Graduate Student
Nichols
Bio
I am a doctoral candidate primarily focused on the medieval period. My current research engages issues of clerical authority, lay reading practices, and theological texts written in the vernacular in thirteenth and fourteenth century England. Other interests of mine include scholasticism, literacy studies, medieval vernacularity, devotional literature, saints' lives, Chaucer, Langland, and science fiction.
I am a doctoral candidate primarily focused on the medieval period. My current research engages issues of clerical authority, lay reading practices, and theological texts written in the vernacular in thirteenth and fourteenth century England. Other interests of mine include scholasticism, literacy studies, medieval vernacularity, devotional literature, saints' lives, Chaucer, Langland, and science fiction.
Kessenich
On Research: I am a doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of Virginia. My dissertation centers on historical recovery as an impulse within African American literature, especially regarding how Black writers address and attempt to rectify the power imbalance that stems from a historical record that misrepresents and elides Black life and Black subjectivity.
Jayne
Davis
Benson
I received my B.A. in English from Hillsdale College and my M.St. in English Literature (650-1550) from St. Hilda's College at the University of Oxford. I am a medievalist and a codicologist. My primary research interests are Early Middle English literature, late 12th and early 13th century manuscript culture, and the interaction of English and Anglo-Norman in post-Conquest Britain.
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.
Robinson
I am a PhD candidate in English studying early modern literature. My dissertation project, "Peculiar Miracles: Pastoral Space and Queer Time in English Literature, 1570-1670," explores the unruly desire(s) generated by pastoral temporalities in works by Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, and Katherine Philips. More generally, my research interests include women's writing, translation, devotional writing, and adaptation.
Persons
Pennington
Pages
