Theory & Criticism

Ghaly

I specialize in the modern and contemporary novel, environmental humanities, novel studies, theory, and how literature and humanities methods can address public advocacy and policy change on climate and environmental justice. My research interests include the novel and post-novelistic media, archives of biodiversity loss and species extinction, the literature of planetary crisis, and the critical methods and ways of thinking the novel affords to address the climate and biodiversity crises.

Williams

My name is Tom and I’m in the first year of my MA at UVA. I graduated with a BA in English from University College London in 2003 and an MA in Issues in Modern Culture, also from University College London, in 2004. Since then, I’ve worked in publishing, as a literary agent, and in publishing tech and mobile games. I am the author of A Mysterious Something In The Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler (Aurum Press 2012 / Chicago Review Press 2014 / Benvira 2014 / University of Nanking Press 2020) and I have reviewed books for The Observer, The Irish Times and The Spectator.

Haines

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."

Olla

Nasrin Olla is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African American Studies. Nasrin completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her PhD in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Nasrin is currently completing her first book project, The Right to Opacity, which engages with the theme of alterity across a range of contemporary African and African diasporic literature.

Jayne

Zenz

I graduated with a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Before that I was a teaching artist in California. Current interests include narrative theory, affect studies, print culture, and 19th c. American and British literature

Sonthalia

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.

Handelsman Katz

2023-2024 Office Hours: By appointment only.

Bio

Churchill

Bio:

Katherine Churchill studies and teaches medieval literature. Her dissertation project, Archival Sensibilities: Posterity, Organization, and Collection in Late-Medieval England and France, traces how archivists changed how they stored and organized texts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, transforming literary writing in the process. In addition to her work on media history and cultural memory, she also studies virginity, gender, orality, and nineteenth-century medievalism.

Martello

I did my undergraduate work at The Ohio State University (BA ’18), where I trained in narratology with faculty in OSU’s Project Narrative. Since coming to UVA, I've devoted most of my research to British and American poetry from the Romantic period to the present; in particular, I study how poets roughly since William Blake have dealt with the representation of character, event, and other phenomena more commonly associated with prosaic than poetical forms.

Department of English