PhD Students
First year
Lucia De Carli
Lucia De Carli is from Rimini, Italy. She works on Southern US studies of the long 19th century through the lens of spatial theory and the study of literary genre. She is particularly interested in the development of historical fiction in the region and its representation of the interaction between marginalized communities and the environment. She is the department’s 2026-2027 Frantisek Galan Fellow.
David Egan
David Egan is from Altadena, CA. He researches literature and visual art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with particular interests in Victorian aestheticism, poetry and poetics, textual scholarship, and psychoanalysis. He received a BA in English with minors in Art History and Creative Writing from UCLA, where his creative writing senior thesis won the Shirley Collier Prize. He received a Provost’s Graduate Fellowship from Vanderbilt in 2026. Some of his fiction and public criticism can be found at davidegan.info.
Yuchen Fu
Yuchen Fu is from Tianjin, China. Her research explores the intersections of text and image in 19th-century print and reading culture. She is interested in the role of the lyrical and ornamental in shaping working-class understandings of land, property, and class. She is a recipient of a University Graduate Fellowship in 2026.
Jasmine He
Jasmine He is from Shanghai, China. She earned her BA with distinction from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude in 2025. She received the M. H. Abrams Honors Thesis Prize for her thesis on the aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical dimensions of Nabokov’s Lolita. Her research interests include 19th-century aestheticism and decadence, Victorian and modernist literature, and queer theory, with particular attention to queer historicist and performance-oriented approaches. At Vanderbilt, she holds the University Graduate Fellowship and was named a Russell G. Hamilton Scholar.
Ingyin Khine
Ingyin Khine is from Yangon, Myanmar. Her research examines digital colonialism at the intersections of postcolonial theory, media studies, and science and technology studies. She is particularly interested in how technological infrastructures, including machine translation and platform labor, shape language, knowledge production, and subjectivity in Southeast Asia. Her work considers how computational systems reproduce and transform longer histories of colonial standardization and governance. She is a recipient of a University Graduate Fellowship.
William McClintick
William McClintick earned his BA in English & Comparative Literature and History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes in early modern drama and poetry and is particularly interested in the ways in which early modern and renaissance authors viewed medicine, theology, and botany. His senior thesis “Corrupted Bodies, Contagious Environments: Shakespeare’s Theatre of Medicine and the Breakdown of Early Modern Binary Thinking” received UNC’s James Lawrence Whitfield, Jr., Memorial Prize for best undergraduate English thesis.
Miranda Ochoa Natera
Miranda Ochoa Natera is from Mexico City, Mexico. Her research focuses on the convergence and translation of systemic violence and the otherworldly in the postcolonial world through literature and art history. Her previous work has examined the concept of solitude and re-examined lo real maravilloso.
Tomas Peña
Tomas Peña is from Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He received his BA in Mathematics (Pure Track) and English Language & Literature from the University of Oregon, where he completed an honors thesis on ownership and repurposing in African American literature. His research interests include African American literature, questions of ownership and inheritance, and the relationships between literature, history, and material culture. His interdisciplinary background in mathematics and literary studies informs his interest in how literary texts engage with questions of form, structure, and meaning.
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 Russell G. Hamilton Scholarship in 2025 and the Leland Sage Scholarship in 2026.
Taylor Gregory
Taylor Gregory studies affect theory. She is interested in the proliferation of negative affects in contemporary life, namely disorientation, apathy, and enervation, as slow registers of state violence. Taylor is a Provost Graduate Fellow and a 2026-2027 Martha Caroline Rheney Scholar.
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 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.
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. At Vanderbilt she completed an MA thesis on the subject of translingualism in Natalie Diaz’s poetry. She is an Ingram English Graduate Fellow, a Russel G. Hamilton Scholar, a Provost Graduate Fellow, and a 2021 Fulbright Colombia Scholar.
Fourth Year
Emma Palmer
Emma Palmer is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she received her BA and master’s degree in English literature from the University of Tulsa. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “The Loneliness Scale,” traces a cultural history of loneliness across postwar literature and sociology, marking the trajectory of loneliness from a philosophical ontology to a pathologized affect. She was an inaugural McCord Graduate Library Fellow and 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
Justine Waluvengo’s research examines how African women negotiate gender, sexuality, agency, and resistance across literary and lived contexts in Africa and the African diaspora. Her current work explores the displacement of African women from their bodies and sexualities through sexual violence and related forms of dispossession, as well as possibilities for recovery and reclamation. She is also interested in feminist solidarities, transnational feminist practices, and first-person forms through which women of African descent articulate their experiences and (re)define their identities.
