English Graduate Student Association
The EGSA fosters and supports the scholarly activity of all English PhD and MFA students through opportunities for scholarly discussion about literature in English between and among graduate students, departmental faculty, and the broader academic community. The EGSA fosters and supports the social activity of its members through opportunities for collegial social interaction between and among graduate students, faculty, and the broader academic community.
President
Maya Riles studies literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, specializing in the Victorian Era. Her research interests include sensationalism, aestheticism, corporeality, morbidity, conceptualizations of the spectacle, and the overall “gray areas” in texts that complicate seemingly mundane events. She has published poetry and fiction in the Northridge Review and has extensive experience working as a graduate archival assistant and teaching assistant.
Vice President
Kanchi Sharma is a fiction writer, poet, editor, creative strategist & communications specialist. She is the Russell G. Hamilton Scholar at Vanderbilt University. A Tin House ’24 alum & Kenyon Developmental Editing Fellowship ’24 finalist, Kanchi currently is the Prose Reader for Quarterly West Magazine and formerly held the same position for GASHER Press & Journal. Older versions of Kanchi’s poems appear in Live Wire, HEArt, PANK, TinySpoon. Their translation of a human-interest profile appears in PARI (People’s Archive of Rural India). Kanchi comes from a small town near Mumbai and is at work on a linked story collection and novel.
Treasurer
Taneisha Urquhart researches Caribbean, Romantic, and Victorian literature with special emphasis on childhood trauma in the Victorian novel. Her master’s thesis helped to reimagine trauma studies in the Victorian novel by reading across national and historical boundaries to articulate an ethics of care that move beyond trauma’s unknowability toward locating the resilience that, on the one hand, locates and inscribes trauma’s meaning, and, on the other hand, negotiates a recovery process that challenges our linear conceptions of time and memory. She is a Russell G. Hamilton Scholar and 2026-2027 Pepperdene Fellow.
Secretary
Anlie Williams studies 19th-century transatlantic literature, with an emphasis on women’s writing. Her research interests include archival theory, reception studies, and visual and material culture. She received BA and MA degrees in English from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and a MA in English from Vanderbilt University.
Social Chair
Noa Shevcuk researches the intersections of 19th century and contemporary speculative fiction, with an emphasis on animal studies and ecocriticism (including the ecogothic). Her work strives for an interdisciplinary approach that spans across the humanities and sciences. Noa received her BS in Biology and English with a minor in Classics from Union College in Schenectady, NY. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and received the Mrs. Edwin L. Rich award for her “outstanding scholarship” on her undergraduate thesis titled “Mary Shelley and the Vitality Debate.”