Graduate Students
Graduate students in the UMass English Department hail from all over the United States and around the world, and they are wonderfully diverse with respect to age, race, sexual orientation, and professional interests.
Our students also compete successfully for University Fellowships, national fellowships, and the university's distinguished teaching awards. They regularly present papers at both regional and national conferences, and many leave with at least one publication at the time of their doctorate. Students play an active role in program policy and governance, and they organize an annual conference, hosted by the English Graduate Organization.
MA
Andrew (They/Them) is a first-year student in the MA/PhD English Literature program. They study 20th- and 21st-century trans and queer American fiction. The authors that currently interest them are Willa Cather, Joshua Whitehead, Carson McCullers, Audre Lorde, Jewelle Gomez, Craig Womack, and Andrea Lawlor. They are concerned with trans bodies, historical relations between queer and Indigenous communities, and issues trans people face today, such as the Gender Critical movement. They are critically influenced by (Trans-)feminist Theory, Native American literary studies, Marxism, Queer Theory, and Indigiqueerness.
Ph.D.
Sarah Ahmad is a PhD student in Literature, working on the poetics of space in contemporary queer/diasporic texts. She was born in Delhi and grew up across the Indian subcontinent. She is Assistant Editor at Guernica (poetry) and Conjunctions, reads for Poetry, and writes in-between poem-prose beings.
Specilizations: poetics of space, global Anglophone, queer studies, feminist architectures
Ph.D.
Dina is a PhD student in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and WGSS dept. Her researches incorporates religious studies, philology, and Latin lyric to explore the intersections between faith and sexuality in the poetry of Milton and Donne.
Specializations: Renaissance and Early Modern Literature
Maryam Amiri Ph.D.
Maryam (Marie) Amiri is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric and a Teaching Associate in the Writing Program. She earned a BA in English Language and Literature and an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language and has some experience working as an English translator, content writer, and tutor. Her research interests include cross-cultural writing, literacy, and writing for social change.
In her free time, she enjoys hanging out with friends, painting flowers, writing plays, and learning other languages.
Crystal Baines Ph.D.
Crystal is a doctoral candidate in colonial and postcolonial literature. Her dissertation focuses on twentieth-century narratives of secularism and secularization in South Asian literary history and Indian Ocean Anglophone literature. Her research incorporates religious studies, feminist theory, and eco-criticism perspectives. She is also interested in Buddhist influences on African American and Asian American literary representations. She is a digitization consultant for the American Institute for Lankan Studies Colombo which specializes in the preservation and digitization of rare archives. She received her BA in English from the Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka.
Specializations: Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies, Digital Humanities
MA
Alejandro Beas-Murillo Ph.D.
Alejandro--or Ale--(he/him/él) was born in Madrid, Spain. He is a second year English PhD student. His research is in conversation with Marxist queer and trans* spacetimes of displacement in contemporary utopian, dystopian and apocalyptic narratives. Alejandro's work pays close attention to the figures of the climate migrant, the refugee, and the fugitive in postcolonial and transnational narratives, as well as the relation between the body-as-consciousness, the land, and alternative, non-Newtonian temporalities. Currently, his analyses engage with authors like K. Sello Duiker, Octavia Butler, Marlene van Niekerk, Omar El Akkad, Rita Indiana, Ling Ma, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Alejandro works as a Teaching Associate and a Graduate Assistant Director in the Writing Program, and has been teaching for 8 years in Spain and the United States, including at Williams College and Thrive Scholars.
Specializations: American Studies
Ashley Canter Meredith Ph.D.
Ashley is a PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric. She earned an Advanced Feminist Studies Certificate in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. She currently teaches Writing & Society. Her dissertation research explores the ways that Appalachian women's community literacies at one non-profit organization connect to global political economic rhetorics that have led to extractive economies in the region. When she isn’t on campus, Ashley enjoys hiking, finding new houseplants, and admiring how cute her dogs are.
Shwetha Chandrashekhar Ph.D.
Shwetha is a fifth year doctoral candidate and a teaching associate in the Department of English at UMass Amherst. Her research interests include global Anglophone literatures and cultures, postcolonial studies, affect studies, and disaster studies. She is currently working on her dissertation tentatively titled "Feeling Unpleasant: Affect, Violence, the Everyday in Contemporary South Asian Anglophone Fiction". In her project, she explores how writers such as Manu Joseph, Indra Sinha, Mohammed Hanif, Anuk Arudpragasam, Mirza Waheed, and Arundhati Roy mine unpleasant feelings to problematize the victim-perpertrator equations and shed light on the oft-ignored temporalities and spatialities of unexceptional violence in contemporary South Asia. Her research has been published in South Asian Review.
Ph.D.
Grayson Chong is a transhistorical Caribbeanist. As an artist-scholar, she creates visual art to articulate how processes of colonialism and creolization beginning in the early modern period influence interracial relations in the Caribbean. In particular, her research uses transhistorical, feminist, and diasporic approaches to explore how family structures and womanhood are expressed in visual and musical performances within Jamaica and the Caribbean diaspora. Her works have been featured in Contemporary Media Arts Journal (2021) and in the Small Axe Salon special issue on textiles (2021).
Specializations: Caribbean studies, Performance studies, Renaissance visual and material culture
Rowshan Chowdhury Ph.D.
Rowshan Chowdhury earned her BA and MA in English from the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, and completed her second MA from North Dakota State University. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate with a concentration in American Studies and a Teaching Associate in the English Department at UMass Amherst. As a nineteenth-century Americanist, she is particularly interested in the interrelationships among various empires. Her current project investigates the investment of the United States in the colonial history of British India, focusing on the place of Indianness in the U.S literary imagination in the long nineteenth century, particularly via figurations of uprisings and rebellions.
Specializations: Long Nineteenth-Century American Literature; Asian American and Transnational Literature; Black Studies; and Serialized Literature.
Tyler Clark Ph.D.
Tyler Clark earned his BA and MA in English at Northern Arizona University. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate with a concentration in Victorian literature and Queer theory, as well as a Teaching Associate in the Writing Program. His focus lies primarily on gender deviance found in the sensation novel genre and its contemporary readership, as well as the homoerotic discourse of the Cambridge Apostles. Currently, he is researching “camp” as an underground, ritual expression of sexual deviance in late-nineteenth-century British men. Recent research of his has been published in South Central Review and The Riverside Quarterly.
Specializations: Nineteenth-Century British literature, British Modernism, Queer theory, Homosocial studies, Victorian sensation
Sam Davis Ph.D.
Sam Davis is a trans critical theorist, literary scholar, filmmaker, and musician. His research is at the intersection of Trans studies, Black studies, and Disability studies, with a focus on the relationship between social abjection and prosthesis. His auto-ethnographic documentary thesis, "In Our Own Words: On Being Trans at Smith" (2017) has received various awards, including the Valeria Dean Burgess Stevens Prize at Smith College, as well as being the Feature Film at GLAAD’s Spring Film Festival in 2018. Sam is currently a doctoral candidate in the English department as well as an instructor in the writing program.
Research Interests: Trans studies, Black studies, Disability studies, object-oriented-ontology, Critical Social Theory, Queer studies, Modern American Literature
Jarrel De Matas Ph.D.
Jarrel earned his MA in Literature from the University of West Indies. He is currently a PhD candidate in the English Department and Teaching Associate in the Writing Program. His research interests focus on the intersections between Caribbean Science Fiction and Post/human studies. He has published in the Journal of West Indian Literature, Anthurium Journal of Caribbean Studies, and The Researcher: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Jarrel is also the producer and host of a podcast; The Caribbean Science Fiction Network.
Thomas DeLapp MA
Thomas DeLapp (he/him) is a first year MA/PhD in composition and rhetoric and teaches in the Writing Program. His research interests center around the relationship between writer and writing; using writing to work through the many tangled cultural and personal narratives that shape our lives, bodies, and identities. He grew up in Minneapolis, MN, and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin — Eau Claire.
Abby Edgecumbe MA
Abby earned her BA in English at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA, with a specialization in Creative Writing and a minor in French. She has strong interests in Postmodern literature and British Romanticism. Some writers that fascinate her are Italo Calvino, Wordsworth, Ross Gay, and Ursula K Le Guin. Outside of academics, she enjoys writing, loafing, and walking.
Oscar Garcia Ph.D.
Oscar Garcia is a current PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition. His interests lay within the gatekeeping of Critical Literacies that inform past and current education hierarchies. His research lies within amplification rhetorics that implements hip hop pedagogy as a mediation to inform the intercalation that informs a evolutionary critical literacy that brings together CRT, multimodal, and multilingual concepts together to inform professional communication standards in Junior Year Writing that better serves socially transformative pedagogy relevant to students immediate and future communicatory needs. When he isn’t working or lost on campus, you can find him in the gym or out and about.
MA
Jeremy Geragotelis is an MA/PhD student in English with a concentration in American Studies. Their research focuses on sites of failure, the performative repercussions of reiteration/repetition, and issues of embodiment relating to technologies of recording. Along with their scholarly work, they are a performance-maker, playwright, and composer. They recently graduated with an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.
Ph.D.
Phoebe Glick is a first year PhD student in English with a concentration in American Studies. Her research draws from the tradition of historical and dialectical materialism to theorize 20th century literature and culture, as well as counter histories of cultural hegemony and antiradicalism. She has an MFA in poetics from Pratt Institute.
Ph.D.
Ph.D.
Jon Hoel Ph.D.
Jon Hoel is a PhD student in literature. His focus is on 20th century modernist poetry and political philosophy. He earned his BA in English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of a monograph on Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, with Liverpool University Press, and has published essays and poems with Joyzine, Lumina, Black Lawrence Press, and elsewhere.
Specializations: 19th century poetry, 20th century poetry, cultural studies, Marxist theory, poetic cinema.
Ph.D.
Elena Kalodner-Martin Ph.D.
Elena Kalodner-Martin's Website
Elena is a current PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric with specializations in technical communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, and feminist rhetoric. She currently teaches writing in the disciplines courses in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program at MIT.
Specializations: Technical communication, rhetoric of health and medicine, feminist rhetoric, digital rhetoric
Ph.D.
Dyala Kasim Ph.D.
Dyala Kasim earned her BA in English and Communication from Villanova University and MA in American Studies from Columbia University. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the English Department and a Teaching Associate in the Writing Department at UMass Amherst. Dyala's research focuses on contemporary Arab American fiction, Postcolonialism, hyphenated-American identity and homeland. When she isn't on campus, you can find her admiring her houseplants and her cat, Val.
Ph.D.
Specializations: American Studies
Ph.D.
Specializations: American Studies
Ph.D.
Stacie is a PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric and is currently Assistant Director of the Writing Center. She is also an editorial assistant for Peitho, the journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and is completing a graduate certificate in public history at UMass. Her research focuses on community literacy work, writing ideologies, writing center studies, and archival histories. In her free time, Stacie likes to hang out with her cats, knit, and listen to podcasts.
Ph.D.
Specializations: American Studies
Ph.D.
Jeremy Levine (he/him) is a final-year PhD candidate from Long Island, New York. His main research involves the intersection of education policy, writing development, the grammar of schooling, and equity. His dissertation examines how education policy can build opportunities for teachers, students, and administrators to come together over shared goals and definitions of writing. Outside of academics, he is a musician, below-average bicyclist, and amateur breakfast chef.
Ph.D.
Specialization: Renaissance
Ph.D.
Specialization: Renaissance
Miranda Lutyens Ph.D.
Miranda (she/her) is an MA/PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric. She teaches College Writing and is also a Graduate Assistant Director in the Writing Program, where she mentors first-year teaching associates. Prior to coming to UMass, Miranda spent fifteen years teaching secondary English Language Arts, first in the Boston Public Schools and then at the American School of Lima, Peru. She is a National Board Certified Teacher and has two Master's in Education. Her research and praxis interests include: leveraging the study of multilingualism for enacting social justice pedagogy; rhetorics of voice and the aural; and freewriting as reflective practice.
Mike Lyons Ph.D.
Mike is a Ph.D. student concentrating in Composition and Rhetoric. His research focuses on the relationship between rhetoric, sound, and ethics, and he is especially interested in the world of sports. Mike received his B.A. and M.A. from Boston College, where he taught First-Year Writing classes and worked as a Teaching Assistant in the Carroll School of Management. Mike's work has been published in America Magazine and he served as an Associate Editor for "The Best of Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2022."
Ph.D.
Abi Mbaye Ph.D.
Abi Mbaye is a PhD student specializing in English with a focus on American Studies. She completed her undergraduate studies at Tulane University where she earned her bachelors in English, Public Health and Africana Studies. She then pursued and attained her M.A. in English from Tulane University and a second M.A. in African Studies from UCLA. Abi's research is centered around critical issues faced by Black women, including health disparities, migration impacts, historical trauma, Black feminist thought, and revolutionary politics. Abi is also an activist and seasoned social justice trainer with decade long experience in challenging oppressive systems through impactful trainings focused on anti-oppression, power dynamics, and identity exploration. During her free time, Abi dedicates herself to fostering transformative education through the creation of curricula influenced by renowned literary works; these curricula explore intricate subjects like race, class, gender, and various manifestations of oppression.
Ph.D.
Kevin Morris is a PhD student on the American Studies track focusing on 19th and 20th century African American literature and culture. Kevin's current project looks to connect slave narratives and prison literature along a continuum of African American writing from the "front lines," and addresses concerns around black masculinity, black male sexualities, class, citizenship, and the law.
Specializations: American Studies, 19th & 20th c. African American Literature, Political Theory, Black Male Studies, Carceral Studies, Law & Literature
Christina Muoio Ph.D.
Christina (she/her) is an MA/PhD student in Literature with an Early Modern specialization. Originally from California, she earned her Bachelor's Degree in English at UC Santa Barbara, where she also specialized in the Renaissance. Christina’s research is primarily focused on mixed-race studies and its exclusion from the Early Modern literary canon, along with interracial relationships, critical race theory, queer theory, Early Modern drama, and other intersecting, marginalized identities in the context of the 15th and 16th centuries. She is also a REAL Fellow, and she teaches in the Writing Program, where she serves as one of four Graduate Assistant Directors for Teacher Training. She also teaches a First Year Seminar in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, where she instructs first-year students on queer theory as it relates to one of Shakespeare's most famous plays, "Twelfth Night."
MA
Ph.D.
Ph.D.
MA
Ph.D.
Nicole (she/her) is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric and a current Co-Chair of the English Graduate Organization. She teaches in the Professional Writing and Technical Communication Program and the First-Year Seminar Program. Nicole earned an MA in professional writing and communication. She is interested in intersections between technical communication and public history.
Timothy Ong Ph.D.
Tim is a PhD student in English with a concentration in American Studies and a Teaching Associate in the English Department. His research interests are Asian American Literature and Environmental Humanities. Specifically, his research focuses on the ecological imagination of the US empire during the American colonial period in the Philippines (1898-1946). He is one of the managing editors of the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism.
Specialization: American Studies
MA
Ph.D.
Jaclyn received her BA in English/Communications and BS in Education from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Currently, she is PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric, whose interests include writing instructor training, digital literacies, and writing centers. She is also a Teaching Associate in the English Department, the office manager of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, and a tutor in UMass's Writing Center.
Danielle Pappo Ph.D.
Danielle is a current PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric, focused in community literacy studies. She is a Writing Fellow for the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, where she provides full-time writing support to both instructors and students in the major. Danielle is also a 2021-22 Herstory / CCW Fellow, in which she works alongside a cohort of scholars and activists to practice and develop empathy-based writing pedagogy. Danielle is also a runner, a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and a home-baker.
Ph.D.
Ph.D.
Specializations: Modernism
Ph.D.
MA
Nana Prempeh Ph.D.
Chiefly informed by the literature and culture of the African diaspora, comparative race, and postcolonial studies, N. K. A Prempeh's research interests focus on Afro-diasporic fugitivity, migration, memory, comparative blackness, and being.
Raihan Rahman Ph.D.
Raihan Rahman is a PhD student in Literature, working in the field of environmental humanities. He earned his BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and his MA in English Literature and Cultural Studies from University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. His research incorporates climate precarity, environmental politics, and and political imagination in the Anthropocene. A bilingual writer, Raihan writes short fiction in Bengali.
Specializations: Environmental Humanities, Marxist Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Climate Fiction, South Asian Fiction, Bengali Fiction, Bangladeshi Literature
Manasvini Rajan Ph.D.
Manasvini Rajan is a PhD student in Literature. She holds a BA in English from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and an MA in the same discipline from the University of Warwick. Her research interests lie in the fields of postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, particularly in understanding what forms of writing can tell us about histories of development and hydrocolonialism in independent India.
Ph.D.
Specializations: American Studies
Ph.D.
Ph.D.
Specialization: Renaissance
Rachel Smith Olson Ph.D.
Rachel Smith Olson (she/her) is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric. Her research explores how individuals conceive of their identities in digital spaces, especially in relation to online social activist movements. She works as a Graduate Teaching Associate and as an Editorial Assistant for Peitho, the journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. In her free time, she enjoys going to concerts and hanging out with her cat.
Ph.D.
Specialization: Renaissance
Chandler Steckbeck Ph.D.
Chandler Steckbeck is a PhD student in literature and is a Teaching Associate in the Writing Program. Through the use of Actor Network Theory (ANT) along with other object-oriented theories, Chandler's current work explores hierarchies of power and the relationality between personified characters and non-human entities on the early modern English stage.
Ph.D.
Specialization: Renaissance
Ph.D.
Sarah is a PhD candidate who specializes in composition and literacy studies. Her dissertation is a mixed-methods study of basic writing teachers' self-identified socially just writing assessment practices. Sarah's research and teaching interests include histories of basic writing, social justice in literacy studies, writing assessment, and qualitative methods.
Thakshala Tissera Ph.D.
Thakshala Tissera is a PhD candidate specializing in the Environmental Humanities and Human-Animal Studies. Her doctoral research on narratives of Asian elephants examines the participation of non-human animals in political and economic networks that merge the ecological and the social in the construction of colonial modernity and complicates the positionality of this species of charismatic megafauna in the backdrop of the Sixth Extinction.
Janell Tyron Ph.D.
Janell Tryon is a doctoral candidate in the English Department with a concentration in American Studies and a 2023-2024 Mellon Fellow. She received her MPH from UC Berkeley and led public health research initiatives for the Departments of Public Health in San Francisco and New York. Her dissertation project historicizes the co-emergence of New York City's Sanitation and Parks Departments and examines their role in residential displacement, surveillance, and resource extraction, under the guise of developing public space. Her research is guided by spatial and Black Marxism, discard studies, citizenship theory, queer theory, and anti-colonial eco-criticism. Her literary and critical work has been published in American Journal of Public Health, AIDS and Behavior, AIDS Care, and Gertrude Press.
Ph.D.
Specialization: Renaissance
Danyea West MA
Danyea (she/her) is a first year MA/PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric. Her research interests include how race shapes and informs writers' relationships with writing, feminist theories, writing program administration, and writing center studies. She grew up in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. When not on campus, you can find her hiking, baking, and spending time with her cat, George.
Othniel Williams Ph.D.
Othniel Williams is a vibrant educator who has taught writing at the secondary and the tertiary levels both in the U.S. and in Jamaica. He earned a BA in journalism and an MA in English Language from the University of the West Indies before he pursed a second MA at St. Cloud State University in MN, majoring in TESL. Othniel's research interests include culturally relevant and linguistically diverse pedagogies and assessments in composition classes, student writing perceptions and experiences, and writing program administration.
