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PhD Placements

PhD Placements

Graduates of the English doctoral program are prepared to succeed in a variety of fulfilling careers, including tenure-track and non-tenure track teaching positions at universities and colleges, academic research and administration positions, and careers outside of the academy entailing public-facing scholarship and curation, industry consultation, non-profit administration, writing and journalism, educational advocacy, and more.

Below is a celebratory list of recent doctoral students who have successfully defended their dissertations, with records of where those students are currently working:

Yi-Ting Chang, Apple Corporation
Director: Tina Chen

Theodore Chelis, Penn State Post Doc
Director: Bob Edwards

David Garcia, Penn State Post Doc
Director: Christopher Reed

Liana Glew, Program Manager of the Restorative Justice Initiative, Penn State
Director: Janet Lyon

Gabriel Green, Xavier University of Louisiana, Tenure Track
Director: Keith Gilyard

Douglas Kulchar, Penn State Post Doc
Directors: Jeffrey Nealon and Rich Doyle

Aaren Pastor, University of Delaware, Post Doc
Director: Claire Colebrook

Eduardo Ramos, Arizona State University, Post Doc
Director: Scott Smith

Alex Sibo, Penn State Post Doc
Director: Carla Mulford

Akash Belsare, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Tina Chen

Adam Faircloth, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Claire Colebrook

Justin Griffin, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Jeffrey Nealon

Curry Kennedy, Virginia Military Institute, Tenure Track
Director: Debra Hawhee

Elizabeth Ashley Rhea, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Tenure Track
Directors: Debra Hawhee and Stuart Selber

Emily Smith, Georgia Institute of Technology, Post Doc
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Nathaniel Voeller, Frances Marion University, Tenure Track
Director: Stuart Selber

Sean Weidman, Lycoming College, Visiting Assistant Professor
Director: Janet Lyon

Patrick Allen, Culver-Stockton College, Tenure Track
Director: Shirley Moody-Turner

Mckenzie Eggers, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Garrett Sullivan

Brandon Erby, University of Kentucky, Tenure Track
Director: R. Keith Gilyard

Leslie Joblin, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Christopher Reed

Layli Miron, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Megan Poole, University of Louisville, Tenure Track
Director: Debra Hawhee

J. Logan Smilges, University of British Columbia, Tenure Track
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Shannon Stimpson, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Hsia Ting Chang, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Sean Goudie

Gregory Coles, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Bethany Doane, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Claire Colebrook and Susan Squier

Jace Gatzemeyer, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, Lecturer
Director: Sean Goudie

Michael Hart, Lane College, Tenure Track
Directors: Janet Lyon and Jonathan Eburne

Maxwell Larson, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Brian Lennon

Jayme Peacock, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Patrick Cheney

Brice Peterson, Brigham Young University, Visiting Assistant Professor
Director: Garrett Sullivan

Mudiwa Pettus, Medgar Evers College (CUNY)
Director: R. Keith Gilyard

Sarah Adams, Berea College, Post Doc
Director: Debra Hawhee

Michael Gadaleto, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: David Loewenstein

Colin Hogan, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Christopher Castiglia

Derek Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology, Post Doc
Director: Susan Squier

Michael Maguire, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Benjamin Schreier

John Schneider, Penn State, Post Doc
Director: Brian Lennon

Leland Tabares, Washington University, Post Doc
Director: Tina Chen Goudie

Nathaniel Windon, American Philosophical Society, Post Doc
Director: Christopher Castiglia

Michelle (Kaczmarek) Zaleski, Marymount University, Post Doc
Director: Xiaoye You

Emily Baldys, Millersville University, Tenure Track
Dissertation: Narrative Rehabilitation: Disability and Ideology in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Directors: Nicholas Joukovsky and Robert Lougy

Earl Brooks, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Tenure Track
Dissertation: On Rhetoric and Black Music
Director: R. Keith Gilyard

Connie Bubash, Buena Vista University, Visiting Assistant Professor
Dissertation: Contagious Texts Embodied: Melancholy Hermeneutics in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature
Director: Garrett Sullivan

Michelle Huang, Northwestern University, Tenure Track
Dissertation: Molecular Aesthetics: Race, Form, and Matter in Contemporary Asian American Literature
Directors: Tina Chen and Susan Squier

Kyle King, Penn State-Altoona, Tenure Track
Dissertation: Sports Spectacle, Athletic Activism, and the Rhetorical Analysis of Mediated Sport
Director: Debra Hawhee

Lisa McGunigal, Hope College, Visiting Assistant Professor
Director: Sean Goudie

James Morgart, Potomac State College of West Virginia University
Dissertation: Haunted Regions: Exhuming Marginalized Narrative in Postwar American Gothic Fiction
Director: Sanford Schwartz

Shakil Rabbi, Bowie State University
Dissertation: Translingual Socialization in the Disciplines: A Case Study of Mediation and Disposition Shaping the Academic Literacy Practices of International Graduate Students
Director: Athelstan Canagarajah

Eric Vallee, University of Florida,  Lecturer
Dissertation: States of Insensibility: The Uncommon Sense of Perceptual Disorders in Antebellum Literature and Medicine
Director: Christopher Castiglia

Laura Vrana, University of South Alabama
Dissertation: Writing Transgressions: Publication Contexts and the Politics of Recognition in Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry
Director: Aldon Nielsen

Laura Brown, Iowa State University, Tenure Track
Dissertation: Region and Remembrance: Public Memories of Civil Rights in Greensboro, North Carolina
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Joshua DiCaglio, Texas A&M University, Tenure Track
Dissertation: On Being Scaled: Rhetorical Practices of the Cosmos
Director: Richard Doyle

Sara DiCaglio, Texas A&M University, Non-tenure Track
Dissertation: Diagnosing Growth: The Problem of Development in Reproductive Culture
Director: Susan Squier

Abraham Foley, University of Exeter, UK, Lecturer in Literature and the Creative Industries
Dissertation: On Second Reflection: Assembling Contemporary Literature
Director: Jonathan Eburne

Jo Hsu, The University of Texas at Austin, Tenure Track
Dissertation: Dynamic Disclosures: Personal Writing, Relational Rhetoric, and Institutional Narratives
Director: Debra Hawhee

Samuel McMillan, Buena Vista University, Visiting Assistant Professor
Dissertation: Medieval Authorship at Reason’s End: The Roman de la Rose’s Legacy of Misrule
Director: Robert Edwards

Justin Mellette, Northeastern University, Visting Lecturer
Dissertation: Peculiar Whiteness: White Racial Anxiety in Southern Literature
Director: Aldon Nielsen

Matthew Price, Penn State, Post Doc
Dissertation: Of Minor Spaces: Spatial Narratologies of the Modern British Novel
Directors: Janet Lyon and Eric Hayot

Krista Quesenberry, Albion College, Visiting Assistant Professor
Dissertation: Reading at the Intersection of Modernist, Feminist, and Lifewriting Studies
Director: Susan Squier

Stephanie Scott, Pennsylvania State University, Stewardship Communications Specialist
Dissertation: Beyond National Trauma: Experiential Memory and Epistemic Practices in the Literature of Ireland and Irish-America’s Minoritized Populations
Director: Mark Morrisson

Erica Stevens, Houston Community College, Instructor
Dissertation: Social Lives: Nineteenth-Century New Orleans in Literature
Directors: Sean Goudie and Christopher Castiglia

Susan Weeber, University of Oregon, Postdoctoral Scholar
Dissertation: Poetics of Interruption: Media and Form in Twentieth-Century Literature
Director: Aldon Nielsen

Matthew Biddle, Penn State, Administrative
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Robert Birdwell, Tulane University, Visiting Assistant Professor
Dissertation: The Radical Novel: Utopian and Scientific. A Study of Genre and Recognition
Director: Michael Anesko

Julian Fung, Pennsylvania State University World Campus, Academic Advisor
Dissertation: The Satiric Novel from Fielding to Hogg
Director: Robert Hume

Megan Fung, Pennsylvania State University World Campus
Director: Marcy North

Thomas Joudrey, Penn State, Post Doc
Directors: Robert Lougy and Nicholas Joukovsky

Bethany Ober Mannon, Appalachian State University, Visiting Assistant Professor
Dissertation: Identity and Activism in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Women’s Memoirs
Director: James West

Tyler Roeger, Loyola University – Chicago
Dissertation: The Gothic Goes to Town: Reading the Gothic City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Director: Hester Blum

Robert Volpicelli, Randolph-Macon College, Tenured
Dissertation: On the Circuit: Transatlantic Modernism and the U.S. Lecture Tour, 1880-1945
Director: Janet Lyon

Paul Zajac, McDaniel College
Dissertation: Reforming Contentment: Pastoral, Self, and World in English Renaissance Literature
Director: Patrick Cheney

John Belk, Southern Utah University, Assistant Professor
Dissertation: Rhetorical Verse: Persuasion in Early Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Geffrey Davis, University of Arkansas
Dissertation: Idiomatics: Between the Languages of Poetry and the Languages of Criticism
Director: Jeffrey Nealon

Patricia Gael, Addepar, Product Content Strategy Lead
Dissertation: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction in the London Marketplace, 1737-1749
Director: Robert Hume

Jacob Hughes, The Upper School – Berkeley Carroll School, Teacher
Dissertation: Spontaneous Overflow: Internalization and Excess in British Romanticism
Director: Nicholas Joukovsky

Kristopher Lotier, Hofstra University
Dissertation: Words and Work: An Economic History of Composition: 1960-Present
Director: Debra Hawhee

Ethan Mannon, Mars Hill University
Dissertation: Reading the Earth Workers: The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Writing
Director: Robert Burkholder

Jason Maxwell, University of Buffalo
Dissertation: Agonistic Discourse: Exploring the Relationship Between Literary Theory and Composition in the Contemporary University
Director: Jeffrey Nealon

Sarah Salter, Texas A & M University – Corpus Christi
Dissertation: Nations Unformed: The Aesthetics of Extra-National Literature, 1832-1910
Directors: Robert Caserio and Christopher Castiglia

Joshua Smith, Robert Morris University, Academic Advising and Enrollment Coordinator
Dissertation: Renaissance Play Things: The Making of Genre in Performance
Director: Garrett Sullivan

Sarah Summers, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Dissertation: Graduate Writing Centers: Programs, Practices, Possibilities
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Joshua Tendler, Freudigman & Billings, Tutor
Dissertation: Sublime Insolvency: The Aesthetic of Failure and American Literature After the Panic of 1837
Director: Christopher Castiglia

Gabriel Ford, Converse College
Dissertation: Exemplarity, Compilation, and Literary History in Trilingual England, 1100-1500
Director: Robert Edwards

Alexandria Lockett, Spelman College
Dissertation: Leaked: A Grammar of Information in Surveillance Cultures
Director: Richard Doyle

Leah Orr, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Dissertation: Did the Novel Rise?: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730
Director: Robert Hume

Katie Owens-Murphy, University of Northern Alabama
Dissertation: Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel
Directors: Kit Hume / Robert Caserio

Mathew RudeWalker, Kennesaw State University, Limited Term Assistant Professor
Dissertation: Where Our Dead Lie Buried: Articulating American Indian Sovereignty
Director: Carla Mulford

Sarah RudeWalker, Spelman College
Dissertation: The Rhetoric and Poetics of the Black Arts Movement
Directors: Keith Gilyard and Bernard W. Bell.

Mark Sturges, St. Lawrence University
Dissertation: Dwelling on the Land: The Literature of Agriculture in the Early American Republic
Director: Carla Mulford

Heather Adams, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Dissertation: Secrets and Silences: Rhetorics of Unwed Pregnancy Since 1960
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Sarah Birge, Rice University, Fixed Term Position
Dissertation: Surviving the Narrative Self: Cognitive Disability in Contemporary Fiction
Director: Susan Squier

Mahpiua-Luis Deas, Lincoln University
Dissertation: Passing, Passages, and Passkeys: Post-Civil Rights Satirists Unlock the Master’s House
Director: Aldon Nielsen

Michael Faris, Texas Tech University
Dissertation: Rhetoric, Social Media, and Privacy
Director: Stuart Selber

Ryan Hackenbracht, Texas Tech University
Dissertation: National Reckonings: The Last Judgment in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Director: Laura Knoppers

Michael New, Keene State University, Fixed Term Position
Dissertation: Instrumental Voices: Experimental Poetry and the Jazz Tradition
Director: Aldon Nielsen

Eric Norton, Marymount University
Dissertation: Micropublics: Mob Life in Antebellum American Literature
Director: Christopher Castiglia

Gregory Pierrot, University of Connecticut – Stamford
Dissertation: The Black Avenger Trope in Atlantic Literature
Director: Aldon Nielsen

Emily Sharpe, Keene State University, Tenured
Dissertation: Mosaic Fictions: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Canada’s Spanish Civil War
Director: Janet Lyon

David Spielman, Vanderbilt University, Special Projects Manager
Dissertation: Money, Class, and Realism in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction from Robinson Crusoe to Amelia
Director: Robert Hume

William Woolfitt, Lee University
Dissertation: The Folk Imaginary in American Literature, 1875-1925
Director: Linda Selzer

Katherine Cleland, Virginia Tech University
Dissertation: Fictions of Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern England: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare
Director: Patrick Cheney

Ryan Croft, University of Wyoming, Visiting Faculty
Dissertation: Anatomies of Authorship: Poetic Physicality in English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences
Director: Marcy North

Jeffrey Gonzalez, Montclaire State University
Dissertation: Necessary Fictions: The U.S. Novel in the End of Ideology
Director: Kit Hume

David Green, Howard University
Dissertation: It’s Deeper than Rap: A Study of Hip Hop Music and Composition Pedagogy
Director: Keith Gilyard

Julius Lobo, Loyola Blakefield High School, Teacher
Dissertation: Documentary Poetry and American Modernism from the Depression to World War 2
Directors: Robin Schulze & Mark Morrisson

Sean Moiles, Leggett School, Teacher
Dissertation: Ethics and Urban Realities: American Fiction Since 1984
Director: Kit Hume

Ersula Ore, Arizona State University
Dissertation: Rhetoric and Civic Belonging: Lynching and the Making of National Community
Director: Keith Gilyard

Andrew Pilsch, Texas A&M University, Tenured
Dissertation: Transhumanism: Evolutionary Logic, Rhetoric, and the Future
Director: Richard Doyle

Shawna Ross, Texas A&M University, Tenured
Dissertation: Spaces of Play: Inventing the Modern Leisure Space in British Fiction and Culture, 1860-1960
Director: Janet Lyon

Brandy Scalise, University of Kentucky
Dissertation: Preaching Without a Pulpit: Women’s Rhetorical Contributions to Scientific Christianity in America, 1880-1915
Directors: Jack Selzer and Cheryl Glenn

Sarah Breckenridge Wright, Duquesne University
Dissertation: Space, Economics, and the Poetic Imagination in England’s Literary Landscapes, 1125-1590
Director: Robert Edwards

Phyllisa DeRoze, United Arab Emirates University, Dubai
Dissertation: Womanist Restorative Drama: Violence, Community, and Healing by Contemporary Black Women Playwrights
Director: Iyunolu Osagie

Verna Kale, Pennsylvania State University, Assistant Research Professor
Dissertation: Women Writing War: The Evolution of the Girl Reporter 1845-1945
Directors: Sandy Spanier and Robin Schulze

Giuseppina Iacono Lobo, Loyola University Maryland
Dissertation: Writing Conscience and the Nation in the English Revolution
Director: Laura Knoppers

Chad Schrock, Lee University
Dissertation: The Consolation of Narrative: Figural Selves from Augustine to Thomas More
Director: Robert Edwards

Michelle Smith, Clemson University
Dissertation: At the Intersection of Utopia and the Public Sphere: The Spatial-Rhetorical Negotiations of 19th-Century Women
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Abram Anders, Iowa State University
Dissertation: Rhetoric for Becoming Otherwise: Life, Literature, Genealogy, Flight
Director: Rich Doyle

Kevin Browne, Long Island University
Dissertation: Mas Movement: Toward a Theory of Caribbean Rhetoric
Director: Keith Gilyard

Antonio Ceraso, DePaul University
Dissertation: Crowd Technologies: Rhetoric and Power in Peer Production Discourse
Director: Rich Doyle

Amy Clukey, University of Louisville, Tenured
Dissertation: Plantation Modernism: Irish, Caribbean, and U.S. Fiction, 1890-1950
Director: Janet Lyon

Ashley Marshall, University of Nevada – Reno
Dissertation: The Practice of Satire in England, 1650-1770
Director: Robert Hume

Niamh O’Leary, Xavier University
Dissertation: Acting in Concert: Female Camaraderie in Early Modern Drama
Director: Garrett Sullivan

Stacey Sheriff, Colby College
Dissertation: Rhetoric and Revision: Women’s Arguments for Social Justice in the Progressive Era
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Rochelle Zuck, Iowa State University
Dissertation: Imagined Citizens: Ethnic Nationalisms and Crises of Culture in the United States, 1816-1856
Director: Carl Mulford

Robert Bleil, College of Coastal Georgia
Dissertation: Temporarily Devotedly Yours: The Letters of Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Director: James West, III

John Hruschka, Penn College of Technology
Dissertation: Ordering Books: The Development of a Modern American Book Trade
Director: James West, III

Kelly Innes, Software Developer
Dissertation: Antisocial Modernism: H.G. Wells, Dorothy Richardson, Wyndham Lewis
Director: Robert Caserio

Jenell Johnson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dissertation: Echoes of the Soul: A Rhetorical History of Lobotomy
Director: Susan Squier

Lindsay Jones, Penn State-Fayette
Dissertation: “By His Common Talke”: Representations of Linguistic Difference on the Early English Stage
Director: Robert Edwards

Lissette Szwydky, University of Arkansas
Dissertation: Adaptations: The London Stage as Entertainment Industry, 1790-1890
Director: Paul Youngquist

Jill Treftz, Marshall University
Dissertation: The Figure of the Poetess in British Sentimental Literature, 1820-1860
Director: Nicholas Joukovsky

Carissa Turner Smith, Charleston Southern University
Director: Deborah Clarke

Shannon Walters, Temple University
Dissertation: A Rhetoric of Touch: Disability and the Reshaping of Rhetorical Bodies
Director: Susan Squier

Christopher White, Governor’s State University
Dissertation: Animals, Technology, and the Zoopoetics of American Modernism
Director: Sanford Schwartz

Timothy Arner, Grinnell College
Director: Robert Edwards

Matt Newcomb, SUNY-New Paltz
Director: Jack Selzer

Steele Nowlin, Penn State (Teaching Professor of English) 
Director: Robert Edwards

Stephen Schneider, University of Louisville
Director: Keith Gilyard

Dustin Stegner, Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo
Director: Patrick Cheney

Carissa Turner Smith, Charleston Southern University
Director: Deborah Clarke

Aesha Adams, Self-employed
Director: Elaine Richardson

Herschel Conner, University of South Florida-St. Petersburg
Director: Rich Doyle

Timothy Donovan, University of Northern Florida
Director: Rich Doyle

Cecil “Jay” Jordan, University of Utah
Director:  Keith Gilyard

Elizabeth Mazzolini, SUNY – Buffalo
Director: Jeffrey Nealon

Chaunda McDavis, Auburn University at Montgomery
Director: Aldon Nielsen

Jeffrey Pruchnic, Wayne State University
Director: Rich Doyle

Marika Seigel, Michigan Technical University
Director: Susan Squier

Scott Wible, University of Maryland
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Andy Alexander, Castleton State College
Director: Jack Selzer

Megan Brown, Drake University
Director: Susan Squier

Youngsuk Chae, University of North Carolina, Pembroke
Director: Carla Mulford

Holly Flint, University of Alabama, Huntsville
Director: Kit Hume

Jordynn Jack, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Melissa Littlefield, University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana
Director: Susan Squier

Jodie Nicotra, University of Idaho
Director: Rich Doyle

Vorris Nunley, University of California, Riverside
Director: Keith Gilyard

Hiewon Shin, North Greenville University
Director: Linda Woodbridge

Jeremiah Dyehouse, University of Rhode Island
Director: Rich Doyle

Valerie Hanson, Philadelphia University
Director: Rich Doyle

Howard Ramsby, University of Southern Illinois, Edwardsville
Directors: Keith Gilyard & Bernard Bell

Daniel Smith, University of Texas – Austin
Director: Jeffrey Nealon

Catharine Thomas, Georgia Gwinnett College
Director: Linda Woodbridge

Emily Van Dette, SUNY Fredonia
Director: Robert Burkholder

Marco Abel, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Director: Kit Hume

Adam Banks, Stanford University
Director: Keith Gilyard

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Director: Nicholas Joukovsky

Jessica Enoch, University of Maryland
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Mark Longaker, University of Texas at Austin
Director: Marie Secor

Eric Lorentzen, Mary Washington University
Director: Robert Lougy

Cedrick May, University of Texas – Arlington
Director: Carla Mulford

Dana Anderson, University of Indiana
Director: Jack Selzer

Elizabeth Archuleta, University of Utah
Director: Carla Mulford

Elizabeth Heard, Harold Washington University – Chicago
Director: Robert Hume

Ylce Irizarry, University of South Florida
Director: Kit Hume

John Muckelbauer, University of South Carolina
Directors: Jeffrey Nealon & Rich Doyle

Ryan Netzley, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Director: Linda Woodbridge

Jillian Smith, University of North Florida
Director: Susan Squier

Vidhya Swaminathan, Long Island University
Director: Robert Hume

Beth Capo, Illinois College
Director: Deborah Clarke

Mark T. Decker, University of Wisconsin-Stout
Director: Michael Anesko

Colin Fewer, Purdue University at Calumet
Director: Robert Edwards

Brent Henze, East Carolina University
Director: Jack Selzer

Jeffrey Karnicky, Drake University
Director: Rich Doyle

David Kress, University of Maine
Director: Jeffrey Nealon

Harvey Quaman, University of Alberta
Director: Susan Squier

Lisa Roney, University of Central Florida
Director: Susan Squier

Gregory Semenza, University of Connecticut
Director: Linda Woodbridge

Wendy Sharer, East Carolina University
Director: Cheryl Glenn

Julie Vedder, West Virginia University
Director: Susan Squier

Angela Vietto, Eastern Illinois University
Director: Carla Mulford