graduate student profiles

Amy Clukey
Amy Clukey is a doctoral candidate with interests in transatlantic modernism, southern literature, cosmopolitan theory, and regionalism in a global context (particularly the new southern studies). She has taught courses on modern Irish literature, the American short story, and  modernist poetry and regionalism. Her dissertation, "Plantation Modernism," examines colonialism and cosmopolitanism in twentieth century plantation fiction from Ireland, the Caribbean, and United States South.

Peter Collins
Peter Collins is a PhD student whose primary interest is in twentieth century American literature and cultural studies.  His dissertation deals with literary portrayals of shopping and the rise of the department store and the shopping mall.

Anna M. Crawford
I am a current MA candidate and plan to study American Modernism with a particular focus on gender dynamics.

Geffrey Davis
MA candidate with interests in 20th century American literature and American Modernism and cultural studies, with a particular interest in identity formations.

Michael DuBose
Second year MA heading to the PhD Fall 2008; interests in 20th century modernist American Literature, with particular interest in Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Adam Haley
Adam Haley is an MA candidate studying contemporary American fiction and film.  His interests include cultural studies, visual rhetoric, critical and narrative theory, science fiction and utopian/dystopian literatures, science and technology studies, disability, and new constructions of history and memory.

Verna Kale
Verna Kale is a doctoral candidate whose interests include:  Anglo-American modernism, 19th-century American literature, book history/periodical culture, and textual scholarship.  Her dissertation is tentatively titled "Women Writing War: The Evolution of the 'Girl Reporter' as American Icon."  Verna also has a particular interest in Ernest Hemingway: she has published in the Hemingway Review, worked as a research assistant for the Hemingway Letters Project, and recently was guest curator (along with Dr. Sandra Spanier) of the exhibit "Hemingway Writing Home: Letters to his Family 1917-1957."

Dustin Kennedy
Dustin Kennedy studies 19th century American literature, with an interest in resurrecting versions of the American past that are not taught enough. He is currently working to understand the ins and outs of the trans-Atlantic critical approach, and is interested in the fate of labor in and outside of citizenship in the wake of Cold War pressure on the teaching of American literature over the past 70 years. His particular interests are Melville and Melville scholarship, the erasure of the legacy of the Haitian revolution from the American literary conscience, and the vilification of the Haymarket Affair.

Darrell Lagace
19th Century American, focusing on 1850-1890.

Sean Moiles
Contemporary American fiction.

Damjana Mraovic-O'Hare
Ph.D. candidate with interests in  contemporary American fiction and the 20th century American literature, as well as theory and cultural studies.  

Brian Neff
Brian Neff is a PhD student working in 19th century American literature and culture with an emphasis on sensational fiction, the American gothic, and crime literature.  He is particularly interested in the construction of masculinity within these genres.

Michael New
Michael New is a Master's student at The Pennsylvania State University-University Park specializing in African American literature and rhetoric.  His work focuses mainly on musical representations and manifestations of diasporic consciousness.

Eric Norton
A Ph.D. candidate, Eric Norton works in American literature from the Republican era through Reconstruction. His dissertation is tentatively designed around the development of sexuality within categories of citizenship, both politically enforceable and imaginative, through the period, especially as demonstrated in representations of disruptive group behavior, from political protest to unruly mobs.

Katie Owens
I am an MA candidate with an interest in modern American literature and narrative theory.

Gregory Pierrot
Doctoral candidate with interests in 20th century and Contemporary American literature, African American literature, Transatlantic and Cultural Studies, Identity and Nation politics, Music. Personal website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/gzp107

Emily Sharpe
Emily Sharpe is a second-year Master's student beginning her PhD in the fall of 2008. Her work is chiefly in North American modernism, with a focus on the Spanish Civil War and cosmopolitanism.

Phyllisa Smith
Phyllisa Smith, a second year doctoral student, has an interest in African American drama and her dissertation research exams violence against women.

Mat Walker
Interests: 20th/21st century literature of the Western hemisphere/literature of the Americas, including transnational literature, "American" modernism, South American modernism, contemporary Latino/a/Chicano/a lit, and Native American literature.

Rochelle Zuck
Rochelle Zuck defended her dissertation, "Imagined Citizens: Ethnic Nationalisms and Crises of Culture in the United States, 1816-1856," in November, 2007.  Her project examines competing visions of ethnic and racial nationalism in nineteenth-century America, showing the various strategies of identity formation employed by disparate peoples as they sought to renegotiate their political relationship to the U.S. nation. In the fall of 2008, Rochelle will begin work as an Assistant Professor of American literature before 1900 at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.