Theory & Criticism

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.

Shin

I am a first-year master’s student from Osaka, Japan, with a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. My undergraduate thesis focuses on Virginia Woolf’s stylistic and symbolic incorporation of the pictorial in Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse. At UVA, I am interested in exploring how modernist and contemporary novels portray ordinary experiences, and how they interact with visual media in their formal experimentation. Other areas of interest include critical perspectives on everyday life, and contemporary novelists’ negotiations of high modernist methods and ideals.

Barry

Rebecca is a first-year M.A. in the Teaching Concentration whose interests center around the complex and sometimes contentious interplay between the fields of science fiction, speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism. Specifically, she is interested in how texts from these traditions interact with theories of temporality, spirituality, and ancestral memory, and how they create contemporary literary spaces for intellectual engagement that promote earnest spiritual dialogue.

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

Fall 22 Office Hours: T/Th 12:30-1.30 (Clemons 234)

Fall 22 Class Schedule: T/Th 11:00-12:15

Bio

Churchill

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.

Department of English