to American Poetry
• Introduction to Classical and Romantic Poetry
• English Core I, II, III

Visiting Research Scholar
Arizona State University, USA. (Jan – May 2015)
    Description:

• Faculty Exchange Program between Kinnaird College for Women and Arizona State University. Funded by the US Department of State. 
• The theme of the program was: Contemporary US Literature and Theory.

Visiting Lecturer
Lahore School of Economics, Pakistan. (Jan – June 2020)
    Course(s) taught:

• Academic Writing

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Position:  Graduate Teaching Assistant, Vice-President EGSO
Email: [email protected]

As a young scholar and researcher, Farhana is interested in studying material objects, and their socio-political representation in Postcolonial and 20th Century American Literature. Subscribing to philosophies of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory(ANT) and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), she advocates for a radical democratic view of the world where objects are recognized as social actants and granted with rightful political agency. She is also a keen observer of human-object interactions and the impacts of objects on human emotion, memory, and identity. Her research area is ultimately interdisciplinary and regularly crosses between literary studies and social science. 

Currently, at UAlbany, she teaches a course titled: “American Experiences Through Objects and Bodies” which encourages students to critically approach American history and experiences of different ethnic, racial, and religious groups in America through analyzing a series of cultural objects and portrayals of human bodies found in literary texts, artworks, photographs, and other media contents. Her teaching goal remains to help students recognize the latent power of objects and human bodies to symbolize personal and communal freedom in societies through inquiring into contemporary socio-political events.

Before coming to the United States., she worked as a Lecturer and taught courses such as Introduction to College Composition, 19th-Century Poetry, and Early American Literature at East-West University, Bangladesh. She also made four academic paper presentations at national and international conferences. 
 

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Originally from Cali, Colombia, Verónica Jordán-Sardi immigrated to the United States with her immediate family as a young teen fleeing sociopolitical unrest. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and French from the University of Florida, an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. Her work can be found in Columbia Journal, Litro Mag (UK), Cleaver Magazine and Comparative Literature Commons. 

Email: [email protected]

Anastasios is working on extinction, oceans, and Michael Jackson. Recent writing appears online at jubilat, Adjacent Pineapple, Recliner, BOMB, and the Iowa Review.

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HU 388

Position: Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

MFA in Poetry, MA in English Literature - Rutgers University-Newark

Kevin Kilroy is a doctoral student studying the relationship between literature, composition, and academic writing practices. He is the current co-editor of Barzakh Magazine, and he has previously served as the EGSO President, on the EGSO Conference Committee, and as a member of the GSA Judicial Board. Prior to joining UAlbany, he earned MA and MFA degrees from Rutgers University-Newark and spent the better part of a decade teaching literature and English composition. Kevin has presented papers at the CCHA, ACLA, and IAFOR national and international conferences, and he will be presenting work at the upcoming 2021 MLA conference. 

Email: [email protected]

Degrees:
Ph.D. in progress, University at Albany, SUNY
M.A., English, Texas A&M University
B.A., English, Hanbat National University 

Research Interests:
19th- and 20st-century literature and culture, Modernism, Film studies, Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Biography:
Gunok Kim is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research, broadly stated, explores the late nineteenth and the twentieth century literature, Modernism, media and film studies, particularly modernism and its historical, sociological, and philosophical contexts in Great Britain, and the relationship between literature and visual culture. She is currently teaching the first-year writing course, ENG110Z: Writing and Critical Inquiry. 

Teaching Experience:
ENG110Z: Writing and Critical Inquiry, University at Albany, SUNY (2020 Fall)
 

HU 391

Position: Lecturer
Email: [email protected]

ABD University at Albany, SUNY (2018)
MA William Paterson University (2013)
BA Shippensburg University (2010)

Postmodern American Literature, New Sincerity American Literature, Film, Writing Pedagogy

E. C. Koch is a doctoral candidate at the University at Albany, SUNY. His dissertation project seeks to plot the transition from postmodern to New Sincerity literature, concentrating on the work of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Don DeLillo, and Colson Whitehead.

Courses Taught

AENG 272: Media, Technology, and Culture
AENG 240Z: The Literature of September Eleventh
AENG 110Z: Writing and Critical Inquiry in the Humanities

Email: [email protected]

Tim Laberge is a doctoral student interested in modernisms/postmodernisms and the way they intersect with, are informed by, and are shaped by postcolonial traditions. Additional interests include the Novel, questions of genre (particularly science fiction), film history, and the way cinema re-focuses and challenges literary ideals. Prior to joining the University at Albany English Department, Tim was part of the adjunct faculty at SUNY Schenectady where he taught College Composition; he was also a community development planner and grant writer for a civil engineering firm. 

Email: [email protected]

PhD – In progress, studying at the University at Albany, SUNY
M.A. – English, University at Buffalo, SUNY (2019)
B.A. – English/Combined Degree, University at Buffalo, SUNY (2018)
A.A. – Liberal Arts and Sciences, Niagara County Community College (2016)

Research Interests:
Native American Indigenous Studies (NAIS), 19th Century American Literature, Historiography, Colonial/Post-Colonial Studies, Folklore, Poetry, Creative Writing

Teaching Experience:
Instructor: University at Albany, SUNY (2020-present)
AENG 240z – American Experiences
 

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Writing Center (HU 140)

Degree(s) earned and location:
BA English, Seoul National University
MA English Language Education, Seoul National University

MA Thesis: “Logic of Puritan Community and Family in Hawthorne’s Short Fictions” (2015)

Research Interests:
Early American Literature; 19th-century American Literature; Ecocriticism; Comparative/Intercultural Studies (Writings of American Missionaries in North-East Asia)

Email: [email protected]

MFA in Fiction Writing, University of Alabama
BA in English, DePauw University

HU 353

Position: Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: [email protected]

MA in English, University of Maine (2018)
BA in English, Kent State University (2016)

Interests

Marxism, feminist and queer theory, U.S. AIDS narratives and media, twentieth century American literature.

Courses Taught

AENG 243: Literature and Film
AENG 272: Media, Technology and Culture

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BA Philosophy (magna cum laude), Stony Brook University

Research Interests

Twentieth/Twenty-first Century World Anglophone Literature; Literature and Empire; Global Modernisms; Cultural and Critical Theory; Postcolonial Literature and Theory. Secondary areas include: Feminist Theory and Women’s Literature; Creative Writing (non-fiction prose and poetry)

Publications

2017 - “Characters of Finance” GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine
2016 - “How to Ask a Feminist to Do the Dishes” Blindfield: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry.
2015 - “The Losses” (poem). Barzakh.
2011 - “Base/Superstructure” in The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Wiley-Blackwell Publishers) Eds. Michael Ryan and Gregory Castle. 
2007 - “High Ceilings, Seductive Shrines: Inside Starbucks.” Techknowledgies: New Imaginaries in the Humanities, Arts, & TechnoSciences. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Conference Presentations

2018 - “Capital and the Caves: Accumulation and Violence in Forster’s A Passage to India.” Northeast Modern Language Association. Pittsburgh, PA.
2016 - “The Booker Prize and Violence.” World Literature and Dissent, English Colloquium. University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
2013 - “Complicity, Colonialism and the Failure of Bourgeois Ethics in Orwell’s Burmese Days.”American Comparative Literature Association. Toronto, Canada.

Fellowships and Awards

John Woods Scholarship, Prague Summer Program, 2010
Philip Hurd List Poetry Prize, 2010 Honorable Mention
School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, Tuition Scholarship, 2007

Select Teaching Experience

ENG 368: Global Women Writers of the 20th and 21st Centuries
ENG 240: Rewriting America: Literature and Culture after 9/11

ENG 205: Introduction to Writing in English Studies 
 


HU 353

Position: Ph.D. Student & Teaching Assistant
Email: [email protected]

Annika is a Creative Writing PhD student and a Teaching Assistant. Her interests include memory studies, literary trauma theory, German poetry of the early 20th century, (de)construction of national identity, ecopoetics and children’s literature. 

Position: Ph.D. Graduate Assistant
Email: [email protected]

My experience with the Bureau of Land Management and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy shifted my professional/academic interests towards conservation and environmental literature. Being involved in silviculture, waste-management, and sustainable farming, these involvements outside the normalized ecocidal tendencies of contemporary culture established an appreciation for ecological-living, and influenced my decision to begin a doctoral program at UAlbany. Examining the frames of invisibility surrounding the physical waste of our American population, my research explores how our ungrieving complacency within the Anthropocene continues through ideological perversions of our material/non-material cultures. Hoping to trace the shifting depictions of trash, excrement, and animal production/slaughter throughout American literature—and to analyze its cultural movement from open arenas to delimited spheres of apprehension within the contemporary—my work explores the current hiddenness surrounding these social products and practices, and reveals the cultural consequences of our misapprehensions. From depictions of excess and animal life within the 19th century poetry of Walt Whitman to Cormac McCarthy’s portrayal of waste and animal slaughter in his contemporary south-western novels, my research details the development of these structures of invisibility through America’s evolving literary interpretations, and reveals how their formation allows our ever-increasing violence towards the natural world to continue without grievability. 

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HU 365

Position: PhD Fellow/ Secretary - English Graduate Students Organization (2018-2019)
Email: [email protected]

• PhD – In progress, currently studying at the University at Albany, SUNY.
• MA – English Language and Literature (Concentration in Literature), Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea (2015).
• BA – English Language and Literature, German Language and Literature (double major), Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea (2013).

Research Interests

African American Literature, Multi-Ethnic Literature, Critical Race Theory, Black Ontology, The Black Atlantic, Postcolonial Studies, Memory Studies, Women of Color Feminism

Conference Presentations

• “Cinematic Gaze and Performative Subversion of Racial Embodiment in Django Unchained.” NeMLA, Boston. March 2020.
• “The Sovereign Power and Racialization of Bodies in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” NeMLA, Boston. March 2020.
• “(Un)Seeing the Instructor’s Race: Challenges and Opportunities.” NWSA, San Francisco. November 2019.
• Panelist, “Working in The English-speaking Academia as a Postcolonial Experience: Exclusion and Linguicism Faced by Xenophone Scholars” Roundtable. NWSA, San Francisco. November 2019.
• “Women and Sexuality in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” NeMLA, Washington D.C. March 2019.
• “‘This is Not a Story to Pass On’: Unsettling Continuous Collectivity of Memory in Beloved.” NeMLA, Washington D.C. March 2019.
• “Race, Identity and Diaspora in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” ELLAK, Daejeon, South Korea. December 2016.
• “Inter/Intra-Racial Relations in Don Lee’s Yellow: Stories.” ELLAK, Busan, South Korea. December 2015.
• “L’s Function in Toni Morrison’s Love.” ELLAK, Seoul, South Korea. November 2014.

Publications

• “Sovereignty, Biopower, Immunity: Racialized Bodies in Robinson Crusoe.” English21 Vol. 33.1, March 2020.
• “‘You Couldn’t Overcome the Hatreds of Countries or Race’: Color Consciousness and Pan-Asian Solidarity in Don Lee’s Yellow: Stories.” Journal of English and American Studies Vol. 14, February 2016.
• “Between Narrator and Character: L’s Function in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Journal of English and American Studies Vol. 13, December 2014.

Teaching Experience

Instructor: University at Albany, SUNY (2018-)

• AENG 272 Media, Technology & Culture: Challenges in the 21st Century—Black Bodies on Screen and Page: Afro-Pessimism and Afro-Futurism (Fall 2020)
• AENG 261 American Literary Traditions: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom (Spring 2020)
• AENG 240z American Experiences: Black Lives Now (Fall 2019, Recipient of the StAR Grant)
• AENG 121 Reading Literature: Literary Representations of Slavery (Spring 2019)
• AENG 240z American Experiences: Marginalized Voices in American Literature (Fall 2018)

Lecturer: Far East University, South Korea (2016-2017)
• Introduction to English Composition
• Advanced English Composition

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HU 366

Email: [email protected]

Ph.D., English, SUNY Albany (in-progress)
MA, English, SUNY New Paltz (2016) 
B.A., English, B.A. Journalism, SUNY Purchase (2006) 

Audrey Peterson-McCann is a Ph.D. Candidate with a focus in Victorian literature, including both the novel and narratives written for children. Her research areas are animal studies, childhood studies, and ethics, and her dissertation will examine the concatenation of child and nonhuman animal figures in Victorian culture and literature. Most recently she has taught AENG 121 “Reading Literature” and AENG 242 “Science Fiction” at UAlbany. 

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Email: [email protected]

Position: GA/Instructor

Sudarshan Ramani graduated from SFSU with an MA in English Literature in 2018. His MA Thesis was "MIMESIS, ROMANCE, NOVEL: REPRESENTATION OF MILIEU IN THE MONK AND NOSTROMO". He completed his BA in English Literature in India, at Jai Hind College, Mumbai, in 2007. He is currently the Instructor of AENG 121 - Reading Literature - "Criminals, Rogues, Outlaws in Fiction".  Between his BA in 2008 and his immigration to USA in 2016, he spent several years as a published film critic in India. He worked as a reviewer for The Asian Age between 2015 and 2016, and as a film editor for Projectorhead Magazine. His articles have been printed in publications such as "La Furia Umana" (a bilingual Italian-English publication), Economic and Political Weekly, while his biography of director William A. Wellman appeared in Routledge Publications' Fifty Hollywood Directors edited by Yvonne Tasker. 

He's interested in history, literature, cinema, with a special focus on literary topics that break the boundaries of periodization. He's especially interested in the dialogue between English Literature and Continental Literature, on the development of the genre fiction -- i.e. the historical novel, the gothic novel, and the influences literature has taken from other art forms. 

HU 374

Position: Graduate Teaching Assistant
Email: [email protected]

Yolande Schutter is focusing her research on Francophone Algerian poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries, Translation Studies, and Postcolonial Theory. Her poetry and her translations have been featured in Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature, Eleven Eleven, Rattapallax, and CELAAN Revue du Centre d’Études des Littératures et des Arts d’Afrique du Nord. She was co-Editor of the University of Oxford book Marivaudage: théories et pratiques d’un discours.

Degree(s) earned and location

BA The Evergreen State College, M.A. Carnegie Mellon University

Research Interests

20th Century American Literature, History of Criticism and Theory, The American University, Aesthetics and Politics

Select Publications

"Mind in its Purest Play: Imagination, Politics, and Reading" in Conference Proceedings of "The Natural History and Reading" UW 2010.

“Review: Life, Literature, and Modernity”. in MLN Vol. 124 Num. 5, 2010.

3 Poems published in The Monongahela Review Issue 3, Winter 2009
(www.monreview.com)

Select Conference Presentations

“Why I (Still) Read Poetry”
Carnegie Mellon University: LCS Colloquium Roundtable: Defend Your
Studies! April 1st, 2010

“Allegorical Desire and the Repression/Representation of the Real.”
SUNY Stony Brook: Graduate Conference: The Desire for
Representation/The Desire of Representation, February 21st, 2009

“Troublesome Symbols, or Reading as Hawthorne Asks Us To.”
Stockholm University: Metaphor Festival September 18-19th, 2008

“Problems of Belief and Authority in Hawthorne’s Salem: A Pragmatic Approach.”
University of Washington: Graduate Conference: Transcendentalism in
America, Spring 2006

Select Fellowships and Awards:

Raymond Williams Fellowship in Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon, 2008-2009

Email:
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BA in English Literature, University at Albany

Research interests

Medieval Drama and Performance, Middle English Literature, Theories of Space, Writing Pedagogy

Dissertation Title:
“Christ at the Gates of the Minster: Drama and Civic Space in Later Medieval York”

Select Publications

“Julie Taymor's Titus: Visualizing Shakespeare's Language and Ideas on Screen,” in
In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008.

Select Conference Presentations

“Representing Civic Identity through Visual Performance: Later Medieval York, Its
Visual and Performance Arts,” CEMERS Conference, Binghamton University,
SUNY, October 2006

“Space and Cultural Performance in York,” International Medieval Congress, Western
Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2005

“Civic Space and Its Influence on Received Meaning in Medieval Drama,” CHATS
Conference, University at Albany, Albany, NY, April 2005

Select Awards

Conference Travel Award, Department of English, University at Albany, Spring 2005
Graduate Student Organization Travel Award, University at Albany, Spring 2005
Teaching Assistantship, English Department, University at Albany, 2001-5

Select Teaching Experience

ENG355: Shakespeare on Film
ENG291: British Literary Traditions
ENG346: Shakespeare’s Power Plays
ENG 422: Literature of the Earlier Renaissance

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