Graduate Student Research

At regional, national and international conferences, graduate students in the English department at Lehigh are actively presenting their work in all fields of literature. In leading academic journals as well as publications for broader audiences, they publish critical, pedagogical and creative work as well as projects based in the digital humanities and about the academic profession. Graduate student researchers often find that they gain familiarity with and expertise in more than one field of study because of the cross-period, comparative structure of the literature and social justice program.

Select Publications

2019

  • Dashielle Horn, “The Role of Empathy in Teaching and Tutoring LD Students,” forthcoming in Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 19/1, January 2019.
  • Robert Fillman’s poem ” The Second Offer” was a finalist for the Ron Rash Award in Poetry and is forthcoming in Broad River Review. In the fall of 2018, he published the following poems: “Sing Cardinal” in The Aurorean; “Geese” in Canary a Journal of Environmental Crisis; “Rattails” and “The Worm” in Poetry East; and “I sit in the passenger seat” in Sugar House Review. He currently has poems forthcoming in the following publications: Allegro Poetry, Ninth Letter, and Pembroke Magazine.

2018

  • Elizabeth Erwin and Dawn Keetley, editors. The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the Television Series and Comics. McFarland Publishing, Inc., 2018
  • Jimmy Hamill’s article (co-written with Chelsea Fullerton and Scott Burden from the Pride Center), “Intersectional Praxis in Higher Education and Student Affairs Supervision” in Intersectionality & Higher Education, 2nd. ed. through Peter Lang, Inc.
  • Cynthia Estremera, “Connectedness: Mentorship As Advocacy” on HuffPost.
  • Dana McClain, “Rewriting Republican Motherhood: Mentorship and Motherhood in Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Mentoria” forthcoming in College Literature.

2017

  • James McAdams published a poem, “Like Talking to a Priest (in Javascript 1.5),” in Matador Review, and the short stories “Gio’s Arm” in Belletrist Magazine, “Monads with Windows” in Rum Punch Press, “Estar sin Blanca” in River River, and “Theory of Mind” in Menacing Hedge.
  • James McAdams “I Did a Nice Thing”: David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy” in English Studies in Canada, and “David Markson’s Postmodern Turn: Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Minor Literature” in Rhizomes.

2016

  • Edward Simon, “Joel Barlow’s Miltonic Epic and Western Directional Poetics” Milton Studies
  • Edward Simon, “The Fantasy of Non-Colonial Conversion in Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American” Women’s Studies.
  • Edward Simon, “Bradstreet and Trans-Atlantic Non-Conformism in the American-Prophetic Mode,” in Prophecy and Eschatology in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-1800, edited by Andrew Crome (Palgrave-McMillan, 2016).

2015

  • Cynthia Estremera co-authored a book chapter, “‘My President is Black’: Speech Act Theory and Presidential Allusions in the Lyrics of Rap Music,” in The Hip Hop and Obama Reader.
  • David Fine published “Teaching Privileges: Three Guineas and the Cost of Global Citizenship” in Virginia Woolf Writing the World (2015).
  • Laura Kremmel, “Suddenly Monstrous: Gothic Configurations of Disability and Justice in Joshua Pickersgill, Jr.’s The Three Brothers,” European Romantic Review.
Master Theses and Ph.D. Dissertations
  • Sara Monahan Ph.D. dissertation: “Native Bodily Authority and Alternative Textuality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature”  (director: Ed Whitley)
  • Robb Filman, Ph.D. Dissertation: : “Haunted by Violence: Ambivalent Pastoral Visions in American Modernist Poetry” (May 2019) (director: Seth Moglen)
  • Evan Reibsome,  “Challenging Martial Manhood: Antiwar Literature in the United States, 1861-2012)  (August 2018) (director: Seth Moglen)
  • Jenny Hyest: ““Not Entirely Secular, Not Entirely Sacred: Women, Modernism, and Religion” (2015) (director: Seth Moglen)
  • Minh Trinh, ““ ‘My Mother is Calling Me’: Legacies of Sexual Violence in 20th-Century American Fiction by Women of Color,”  (2015) (director: Seth Moglen)
  • Pete Nagy, “”Momma’s Boy: Queer Masculinity and Cross-Gender Identification in U.S. Modernism,” (Ph.D. dissertation: 2015) (director: Seth Moglen)
  • Lois Benedict, “Uncertain Men: Faulkner, Steinbeck and Modern Masculinities” (2010) (director: Seth Moglen)
  • Belinda Waller-Peterson, ““Are You Sure Sweetheart, That You Want to be Well?”: Desire and Wellness in Black Women’s Literature” (Ph.D. Dissertation: 2016) (director: Beth Dolan)
  • Brian P. Crowe, “Irish Hunger/ American Eyes: The Great Famine in Antebellum American Literature” (Ph.D. dissertation 2014)  (director: Ed Whitley)
  • Jason Cash, Ph.D. dissertation: “Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction”  (2015) (director: Betsy Fifer)
  • Colleen Martell, “Liberatory Embodiment: Love and the Body in the Works of American Women Writers, 1855-1945” (Ph.D. dissertation, 2011) )(directors:  Dawn Keetley and Beth Dolan)
  • Brian Reese, “The Red Menace in the Cellar: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Enduring Power of the Old Left to Subvert Young Minds” (M.A. Thesis, 2019) (director Seth Moglen)
Select Presentations

Modernism / 20th / 21st century

  • Gillian Andrews, “The Hazards of Medicating Memory: Propranolol, Posthuman Ethics, and M. Night Shyamalan’s Split” the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, Toronto, Canada, November 2018.
  • Gillian Andrews, “Borders, Bodies, and Black Goo: Ebola Analogues in ‘It Comes At Night’,” The 8th International Health Humanities Meeting, Chicago, IL, March 2019.
  • Jimmy Hamill, “Mobilizing in the Marginalia: Coalitions of Theory in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts,” The Pennsylvania College English Association Conference in Bethlehem, PA, March 2018;
  • Jimmy Hamill, “The Trans Reveal: Reality T.V. Storytelling and Gender Identity on RuPaul’s Drag Race” the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA, April 2018.
  • Megan Bruening, “Ways of Knowing the Unknowable in Lovecraft and ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’” the International Gothic Association Conference in Manchester, England, 2018.
  • Caitlin Edwards, “’Latent life streamed and seeded’: Tillie Olsen as Environmental Activist,” the Arts and Activists, MMLA, Cincinnati, OH, November 2017.

19th Century

  • Kyle Brett, “’Strictly what it purports to be’: The Lowell Offering’s Challenge to Antebellum Print Economies,” the Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Conference, Washington, DC, March 2019.
  • Kyle Brett, “Who is He Who Would Become My Follower”: Mapping Letters to and from Walt Whitman Using ArcGISPro,” the American Literature Association, May 2017
  • Kyle Brett “Make US Where We Are: Spatial Personalization and Inhabitance in Byron and Lovecraft,” the IGA: Gothic Traditions and Departures, July 2017.
  • Rachel Heffner-Burns, “Queer Ecopoetics: Angelina Weld Grimke’s “Grass Finger” & Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the Modern Language Association annual convention, January 2017.
  • Sara Snyder, “The Bible of the Heart”: Maganega’s Bodily & Textural Authority in Hope Leslie” at the NeMLA Conference, Hartford, CT, March 2016

18th Century

  • Gillian Andrews “Mapping the Story of an Eighteenth-Century Woman’s Life: Charlotte Smith Story Map” co-presented with Elizabeth Dolan and Sofia Gracias, at Our (Digital) Humanity: Storytelling, Media Organizing, and Social Justice Conference, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, April 2018.
  • Dashielle Horn, “Protestant Nunneries and Spinster Utopias,” the British Women Writers Conference, UT Austin, April 2018
  • Dashielle Horn, “Spinsterhood and Privilege Among Jane Austen’s Single Women” at the Single Lives Conference, at University College Dublin, October 2017
  • Dana McClain organized the panel, “Early National Women’s Education and the Public Sphere,” and presented her paper, “‘I shall continue your preceptress’: Mentorship in Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Mentoria” at the Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, March 2017.

Renaissance

  • Lauren Van Atta, “Infertile Pleasur(ers): Exploring the Bodies of Falstaff and Moll,” the University of Massachusetts Graduate Conference at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, October 2017.

Pedagogy

  • Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno, ” Beyond Classrooms: Intersectional Feminist Practices in Higher Education” at Lehigh’s Literature and Social Justice Conference, March 2017.
  • Dashielle Horn, “The Role of Empathy in Teaching and Tutoring Learning Disabled Students” at the SUNY Council on Writing Conference at Onondaga Community College, September 2018,
  • Joanna Grim and Dana McClain, “Collaboration in the Composition Classroom and Beyond,” panel on Teaching as Theoretical Practice at the Modern Language Association annual convention, January 2017.
  • Emily Shreve presented, “First-Year Experience Graduate Assistants Tell All: On School-Work Balance, Professionalization & Successes” at the 35th Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience, in Orlando, FL, February 2016.
  • Jimmy Hamill facilitated the workshop, “Building Bridges: Promoting LGBTQ+ Self-Care Through Interfaith Practices” at the LVAIC LGBTQ+ Conference at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA, February2018
  • Caitlin Edwards presented her papers, “The Composition of Material Bodies in the College Writing Classroom,” the Arts and Activists, MMLA, Cincinnati, OH, November 2017.

Profession

  • Cynthia Estremera, “Beyond ‘Transferable Skills’: Expending Reach of Humanistic Expertise” invited panelist at the  at the National Humanities Conference in Boston, MA, November 2017.
  • Cynthia Estremera “Connected Academics: Showcase for Career Diversity” invited speaker at the Modern Language Association Conference in NYC, January 2018.
  • Joanna C. Grim, “Rhetoric, Social Justice, and Abortion Rights” at the 11th Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference, University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, October 2017.