Current Thematic Graduate Student Fellows
2023-2024 Thematic Graduate Student Fellows: The Place of Memory
Tandria Fireall
Department of English
Tan Fireall is an MFA candidate in Poetry. Her research interests span various topics such as film theory, the Renaissance and early modern era, metaphysical poetry, poetics, and science in literature. She is currently researching the theme of violence and victimization within communities. Her research is framed as a critical essay focusing on tragedy as a genre and invites readers to consider the complexities of violence, acts of desecration, and the prevention of burial.
Kanak Kapur
Department of English
Kanak Kapur is a writer from Dubai and Los Angeles. Her fiction has previously appeared at The Rumpus, the cyber zine CodeLit and Black Warrior Review. She has received support through a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Vanderbilt University.
Seulbin Lee
Department of Religion
Seulbin Lee is a Ph.D. student in Ethics and Society in the Graduate Department of Religion. She specializes in Christian Social Ethics and Political Theology, and her research interests include transnationalism, democracy, liberative historiography, and feminist decolonial praxis. Her current research explores the moral agency of transnational activists who carry the memory of the May 18th People’s Uprising in South Korea into the U.S. through the lens of religion. As a certified candidate in the United Methodist Church, her passion lies in connecting the traditions of UMC to her teaching of ethics as cultivating good troublemakers in the world. She is excited to be co-teaching a “Religion and Social Movement” course this fall, as a teaching associate, with Dr. Melissa Snarr.
Melissa Luong
Human and Organizational Development, Peabody
Melissa Luong is a second-year PhD student in Community Research and Action. Her work aims to reorient public health study and practice around an examination of power and the social systems that produce and reproduce health inequities in communities as a result of structural violence. Through exploring community organizing and social movement-building efforts to advance health equity, she focuses on how communities resist, contest, and transform social structures that create and reinforce harm. Her work draws from community psychology, public health, critical ethnic studies, and anthropology.
Megan McCormick
Human and Organizational Development, Peabody
Megan McCormick is a second-year doctoral student in Community Research and Action in the Department of Human & Organizational Development. She is an interdisciplinary critical youth scholar who uses participatory, qualitative, and critical methodologies to think about youth power-building in neighborhoods and schools. She is interested in youth-led transformation processes (in schools and cities), youth-adult partnerships, youth organizing, and conceptions of schools as place and as sites of resistance. She proposes a novel synthesis in the form of a scholarly article that outlines practices for re-building and/or transforming schools as sites of memory and healing. She is interested in expanding on “place fracture,” a framework for understanding how people respond when a physical place, like a school, is disappeared from the community.
Kelsey Rall
Department of English
Kelsey Rall is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature, and her research interests include queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, spinsterhood, and genre studies. Her dissertation, titled “Seeing Through the Spinster: The Nineteenth-Century Single Woman in Literature and Theory,” analyzes how single women redefine notions of gender, kinship, and temporality in nineteenth-century texts. In particular, she proposes that various “genres” of nineteenth-century single womanhood simultaneously structure and destabilize the major literary genres in which they appear.