Graduate Careers
Our recent Ph.D. graduates have pursued careers that include both academic and non-academic positions in educational, non-profit, and research institutions, foundations and libraries, entertainment and technological industries. Please fill out the Graduate Career Update Form to submit updates to this page.
2023
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Andrea Acosta
Virtual Bodies: On Minoritarian Performance and Digital Subcultures
Assistant Professor of Digital Media, Department of Media Studies, Pitzer College
Kate Bonnici
Becoming Dead in Early Modern English Literature: A Lucretian Poetics
Assistant Professor, Pepperdine University
Kersti Francis
Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural 1150-165
Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Boston University College of Arts and Sciences
Misho Ishikawa
Into Sensation: Sensing Mongol Imperialism in Medieval Contact Literatures (1206–1368)
Assistant Professor of the Global Middle Ages, New York University
2022
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Ellen Truxaw Bistline
The Realism of Seeing the Text in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Assistant Professor, Orange Coast College
Vivian Delchamps
The Names of Sickness: Writing Disability and Revising Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century America
Lauren Dembowitz
Retracing the Black Venus: Figures of Intimate Commerce in the Atlantic World
Timothy Fosbury
Persistent Futures of Bermudas Past: Genres of Geography and Race in Early America
Senior Fellowships Officer, UCLA
Hannah Nahm
Alien Love: Passing, Race, and the Ethics of the Neighbor in Postwar African American Novels, 1945 -1956
Taly Ravid
Time Out of Joint: Counterfactuals, Alternate Histories, and Traumatic Narrative
Lecturer (Teaching Track), University of Southern California
Kiel Shaub
Rethinking the Arts and Sciences: Institutional Movement and the Formation of Romantic Discourse
Academic Curator, EXL Lab (Experiential & Applied Learning), University of Southern California
Claire Stanford
Future Asians: Orientalism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century U.S. Science Fiction
Gabriela Valenzuela
Reading Centroamericanismo: U.S. Central American Literatures in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1870-1921
2021
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Comfort Azubuko-Udah
Unwritten Spaces: African Literature and Charismatic Spatiality
Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies, University of Toronto
Jacqueline Barrios
London’s Pacific Rim: East Asian Emplacements of the British Capital
Mark Gallagher
Affective Transcendentalism: Sense and Spirit in Emerson, Peabody, Thoreau, and Melville
Lauren Rebecca King
Reaching Readers: An Analysis of Identification in the Writings of Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey Chaucer
Full-time Lecturer, UC Irvine Composition Program
Efren Lopez
Arrested Solidarities: Resistance and Racial Contact Zones in the U.S. 19th Century
Assistant Professor of English, San Diego State University, Imperial Valley
Craig Messner
Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States from 1790-1930
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Digital Humanities, Johns Hopkins University
Jeremy Schmidt
Three Very Short Poems: The Verbal Economics of Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Assistant Instructional Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago
2020
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Ji Eun Lee
Walking London: Urban Gaits of the British Novel, Jostling, Prowling, Wooshing, 1855-1909
BK21 Post-Doctoral Fellow, Sung Kyun Kwan University, Seoul, Korea
Kirsten Lew
Deviant Representations: Discourses of Sexuality and Facilitations of Intersectionality in American Film and Literature, 1918-1945
Fellow, Getty Research Institute
Literary and Film Historian, Content Producer, Getty Research Institute
Samantha Morse
Dread: The Literary History of a Political Affect, 1750-1900
English Teacher, Ransom Everglades School
Robert Smith
Representing Radical Politics in Anglophone Caribbean Literature After Independence
2019
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Ben Beck
Matters of Life: Writing Lives in the Age of United States Slavery
Associate, Whitmore Rare Books, Pasadena, CA
Kathryn Cai
Nascent Articulations of Feeling: Affective Care Labor in Emerging Postsocialist and Late Capitalist China-U.S. Circuits
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wake Forest University
Angelina Del Balzo
“Furbish’D Remnants”: Theatrical Adaptation and the Orient, 1660-1815
Shawn Cailey Hall
Visceral Romanticism: The Literature and Culture of Digestion, 1780-1830
Assistant Professor, Oklahoma State University
Jonathan Kincade
Adaptation, Remediation, and Reciprocity in Narrative Video Games
Graphic Novelist
Crescent Rainwater
Fashioning Feminist Aestheticism in the Early Twentieth-Century Novel: Lucas Malet, Netta Syrett, Dorothy Richardson, and Fin-De-Siècle Culture
Lecturer, Mercer University
Lecturer, Mercer University
Jordan Wingate
The Periodical Origins of the American Self
Academic Editor, University of North Carolina School of Social Work
2018
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Sharon Chon
Narrating the Visual: Seeing Race in Asian American Literature
Upper School English Teacher, Viewpoint School
William Clark
Time’s Citizens: American Fiction and the Sexual Politics of U.S. Civic Membership, 1886-1929
Visiting Assistant Professor, William and Mary
Kimberly Susan Hedlin
The Book of Job in Early Modern England
Postdoctoral Fellow, Newberry Library
Allison Hegel
Social Reading in the Digital Age
Data Scientist, HackerRank
Applied Scientist, Lexion.ai
Boram Claire Kim
“A Little Out of Its Due Course”: The Appeal of the Digressive Chronotope in the Early English Novel
Maria De Lourdes Medrano
Performance and Mestizaje in 20th/21st Century Literature of the Americas
Instructor, Marlboro School
Eric Newman
Queer Orientations: Desire, Race and Belonging in Queer American Literature, 1900-1940
Communications Manager, UC Humanities Research Institute (UC Irvine)
Senior Associate Podcast Producer, AYR Media
Erica Onugha
Abberant Time: The Peculiar Temporalities of Black Women’s Labors in Nineteenth-Century African American Autobiographies
Samantha Marie Sommers
Reading in Books: Theories of Reading in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
OSU President’s Postdoctoral Scholar, The Ohio State University
Alexandra Verini
“A New Kingdom of Femininity”: Women’s Utopias in Early English Culture and Imagination (1405-1666)
2017
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Julia Callander
Plagiarists, Sodomites, and Cannibals: Authorship and the History of Sexuality, 1740-1820
Visiting Asst Professor: Watauga Residential Col., Appalachian State University
Deborah Donig
Leave Nothing to the Imagination: Global Forms of Unspeakable Atrocity After 1945
Consultant, Amazon Studios
Sarah Nance
The Pathologies of Flesh: Temporalities of Feminine Embodiment in Contemporary Poetry
Visiting Assistant Professor, U.S. Air Force Academy
Assistant Professor, U.S. Air Force Academy
Alethia Shih
The Intellectual Scale of Children’s Fantasy: Telling Ideas in the Works of Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, A.A. Milne, and E.B. White
Digital Marketing Coordinator, Walt Disney Studios
Manager, Studio Technology Strategic Initiatives, Walt Disney Studios
Sharon Tran
Between Asian Girls: Minor Feminisms and Sideways Critique
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Southern California
Brandy Underwood
Feeling the Crowd: Affective Responses to Collective Violence in African American Fiction
Assistant Professor, CSU Northridge
Joyce Warren
Theorizing the Pō: Genealogy, Time, and Space in Polynesian Literature
Postdoctoral Fellow (2-year), University of Oregon
Lindsay Wilhelm
Evolutionary Aestheticism: Scientific Optimism and Cultural Progress, 1850-1913
2016
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Gillian Adler
Seeing Time: Boethius and the Ethics of Perspective in Chaucer’s Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde
Visiting Assistant Professor, Saint Peter’s University
John Caughey
How to Become an Author: The Art and Business of Literary Advice Handbooks from 1884-1940
Chair, UCLA Geffen Academy
Katherine Charles
The Interpolated Tale in the Early Novel
Assistant Professor, Washington College
Daniel Couch
The Imperfect Form: Literary Fragments and Politics in the Early Republic
Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Leigh-Michil George
Sentiment and Laughter: Caricature in the Novel, 1740-1840
Instructor, Pasadena City College
Christine Gottlieb
The Past Tense of Gender on the Early Modern Stage
Renee Hudson
Revolutionary Futures: Romance and the Limits of Transnational Forms 1910-1986
UCSD Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC San Diego
Alexandra Milsom
British Travelers, Catholic Sights, and the Tourist Guidebook, 1789-1884
Teacher, Harry S. Truman High School, Bronx, NY
Holly Moyer
To Yield or Die: The Power of the Prisoner from Chaucer to Shakespeare
Series Television Writer and Executive Story Editor
Michael Nicholson
After Time: Romanticism and Anachronism
Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Toronto
Brendan O’Kelly
The Unseen in the Modern Image World
Instructor, University of Oregon
James Bryant Reeves
Unbelief: Atheism in the Literary Imagination, 1790-1810
Visiting Assistant Professor, Franklin and Marshall College
Amanda Waldo
The Ethical Consumer: Narratives of Social and Environmental Change in Contempoarary American Literature
Business Communication Instructor, Year Up
Data Science Talent and Community Program Lead, Climate Corp. Data Science Center of Excellence
Taylor Walle
Viva Voce: Speech and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Assistant-Professor, Washington and Lee University
Alexandra Zobel
Georgic Reformations of the Vita Activa : The Nature of Work in Early Modern
English Literature
English Literature
Instructor, Napa Valley College
Co-Owner, Armistice Brewing Company
2015
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Jacquelyn Ardam
Reading from A to Z: The Alphabetic Sequence in Experimental Literature and Visual Art
Visiting Assistant Professor, Colby College
Ronjaunee Chatterjee
Literature and Feminine Singularity: 1850-90
Visiting Assistant Professor, Loyola Marymount University
Matthew Dubord
The Organization of Organizations: Bureaucratic Administration and Domestic Comfort in the Victorian Sequence Novel
Team Lead, Screenplay Systems
Director of Software Engineering, Okta, Inc.
Cristina Griffin
Omniscience Incarnate: Being In and Of the World in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
College of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Virginia
Amanda Hollander
The Fabian Child:
English and American Literature and Socialist Reform, 1884-1915
English and American Literature and Socialist Reform, 1884-1915
Assistant Professor, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
Librettist Fellow, American Opera Project
Kimberly Mack
The Fictional Black Blues Figure: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention
Assistant Professor, University of Toledo
Lisa Mendelman
Modern sentimentalism: Feeling, Femininity, and Female Authorship in Interwar America
Shirley Tung
A Self-Reflexive Journey: Imagining Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Travel Narrative
Associate Professor, Kansas State Universtiy
Katherine Webster
Novels of the Nation: Literary Theory, Post-Revolutionary Republicanism, and the Rise of the Novel in America, 1789-1812
Adjust Professor, Chabot College
Assistant Professor, College of San Mateo
Amy Wong
Victorian Talk: Human Media and Literary Writing in the Age of Mass Print
Assistant Professor, Dominican University of California
2014
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Stacie Cassarino
American Food Culture, the Language of Taste, and the Edible Image in Twentieth-Century Literature
Guadalupe Escobar
Arms of America: Latina Literary Re-Interventions & Reinventions
Faculty Fellow, New York University
Tara Fickle
The game is not up: Reading the Asian American fiction
Assistant Professor, University of Oregon
Daniel Gardner
Urban Frontiers, Ethnic Fictions: Revising the Frontier Myth in the Writings of Mike Gold, James T. Farrell, and John Fante
Instructor, Cerritos College
Alice Henton
Spectral Evidence of an Invisible World: Gender and the Puritan Supernatural in American Fiction, 1798-1856
Visiting Assistant Professor (1 year), Trinity College Hartford
Alex Hernandez
Modernity and Affliction: The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy
Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
Katherine Isokawa
The Surprising Times of the Modernist Novel
Humanities Instructor, The Bay School of San Francisco
Visting Scholar, Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center
Susan Lewak
Sustainable Gardens of the Mind: Beat Ecopoetry and Prose in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Publications
Director of Programs and Development, John Hughes Institute
Justine Pizzo
Solid Air: Victorian Atmosphere and Female Character in British Fiction 1847-1891
Emily Runde
Ways of Reading and Framing Collection In Late Medieval England
Researcher and Cataloguer, Les Enlumineurs
Sara Torres
Marvelous Generations: Genealogical Narratives and Romance in Late Medieval England, Portugal, and Castile
Postdoctoral Fellow, Medieval Academy of America
Fuson Wang
The Immune Response: Romanticism and the Radical Literary History of Smallpox Inoculation
Assistant Professor, City University of New York
2013
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Katherine Bergren
After Wordsworth: Global Revisions of the English Poet
Assistant Professor, Trinity College – Hartford
Anthony Camara
Dark Matter: British Weird Fiction and the Substance of Horror, 1880-1927
Assistant Professor, University of Calgary
Donal Harris
On Company Time: American Modernism and the Big Magazines
Assistant Professor, University of Memphis
Allison Johnson
The Scars We Carve: Disruptive Bodies in Civil War Literature
Lecturer, Writing Programs, UC Santa Barbara
Kevin Moore
The Myth of Writer’s Block: Imagining American Moral Realism
Lecturer, UC Santa Barbara
Ian Newman
Tavern Talk: Literature, Politics & Conhviviality
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Notre Dame
Elizabeth Raisanen
Literary Gestations: Giving Birth to Writing, 1720-1831
Assistant Director, UCLA Scholarship Resource Center
Josephine Richstad
Fashionable Form: The Narrative Strategies of Silver-Fork Fiction, 1824-1848
Editor, Schmoop
Director of Curriculum, World Scholar’s Cup
2012
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Vivian Davis
Mongrel Forms: Tragedy, Comedy, and Mixed Genres in Britain, 1680-1760
Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas
Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas
Dustin Friedman
Erotic Negativity and Victorian Aestheticism, 1864-1896
Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore
Valerie Popp
The Art of the Modern Body
Instructor, Walrus School
Senior Program Officer, American Council of Learned Societies
James Pulizzi
Fractal Realism: The Folding Tegoether of Literature, Technical Media, and Cognition in the Twentieth Century
Arnold Faculty Fellow, UC Santa Barbara
Senior Manager, Technology, Walt Disney Studios
David Shepard
Parsing Fiction: Humanistic Computing and the Postmodern Novel
Lead Developer, UCLA Center for Digital Humanities
Senior Data Engineer, Evidation Health
Jennifer Smith
Reginald Pecock and Vernacular Pedagogy in Pre-Reformation England
Instructor, Occidental College
2011
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Michael Devine
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: American Poetry and Film, 1985-1930
Assistant Professor, SUNY Plattsburg
Elizabeth Goodhue
Graveyard Plots: Menippean Afterlives and Satiric Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Assistant Director, UCLA Center for Community Learning
Adam Gordon
Cultures of Criticism in Antebellum America
John B. Hensh Postdoctoral Fellow, American Antiquarian Society
Georgina Guzman
Shame and Empathy in Chicana/o Literature
Lecturer, UC Santa Barbara
Assistant Professor, CSU Channel Islands
Julian Knox
Self-Portrait in a Concave Mirror: Coloridge and the Art of Translation
Lecturer, University of South Alabama
Adam Lowenstein
The Serial Art of Henry James
Senior Education Director, Summa Education
Christina Nagao
Cultural Mediations in Contemporary Asian American and Latina/o Migrant Fiction
Adjunct Professor of English, Los Angeles Pierce College
2010
Name
Dissertation Title
First Position
Current Position
Olivia Banner
The Biocultural Imaginary: Contemporary Narratives of Human Variation and Genetics in the Sciences and the Arts
Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar, Rice University
T. Austin Graham
The Great American Songbooks: Listening to Literature in the Golden Age of Popular Music
Post-Doctoral Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Emily Morishima
Remembering the Internment in Post-World War II Japanese American Fiction
Course Mentor for Liberal Arts, Language and Comm., Western Governors University
Senior Manager, Learning and Organizational Quality at Western Governors University
Valerie Shepard
Visible Creation: Reading the Cosmos in Milton’s Paradise Lost
Program Manager, UCLA Graduate Student Resource Center
Senior Writer, UCLA Recreation
Erin Suzuki
Sacred Travelers: Diasporic Narratives of Pacific Literature
Senior Marketing Writer, iolo technologies, inc.
Dennis Tyler
Disability of Color: Figuring the Black Body in American Law, Literature, and Culture
Carter G. Woodson Post Doctoral Fellow, University of Virginia
Alison Walker
Politics, Patronage, and Orthodoxy in Late Medieval England
St. Louis University, Mellon Research Fellow
Amazon, Senior Content Aquisitions Manager, Kindle Vella