The English Department

Megharaj Adhikari is a Ph.D. student. He holds an M.Phil. and an M.A. in English from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. His research focus is Twentieth and Twenty-first-century American Literatures, centering on Modernism and literary canons, institutions, and infrastructures. Additionally, his interests extend to New Media, Ecocriticism, Postcolonial Literatures, World Englishes, Literature in Translation, and Western Buddhism. In 2018, he was a visiting Fulbright Commission scholar in the Study of the United States Institute in Contemporary American Literature, and, in 2012, he received a scholarship from the U.S. Embassy in Nepal for Online Learning to EFL Educators. Prior to FSU, Megharaj held positions as an adjunct faculty member at Tribhuvan University teaching English language and literature and worked as an interpreter and translator. His translated plays include Tartuffe and Three Sisters, performed in the Nepali National theater. Since 2022, he has worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in English at FSU.

In December 2023, the Modern Language Association elected Megharaj as a Professional-Issues Delegate of the MLA Delegate Assembly. His term runs until January 2027. Additionally, he recently took on the role of a peer reviewer of the open-access literary journal Critical Humanities.

Charlotte Alcon is a first-year M.A. student. She specializes in Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality studies and her research interests primarily lie in feminist and queer theory. She particularly enjoys exploring the relationships between culture and perceptions of gender and sexuality. She holds a B.A. in English with minors in education and women’s studies from Flagler College, and her senior thesis analyzed the portrayal of sublime female desire in Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights. Upcoming work includes an assessment of representation within modern bisexual literature, to be presented at the Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association’s 120th Annual Conference this fall.

Anna Bighta is a Ph.D. student, and she studies Romantic and Victorian literature and is part of the History of Text Technologies program. She received her B.A .from Emory University in Atlanta and her M.A. from the University of Georgia in Athens. Her interests are book illustration, realisms, and the development of the 19th-century British novel.

Tyler ("Ty") Blackerby is currently pursuing her M.A. She earned her B.A. in English and minors in Spanish and Comparative Literature from Trinity University. Her research primarily asks the question: in what ways do we see reverberations of the Holocaust and World War II history in contemporary literature and media? Since graduating, Tyler has been invited back to Trinty to give guest presentations to the courses “Literature of the Holocaust” and “The Jewish Graphic Novel." Upcoming work includes research on Children's Holocaust Literature and border aesthetics in graphic novels, to be presented at the Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association’s 120th Annual Conference in the fall of 2023.

Brooke Bradley is a current Ph.D. student who specializes in Post-1900 American Literature with an emphasis on Gender and Feminist Studies. Her research interests include multi-ethnic literature, queer studies, ecocriticism, science fiction and fantasy, speculative fiction, borders (both corporeal and noncorporeal), and popular culture. Brooke obtained her M.A. degree in Literature, as well as a graduate certificate in Gender Studies, in 2015 at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, where she also received a B.A .in Literature with a History minor in 2012. In 2016, she presented her paper “The School Yard Town: Juvenility in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” at Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Salt Lake City, Utah; later that year at Midwest Modern Language Association’s conference, she presented “Mountain Borders: Femininity, Masculinity, and Sex in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven” in St. Louis, Missouri. Brooke has always possessed a passion for literature, education, and books which she has kindled throughout her academic career as well as during her former position as a library cataloger at Murray State University’s library. Brooke continues to pursue her interests through her research and by teaching literature and composition courses at FSU.

Emma Bruce is an M.A. student in the Literature, Media, and Culture Program. They study popular culture, particularly reality TV and dance on the popular screen, and are most interested in constructions of gender and authenticity in these genres. Upcoming work on Dancing with the Stars and the reality TV dance performance will be presented at the Midwest Popular Culture Association conference. Emma received a B.F.A .in Creative Writing from Emerson College and their creative work can be found in Hippocampus.

Brandi Burns is a doctoral candidate with a focus on Victorian literature. She obtained her M.A. in History and B.A.s in English Literature and Classical Civilizations from FSU. Recent presentations include “‘All Foolish Modesty and Coy Grimaces’: The Contaminating Influence of Mary Wollstonecraft” at the Victorian Recollections, Revolutions, and Realities conference and "Familiarity Breeds Contempt: Mousleyer as a Familiar in William Baldwin’s 'Beware the Cat'" at Romancing the Gothic's conference The Supernatural and Witchcraft in Belief, Practice and Depiction. Her article “’The Only Thing Left to Us is Death’: The Doctor as a Criminal Hypnotist in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Short Stories” was published in The Postgraduate Journal of Medical Humanities in 2022. She recently won first place in a creative writing competition for her poem, “Down, Down, Down,” which will be published in The Windward Review Fall of 2023. Her research interests include the Gothic, ghost stories, death culture, health humanities, and representations of medical practitioners in literature.

Brielle Gorrell is a second-year M.A. student with a concentration in African American Literary and Cultural Studies. Her research interests include but are not limited to, the poetics of Black music, Black queer feminist epistemologies and expressions, 20th-century African American culture, Marxist critiques of capitalism, and aesthetic theory. Currently, she is interested in examining how Black queer feminist writers transform our notions of hu(man)ity and the sociopolitical value of their language toward liberation from modern-day systems of domination.

Caroline Hampshire is a Ph.D. student, concentrating on Medieval and Early Modern British Literary and Cultural Studies. She received a B.S. in English with a Portuguese minor from the United States Air Force Academy and a M.A. in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London. After receiving her M.A., she served as an Intelligence Officer in the United States Air Force, and she continues her military service as a reservist. During her last two years of active duty, she taught introductory English composition and literature courses at USAFA and continued her research in early modern materialism, performance studies, actor-network theory, and phenomenology. She has focused her scholarship on examining the early modern mirror stage property, prologue costuming, and material collaborative authorship, presenting selected works for the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association (2022, 2023). Her additional interests include travel and food literature as well as reviewing poetry and literary-inspired performances—she has published reviews in War, Literature, and the Arts 34.1 (2022) and KCL’s collection of Shakespeare400 consortium student reviews (2016).

Holly Horner is a third-year Ph.D. student focusing on British Romantic literature and Digital Humanities. Her research interests include the 19th-century gothic novel, Romantic women poets, and digital applications to literary studies. She holds a B.A. in English from Flagler College and a M.A. from FSU. Most recently, her work on Charlotte Smith has been featured in Tokyo, Japan for The Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH) and Birmingham, Alabama for South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA).

J. Tyler Johnson is a first-year M.A. student born and raised in Southwest Georgia, but more generally he's always lived near the Florida state line. He received his A.A. in English from Bainbridge State College in Bainbridge, Georgia, and his B.S. in English from Troy University in Dothan, Alabama, before matriculating just down the road to FSU in Tallahassee, Florida. Tyler's still "figuring things out" in terms of specialization, but in general his current areas of academic interest include (but are not limited to) Medieval and Classical Literature, translation studies, psychoanalytic theory, and the works of William Blake.

So Young Koo is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature, Media, and Culture Program at Florida State University. She has studied Literary Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas (M.A.) and English and French at the University of Texas at Austin (B.A.). She focuses on the Asian/Asian-American literature and media, specifically on the transnational cross-pollinations of literature and media in the cultural psyche.

Casie Shirley Minot is an M.A. student. Her current interests involve investigating print and digital media production and reader engagements as a systemically complicated series of embodied and disembodied interactions, a topic explored in her 2023 Association for Computers and the Humanities conference presentation, “Conceptualizing Corporeal Bodies and Labor in Digital Cinematic Production.” She is currently working on assembling a database of digitized annotations from copies from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, studying its marginalia as a cross-temporal form of embodied feminist praxis. Casie earned a B.A. in English, with a literature concentration with a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, from Georgia State University, where she also received the James E. Routh Outstanding English Major award. Her creative work and publishing experience can be viewed in Georgia State University’s literary journal, “The Underground.”

Oluwafunke Brinda Ogunya is a Ph.D. student specializing in African-American Literature and cultural studies. Her research interest focuses on African/Africana folklore, Motherhood, and African/Africana women’s fiction. She received her M.A. in African Literature from the University of Ibadan, and a B.A. in English Studies from Adekunle Ajasin University, Nigeria. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut as Foreign Language Teaching Assistant where she taught the Yoruba Language. Currently, she teaches composition and literature courses in the English department.

Kris Rafferty is a Ph.D. student, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina Wilmington's English Master's Program, and she previously earned her B.A. in Theater Arts from University of Massachusetts Boston. She also earned her 3rd-degree Black Belt in American Parker Kenpo Karate, has eight published novels, and a short story. She plays piano truly horrendously--it's sad, really--and she can read French with less skill than even that. She continues to be a sporadic runner but is trying to be better about that. She also is blissfully married with three children, and has a puppy named Tallulah.

I’m a first-year Ph.D. student born and raised in Germany focusing on American modernism, ludo-narratology, and post-humanism. My other research interests include early American literature, utopias, and the Western. I have presented papers at New Voices and the Southern Studies Conference. I earned my B.A. and M.A. in American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany and studied English Literature at Georgia State University on a year-long exchange scholarship. I am also the recipient of the Elliot Butt Loyless Doctoral Fellowship and was awarded a DAAD stipend and Hans Galinsky Memorial Prize.

Lucy Robertson is a Ph.D. student. She earned her bachelor's degree in History and Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia and her master's in comparative (Korean) Language and Literature from both the University of Georgia and Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea), respectively. Lucy has creative and academic pieces published in the journal of the Sejong Cultural Society and in the collection, Of Heartbreaks and Subdued Yearnings. 

Alex Ruhsenberger, a Ph.D. candidate who studies World Literature (1945-present), Post-Colonialism, and Critical Theory. Additional research interests include Revolution, Media studies, and Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as a method for reading history and literature. Ruhsenberger got his M.A. from Montana State University, and did his thesis on the problems of American happiness and irony in popular culture in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The thesis, in part, is published in Normal 2016: Selected Works. Ruhsenberger has just completed a project on Revolution, the Will, and Hannah Arendt, which will soon be out for review. Ruhsenberger is also working on a project that deals with media, violence, and ideology, and its relationship in Western Culture to the Roman Colosseum.

Olivia Samimy is a second year M.A. student with a focus in History of Text Technologies. She received her bachelor's degree in Literary Studies in 2021 from Roanoke College. Her research areas include contemporary literature and media, digitization of literature, and women's studies. 

Laci Swann is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in post-20th-century African American literary and cultural studies. Her research interests include architectural exclusivity, segregation narratives, and concepts of borderless space. Laci received her B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Florida State University and a second M.A. in professional studies (publishing) from George Washington University. Laci’s passion for literature and creative strategies led her to establish Sharp Editorial, an editorial and marketing company specializing in ghostwriting and content creation, which recently earned a Forbes feature and the Tally Award for Best Marketing Company. She continues to pursue her writing interests by operating her women-led company and serving as Executive Editor for Tallahassee Woman Magazine and Senior Content Editor at Rowland Publishing.

Camille Vilela is a Brazilian Ph.D. student who focuses on 20th-century British Modernism. A Fulbright scholar, Camille has earned her M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Texas Tech University. She's interested in building bridges between literature and linguistics through the fields of comparative literature, British Modernism, codeswitching, and bilingualism. She has presented in several conferences in Brazil, Texas, and Florida in both fields of Applied Linguistics and Literature.

Peyton Wahl is a Ph.D. candidate concentrating on Victorian literature. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama. Her research interests include the Victorian supernatural, the Gothic, and nineteenth-century occultism. Most recently she has presented her work on the image of the psychic vampire in Victorian literature at the Victorian Popular Fiction Association’s conference and the International Vampire Film and Arts Festival’s academic conference. Her upcoming dissertation project intends to investigate how developing occult spiritual movements in England ran alongside to the shifts in the supernatural genre throughout the nineteenth century.

Arhaba Waseem is first-year M.A. student. Her research interests include transnational political economy of media and its gender politics, post-colonial literature and gender studies. She has a bachelor's degree in English Literature from Government College University Lahore, where she graduated summa cum laude. Her honors thesis was a feminist historiographical analysis of the impact of political acts on the gendered domestic sphere and how the socially structured binary of public versus private spaces in Pakistan has led to the exclusion of women from history, leading to the need for herstory.