{"id":7209,"date":"2026-08-05T17:40:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T17:40:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/?page_id=7209"},"modified":"2026-08-13T19:22:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T19:22:58","slug":"phd-students","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/phd-students\/","title":{"rendered":"PhD Students"},"content":{"rendered":"
First year<\/h5>\n

Lucia De Carli<\/h2>\n

\"\"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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Egan<\/h2>\n

\"\"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\u2019s Graduate Fellowship from Vanderbilt in 2026. Some of his fiction and public criticism can be found at davidegan.info<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Miranda Ochoa Natera<\/h2>\n

\"\"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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tomas Pe\u00f1a <\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"Tomas Pe\u00f1a 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hanjie Tang<\/h2>\n

\"\"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\u00a0stubborn forms of life that persist despite them.<\/p>\n

Second Year<\/h5>\n

Noelle Candler<\/h2>\n

\"\"Noelle\u00a0Candler studies embodied knowledge in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture.\u00a0Drawing on queer theory and black feminist theory, she explores speculative reimaginings of history as a site of political possibility and coalition building.\u00a0Noelle\u00a0received her BS in English and Gender & Women\u2019s Studies from the University of Wisconsin \u2013 Madison. She received the department\u2019s Russel G. Hamilton Scholarship in 2025 and the Leland Sage Scholarship in 2026.<\/p>\n

Taylor Gregory<\/h2>\n

Taylor<\/span>\u00a0Gregory<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

Andrew Rawlings<\/h2>\n

\"\"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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Katie Remaklus <\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"Katie Remaklus\u2019s research interests include comparative Central and Latin American feminist literature, gender and queer studies in the Americas, and expanding the analytical meaning of \u201cliterature\u201d 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\u2019s Russel G. Hamilton Scholarship in 2025.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Noa Shevchuk<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"Noa Shevchuk\u2019s 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 \u201coutstanding scholarship\u201d on her undergraduate thesis titled “Mary Shelley and the Vitality Debate.”<\/p>\n

Joseph Sweeney<\/span><\/h2>\n

Joe\u00a0Sweeney’s\u00a0<\/span>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.<\/p>\n

Taneisha\u00a0Urquhar<\/span>t<\/h2>\n

Taneisha\u00a0Urquhart’s research interests include Caribbean, Romantic, and Victorian literature with special emphasis on childhood trauma in the Victorian novel. Her master\u2019s 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\u2019s unknowability toward locating the resilience that, on the one hand, locates and inscribes trauma\u2019s meaning, and, on the other hand, negotiates a recovery process that challenges our linear conceptions of time and memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Third Year<\/h5>\n

Emilka<\/span> Jansen<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"Emilka<\/span> Jansen’s research\u00a0<\/span>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. <\/span>Emilka<\/span> received her BA in English and Art History from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Anlie Williams<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Anlie Williams studies 19th-century transatlantic literature, with an emphasis on women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Camila Wise Robles<\/h2>\n

\"\"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\u00a0on the subject of queer, feminist Black and Chicana autobiographics and where she mapped a genealogy from Audre Lorde’s\u00a0Zami<\/em>\u00a0to Cherrie Moraga’s\u00a0Native Country of the Heart<\/em>. She is a Russel G. Hamilton Scholar, a Provost Graduate Fellow, and a 2021 Fulbright Colombia Scholar.<\/p>\n

Fourth Year<\/h5>\n

Emma Palmer<\/h2>\n

\"\"Emma Palmer is from Tulsa and specializes in postwar\u00a0American 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\u00a0Crab Creek Review\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Stylus Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Remy Rendeiro<\/h2>\n

\"\"Remy Rendeiro’s research focuses on modern American poetry and 20th-century Black women\u2019s writing. She engages with topics including jazz studies, humor, Black feminist thought and poetics, conceptions of time, and socioecological criticism.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maya Riles<\/h2>\n

\"\"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\u00a0the Northridge Review\u00a0<\/em>and has extensive experience working as a graduate archival assistant and teaching assistant.<\/p>\n

Fifth Year<\/h5>\n

Salik Basharat<\/h2>\n

\"\"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\u00a0(New) Kashmir\u00a0<\/em>Manifesto\u00a0<\/em>alongside Jawaharlal Nehru’s exoticized descriptions of the Kashmir Valley and examines their relation to\u00a0the aesthetics of the modern Kashmiri State and the imagination of the modern Indian Nation.<\/p>\n

Sixth Year<\/h5>\n

Matthew Milbourne<\/h2>\n

\"\"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.<\/p>\n

Justine Waluvengo<\/h2>\n

\"\"In 2016, Justine spent a year as a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant at Tulane University.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Explore alumni placements.<\/a><\/p>\n

Continue to explore the program.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":7192,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7209"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7209"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7310,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7209\/revisions\/7310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}