Graduate School


I'm a 6th year PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I'm based in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. I occasionally teach in the Department of Spanish in the School of Romance Languages. I finished my MA in Spring, 2007 and am presently working on a dissertation project that examines the similarities in the conceptual frameworks and metaphors that organize and bring coherence to 16th and 17th c. circum-Atlantic literatures, primarily as they concern proto-scientific Spanish and English colonialist discourses. By looking specifically at the use of the language of friendship borne of Aristotelian natural philosophy and a tradition of analogical thinking, gendered readings of nature's secrets, and alchemical theories of mixture, I hope to show that the foundational images upon which these two colonizing enterprises of the Americas have been built -- English planter and Spanish miner -- are much more similar than the early modern leyenda negra and our own scholarship suggest.

For the Spring 2010 semester, I was one of the fortunate recipients of a fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI. To see examples of what I'm working on, click here for the slides from my JCB Fellows talk on 17 March, 2010, an overview of the types of friendships that emerge in the social world of human relations and the cosmological order of agricultural and mineralogical essays into New World nature. For a reading of the gendered subjectivities of soils, seeds, minerals, mines and the human and divine agencies in whom they find cosmic sympathy, click here for the slides from the talk that I delivered as part of the Women Writers Project: Women in the Archives Conference, held on 24 April, 2010 at Brown. That work, in conjunction with research trips to the national archives of Bolivia and Peru (summer 2010 and 2011) helped me to produce the following chapter. My CV helps to show what I'm working on now.

Qualifying List
Having experienced multiple incarnations, my final exam list can be found here. Here are some sample questions and supplementary questions that I drafted. I happily passed my doctoral qualifying exams in October, 2008, submitted my dissertation proposal in January 2009 (the day before I flew to Havana), and officially became ABD upon passing the Portuguese reading competency exam in September 2009. I am deeply grateful to my dissertation and exam committee, and Monica Rector in the Portuguese department, for their flexibility and consideration.
Major: Philip Gura, Rosa Perelmuter, and Tim Marr (director)
Minor: Jessica Wolfe (exam chair) and Mary Floyd-Wilson

MA Thesis
"Literary Transculturations: The Erotic Energy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Edward Taylor's Religious Verse"
Director: Philip Gura
Reader: Eliza Richards

Coursework
Proseminar in American Literature, beginning through 1900; Philip Gura, Fall 2005
19th Century American Poetry; Eliza Richards, Fall 2005
Christian and Classical Influences on Pope and Swift; Tom Stumpf, Fall 2005
Proseminar in Renaissance Literature; Jessica Wolfe, Spring 2006
Aesthetics of the Baroque; Rosa Perelmuter, Fall 2006
Proseminar in 18th Century and Feminist Theory; Ruth Salvaggio, Spring 2007
William Shakespeare, Political Theorist; Laurie Shannon (Duke), Spring 2007
Introduction to Yucatec Maya; David Mora Marín, Spring 2007
Portuguese I and II; Regina Santos and Marcelo Amorim; Fall 2006 and Spring 2007
Love and Death in the American Novel: Revisited; Philip Gura, Fall 2007
Polytropic Romances; Jessica Wolfe and Marsha Collins (audit), Fall 2007
Colonial and Nineteenth Century Latin American Literature (audit); Rosa Perelmuter, Fall 2007
Survey of Indigenous Mesoamerican Languages (audit); David Mora Marín, Fall 2007
Seventeenth-Century Religious Thought (directed reading); Philip Gura, Spring 2008
Yucatec Maya Level II; Ismael May May (weeks 1-3) and John Tuxill (weeks 4-6), Summer 2009
Yucatec Maya Level III; Fidencio Briseño Chel

Teaching Position
For a statement on my beliefs about teaching, click here.




Main      CV      Course Websites      Photos      Links