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2022 Modern Languages Graduates

Our heartfelt congratulations to the extraordinary class of 2022! We invite you to get to know them by clicking on their bios below.
Jay Jolles
Jolles, JayPh.D.
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Jay Jolles

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|jajolles]]
Research Interests: 20th and 21st century literature and culture, critical theory, comparative media studies, sound, noise, popular music (Taylor Swift), memory studies, surveillance studies, war and militarization, and theories of masculinity.
Jay Jolles is an interdisciplinary scholar with interests in a wide range of fields, including 20th and 21st century literature and culture, critical theory, comparative media studies, and the politics of sound and noise. He is currently at work on a dissertation tentatively titled Man, Music, and Machine which investigates the changing aesthetic practices that animate sounding and listening cultures in contemporary America. Jay’s scholarly work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store: A Global History (Bloomsbury 2023), The Los Angeles Review of BooksSounding Out!U.S. Studies Online, and Comparative American Studies. His essays can be found in Per Contra, The Atticus Review, and Pidgeonholes, among others. Jay currently serves as the peer review editor at Sonic Scope.  
Kit Bauserman
Bauserman, KitM.A./Ph.D.
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Kit Bauserman

M.A./Ph.D.

Email: [[babauserman]]
Research Interests: Horror and Gothic Studies; Sound Studies; New Media; Queer Studies; Landscape and Wilderness; Environmental Humanities; Spectrality and Haunting; American Folklore

Kit Bauserman is a third-year Ph.D. Student in American Studies at the College of William & Mary. Their work focuses on gothic and horror fiction and media with an emphasis on new media. Kit is interested in the representations of queerness, haunting, and landscape within new media horror, particularly audio dramas and electronic literature. They are currently at work on a series of projects interrogating ghostliness and landscape within horror podcasts.

Temporary Website: https://kitbauserman.carrd.co/

M.A. in American Studies, College of William & Mary, 2024.

B.A. in Philosophy, Christopher Newport University, 2021.

Joseph Lawless
Lawless, JosephM.A./Ph.D
Joseph Lawless

Joseph Lawless

M.A./Ph.D

Email: [[e|jlawless]]
Website: https://ssrn.com/author=2766596
Research: Affect Studies; Criminal Law and Critique; Critical Legal Studies; Critical Race Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; Jurisprudence; Media and Digital Studies; New Materialisms; Postmodernism and Poststructuralism; Psychoanalytic Theory; Queer Archival Methodologies; Temporality Studies; Visual Cultural Studies

Joseph F. Lawless is an Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program at the College of William & Mary, with an interest in the nexus shared by law, sexuality, and digital personhood. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, where his studies were oriented toward political theory and continental philosophy, particularly that of late twentieth-century France. From 2012 to 2014, he was a member of the Las Vegas Valley corps of Teach for America and served as the chair of the English/Language Arts department of the middle school at which he taught. While teaching, he completed his M.Ed. at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with an emphasis on critical pedagogy and curriculum development. In 2017, he obtained his J.D. from Columbia University, and in 2019 he received his M.A. in American Studies at William & Mary. His dissertation project considers the articulations of digital sexual subjectivity through Foucauldian and Lacanian frames to more thoroughly interrogate relationship between late capitalist globalization, the uneven modalities of subjectification through which queernesses emerge, and the ethical demands of a technologized politics of sexuality.

Shana Haines
Haines, ShanaPh.D.
Shana Haines

Shana Haines

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|slhaines]]
Research Interests: American Legal History, Southern Literature and Culture, Women’s Literature, African American Studies, Citizenship and Visual Culture, Plantation Material Culture and Every Day Life, The Long Civil Rights Movement, 19th and 20th Century American Literature, African American Literature, Cultural Studies, History and Theory of Race
Claudia Garcia Mendoza
Garcia Mendoza, ClaudiaPh.D.
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Claudia Garcia Mendoza

Ph.D.

Email: [[cgarciamendoza]]
Research Interests: Media, Cultural, Disability, and Queer Studies, digital labor, representation, social justice, capitalism, immigration, and race.

Claudia Garcia Mendoza is a Ph.D. student in American Studies. Her research has focused on media representation and counternarratives in digital spaces. She is interested in information technology and how minority identities navigate and challenge social, economic, and political structures. 

MA, Lifespan and Digital Communication, Old Dominion University.
BA, Communication, Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Guadalajara.
Christopher J. Slaby
Slaby, Christopher J.Ph.D.
C. Slaby

Christopher J. Slaby

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|cjslaby]]
Research Interests: Native American History, Environmental Studies, Visual and Material Culture, Vernacular Architecture, the Built Environment, and Cultural Landscapes, Monuments, Memory, and Memorialization, Public History, Parks and Roads, Museum Studies, Popular Culture, the Northeast/New England.
Kelsey Smoot
Smoot, KelseyPh.D.
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Kelsey Smoot

Ph.D.

Email:
Research Interests: Queer Studies, Race/Racism, Cultural Studies, Social Movements

Kelsey (they/them/theirs) is a PhD candidate in American Studies. Their work explores the process of identity formation, at the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality. Kelsey seeks to illuminate the experiences of Black queer folks, navigating the contemporary US sociopolitical landscape.

Kelsey is also a poet, a writer of lyric fiction, and other musings. If you’re interested in reading some of their writings, explore the links below:

https://www.phdbalance.com/post/reflection-and-realizations

M.A. University of Miami, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (2016)

B.A. University of California Davis, Sociology with a Minor in African and African American Studies (2014)

Adrienne Resha
Resha, AdriennePh.D.
resha_a

Adrienne Resha

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|aresha]]
Website: {{http://www.adrienneresha.com}}
Research Interests: Arab and Muslim representation in American popular media, the superhero genre, comics studies, and media theory

Adrienne Resha is a Ph.D. candidate writing about Arab and Muslim comic book superheroes created after 9/11 and the Arab Spring. She has presented at the American Studies Association and Comics Studies Society's annual meetings. Her work has been published in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and in Mixed-Race Superheroes

MA, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, University of Virginia

BA, International Affairs and Anthropology, Florida State University

House, Kathryn PrevitiPh.D.

Kathryn Previti House

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|kchouse]]
Meagan Thompson
Thompson, MeaganPh.D.
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Meagan Thompson

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|mathompson03]]
Research Interests: Trauma Studies; Queer of Color Critique; Gender Studies; Modern and Contemporary American Literature; New Media Studies; Fat Studies; Minority Literatures and Rhetorics; Performance Studies; Writing Center Pedagogy
Meagan Thompson is a PhD student in the American Studies Program at The College of William & Mary. She earned her B.A. in English at Roanoke College and M.A. in English from Old Dominion University. Her interests include trauma and performance studies, queer of color critique, and contemporary American literature. She has presented at several conferences on topics related to writing center pedagogy, gender and queer theories, and cultural studies. She is particularly interested in the intersection of trauma and utopia, exploring how marginalized peoples construct and maintain pockets of joy to resist oppression. Meagan is currently studying the power of storytelling as a means of protest, as well as the foregrounding of spatiality and boundedness in space in trauma narratives.

BA English, Roanoke College, 2012

MA English, Old Dominion University, 2018

"Digital Activism and Storytelling: Exploring the Radical Potential of The #MeToo Movement.” Resistance in Pop Culture and Contemporary Culture, edited by Leisa Clark, Amanda Firestone, and Mary Pharr, McFarland Books, 2019.

Co-authored with Megan Boeshart Burelle, “An Inquiry-Based Approach for Customizing Training for Graduate Student Tutors.” Re-defining Roles: The Professional, Faculty, and Graduate Consultant’s Guide to Writing Centers, edited by Megan S. Jewell and Joseph Cheatle, Utah State U.P., 2019.

 

Kelly  Conway
Conway, Kelly Ph.D.
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Kelly Conway

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|kaconway]]
Research Interests: Material Culture; Museum Studies and Historiography; Memory and Memorialization; 19th and 20th Century U.S. Cultural History.

Kelly Conway was the curator of American glass at The Corning Museum of Glass from 2013 to 2019. While in Corning, she co-curated and edited the museum’s 2017 exhibition and accompanying publication, Tiffany's Glass Mosaics, and she led the reinstallation of the permanent collection gallery, Corning: Glass in the Crystal City.  Conway was also the Carolyn and Richard Barry Curator of Glass at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, from 2007 to 2013. There, she led the design and re-installation of the renovated glass collection galleries, was a key member of the team that established a hot glass studio at the museum in 2011, and was a contributor to the 2017 publication, Glass: Masterworks from the Chrysler Museum of Art.  She currently serves on the Collections Committee at the Rockwell Museum of Art, on W&M’s Faculty DEI committee, and as an Editorial Adviser for the Journal of Glass Studies. Conway’s dissertation research focuses on the historical development of museums in the American South.

M.A., History of Decorative Arts, Parsons School of Design and Smithsonian

B.A., American History, DePauw University

Artz, KendallPh.D.

Kendall Artz

Ph.D.

Email:
Vania Blaiklock
Blaiklock, VaniaM.A./Ph.D.
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Vania Blaiklock

M.A./Ph.D.

Email: [[vbblaiklock]]
Research Interests: Critical Race Studies; Critical Legal Studies; African American Studies; 19th and 20th Century Black Education; Constitutional Jurisprudence; First Amendment Jurisprudence – Religion Clauses; American Legal History

Vania Blaiklock is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies. Her research often deals with the intersection of race, religion, and education in American Jurisprudence, with an emphasis on the impact this intersection has on the political and societal advancement or oppression of Black Americans. Vania’s work often deals with the legal strategies and discourses used to maintain educational inequality for Black middle and high school students. She has written on the relationship between school choice alternatives, educational inequality, and the history of segregation. Currently, Vania is working on expanding that research in the context of religious charter schools. Additionally, her dissertation explores the relationship between Black Americans’ pursuit of literacy as a means of citizenship and the existence of a constitutional fundamental right to literacy. Prior to her work in graduate school, Vania worked as a general practice attorney in both Hampton Roads and Richmond.

The Unintended Consequences of the Courts Religious Freedom Revolution: A History of White Supremacy in Private Christian Church Schools, 117 Nw. U. L. Rev. Online 46 (2022) https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/nulr_online/325

M.A., American Studies, William & Mary, 2022

J.D., William & Mary Law School, 2018

B.A., Political Science, 2015

State of Virginia, 2018

Associate Attorney, Vandeventer Black LLP, 2018-2020

Nicole Brown
Brown, NicolePh.D.
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Nicole Brown

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|ncbrown]]
Research Interests: Intersectional relationship between 18th century religion, education, and the institution of slavery; literacy of enslaved peoples; African American education in colonial Virginia; enslaved narratives and oral histories; race, gender, and power dynamics in the 18th century British Empire; charitable institutions in the British Empire
Biography

Nicole Brown is currently the Graduate Assistant for the William & Mary Bray School Lab and a PhD Candidate in American Studies at William & Mary; she was previously a Program Design Manager at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

As a first-person historical interpreter, Brown also portrays a variety of women from the Colonial and Antebellum Eras. Some of these individuals include Ann Wager, the eighteenth-century white teacher at the Williamsburg Bray School, and Monticello’s Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson.

Her ongoing academic research focuses on the intersection of Black literacy and revolution in the Atlantic World via interdisciplinary and descendant-engaged scholarship. Brown’s work as a museum professional has also taken her across the globe, presenting on interpretive techniques for “hard” histories at museums and historic sites in the United States. Brown recently co-edited a book entitled The Williamsburg Bray School, 1760-1774: A History Through Records, Reflections, and Rediscovery

Tijuana Reeve
Reeve, TijuanaPh.D.
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Tijuana Reeve

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|trreeve]]
Research Interests: Native American Literature, Culture, and History; Mixed Race Literature; Oral History; Narrative; Early American Literature; Postcolonial Theory; Critical Race Theory; Settler Colonialism; American Mythos; Minority Literatures and Rhetorics.
Morgan Brittain
Brittain, MorganPh.D.
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Morgan Brittain

Ph.D.

Email: [[mjbrittain]]
Research Interests: Arts and Visual Cultures of the Americas; Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, and the Environmental Humanities; Waterscape and Landscape; Anti-colonization
Morgan is a PhD candidate in American Studies at William & Mary. He holds an MA in Art History and a BA in Political Science, both from the University of Iowa. His work is situated within the intersection of visual culture studies and the environmental humanities, and his dissertation project is currently titled "Pipelines: New Studies at the Edges of American Art and Petroleum." Morgan's writing has appeared in Panorama, Sequitur, and H-Environment. His work has been supported by the Newberry Library Consortium, Gilcrease Museum, and a Davidson Family Fellowship at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
Molly Robinson
Robinson, MollyPh.D.
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Molly Robinson

Ph.D.

Email: [[e|merobinson03]]
Research Interests: U.S. environmental and agricultural history; craft and material culture; history of photography; cultural studies; settler colonialism; oral history; legal history; African American Studies; Indigenous Studies; community-engaged scholarship
Biography

Molly Robinson is a PhD candidate in American Studies. Her work attends to the overlaps and intersections of kinship, land tenure, and contested belonging among Black descendant communities with limited access to their ancestral homelands. These themes motivate her dissertation, which uses oral histories, land deeds, survey maps, court testimonies, and photographs among other texts to reconstruct the story of a 1918 federal commandeering that dispossessed hundreds of Black families of land on the Virginia Peninsula. Currently in operation as the Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, this 11,000-acre military installation was once home to Black communities that had established churches, schools, and fraternal organizations prior to and after the Civil War. Molly partners with descendants and the Village Initiative’s Local Black Histories Project, a grassroots nonprofit, to bring this history to light through interactive online exhibits.

Her dissertation is a sibling project to the research that she completed as a student in UC Berkeley’s Folklore Program, where she was supported by the Alan Dundes Fellowship in Folklore (2019-2020). There, Molly wrote about Gullah/Geechee sweetgrass baskets, a craft that embodies the environmental, economic, and real estate forces that have dramatically transformed South Carolina’s Low Country over the past hundred years. Her writing on sweetgrass baskets has appeared in Panorama and PLATFORM, and completion of her MA thesis was supported by the Center for Craft in Asheville, North Carolina. In addition to sharing the common denominator of Black-owned land loss, Molly’s past and current work is animated by the question: How do communities articulate and fight for a vision of what should be communally accessible in spaces shaped by privatization, militarization, and discriminatory discourse on who belongs? 

Education

B.A., Anthropology, University of Chicago 

M.A., Folklore, University of California, Berkeley

Jennifer Hackney
Hackney, JenniferPh.D.
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Jennifer Hackney

Ph.D.

Email: [[jphackney]]
Research Interests: American interiors, 20th C American Art, Decorative Arts and Design History, Film Studies, Visual and Material Culture, Set Design, Popular Culture.
Jennifer Hackney is the Senior Educator in Material Culture at The Mariners' Museum and Park where she specifically focuses on incorporating and interpreting the museum's collection in student programming. She also leads the docent training program at the museum and is on the curatorial team for the new Exploration core gallery. Prior to moving into the museum field, Jennifer worked for nearly a decade in the film industry, spending her time in the art department on major motion pictures. Her research interests exist at the intersection of decorative arts and film history, specifically focusing on the role that set decoration plays in affecting public perception of gender, race, and socioeconomics portrayed on screen.
M.A., Decorative Arts and Design History, GWU-Corcoran with Smithsonian Associates, 2018
B.F.A., Theatre, Scenic Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2007
Allegakoen, AanjaliM.A./Ph.D.

Aanjali Allegakoen

M.A./Ph.D.

Email:
Choo, VeraM.A.

Vera Choo

M.A.

Email:
Rachel Rosengarten Hunnicutt
Hunnicutt, Rachel RosengartenPh.D.
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Rachel Rosengarten Hunnicutt

Ph.D.

Email: [[RHRHunnicutt]]
Research Interests: Design history; architecture, interiors, and material culture; immersive museology; world’s fairs; corporate culture and design; histories, theories, and cultures of bureaucracy; occult studies; 20th-century US history
Rachel Rosengarten Hunnicutt is a doctoral candidate in American Studies. She holds an MA in History of Design and Curatorial Studies from Parsons School of Design, The New School, and a BA in Art History from Trinity College. Her dissertation explores connections between large organizations—corporate, state, and military—and the occult in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American pop culture and public history narratives. Her project sheds light on the conspiracy theories, waning faith in institutions, and anxieties about technology and authority that shape our recent past and present moment. Rosengarten Hunnicutt has taught courses on decorative art, industrial design, visual culture, and interior design history and theory at Parsons, and her writing and reviews have appeared in Design IssuesCollections, the Journal of Design History, and Winterthur Portfolio. She formerly served as a cataloguer and curatorial fellow at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and is presently an Editorial Assistant at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

B.A., Art History, Trinity College, 2012

M.A., History of Design and Curatorial Studies, Parsons School of Design, The New School, 2019

Andre Taylor
Taylor, AndrePh.D.
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Andre Taylor

Ph.D.

Email: [[ataylor06]]
Research Interests: Interests: Oral History; Foodways; African Diaspora; Environmental History; Black and Indigenous Studies; African American History; Religion History; Museum Studies; Impacts of Climate Change on Culture
Andre LeVar Taylor is a PhD student in American Studies. He examines how unwritten recipes in African American families are also repositories for the histories of those families. Furthermore, he examines how those recipes explain the migration of foodways and their significance in religion and family celebrations. This concept is at the epicenter of his current research project, “Black Folk and our Food: Extracting memory hidden in unwritten family recipes through oral histories.” The project was funded through a 2022 OHA/NEH Mini- grant. Prior to becoming the oral historian at William & Mary, Andre spent more than 15 years as a print journalist. He is married with twin daughters.
B.A., History, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University 
M.A., Public History, North Carolina State University
Sutherland, NathanielPh.D.

Nathaniel Sutherland

Ph.D.

Email: [[nsutherland01]]
Research Interests: Modern and Contemporary American Literature; Race & Immigration Studies; Intergenerational Studies; Semifiction; American Pragmatism; Literary Theory & Continental Philosophy; Bob Dylan
Nathaniel Sutherland is seeking a PhD in American Studies, having come to William & Mary with an M.A. in English from the University of Virginia, where he wrote a thesis under the direction of Rita Felski about the epistemology of celebrity as filtered through the career of American songwriter Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Nathaniel’s research explores the intersections between art and politics through the lenses of the postmodern American novel, mid-20th century popular culture, and existentialist phenomenology. His work emphasizes the semifictional relationship between reality and fiction, especially with respect to the way that fictions of all kinds shape Americans’ collective imaginary about themselves and their country. A seasoned teacher, Nathaniel loves nothing more than watching his students learn more about the world around them and their places in it.

B.A., English, Penn State University (2017)

M.A., English, University of Virginia (2021)

Nathaniel was a 2017 corps member with Teach for America. This experience took him to El Dorado, Arkansas, where he spent two years teaching science and engineering to several hundred mostly wonderful eighth graders.
Anna Bowers
Bowers, AnnaM.A.
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Anna Bowers

M.A.

Email: [[aabowers01]]
Research Interests: Art History, Early American Art History, Material Culture, Museum Studies, Art and Environment.
Jordan Lewis
Lewis, JordanM.A.
jordan-lewis.jpg

Jordan Lewis

M.A.

Email: [[jalewis04]]
Jordan Lewis is a Master’s student originally from Waxhaw, North Carolina. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in History and English from Elon University. Over the past five years, she has worked as a historic interpreter at museums in North Carolina, Kentucky, Colorado, and Virginia. Her research interests include subcultural and third culture spaces, labor, and craft in 18th-century North America, museum studies, and Early American literature.
Margaret Perry
Perry, MargaretM.A.
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Margaret Perry

M.A.

Email: [[maperry]]
Research Interests: Histories of science & medicine; the American asylum; public history; material culture; disability studies; medical ethics; philosophy of mind
Margaret Perry is an MA student in American Studies whose research investigates historical conversations about minds, bodies, and institutions. Most recently, in tracking the path of the earliest American psychiatric facilities and their inhabitants, she has been working at positioning the patient within the landscape of nineteenth-century asylum historiographies and interrogating how Americans tell institutional stories today. She works full-time in public history.
Anja Keil
Keil, AnjaPh.D.
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Anja Keil

Ph.D.

Research Interests: States of Exception, Political Theory, Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Intersectionality, Minority Literatures, Displacement and forced migration
Carly Barnhardt
Barnhardt, CarlyM.A./Ph.D.
Carly Barnhardt

Carly Barnhardt

M.A./Ph.D.

Email: [[cmbarnhardt]]
Research Interests: Literature, Visual Culture, Feminist Theory, Psychoanalysis, Disability Studies
Carly Barnhardt is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in 20th- and 21st-century literature and visual culture. Her work primarily draws on feminist theory, psychoanalysis, disability studies, and literary criticism and methods. Her research has focused on the representation of the (racialized, gendered, disabled) body in photography and literature, and artists' challenge of those representations through self-portraiture. 
M.A. in American Studies, College of William & Mary, 2024.
B.A. In English, Boston College, 2017.