2022 Modern Languages Graduates

Kit Bauserman (they/them) is a second-year M.A./Ph.D. Student in American Studies at the College of William & Mary. They specialize in horror and gothic fiction. Their research explores how horror and the gothic’s intersections with folklore and digital media highlight non-traditional forms of haunting and spectrality, such as haunted landscapes. Additionally, Kit is interested in questions of nation’s influence on hauntological frameworks. Their current work focuses on the ethics of narrating ghost encounters.

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.

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. 

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

https://www.cathexisnorthwestpress.com/gradschoolandothermanicepisodes

https://www.prometheusdreaming.com/hearse-delayed

https://www.poachedhare.com/kelsey-smoot

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 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

Biography

Erna Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies who interrogates the function of fictional orphans and how they inform and are informed by American identity formation. Currently, Erna is collecting as many works of fiction she can find that center orphans, as that will enable her to discern patterns and shifts in regards to the treatment of parentless children, and what this says about how Americans have perceived themselves throughout the centuries.

Education

M.A. American Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, 2018

B.A. American Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, 2015

Selected Professional Experiences

Research Assistant – Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2015-2018

Course Instructor – American Literature II, Humboldt University of Berlin, 2016

Biography

Molly Shilo is an MA/PhD student in American Studies. She came from Fordham University where she obtained her B.A. in English and Communication & Media Studies. Her scholarly interests include postcolonial and feminist studies, critical race theory, and education. She is currently working on completing her master’s thesis which examines how empathy is rhetorically deployed within service-learning programs.

Education

B.A., English & Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University, 2017

Biography

Sara Woodbury’s research explores the intersections between mobility studies and museum studies in relation to art access. Her dissertation focuses on outreach art exhibitions and how they potentially enable or restrict art access through their content, transportation, and community engagement. An experienced museum curator, she is currently collaborating with the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University on the interdisciplinary exhibition, Motion and Emotion: Exploring Affect from Automata to Robots, scheduled to open in 2022. Prior to coming to William and Mary, Sara held curatorial positions at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Shelburne Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art. 

You can learn more about Sara's academic and personal interests by visiting her website.

Education

B.A., Art History, Lake Forest College

M.A., History of Art, Williams College

Selected Professional Experience

Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Roswell Museum and Art Center, 2013-2018

Curatorial Fellow, Shelburne Museum, 2011-2013

McDermott Curatorial Fellow, Dallas Museum of Art, 2010-2011

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 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

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.

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

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

B.A., Political Science, 2015

Associate Attorney, Vandeventer Black LLP, 2018-2020

Biography

Nicole Brown is an M.A. student in American Studies. Her topics of interest center around American women’s roles in education, legislation, religion, and the institution of slavery. In addition to her graduate work, Mrs. Brown works full-time as a public historian that specializes in performing, researching, and interpreting women in Virginia spanning from 1750 to 1820. She has performed at a variety of historic and cultural sites, such as The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Monticello, and the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. She currently works full-time portraying Ann Wager and developing programming on the Williamsburg Bray School for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Mrs. Brown’s research has also taken her across the globe. Nicole spoke in Reims, France at the 2018 National Association for Interpretation’s annual conference regarding the efficacy of using character interpretation to discuss challenging topics. She has also conducted research trips to the University of Oxford and Lambeth Palace Library to study the topics of religion, education, and slavery in Colonial Virginia. Her ongoing study of the Bray Associates and Black literacy in American history is a main focus of her current research.

MA, Art History, University of Iowa, 2020

BA, Political Science, University of Iowa, 2016

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

Rachel H. R. Hunnicutt is a Ph.D. student in American Studies. Her work focuses on twentieth-century industrial, domestic, and corporate design relative to capitalism, consumerism, and labor issues. Her most recent research considers Upton Sinclair’s literature as a mediator of the military-industrial complex, its material and design innovations, and the evolution of everyday life, work, and culture across the World Wars.

Hunnicutt previously worked as cataloguer of the Donald Deskey Collection in the Department of Drawings, Prints & Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where she was also a curatorial fellow in the museum’s Department of Product Design and Decorative Arts. She taught interior design history and theory as Part-Time Faculty at Parsons, and formerly served as the copyeditor and coordinator of book reviews for the Journal of Design History.

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

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

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

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