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Graduate Students

Aisling Cormack Aboud
AboudYear Entered Program: Fall 2002

Research Interests: Anglophone Modernism, Irish and Anglo-Irish
Literatures, Indigenous Literatures, Discursive Communities

Anil Chandiramani
Year Entered Program: Fall 2009

Research Interests: Postcoloniality. Poststructuralism. Historiography.

Advisor: Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan

Robert Colson
Year Entered Program: Fall 2003

Research Interests: modernism, postmodern and postcolonial literature, and the novel

Advisor: Margot Norris.

Kelly Corwin
Year Entered Program: Fall 2001

Research Interests: 17th century drama; gender studies

Tracey Creech
Year Entered Program: Fall 2003

Research Interests
20th-century American literature and film

Personal Website
http://webfiles.uci.edu/tcreech/www/index.htm

Paul Dahlgren
Year Entered Program: Fall 2002

Research Interests: Antebellum American Lit, Political Theory, Critical Theory, History of Economic Thought, Secularization, Transatlantic Studies

Loren Eason
EasonYear Entered Program: Fall 2004

Research Interests: Rhetoric, New Media, Systems Theory, Transmedial Rhetorics, Combat and Subjectivity

Dissertation Committee: Carol Burke, Jonathan Alexander
and Bonnie Nardi

Dissertation Project: Analyzing the differing cultural rhetorics of representations of soldier subjectivity across verbal, visual, and procedural media.

Brian Garcia
GarciaYear Entered Program: Fall 2007

Research Interests: Pre-Reconstruction 19th century American literature, religion and secularization, narratives of progress.

Advisor: Steven Mailloux

Brandon Gordon
GordonYear Entered Program: Fall 2004

Research Interests: I am interested in 20th Century American and African American Modernism.

Advisor: Michael Szalay.

Farida Habeeb
HabeebYear Entered Program: Fall 2005.

Research Interests: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture,
Victorian Literature, Identity, Religion.

Awards:
Hester A. Laddey Memorial Fellowship, UC Irvine, 2005-2006.
Honors in English, Wellesley College, 2005.
Phi Beta Kappa, Eta of Massachusetts, 2005
Jerome A. Schiff Fellowship, Wellesley College, 2004.

Advisor: Steven Mailloux

Matthew Harrison
HarrisonYear Entered Program: Fall 2004

Research Interests: 19th- and 20th-century American literature and
culture; cinema studies

Advisor: Mark Goble.

Shayda Hoover
HooverYear Entered Program: Fall 2003

Research Interests: Eighteenth-Century British and American Literatures
epistolarity, sensibility, anti-slavery discourses, religious discourses, The Novel

Advisor:
Professor Robert Folkenflik (Emeritus)

Dissertation Committee:
Chair, Professor Robert Folkenflik (Emeritus); Professors Ann Jessie Van Sant and Jayne Lewis

Dissertation Topic:
English Enthusiasm in the Eighteenth Century

Conference Presentations:
“Strains of Sensibility, Straining Sensibility: Janet Schaw in the West Indies.” (dis)junctions: Romancing Heteroglossia, University of California, Riverside. April 2004.

Additional Information
Contact for the UCI Eighteenth-Century Studies Reading Group. Mailing list information here: http://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci18thc

James Huff
HuffYear Entered Program: Fall 2005

Research Interests: Postcolonial anglophone literature, 20th C. American, Literary & Aesthetic Theory

Ian Jensen
Year Entered Program: Fall 2008

Research Interests: The Postmodern novel; literature of the Western United States; Native American writing; theories of place and space; portrayals of the natural world and the rural in American literature; literature and philosophy; (post)modern ideas of identity, subjectivity, individuality, and community; German philosophy, particularly Heidegger.

Advisor: Michael F Szalay

Adam Kaiserman
KaisermanYear Entered Program: Fall 2004

Dissertation Project: Channeled Modernism: Liberalism and Literature in the Age of Television

Dissertation Committee: Mark Goble (chair), Michael Szalay, and Brook Thomas

Research Interests: American Literature post 1865, Anglo-American modernisms, mass culture, intellectual history, religious studies, materialist discourse, and political theory

Papers Delivered:
“‘Cool’ Aesthetics and Media Rhetoric: The Yippies, Richard Nixon, and Marshall McLuhan,” 1968: A Global Perspective, University of Texas at Austin, October 11, 2008.
“Reading the Mosaic: A Failed Attempt to Reconfigure Fan Subjectivity,” Failure: Ethics and Aesthetics, University of California, Irvine, March 3, 2006.

Awards and Honors:
Regents’ Fellowship (2004-2005)
Undergraduate Research Grant 2002-2003
Distinction in the Major, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2003
Outstanding Achievement in the Major, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2003

Teaching Experience:
E28C: Realism and Romance (Fall 2008)
Teaching Assistant, E102D: American Documentary (Spring 2008)
E28A: Poetic Imagination (Fall 2007, Winter 2008)
Writing 37 Intensive Writing (Fall 2005, Fall 2006)
Writing 39A & 39AP Fundamentals of Composition (Winter 2006, Spring 2006, Summer 2007, Summer 2008)
Writing 39C Introduction to Research (Winter 2007, Spring 2007)

Editorial Work:
Editorial Assistant to Brook Thomas for REAL (2006)

Patrick Keller
Year Entered Program: Fall 2003

Research Interests: Transhistorical transcontinental Metafiction,
post-WWII American Novel. Sterne, Ellison, Poe, Kafka, Nabokov.
Narrative, mimesis, surrealism, Dada. Paranoia.

Advisor: Margot Norris.

Maia Krause
KrauseYear Entered Program: Fall 2006

Advisor: Jayne Lewis
Committee Members: James Steintrager, Ann Van Sant, Hugh Roberts

Research Interests:
18th Century British Literature, Romanticism, Aesthetics, Reception Theory, Play

Lance Langdon
LangdonYear Entered Program: Fall 2008

Research Interests: The post-war American novel, literature of suburbia, literature as social history, poetics

Peter Leman
LemanYear Entered Program: 2005

Research Interests: Late Victorian and Modern British Literature,
Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Law and Literature, Legal Theory,
Colonial and Postcolonial Legal History

Awards:
Graduate Fellow, UCI Center in Law, Society, and Culture, 2007-2008
Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, U.S. Dept. of Education, 2005-2009
UC Regents Fellowship, 2005-2006
Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Idaho

Advisor: Laura O'Connor

Yi-Zhou Liu
LiuYear Entered Program: Fall 2003

Research Interests: Theories of literary valuation, canonicity, influence, and historiography; late style; modern and postmodern American poetry; creative nonfiction; literary responses to the Vietnam War.

Awards:
Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, Department of Education, 2004-2008
Chancellor's Fellowship, UC Irvine, 2003-2004
Phi Beta Kappa, Kappa of California

Advisor: Mark Goble.

Committee: Eyal Amiran, Rei Terada, Andrzej Warminski.

Emily Liu
Year Entered Program: Fall 2004

Research Interests: 18th-century British literature; the novel

Jennifer Locke
Year Entered Program: Fall 2003

Research Interests: 18th-century literature

Advisor: Ann Van Sant.

Daniel Matlock
Year Entered Program: Fall 2007

Research Interests: Victorian literature; the 18th century novel; the bildungsroman; cultural rhetoric study.

Bobby McDonie
Year Entered Program: Fall 2003

Awards: Mellon Fellowship, 2003-2004

Advisor: Professor Elizabeth Allen

Research Interests:
Medieval Literature
12th- and 13th-century devotional literature
Friendship
Chaucer
Medieval Latin

My most recent work is on the Ancrene Wisse, a 13th-century guide for anchoresses, in which I explore the textual community that the author allows for despite his rhetoric of solitude. I have also written at length on Aelred of Rievaulx and Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale,” and Troilus and Criseyde.

Erin McNellis
McNellisYear Entered Program: Fall 2004

Research Interests: Modern & contemporary avant-garde poetry, critical & gender theory, autobiography, Buddhism.




Publications:
Poetry
"he said: you talk a wide variety of nowhere." Hysteria: An Anthology on Women and Madness. ed. Jennifer Savran. Ithaca, NY: LunaSea Press, 2003. p. 29.

"i woke up singing." Hysteria: An Anthology on Women and Madness. ed. Jennifer Savran. Ithaca, NY: LunaSea Press, 2003. p. 83.

"Overture." In Our Own Words, vol. 2. ed. Marlow Peerse Weaver. Raleigh, NC: MW Enterprises, 2000. p. 119.

Academic Awards: John S. Knight Prize for Writing in the Majors, Cornell University, Spring 2002.

Michelle Neely
NeelyYear Entered Program: Fall 2004

Research Interests:
American literature and culture to 1900.

Academic Awards:
Chancellor’s Fellowship, Department of English and Comparative Literature, U.C. Irvine, 2004-2005
Departmental Citation, English Department, U.C. Berkeley, 2002-2003
H.W. Hill Award, English Department, U.C. Berkeley, Spring 2002
U.C. Berkeley Regent’s/Chancellor’s Scholar, 1998-2002

Advisor: Elisa Tamarkin.

Julia C. Obert
ObertYear Entered Program: Fall 2006

Research Interests: postcoloniality, particularly postcolonial poetry; sound theory & acoustic ecology; affect theory; Irish studies

Current grant support: UCI Murray Krieger Endowed Fellowship in Literary Theory, 2006-2011; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, 2006-2010

Publications: "Space and the Trace: Thomas Kinsella's Postcolonial Placelore," New Hibernia Review 13.4 (2009)
"Sound and Sentiment: A Rhythmanalysis of Television," Continuum 22.3 (2008)
"The Cultural Capital of Sound: Quebecite's Acoustic Hybridity," Postcolonial Text 2.4 (2006)

Advisor: Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan.

Amelia Parkin
ParkinYear Entered Program: Fall 2003

Research Interests: Victorian literature, emphasis on the novel and women's
studies; 18th-19th century women's studies; theories of the novel; theories
of community; women and religion.

Advisor: Ann Van Sant.

Eric Peterson
Year Entered Program: Fall 2005.

Research Interests: 18th Century.

Cristina Rodriguez
RodriguezYear Entered Program: Fall 2009

Research Interests: Postmodernism

Advisor: Rodrigo Lazo

Brent Russo
RussoYear Entered Program: Fall 2006

Research Interests: Lyric poetry; Romanticism; Theory

Katherine Ryan
RyanYear Entered Program: Fall 2009

Research Interests: Modernism, Critical Theory, Gender Studies, Representations of Trauma & 'Madness'

Advisor: Margot Norris

Rob Schoenbeck
SchoenbeckYear Entered Program: Fall 2005

Research Interests:
Primary: New Media Studies, post-WWII U.S. poetry
Secondary: Systems theory, game studies, literary theory, 20th Century American Literature

Academic Awards:
Honors in American Studies, Wesleyan University, 2004
Honors in English, Wesleyan University, 2004
Camp Prize in English, Wesleyan University, 2004
GLASS Prize in English, Wesleyan University, 2004
M.G. White Prize in American Studies, Wesleyan University, 2004
Wesleyan Fiction Award, Wesleyan University, 2004
Phi Beta Kappa, Gamma of Connecticut, 2004
Honorable Mention for the Horgan Prize for Short Fiction, Wesleyan University, 2003

Matt Seybold
SeyboldYear Entered Program: Fall 2005

Primary Research: 19th Century American Literature, Henry James, Confidence

Secondary Research: 20th Century Novel, Economic Crisis, Jazz, Baseball


Advisor: Brook Thomas

Robin S. Stewart
StewartYear Entered Program: Fall 2005

Research Interests: the English Renaissance; the History of Western Philosophy; Analytic Philosophy; Political Theology esp. as regards the institutional history of the Catholic Church; Secular Humanism; Development of the Novel; Expatriation Literature; the Metaphysical poets; William Blake; Aesthetics; High Modernism; Auteur theory of Film; Formalizing Authorities and Institutional Politics of language and literature.

Advisor:
Julia Reinhard Lupton

Tae-Kyung T.E. Sung
T.E. SungFields of Study:
Primary: Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Secondary: Twentieth-Century African American & Asian American Fiction
Theoretical: Charismology – Rhetoric, Religion, Pragmatism, & Phenomenology
Emphases: Critical Theory, Asian American Studies

Committee
Steven Mailloux (chair), John Smith, Michael Szalay, Brook Thomas

Associations
Modern Language Association
Rhetoric Society of America
International Society for the History of Rhetoric
American Academy of Religion

Elaina Taylor
Year Entered Program: Fall 2005

Research Interests: Poetry and poetics, 20th-century hemispheric American literature, feminist theory, emotion, aesthetics and visual studies, postcolonial studies

Academic Awards: UCI Regents' Fellowship 2005-2006; Literary Excellence, USD Department of English, 2003.

Shaina Trapedo
TrapedoYear Entered Program: Fall 2006

Research Interests: Early Modern literature (primarily drama) and culture, Religious Studies (especially Hebrew Biblical literature), and Rhetoric.

Conferences:
Northern California Renaissance Conference, UC Berkeley, September 28, 2008.
Graduate Student Symposium, Sponsored by the Group for the Study of Early Cultures, UCI, November 21, 2008.

Andrew Warren
WarrenAndrew Warren
Year Entered Program: Fall 2002

Dissertation Project: Populous Solitudes: Solipsism, the Orient, and the Young Romantics

Research Website: populous-solitudes.com

Research Interests: British Romanticism (particularly the late Romantics); Orientalism; Postcolonial Theory & Literature; German Romantic Literature & Philosophy; the "Human" in the Romantic Period; the Gothic; Joyce; Foucault; Badiou; Contemporary American Fiction; Irony (Romantic or Otherwise); Satire

Other Interests: Fiction Writing, Satire (MLAde and Antfarm), Travel & Foreign Languages, Soccer, Sushi

Conference Papers: “Shelley’s Adjectival Human: Knowledge and Problematization, 1815-17,” at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference (Toronto, August 2008); “’Unentangled Intermixture’: Love and Shelley’s Materialism,” at the American Comparative Literature Conference (April 2008); “Feral Infants and the Outlandish Growth of Satire in Infinite Jest,” at the American Literature Association Conference (May 2008); “How to Listen to Sirens: Narrative and Event in the “Sirens” Episode,” Bloomsday
100: the International James Joyce Symposium (Dublin, 2004)

Selected Publications: Keats-Shelley Journal - Review of Michael Vicario’s Shelley’s Intellectual System and Its Epicurean Background. London: Routledge, 2007 (forthcoming, Summer 2009); Entries on David Foster Wallace, as well as his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl with Curious Hair in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Fiction. Edited by Geoff Hamilton. New York: Facts on File, (forthcoming).

Teaching: to see syllabi I've designed for Advanced Writing, Freshman & Intensive Writing, the Humanities Out There Program, Intro to Poetry, Intro to Drama, and 826LA click here.

Selected Awards & Honors: U.C. Irvine Humanities Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, U.C. Irvine Humanities Research Grant, Travel Grant (U.C. Irvine Dept. of English), Post-Secondary Tuition Scholarship (Case Western Reserve University, 1996-7), Honors Thesis in Philosophy (Dartmouth College), Dartmouth Ethics Institute Research Grant

Languages: French, Spanish (speaks/reads/writes; lived in Buenos Aires and Paris); German (proficient); Latin (can read)

Editorial Work: Research Assistant for the Modern Library Edition of Tristram Shandy, Ed. Robert Folkenflik, 2004.

Dissertation Committee: Hugh Roberts (chair), Julia Lupton, Robert Folkenflik.

Jackie Way
Year Entered Program: Fall 2006

Research Interests: Restoration and eighteenth-century British Literature; history and theory of romance; political economy; eighteenth-century British imperialism; amatory fiction.

Advisor: Jayne Lewis

Jeff Wilson
WilsonYear Entered Program: Fall 2005

Research Interests:
Primary:

Milton
Secondary:
Intersections of religion, politics, and literature; especially in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, first century Mediterranean culture, Church history, early modern British literature, representations of Satan in literature, and the history of the philosophy of evil.

Research Summary:
I consider the author a conduit of social energy into art. From this perspective, I have examined the poetry and prose of John Milton, especially its relationship to the politics of the English Revolution and Restoration, the history of Christian theology, and philosophical notions on morality and cognition. For example, in my undergraduate thesis, I analyzed Milton’s revisionary notion of the nature of good and evil, suggesting that his presentation of God the Father and Satan is so ethically overdetermined that Milton virtually discards the binary notion of good and evil. By undercutting the reader’s ability to distinguish good from evil, Milton suggests that the two are not as simple and separate as often thought. In refusing to align God with goodness and Satan with evil, Milton encouraged the personal, subjective, and wildly diverse critical reception to his epic. As such, Milton stands as a precursor to such writers as Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and Camus, who treat evil as a psychological and intellectual experiment, rather than an instrument of moralization. In another essay titled “Milton, Satan and Galileo: the Intellectual Triad of Paradise Lost”, I demonstrate Milton’s archetype of a persecuted intellectual crusader, relating it to Satan’s failed Republican politics, Galileo’s forced recantation, and Milton’s own argument from Areopagitica regarding the dangers of repressing intellectual freedom through censorship. Finally, in a third paper, “The Marked Way: Melville’s Private Encounter with Milton’s Theology”, I examine the marginalia in Herman Melville’s copy of Paradise Lost, suggesting this encounter to be an erratic, constantly shifting, ever-elusive image of the struggles, victories, failures, and resignations that occur during one man’s twenty-year plight to cope with a poet who suffered similar vagaries in his own theology. Melville’s private struggle to grasp Milton’s theology comes in sharp contrast to the image of certainty he presents in public. Taken along with Melville’s public statements, I argue, the value of Melville’s marginalia comes in that – in a critical tradition dominated by claims of certainty and orthodoxy – it demonstrates the struggle to understand and accept Milton, thus validating instability as a critical step in the journey towards conclusion.

Academic Awards:
- Chancellor’s Fellowship, University of California, Irvine, 2005.
- Honors in English. San Diego State University, 2004.
- Sigma Tau Delta, International English Honors Society. San Diego State University, 2004.
- Winner, Roberta Borkat Essay Contest (for “Milton, Satan, and Galileo”). San Diego State University, 2004.

Biography:
Originally from Kansas, I moved to San Diego in 2000 to attend San Diego State and study Milton with Peter C. Herman. While in San Diego, I worked at a number of recording studios to study record engineering and production while also DJing at popular music venues throughout town. After receiving my B.A., I worked in the SDSU Office of University Advancement, developing case statements, writing on-line communications, and conducting donor communication, in addition to writing articles for a number of university publications. In 2005, I moved to Irvine to continue my work on Milton with Victoria Silver.

Advisor: Victoria Silver.

UC Irvine Department of English