Student News Spring 2024

Zachary Anderson successfully defended his dissertation, "Spurious Mediumship: Fidelity, Ideology, and Aesthetics After 1877." Alongside UGA colleagues Hannah V Warren and Maxime Berclaz, he appeared on a panel titled “Heuristics of Horror: Automata, Media, Utopia” at the New Orleans Poetry Festival. He is moving to Tuscaloosa, where he will begin an instructorship in the University of Alabama Department of English in the fall.

Emily Beckwith defended her dissertation, "The Affordances of Liminal Places: Wales and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel." She has accepted a job as Affiliate Professor of First-Year Writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, which she'll begin in August.

Jessica DeMarco-Jacobson won the LGBTQIA+ Literary Success Grant (fiction category) from the Georgia Writers Association for her short story, "The Bathing Pool." She was also one of the recipients of the 2024 Christy Desmet Award and one of the playwriting finalists for the 2024 Agnes Scott Writers' Festival Contest. Additionally, she published three poems and a 35mm film photograph in Stillpoint Literary Magazine, Vol. 55. 

Spencer Doss was inducted into the University of Georgia's chapter of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi on April 22nd, 2024.

While on medical leave this year, CWP PhD candidate Genevieve Guzmán accepted a Zoeglossia scholar award from 24PearlStreet, the online home of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and curated Zoeglossia's poem-of-the-week series for March under their pen name, Genevieve Arlie. This summer with the support of an Appleby award for doctoral research, they will draft the critical introduction to their creative dissertation on the disabled feminist grotesque in poetry of the last hundred years.

Kathleen Hurlock's article, "How 'Dobbs' Threatens the Future of Feminist Education," was published in Ms. Magazine on April 19, 2024. In addition, she authored a chapter, "Sexual Violence, Sexual Transgression and the Law in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice" in the edited collection Romantic Women's Writing and Sexual Transgression, released by Edinburgh University Press on February 29, 2024.

Nneoma Ike-Njoku sold her novel The Water House to Scribner in the UK, Summit Books in the US, and German rights to btb verlag. 

Kelsey McQueen presented a portion of her dissertation at C19's biannual conference in Pasadena, California. She was honored with an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the CTL, and her first article was accepted for publication at ADAPTATION, an OUP journal.

Erin O'Keefe presented her paper  “Shakespeare’s Dancing Plays and Eternality: The Idealization of the Moving Body Onstage" (mentored by Dr. Jacobson) on a panel at the Virtual Early Dance Symposium: New Work on Old Dance: A Pre-1800 Dance Studies Symposium. She presented her paper "The Sentimental Side of Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Painful, Pleasurable, and Eternal Sublime" (mentored by Dr. Diamond) on a panel (with other UGA English majors including Jessica Shumaker, Claire D'Agostino and Zack Dow) at the SouthEastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference. She will be attending Stanford University this fall in the English PhD program, where she will study eighteenth-century British literature with research interests in dance studies and visual aesthetics.
 

Abhijit Sarmah was part of a panel titled “(F)unemployment: Rethinking Graduate Education in the Age of Gen Z and ChatGPT” at the 2024 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference. His poem, “In Her Last Phone Call”, was published in the May 2024 issue of Poetry magazine. Sarmah is also a recipient of the 2024 Michael G. Moran Graduate Student Award.

Kaitlin Thurlow reviewed Irish Artisans and Radical Politics, 1776–1820: Apprenticeship to Revolution by Timothy Murtagh for the May issue of Irish Studies Review. Her paintings will be included in the group show, Inflections: Three Voices with artists Maria Canzano and Morgan Auten Smith. The exhibition will be on view from May 7– June 15 at The Lyndon House Arts Center in Athens, GA.

Hannah V Warren’s poetry collection Slaughterhouse for Old Wives' Tales debuted with Sundress Publications in January 2024, and she defended her dissertation in March. In 2023 and 2024, she published poetry with Arkansas International, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Maine Review, Nimrod International, Palette Poetry, Pleiades, Southeast Review, and Seneca Review, as well as English translations of German poet Alexandra Bernhardt’s work with Action Books and Denver Quarterly. Warren recently published an article on gender and apocalypse television in Science Fiction Film and Television and has a forthcoming book chapter in Creatures in the Classroom: Teaching Environmental Creature Features, as well as an article on Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men as a rhizomatic epic. Hannah received the 2024 McAlexander Graduate Award in American Literature and the Alice C. Langdale Award from the English Department.

Christina Wood published her essay "Craft as Contradiction: Truth and Fiction in the Writing of Willa Cather" in the McNeese Review and interviewed Hannah V Warren for The Rumpus. She won the Alice C. Langdale Award and, next year, she'll serve as a gradute editor for the Georgia Review.