Current PhD Students

Fields: Early modern and medieval studies, gender and sexuality studies, ecocriticism, digital humanities

Degrees(s): BA (English), Creighton University; MA (English), University of Miami

Kate M. Albrecht (email) is a fourth-year PhD student of English literature. She is a mentor for Empower Me First and the secretary of the English Graduate Organization. She has presented at conferences such as the International Conference on Education, Symposium on Education and Culture Development of the Greater Bay Area, Medieval and Early Modern Studies Festival, and SAMLA. She has chaired panels at the Nova Southeastern Crossroads Conference and NEMLA. A former instructor of Writing Studies, she is currently the UGrow Writing Studies fellow. She has been awarded fellowships to work on DH projects such as Archbio and co-directs the Early Modern Care project.

Qualifying Exam Committee: Pamela Hammons (chair), Jessica Rosenburg, Lindsay Thomas

Dissertation: “The Pornographic Isle”: Jamaica and the Purchase of Postcolonial Modernity

Fields: Caribbean Studies, Queer and Trans Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Porn Studies.

Degree(s): BA (English; Anthropology & Sociology), Lafayette College.

Jovante Anderson (email) is a sixth-year PhD candidate. He is also a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at The University of Virginia. His dissertation traces the multiple imaginaries of erotic sovereignty articulated through the circulation practices, aesthetic investments, and performance cultures of pornography in late colonial and postcolonial Jamaica. The project reads a diverse historical, literary, and visual set of archives from the early twentieth century to the contemporary moment, considering how pornography underwrites multiple, and sometimes contradictory, visions of what it means to be a modern Caribbean subject. Jovante has presented work at various annual meetings including the American Studies Association, The Caribbean Studies Association, West Indian Literature Conference, and Beyond Homophobia. His work has been supported by grants from the American Ethnological Society, the Center for Global Black Studies, and the Nomadic Archivist Project. He also has a journal article forthcoming in GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies that examines contemporary trans aesthetics in relation to ecological crisis in the Caribbean. 

Beyond the academy, Jovante enjoys creative writing and was the first co-recipient of the Poet Laureate of Jamaica Young Writers’ Prize for Poetry in 2018. Jovante was also named “LGBT Person of the Year” by the Equality Foundation for All Jamaica in 2020 for work that he continues to do around queer and trans housing insecurity in Jamaica. 

Dissertation: A.I. Got A Feeling? Exploring Hallucinations and the World-Historic Sensations of Empirical Distress

Fields: STS studies; medical humanities; digital humanities; Caribbean studies

Degree(s): B.A.H. (African & African-American Studies, with honors), MA (Anthropology), Stanford University

Ra Bacchus (email) is a third-year PhD student. His dissertation research concerns a long history of hallucination case studies, from nineteenth century theories of (neuro)science to featured outputs of large language models; exploring their effects on contemporary senses of empiricism. Prior to pursuing training with the professoriate, Ra worked at Google as a User Data Policy Specialist from 2019-2024 and is a founding organizer of JamCoders (2020-present). He is a UM Fellow for the 2024-26 academic years; is currently involved with the Miami Law & AI Lab (MiLA) as a dashboard designer; and works with the tri-university Visiones del Caribe digital humanities initiative as a technical advisor. Ra has a peer-reviewed chapter forthcoming with Routledge in a special issue on “Carnival & New Media,” entitled “Uniting the Caribbean: Unruly Transnational Carnivalization post-COVID-19.” His process article, “Measure by Measure: Reflections on Building a Quiz Map for Critical Caribbean Digital Pedagogy,” is forthcoming in archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis.

Dissertation Committee: Dr. John Funchion (Chair); Dr. Joel Nickels; Dr. Ludovic Mompelat

Fields: Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Religion Studies, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Postcolonialism, Digital Humanities

Degrees: BA (English), State University of Ceara (Brazil); MA (Applied Linguistics), State University of Ceara (Brazil), MA (English) , University of Miami

Vanessa Barcelos is a 4th-year English student, whose research focuses on the racial dimensions of discourses of witchcraft in the late medieval and early modern period and women writers in the pre-modern era. Before joining UM’s PhD program, she worked for more than a decade as a teacher of English as a Second Language in Brazil. At UM, Vanessa has taught Writing and Literature courses as a Teaching Assistant. She’s recently authored “She, her, me - a witch? Women join the theological debate of witchcraft in 17th-century England” in the journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (to be published soon). She has presented at several national and international conferences, including RSA (Renaissance Society of America) and CSRS (Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies). She also served as a UGrow Fellow at UM’s Center for the Humanities (2023-2024).

Qualifying Exam Committee: Pamela Hammons, Brenna Munro, Viviana Balsera

Fields: immigrant literature, literature by women, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, Brazilian diaspora

Degrees: BA (English and Portuguese), Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul; MA (English), Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul; MA (English), University of Miami

Mariana C. Petersen is a student in the PhD program. She has published in journals such as Estação Literária, Letrônica, Anuário de Literatura, and Plath Profiles and presented papers at the 11th Annual Conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies, at the VII Congresso Internacional de Estudos sobre a Diversidade Sexual e de Gênero, and at the The International Margaret Cavendish Society Biennial Conference, among others. She has served as a UGrow Fellow at HistoryMiami (2029-2020) and has experience teaching English and Portuguese languages and literatures to students of different backgrounds and origins. Her dissertation project focuses on Anglophone literature of the Brazilian diaspora and queer studies.

Dissertation Committee: Brenna Munro (chair), Timothy Watson, Steven Butterman (MLL)

Dissertation: Ciphers of a Sovereign: Shakespeare and Elizabeth I Negotiating the Female Body of Power

Fields: Early Modern Literature, Shakespeare, Exile Studies, Literary Theory, Medieval Literature 

Degree(s): BA (English), MA (English Literature), Florida International University 

Madeline Cisneros (mnc114@miami.edu) is a third-year PhD student whose research is primarily focused in Shakespearean drama, exile studies, and literary theory. Madeline’s dissertation interrogates the dialogic relationship between William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I concerning questions of queenship, identity, performance, and estrangement. While attending Florida International University for her MA, Madeline placed second in the University’s 3 Minute Thesis competition. Her forthcoming essay “Floating Between Heaven and Earth: Hamlet and Henry V as Shakespeare’s Exiled Princes” will be published in February 2026 in the edited collection “What Country, Friends, Is This? Shakespeare and the Staging of Exile” with ACMRS. Madeline currently serves on the Shakespeare Association of America’s graduate board as Chief of Internal Affairs; as the Writing Studies UGrow Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year; as well as Department Representative of the English Graduate Organization. She has presented her work at conferences such as the Northeast Modern Language Association and Carnegie Mellon’s “Bridges and Borders” Conference. 

Exam committee: Dr. Pamela Hammons (chair), Dr. Noa Nikolsky, Dr. Joel Nickels, Dr. James Sutton (external reader)

Fields: 19th-century British literature, 19th-century children’s literature, the gothic, monsters, Women’s Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Degrees: B.S. (Biology), University of Miami; MA (English) University of Miami

Erica Christmas (email) is an English Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation explores intersections between gender, sexuality, and materiality in the late 19th century gothic and children’s literature of E. Nesbit. Her research investigates the deconstruction of human identity through corpses, wax figurines, statues, and other collections of inanimate objects. During her time at UM, she has served as the instructor of record for multiple Writing Studies courses that include topics such as “Monsters in Literature.” 

Dissertation Committee: Tassie Gwilliam (chair), John Funchion, Catherine Judd, Renée Fox (external reader)

Fields: 20th Century US Literature, Modernism, and Digital Humanities

Degree(s): BA (English), University of Virginia; MA (Comparative Literature), Dartmouth College.

Elizabeth Cornick is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Miami. Her research explores literary and cultural responses to war and peace in 20th-century U.S. literature. Prior to beginning her Ph.D., she spent three years working as a high school educator and lacrosse coach in Miami, and earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College. Elizabeth previously served as a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow on the projects Mapping Imaginary Miami and ArchBio, supervised by Dr. Allison Schifani and Dr. Susanna Allés Torrent, respectively. She has presented her digital humanities work and research on Zora Neale Hurston at the 17th Annual Samuel Armistead Colloquium hosted by UC Davis. Currently, Elizabeth is the American Studies Teaching Graduate Fellow for the 2025–2026 academic year. She has designed two seminars: “American Cities in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries” and “Narratives of Conflict: War, Peace, and American Cultural Memory”. As a co-convener of the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Group, her work focuses on the role of minimal computing in promoting sustainable digital projects and pedagogy.

Exam Committee: Dr. Catherine Judd (chair), Dr. Joel Nickels, and Dr. John Funchion

Dissertation: Technological Optimism and Cyborg Resistance: Navigating Technofutures in Literature and Culture

Fields: Disability studies, media and cultural studies, digital humanities, contemporary literature 

Degrees(s): BA (Creative Writing, Sociology), SUNY Oswego; MA (English), University at Buffalo

Micaela Donabella (email) is a fifth-year PhD candidate. Her research is focused around the intersections of disability and technology, gender, and labor in contemporary literary and online cultures. Prior to beginning her PhD, she spent three years as a K-12 educator and earned an MA in English from the University at Buffalo. Micaela served as the UGrow Writing Studies Fellow during academic year 2023-2024 and was formerly a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow on “Mapping Imaginary Miami,” supervised by Dr. Allison Schifani. Micaela has presented papers at various conferences including the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting and the Northeast Modern Language Annual Convention and has published work in Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture. She is the chair of UM’s English Graduate Organization, current co-convener for the Queer Studies Interdisciplinary Research Group, and a 2025-2026 Dissertation Fellow with the Graduate School.

Dissertation Committee: Tim Watson (Chair), Lindsay Thomas (Co-chair), Marlon Moore, Brenna Munro 

Fields: Memory and Trauma Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Speculative Fiction, Environmental/Blue Humanities, Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Degree(s): BA (English; Spanish; Women’s Studies), University of Georgia 

Meredith Eget (mae206@miami.edu) is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English with a concentration in Caribbean Studies. Her research examines the role of literature and other artforms in shaping collective memory and contesting official archival narratives following periods of state violence and collective trauma. She is the 2023 recipient of the University of Georgia’s Virginia Rucker Walter Scholarship. Prior to beginning her Ph.D., she worked on the staff of UGA’s Stillpoint Literary Magazine for two years. She has published two works in The Classic Journal and presented at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, the UGA IWS Student Research Symposium, and the 22nd Tri-University Graduate Conference, where her research project “Re/Visions of History: The Truth Commission as a Site of Dynamic Truth” placed 2nd in the poster presentation category. Her most recent work, presented at the 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference, focuses on the study of water as a dynamic third space in Caribbean literature and art that embraces contradiction in its fluidity and creates the conditions for reckoning, remembering, and reimagining historic atrocities. She is currently working as a first-year writing instructor and a primary researcher on the Mellon-funded environmental humanities project “Miami as Ground Zero”. 

Fields: Jane Austen, adaptation studies, coloniality & decoloniality, long 18th century literature, Victorian literature

Degrees(s): BA in English and French Language & Literature, Rollins College; MA in Postcolonial Studies, SOAS University of London

Iman Gareeboo (ixg436@miami.edu) is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of English & Creative Writing at the University of Miami. She has presented at the 2024 BCPS Conference on decolonial thinking in fantasy writing and will present on transnational readings and teachings of literature at SCSC 2025 and on the decolonial potential of cultural Austen adaptations at NeMLA 2026. Born in England and raised mostly in the U.S. and briefly in Mauritius, her professional career includes being a teaching assistant in France and working in elementary education. She teaches in UM’s Writing Studies department and was the ‘24-’25 UGrow Writing Studies fellow where she conducted research on the job market and collegiate writing courses, and gained experience in departmental handbook research and writing. She is currently the Treasurer for UM’s English Graduate Organization and makes great effort to support good communication and community building amongst the department’s graduate students, usually through baked goods. 

Exam Committee: Tassie Gwilliam (chair), Tim Watson, Pamela Hammons

Dissertation (Tentative): Browning Jane Austen: Adaptation as a Commentary on the English Canon

Fields: Black Diaspora, Black Queer Studies, Cinema Studies, Caribbean Studies, Black Europe, Ethnography

Degrees: BA (African American Studies, French), Yale University; MA (English), University of Miami

Jordan Rogers (email) is a PhD Candidate in English. He is writing a dissertation on Black Queer Cinema, from a global perspective. During his time at UM, he has held a range of fellowships, including the University of Miami Fellowship and the Mellon Graduate Fellowship at the University of Miami Center for Global Black Studies. He is the recipient of the 2019 Brazilian Initiation Scholarship (BRASA), and two UM Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas/Tinker Grants (2019, 2023). He has also translated work from Italian and Portuguese to English, interned in film archives, produced documentary films, and curated museum exhibitions.

Dissertation: Techno-poetics in the Caribbean: Digital and Post-digital Writings

Fields: Expanded Writing, Electronic Literature, Caribbean Studies, Computation, Migrations

Degree(s): BA (Latin American Literature & Linguistics), UCAB, Caracas; MFA (Creative Writing in Spanish), UI, Iowa City

Nicolas Gerardi Rousset  (email) is a first-year PhD student. His dissertation explores expanded writing projects from the insular and continental Caribbean that use electronic writing to envision alternative futures. His research examines electronic literatures that merge digital computation with poetic thought, tracing developments from the early 1950s through 2019, the year the first quantum computer became operational. Nicolás has presented video art installations, conferences, and readings at various institutions, including the British Council in Venezuela, the Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas, FotoFocus Biennial, Houston Art League, the University of Iowa, Public Space One, and Cruce NYU. Over the past two years, he has received the Ruth Davis Summer Fellowship and the Letterpress Scholarship at La Ceiba Gráfica in Mexico. His MFA thesis, Biolibro de Anacaona, is an artist book with augmented reality that explores, through speculation, a new form of hybrid mycelium humanity. The poetry book narrates how Anacaona transfers her memories and ancient knowledge to a new, younger body, coexisting within it.

Beyond academia, Nicolás is active in creative writing and book arts, engaging in editing, design, and producing artist books such as Uy, Uy, Uy, Ur, Ur, Ur, Viaggio a Tulum, Le Kino Tooj, Tulum Tierra y Manglar, ¿Quién Mora en estas Islas?, Casi Todo, and Chulos x Luminaria. He currently prints books in Miami under Koontie Press (@koontiepress).

Dissertation: (Tentative) “Floating Winds and Waters: Eco-spiritual Narratives in Caribbean Literary and Visual Culture”

Fields: Caribbean studies, Decolonial studies, Blue humanities, Radical geographies, atmosphere and oceanic studies

Degrees: B.A. (English & Africana Studies), CUNY Hunter College; M.A. English, University of Miami

Sade Gordon (email) is a fifth year Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Miami, with a concentration in Caribbean Studies. Her research explores how Caribbean writers and artists use narrative as a technology to imagine eco-spiritual alternatives to Western militarized understandings of air and sea. By tracing floating across literature, visual culture, and archival records, her dissertation considers how themes of spirituality, flotsam, monuments, and death open new ways of inhabiting atmospheric and aquatic space from a global Black perspective.

She has presented her work at the West Indian Literature Conference and contributed publications to the Journal of West Indian Literature and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. In addition to her scholarly writing, she has held a museum fellowship at the Lowe Art Museum and is a collaborator on the Mellon-funded environmental humanities initiative Miami as Ground Zero. 

Dissertation: “Black Feminist Cosmologies: Sacred Grounds in Haitian American Women’s Literature and Visual Culture”

Fields: Caribbean studies, Black feminist theory, decolonial literature, digital humanities

Degrees: B.A. (English & Secondary Education Youth Services), CUNY Queens College; M.A. English, University of Miami

Gabrielle M. Jean-Louis (email) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Miami, with a concentration in Caribbean Studies and a certificate in Digital Humanities. Under the direction of Patricia J. Saunders, she is on track to defend her dissertation by March 2026. Her research and teaching draw on Black feminist theory, decolonial literature, and digital humanities to foreground the intellectual traditions of women across the Black diaspora. Her dissertation, “Black Feminist Cosmologies: Sacred Grounds in Haitian American Women’s Literature and Visual Culture”, demonstrates how Haitian American creatives theorize spiritual healing and cultural survival through literature, visual art, and digital platforms. She introduces sacred grounds as both concept and analytic, showing how these works construct space–physical, historical, or digital–as spiritually charged and central to Black women’s practices of self-making. Her research appears in the Journal of Haitian Studies and she has an article under review with Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism. Her digital humanities projects have been generously funded by the Mellon Foundation and the University of Miami Digital Humanities Graduate Fellowship. She currently serves as the Assistant Director of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute, the founding Director of the Writing Center at Meridian West Central College, a co-editor for Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal and a co-editor for the Caribbean Studies Association’s quarterly newsletter. 

Dissertation Committee: Patricia J. Saunders (Chair), Kelly Baker Josephs, Kate Ramsey, and Jerry Philogene (external reader)

Dissertation: Reproducing Resistance: Caribbean Revisionist Histories and Alternative Narratives

Fields: Caribbean experimental-speculative fictions; African and African Diasporic women’s writing; Africana Feminisms and Womanisms; Pan-African, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies

Degree(s): BA (Literatures in English): University of the West Indies, Mona; and MA (Pan African Studies): Syracuse University

Nardia Lipman (email): Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Ms Lipman is currently a fourth-year PhD Candidate at the University of Miami. Her dissertation interrogates reproduction as a critical site of inquiry for engaging Caribbean experimental-speculative fiction. Her work examines how reproductive discourses in these women-authored texts provide alternative frameworks for understanding enslavement histories, African retentions, and women’s experiences beyond conventional resistance narratives. Prior to her doctoral studies, Ms. Lipman earned her MA from Syracuse University, where her thesis examined the Black Lives Matter Movement and its impact on African American fiction. Ms. Lipman’s professional experience includes teaching English in Colombia-South America; Literature and Communication Studies in Jamaica; as well as various administrative roles in the fields of banking and journalism. At the University of Miami, she was honoured as a Dean’s Fellow for 2022-23 and received a DEI Mini Grant for her Caribbean Literary Studies Archiving Project in May 2023. She is currently the 2025-26 UGrow Fellow for Africana Studies. An active participant in academic discourse, Ms. Lipman has presented papers at numerous conferences, including the West Indian Literature Conference, the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference, Society for Caribbean Studies, UK, and the Tri-University Latin America and Caribbean Studies Graduate Student Conference, where she won second place in the Oral Category. At the University, Ms Lipman is a member of both the Caribbean Student Union and the African Student Union, maintaining her connection to her cultural roots.

Exam Committee: Kelly Baker Josephs (Chair), Tim Watson, and Brenna Munro

Fields: Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Women’s Writings, Travel Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Degrees: BA (English and History) and MA (English), Ewha Womans University, South Korea

Hyekyung Jung (email) is a second year PhD with research interests in the topics of (fe)male bonds, women’s travels in writings, and emotion and masculinity.

Fields: Caribbean Studies, Diaspora Literature, Gender Studies, 20 and 21st Century Literary Studies

Degree(s): BA(English; Studio Art), New York University; MA(Liberal Studies), University of Miami

MariVi Madiedo is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English.  Her research focuses on Caribbean Diaspora Literature.  Specifically, the manifold manifestations of storytelling, the agency that it offers, and its ability to do antiracist work.  Prior to beginning her Ph.D. at University of Miami, she spent three years working as a 6-12 educator and received an M.A. in Liberal Studies at the University of Miami. 

Dissertation (tentative): Liminal Animals in 21st Century Speculative Narratives

Fields: Ecocriticism, animal studies, posthumanism, speculative fiction, digital humanities.

Degrees: B.A. & M.A. (English), Lamar University.

Raul Martin IV (email) is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English & Creative Writing at the University of Miami. He is currently serving as the 2025-26 UGrow Fellow for Digital Humanities. Raul’s  research interests include environmental and animal studies, popular culture, speculative fiction, and digital environmental humanities. His dissertation research examines liminal iterations of animals in contemporary speculative fiction and film. His creative writing and scholarship have appeared in Art Studio INK, Pulse! Literary Magazine, Habits: The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and Gothic Nature Journal. He is currently working on a book chapter for a major publisher. When not investigating weird intersections of animals and culture, he enjoys hiking and gaming with his family. 

Exam Committee: Timothy Watson (Chair), Noa A. Nikolsky, and Tracy Devine Guzman (MLL)

Fields: Caribbean Studies; Digital Humanism; Literature and Spirituality; Literature and Politics; Narratology; Aesthetics; Gender and Sexuality; Immigrant Literature

Degrees: AB with High Honors in English (Creative Writing Concentration), Harvard College; MFA, Creative Writing (Fiction), Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Stephen Narain (email) is a first-year PhD student in English (Caribbean Studies Concentration) under the supervision of Professor Patricia Saunders. His interests are varied and interdisciplinary: fiction writing, writing pedagogy in the age of AI (and the writing process more generally), creolization, Caribbean popular culture (especially music, carnival, and humor), Wilson Harris’s “quantum realism,” autobiography, phenomenology, sacred texts, and the works of Zadie Smith, Marilynne Robinson, Derek Walcott, C.L.R. James, Herman Melville, and Marcel Proust. His stories and essays have appeared in Small Axe: A Platform for Caribbean Criticism, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Wasafiri’s special issue on the afterlives of indentured labor. In 2012, he was selected for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s New Talent Showcase spotlighting the Caribbean’s best emerging writers. His work has been supported by the John Thouron Prize at Cambridge University, the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, and the American Civil Liberties Union for his First Amendment advocacy. He is the recipient of the Small Axe Project’s Fiction Prize, the Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and grants from the Vermont Studio Center, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Aspen Institute. Before beginning his PhD, Stephen spent over a decade teaching literature and writing at the University of Iowa, Valencia College in Orlando, and The Door: A Center of Alternatives, a youth advocacy center in Lower Manhattan. In 2025, he presented work alongside Poinciana Paper Press on contemporary independent publishing in the Caribbean at the 43rd West Indian Literature Conference. Born and raised in Freeport, Bahamas by Guyanese educators, he immigrated to Florida when he was sixteen and now lives between Orlando and Miami, where he tutors at the University of Miami’s Writing Center.

Dissertation: Choreographies of Value Transfer in 1970s Literature of the United States

Fields: Late 20th Century US Literature, Black and Indigenous Literatures of the Americas, Finance and Economics

Degree(s): BS (Secondary English Education), New York University; MA (English), City College of New York

Rachel Northrop (email) is a fifth-year PhD candidate. She has presented at the NSU Crossroads Humanities Student Conference, UM Graduate Research Symposium, and UM Modern Languages and Literature Graduate Student Conference. In her role as a first-year writing instructor, she has integrated archival visits to the Library’s Special Collections and digital StoryMap-making into her classes. Rachel’s dissertation analyzes a wide range of literary texts to ask how their narratives physically describe–choreograph–scenes where value moves from one place to another. Her project argues that the various ways in which value moves through, with, between, among, and beyond people and their environs show that worth and mattering cannot be contained in money, despite contemporaneous efforts to contain value within standardized (and therefore infinitely tradeable) units of currency.

Fields: Disability studies, Medical Humanities, Crip Theory, Monstrosity, Gender and Sexuality, 18th & 19th c. Transatlantic Studies, Gothic Literature, Victorian Literature, Medieval Literature, Speculative Fiction, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Theory, Narratology, Global Cultural Theory/Studies, K-horror

Degrees(s): BA (English, Anthropology, Women’s & Gender Studies), Florida International University; MA (English Literature), Florida International University

Tiffany Oharriz (email) is a second-year PhD student. Her research focuses on representations of disability, bodily difference, gender, and racial alterity and their intersections with monstrosity within literary devices. Tiffany is an Andrew W. Mellow HSI Pathways to the Professoriate Fellow. Prior to beginning her PhD, she focused on interdisciplinary studies at FIU while obtaining an M.A. in English. Her thesis, The Monster Within: Disability Narratology and the Representations of Bodily Difference and Monstrosity in Gothic Fiction analyzes the various depictions of monstrosity in Gothic literature through the lens of a new theoretical framework, disability narratology — coded patterns operating within literary texts that pertain to the impaired body and its portrayal as monstrous through repetitive tropes that paint bodily differences such as race, gender, and disability as horrifying. During her studies at FIU, Tiffany has presented her research at various conferences, including the HSI Pathways Cross-Institutional Conference, Andrew Mellon Humanities Edge Conference, and the 2nd Annual Lorde-Morrison Graduate Student Conference

Dissertation Committee: TBD

Fields: Border Studies, Abolition and Radical Geographies, Global South Feminisms, Speculative fictions, Digital Humanities

Degree: MA in Twentieth and Twenty-first century literary studies, BA in English language and literature (Durham University, UK)

Prishanti Pathak (pxp691@miami.edu) is a PhD student in the English department pursuing a Caribbean studies concentration. Her research attends to literary and  cultural productions of women and queer communities from the Global South, particularly how they offer anti-imperialist, feminist interventions to modern-day border imperialisms. She interrogates the role of the nation-state and its b/ordering technologies in producing gendered, racialized violences against women from the Global South and their diasporas in the Global North. This research stems from her work experiences with feminist and migrant rights community networks across India, the UK and the US to push for culture-specific policies of support for vulnerable migrant communities. Prishanti has been a contributing writer to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing In English (2023). She has also presented papers on border abolitionist visions in twenty-first century South-Asian literature and Caribbean literature at platforms like Society for Caribbean Studies, UK and The West Indian Literature Conference. Prishanti is a primary researcher on the Mellon-funded environmental humanities project “Miami as Ground Zero”. She is also the UGrow for Humanities for the Academic year 2025-26. Outside of academia, Prishanti loves to foster creative feminist spaces for creating and sharing art and culture.

Exam Committee: Dr. Brenna Munro (Chair), Dr. Tim Watson and Dr. Sumita Chatterjee.

Fields: Early Medieval Literature, Old English Language, Middle English, Medieval Literature, British Medieval Studies, Medieval Studies, Medieval Religion, Medieval Christianity 

Degree(s): BA (English: Editing, Writing, and Media), Florida State University; MA (English Literature), Florida International University 

Kyra Ramirez (kmr347@miami.edu) is a Miami native and first-year Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Miami. Her work primarily focuses on early medieval literature and society, and her master’s thesis, titled Ic Eom Grendel, examines language, disability, and monstrosity in Beowulf. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she was awarded the Graduate Teaching Fellowship at FIU, where she taught two courses: an Introduction to Literature course exploring humanity and monstrosity in literature, and an independent study on Gothic literature centered on vampire narratives. Most recently, she presented a paper on Elizabethan religious tolerance at the Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. Her current research interests are broad, but she tends to focus on medieval literature, travel narratives, and Gothic literature.

Dissertation: ‘This printing blood’: Reproductive Materialities in Early Modern English Literature

Fields: Early Modern Studies, Manuscript Writing, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Digital Humanities

Degree(s): BA (English and History), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; MA (Early Modern English Literature), King’s College London; MA (English), University of Miami

Claire Richie (email) is a fifth-year PhD candidate. Her dissertation research explores the language of reproduction across genres in early modern England through a lens of fluidity and liquidity. She has presented at conferences such as the Sixteenth Century Society Conference, BritGrad, and the Renaissance Society of America conference. She is a recipient of a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellowship and served as the 2022-23 Center for the Humanities UGrow Fellow. Claire has also held short-term fellowships at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library, the Ransom Center, and the Huntington Library. She is co-director of the Early Modern Care project, and her work appears in the Early Modern Digital Review. She is a contributor to the Pulter Project. 

Fields: Nineteenth-century American literature and twentieth-century American literature

Degrees: BA (English), Iona College; MA (English), Iona College

Michael Sacks (email) is a seventh-year graduate student in the English Department’s PhD program.  Michael’s dissertation explores the portrayal of urban and rural areas in selected works of the following writers: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis.  Michael has previously served as the managing editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement.

Dissertation: The Portrayal of Urban and Rural Areas in Selected Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis

Dissertation committee: Joel Nickels (chair), John Funchion, Catherine Judd, Kelsey Squire, and Lindsay Thomas

Dissertation: “All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on”: Libertine Performance, the Diseased Body Politic, and the Rise of Empire from Rochester to Defoe

Fields: Restoration and 18th-century English Literature; early modern studies; comparative global history of colonialism and empire; gender, sexuality, and disability studies; plagues and pandemics; Caribbean studies; Florida history; Puritanism, witchcraft, and the occult; English Civil War and the Age of Revolutions 1650-1850; Romantics, special collections

Degree(s): B.A. magna cum laude (English, honors), B.A. magna cum laude (History) Rutgers University; M.A. (English) University of Miami

Daniel Scherwatzky  (email)  is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate and scholar of 17th & 18th-century English literature whose current research is focused on the works of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester and Daniel Defoe. His scholarly interests include libertinism, the intersections of sexuality and politics, global colonial history, the cultures of Florida and the Caribbean, disability studies, Romanticism, and the history of witchcraft and the occult. He also has professional experience in academic libraries, working with rare books and archival materials, including Richter Library’s Cuban Heritage Collection and Florida International University’s Miami Metropolitan Archive. He was a fellow of the JET (Japan Exchange Teaching) Program for two years in Hino, Tokyo, Japan. He holds a B.A. magna cum laude from Rutgers University in English Literature & History and an M.A. from the University of Miami in English Literature.

Dissertation committee: John Paul Russo (chair), Tassie Gwilliam, Catherine Judd

Fields: British early modern drama, science studies, performance studies, gender studies, Renaissance literature

Degree(s): B.A. (English, University of Mississippi); MA (English, University of Miami 2024)

Sydney Shamblin Anderson (email) is an English Ph.D. candidate with a Medieval and Early Modern Studies Concentration. Sydney’s dissertation examines the intersections of experimental science, anatomy, and performance studies in early modern revenge tragedies, charting how the materiality of live performance affords playwrights revolutionary means of anatomical “experimentation.” Her research investigates how Renaissance playwrights utilized stage properties as experimental technologies to challenge and reshape emerging anatomical and cultural conceptions of the female body. Sydney’s interdisciplinary approach to science studies, gender studies, and Renaissance literature is reflected in her pedagogy. As an instructor of record at the University of Miami, she has designed courses such as “Bad Women in Renaissance Literature” and “Ecocritical Shakespeare.”

In addition to her research, Sydney is deeply engaged in academic service. As the Founding Chair of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA)’s Graduate Committee (est. 2024), Sydney leads initiatives to promote graduate student scholarship in one of the leading academic associations for Shakespeare studies. At the University of Miami, she currently serves as President of the English Graduate Organization, UGrow Fellow for the Center for the Humanities, Vice President of the Graduate Student Association, and Graduate Representative to the Board of Trustees Academic Affairs Committee. 

Dissertation: "'Broken Time': Serial Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Radical Print

Fields: 19th century studies, radical print history, seriality studies, digital humanities, media and television studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Degree(s): BA (English), Florida International University; MA (English Literature), University of Miami

Michael R. Soriano (email) is a fifth-year PhD candidate. His research focuses on serialized print production, distribution, and consumption among 19th-century US and Caribbean radicals in the labor movement, abolitionist movement, and socialist and anarchist political movements. Prior to his PhD, Michael worked as a substitute teacher, media studies instructor, and English teacher for Miami-Dade County Public Schools. Michael is an Andrew W. Mellow HSI Pathways to the Professoriate Fellow. Since the 2023 academic year, Michael has served as the UGrow Digital Humanities Fellow and was a DH Graduate Fellow on “Mapping Imaginary Miami” under the supervision of Professor Allison Schifani. As a UGrow Fellow, Michael works under the supervision of Dr. Kelly Baker Josephs on “Manchineel + Seagrapes,” a dramatic archive for unpublished and out-of-print plays by Caribbean playwrights. He is co-organizer of the Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI) and the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Group (DH IRG) at the University of Miami. In 2024, Michael was awarded a DH Graduate Fellowship for his work digitizing the Chicago-based anarchist periodical, The Alarm. Michael is the graduate student editor for Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal. He has presented at various conferences, including The Caribbean Digital, the West Indian Literature Conference, and the International Television Commercial as Short Film Conference, and has written public-facing pieces in In Media Res, JWIL, and Insurrect!. He is currently the Department Representative for UM’s English Graduate Organization.

Dissertation Committee: John Funchion (Chair), Allison Schifani, Tim Watson, Anna Kornbluh (external reader) 

Fields: Caribbean Studies, Ecocriticism, Contemporary Literature, Science and Literature, Digital Humanities

Degree(s): BA (English), University of Miami

Rebecca Vargas  (email) is a second-year PhD student with current research intrests in the intersection between humanities and STEM fields (Biology, Ecology) in interpreting human embodiment in the natural world, with a specific focus on Florida and the Caribbean. They also have an accompanying interest in digital communities and how the formation thereof foster differing ideas of embodiment connected to expanding perceptions of taboo and monstrosity.