Suvendu Ghatak is a PhD student in English at the University of Florida, working at the intersection of Victorian studies, postcolonial studies, and medical humanities. His dissertation explores the historical co-constitution of malaria and modernity from the mid-eighteenth century to the first decade of the twenty first, with a specific focus on South Asia. He has published on Arthur Machen, Decadence, and empire in Volupté, Goldsmiths (Summer, 2021), and on Jonathan Swift and public reason in Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry (2016).
Thomas Johnson is a PhD candidate in the English Department. He is writing his dissertation on representations of the supernatural in American “prestige” television. His scholarship broadly concerns the relationship between genre and aesthetic hierarchies in contemporary television, film, and 20th and 21st-century literature. His review of HBO’s Watchmen is featured in a recent issue of Oxford UP’s journal Adaptation. His monograph on HBO’s The Leftovers, co-authored with Kyle Meikle of the University of Baltimore, is under contract as part of Wayne State UP’s TV Milestones series for scheduled release in 2024.
Ryan Kerr is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Florida. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Virginia and a B.A. in English (with a minor in political science) from the University of Arkansas. His research concerns the intersection of modernism, postmodernism, capitalism, and colonialism. He is currently at work on a dissertation about the collapse of the British Empire and the rise of capitalist realism. His work has appeared in Joyce Studies Annual and Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. He has work forthcoming in James Joyce Quarterly and Rising Asia.
Burcu Kuheylan is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Florida. She holds double-major B.A. degrees from Istanbul University’s departments of English Language and Literature and Art History, as well as an MPhil degree from SUNY at Stony Brook’s English Department. Her research interests include international Modernism, Theory, Utopia, and the representation of women and children in fiction. Her dissertation project, Future in Crisis Tense: Neoliberalism, Dystopia, and Technologies of Generation, links the current popularity of dystopian narratives with the systemic impoverishment of the utopian imaginary since neoliberalism’s rise in the late 1970s as the globally hegemonic politico-economic order. With an emphasis on crises of representation and reproduction, she critiques neoliberal structures and institutions while foregrounding emergent utopian alternatives that await further literary and theoretical attention. Kuheylan’s teaching draws on the intersections of theory, genre, narrative, and fiction’s relation to visual arts, as well as explores subjects related to technology, embodiment, political activism, and more recently, fiction written by Millennials.
Milt Moise is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Florida. His research excavates the aesthetics of contemporary American bipolar fiction. His other research interests include Caribbean and Postcolonial literature, along with Film & Television Studies. He is the co-chair of the Television Reading Group.
Nicholas Orlando is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Florida. A member of the Graduate Film Studies Group, his research focuses on the intersections of film and media studies, critical theory, and the aesthetics of information and technology. As such, he places the politics and sensory mediation of epistemology at the center of his investigations of American moving-image culture.
Amanda I. Rose is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on contemporary speculative fiction and how cultural and environmental dissonances within the genre relate to the postmodern spatial turn. She is most interested in sf published between 1960 and the present-day, specifically considering how the genre’s “spatial” transformations relate to a broader historical shift into the era of Globalization. She is an editorial assistant for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she runs UF’s Speculative Fiction Reading Group (SFRG).
Deepthi Siriwardena is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She researches postcolonial studies, empire studies, and women’s studies, post-structuralism, and the latter’s intersection with Buddhist thought.
Nathan Stelari is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Florida. His research focuses on critical theory, with an interest in communist/anarchist theory and its intersection with religion.
Fi Stewart-Taylor is a PhD student in the Department of English. A member of the Marxist Reading Group, she has research and teaching interests in critical theory and pedagogy, popular and visual culture, and feminist and queer theory.
Vincent Wing is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Florida. His research interests include post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, film, genre, and gender studies, with a special interest in American comedies and melodramas from the 1930s and 40s.
Affiliated Alumni
Kelly Beck graduated with her PhD in English from the University of Florida in 2019. Her areas of interest include Detective /Crime Fiction, British literature, visual and print culture.
Derrick King graduated with his PhD in the English from the University of Florida in 2018. His dissertation, “Forms of Crisis: Realism and Science Fiction in the 21st Century,” investigated how contemporary forms of realism and science fiction give expression to economic, ecological, biogenetic, and exclusionary crises. Derrick’s publications include articles in the journals The South Atlantic Review, Extrapolation, Cinephile, and MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, and a book chapter in Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature, Past and Present.
Mitch R. Murray is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Emory Department of English. He earned his PhD in English at the University of Florida, where he also coordinated the Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory. His teaching and research interests include contemporary literature, speculative fiction, utopia, critical theory, and comics studies. At Emory, he teaches First-Year Writing courses in the Writing Program and English courses on literary worldbuilding and utopia. His classes focus on how the creative practices of reading and writing can make us better readers, and creators, of our shared reality.
Website: http://english.emory.edu/home/people/bios/murray-mitch.html