PhD Students
First year
Hanjie Tang
Hanjie Tang is from China. Her research focuses on Postwar American fiction and the ways war technologies discipline the body, especially for those who cannot simply walk away. She is interested in how literature registers both the violence of these systems and the stubborn forms of life that persist despite them.
Second Year
Noelle Candler
Noelle Candler studies embodied knowledge in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture. Drawing on queer theory and black feminist theory, she explores speculative reimaginings of history as a site of political possibility and coalition building. Noelle received her BS in English and Gender & Women’s Studies from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She received the department’s Russel G. Hamilton Scholarship in 2025 and the Leland Sage Scholarship in 2026.
Taylor Gregory
Taylor Gregory is from Dallas. She studies how modern writers negotiate rigid religious boundaries and carve new spaces for belief beyond the secularization thesis and, in the process, use religiosity as a means for decolonial worldmaking. In doing so, she works to uncover how religious practices in contested spaces challenge dominant narratives of modernity and reimagine religiosity as a transformative force. She was a 2025-2026 Provost Graduate Fellow.
Andrew Rawlings
Andrew Rawlings is from North Carolina and a graduate of Brown University. He studies the history of literature and religion, with a particular interest in the parable and wisdom literature. He’s also interested in second language acquisition, and he’s especially fond of John Milton and Jon Krakauer.
Katie Remaklus
Katie Remaklus’s research interests include comparative Central and Latin American feminist literature, gender and queer studies in the Americas, and expanding the analytical meaning of “literature” to include oral storytelling and performance. She received her BA at Scripps College in Claremont, CA, in Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean Literatures & Cultures along with the Humanities Major: Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture. She received the department’s Russel G. Hamilton Scholarship in 2025.
Noa Shevchuk
Noa Shevchuk’s research interests include 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.”
Joseph Sweeney
Joe Sweeney’s research interests include early 20th-century US literature and the intersection between legal and literature studies. He received a BA in English and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought from Amherst College.
Taneisha Urquhart
Taneisha Urquhart’s research interests include 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.
Third Year
Emilka Jansen
Emilka Jansen’s research interests include the intersections of Victorian and modern literature, with an emphasis on visual and material culture, ecocriticism, and genre theory (particularly the history of the novel and lyric theory). Her work strives for an interdisciplinary approach that spans across art, literature, and science. Emilka received her BA in English and Art History from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Anlie Williams
Anlie Williams studies nineteenth-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.
Camila Wise Robles
Camila Wise Robles (she/her) is from Southern California. Her research interests include ethnic literature and contemporary poetics with a focus on borderlands and national boundaries, hybrid and non-standard languages, and Latinx and Chicanx writing. At the University of Oxford, she completed an MSt in English and American Studies on the subject of queer, feminist Black and Chicana autobiographics and where she mapped a genealogy from Audre Lorde’s Zami to Cherrie Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart. She is a Russel G. Hamilton Scholar, a Provost Graduate Fellow, and a 2021 Fulbright Colombia Scholar.
Fourth Year
Emma Palmer
Emma Palmer is from Tulsa and specializes in postwar American literature. Her current scholarship centers around examining fictional depictions of loneliness in the 1960s through the work of James Baldwin and Shirley Jackson. She has published poetry in the Crab Creek Review and Stylus Magazine.
Remy Rendeiro
Remy Rendeiro’s research focuses on modern American poetry and 20th-century Black women’s writing. She engages with topics including jazz studies, humor, Black feminist thought and poetics, conceptions of time, and socioecological criticism.
Maya Riles
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.
Fifth Year
Salik Basharat
Salik is from Kashmir. Broadly, he studies South Asian experiences, cultures, literatures, languages, aesthetics, thought, and politics. His most recent master’s thesis at Vanderbilt places the rhetoric of the Naya (New) Kashmir Manifesto alongside Jawaharlal Nehru’s exoticized descriptions of the Kashmir Valley and examines their relation to the aesthetics of the modern Kashmiri State and the imagination of the modern Indian Nation.
Sixth Year
Matthew Milbourne
Matthew Milbourne’s research pursues an engagement with African American literature, literary and critical theory, and the textual and cultural engendering of racialized bodies. Matthew is invested in exploring the condition of possibility, context of emergence, and (re)signifying potential of a poetics/politics that not only articulates a critique of racialization and coloniality but in doing so also harbours new forms of subterranean imaginaries.
Justine Waluvengo
In 2016, Justine spent a year as a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant at Tulane University.