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, was born in Madrid, Spain. He earned his BA in English and his MA in American Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and is now a third year PhD student in English with a concentration in American Studies.
Alejandro's work lies at the intersection between the environmental humanities, Black and Black Diaspora studies, and queer and trans* theory. More specifically, Alejandro is interested in the interaction between afropessimism, queer and trans* futurity, and the violence of (post-/para-)Humanist, Anthropocenic and Capitalocenic formulations in narratives depicting the end of the world.
Alejandro has also been an educator for close to a decade. Apart from his current position as a TA in the English department, Ale has taught at the primary and secondary levels back in Spain, as a Spanish language and literature TA in Williams College, and has been a professor of Writing at Thrive Scholars for two years.
He owes everything he has to his maternal grandparents, Genoveva and Pepe.
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 sixth year doctoral candidate and a teaching associate in the Department of English at UMass Amherst. Her areas of specialization include global Anglophone literatures and cultures, postcolonial studies, affect studies, and violence studies. Her recent research has been published in South Asian Review and South Asian History and Culture.
Ph.D.
Grayson Chong is a mixed media artist. As an artist-scholar, she creates visual art and garments that explore the intersection between fashion, gender, and race in 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). Much of her research is transhistorical with a particular focus on how elements of Jamaican dancehall fashion can be traced to elements of enslaved dress on sugar plantations in the early modern Caribbean. She is the current editorial assistant of sx salon: a small axe literary platform.
Specializations: Caribbean studies, Performance studies, Fashion 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 (he/him) is a first year MA/PhD in composition and rhetoric and an instructor in the Writing Program. His research interests center around embodied rhetorics, writing across the curriculum, and writing center studies. He grew up in Minneapolis, MN, and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. Thomas is overly ambitious (but optimistic) about his abilities to hike, bake, and care for houseplants.
Abby Edgecumbe MA
Abby is a student of literature currently earning her MA. She enjoys early British Romanticism and modern/postmodern literature. She is interested in joy as a feminist issue and the literary canon of delight, and looks forward to investigating these and other interests during the course of the program. Outside of academics she enjoys creative writing, and attempting to solve the New Yorker crosswords.
Oscar Garcia Santana Ph.D.
Oscar Garcia is a current PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition with specializations in multilingual studies and pedagogies, literacy studies, race and critical race theory. When he isn’t working or lost on campus, you can find him in the gym or out and about.
Specializations: multilingual studies, multilingual pedagogies, literacy studies, postsecondary education, and critical race theory
Ph.D.
Jeremy Geragotelis is an MA/PhD student in English with a concentration in American Studies. Their research focuses on sites of failure, the performative act of breaking, 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 have an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.
Specialization: American Studies, Performance Studies
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.
Caroline Heafey is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts in the English department. She is also Assistant Director of Glucksman Ireland House at NYU. Her M.A. thesis focused on the prison writings of Irish writer and historian, Dorothy Macardle. In November 2019, Tramp Press published Macardle’s novel, Dark Enchantment, with Heafey’s introduction as a part of their Recovered Voices Series. She has also been published in Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies and Irish University Review. Heafey's research interests include Irish modernism, Irish women writers, transnational modernism, sound studies and the radio, and trauma studies. She is presently working on a dissertation that examines Irish women writers and radio during the Second World War.
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. She is currently WAC Coordinator for the Writing Center and has served in the past as Writing Center Assistant Director. Stacie is working on a graduate certificate in public history at UMass and works as an editorial assistant for Peitho. Her dissertation research uses a rhetorics of space framework to understand the activities of a writing group she facilitates. This project focuses on how history lives alongside the present and how community members write their way through the social changes they are experiencing.
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 is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric. Her research and practice interests include: leveraging the study of multilingualism for enacting social justice pedagogy; freewriting as an embodied and reflective practice; and contemplative composition. 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.
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
Jade Yeen Onn Ph.D.
Jade is currently a PhD student specializing in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research interests lie in the transnational development rhetorics that emerge through postcolonial imaginaries and embodied materialities of Southeast Asian anglophone literatures and geographies. Alongside her studies and research, Jade works as a Teaching Associate for the UMass Writing Program, where she is also presently serving as a Graduate Assistant Director for Teacher Training.
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. After completing a BSc in Electrical Engineering, he studied Literature and Cultural Studies for his Master’s degree. Working broadly in the field of environmental humanities, Raihan’s research is invested in climate precarity, climate politics, and political imaginations in the Anthropocene. A bilingual writer and translator, he works both in Bengali and English. Raihan’s areas of interest also include Marxist and Postcolonial Studies, Anthropocene Studies, Climate Fiction, South Asian Fiction, and 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.
Nick Sancho-Rosi is a Ph.D. Candidate in English. He earned his B.A. and M.A. from Clark University. He is currently writing his dissertation, which explores various forms of "ornamental writing," including calligraphy and pattern poems, in early modern books. Research interests include book history, English Renaissance poetry, and aesthetics.
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's dissertation research focuses on developmental writing, social justice, and writing assessment. She has taught writing at UMass Amherst, Queens College, CUNY, and Queensborough Community College, CUNY. Sarah was a Research Associate in UMass Amherst's Office of Academic Planning and Assessment and is currently a Data Analyst in Brown University's Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity. She holds an MFA from Queens College, CUNY’s Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
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 Tryon 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.
