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Presenters

Mary Frances Bradford (she/her/hers) studies affective nationalism in the 19th-century historical novel. She works on the intersections of race and affect theory in the literatures and cultural histories of the Americas and those who colonized them. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard.

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Summer Cardarelli (she/they) is a second-year English MA student at Boston College. Alongside teaching First-Year Writing Seminar at Boston College, Summer is a Writing Fellow, an MA Program Representative, and the lead organizer for the department's 2023 Graduate Colloquium. Their research interests include ecocriticism, human geography, and gender and sexuality studies.

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Stacie Cruz is a Ph.D. student at Rice University focusing on 20th century literature and queer/disability studies. She is interested in the ways in which bodily experiences of pain and illness intersect with other axes of oppression and the personal and societal narratives that attempt to define what is or is not a body worth living in.

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Daniel Dougherty is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Boston College, where he has taught courses on world literature and Victorian literature. Prior to Boston College, he received his BA and MA from Georgetown University. His research interests include radical form in the novel, Victorian literature, global modernisms, and folklore, with a specific emphasis on pedagogy of the novel and the Bildungsroman form.

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Eric Hollander is a 5th year PhD Candidate in Musicology at Brandeis University. Eric has a BM in viola performance from The Boston Conservatory and an MA in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University. At Brandeis, Eric wonders about what music is and searches for a definition through phenomenological and spiritual methods of description. As a poet and performer, Eric is an active member of the Haiga Duo, a spoken-word/viola/accordion ensemble and exercises his enthusiasm for amateur music making as a section violist in the Arlington Philharmonic and member of his parish choir. 

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Daniel Leonard is a PhD candidate in English literature at Boston University, where he previously earned an MFA in poetry writing. He also completed a two-year Postgraduate Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. Daniel's dissertation examines how twenty-first-century American literature uses ordinary human–animal encounters to posit the self as an entity constituted and sustained by relationship.

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Walter Quiller is a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on 20th century Black Literature and literary criticism. He is a graduate of Brandeis University, where he worked under the direction of Dr. Faith Smith. He is Black and proud.

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Kelsey Quinn is a third-year English PhD student at Boston University studying animals in 19th-century British literature. She is interested in Victorian animals’ relationships to labor, class, empire, and race.

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Renee Runge (she/her) is a second year M.A./M.F.A. student in Children’s Literature and Writing for Children at Simmons University. In the spring of 2021, she graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida with a B.A. in English. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of children’s literature and animal studies. She is particularly curious about the influence of Victorian-era ideas on children’s construction of knowledge on the animal world.

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