Gender and Sexuality

Kaylin Preslar is a current English MA Teaching Concentration student at the University of Virginia. Her areas of interest include speculative fiction, etiological narratives, gender and sexuality, and disability studies. She is passionate about pedagogy, and her studies often consider the best ways to transfer knowledge and cultivate learning in an accessible, differentiated classroom environment. She completed her BA in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 2020.

Rachel Haines's research focuses on the nineteenth-century novel and considers questions of identity and identification relating to the construction of gender and sexuality. Her broad interests include queer theory, gender and women's studies, affect studies, the history and theory of the novel, and Henry James. Before coming to UVa, Rachel received her B.A. in English from Connecticut College, where she wrote an honors thesis on queer female desire in Henry James's novels titled "Queer Substitutions: On Relations Between Women in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove."

I am an international student from India, and before coming to UVA, I did my master's in liberal studies, with a concentration in English, at Ashoka University. I am interested in the everyday, the domestic, the boring and how our identities mediate our experiences and beings in these spaces. The approach I take to these questions, and to scholarship in general, is firmly interdisciplinary. At UVA, I have been a Democracy Initiative Graduate Seminar Fellow and have completed the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Graduate Certificate.

I study medieval English and French literature (primarily from the 13th-15th centuries), and I am currently serving as one of UVa's Medieval Studies graduate student representatives. My academic interests include gender and sexuality studies, virginity studies, Mediterranean trade networks, manuscript studies, and contemporary medievalisms and adaptations. My personal interests include cooking and hiking with my badly behaved dog, Moose.