Administration

Jordynn Jack

Founding Director of HHIVE

512 or 524 Greenlaw Hall
Email: jjack@email.unc.edu

Department of English and Comparative Literature | Website

PhD in English, Pennsylvania State University, 2005
MA in English, Pennsylvania State University, 2002
BA in English, Glendon College, York University, 2000

Dr. Jordynn Jack is a Professor of English & Comparative Literature and . Her research interests include feminist rhetorics and the rhetoric of science and she has published books on the rhetoric of women scientists in World War II and on the gendering of autism in scientific and public discourses. Her most recent project, Neurorhetorics: Behind the Persuasive Power of Neuroscience, undertakes a rhetorical analysis of scientific articles, popular books, and news reports in order to trace the history of neuroscience from the 1940s to the present. More information on her research is available on the Department of English and Comparative website.

Jane Thrailkill

Founding Director of HHIVE
Director of Graduate Programs in Literature, Medicine, and Culture (LMC)

523 or 524 Greenlaw Hall
Email: tkill@email.unc.edu

Department of English and Comparative Literature

PhD in English & American Literature, The Johns Hopkins University, 2001
MA in English & American Literature, The Johns Hopkins University, 1995 
BA in English, Amherst College, 1985

Dr. Jane F. Thrailkill is Bank of America Honors Term Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Admissions. Her academic specialties are pre-1900 American literature and health humanities. In 2013 Dr. Thrailkill delivered a TedxUNC talk about the serious issue of hospital-based delirium in relation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and how literary studies can give insight into medical problems.

Her most recent book is Philosophical Siblings: Varieties of Playful Experience in Alice, Henry, and William James (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Whereas today neuroscientists turn to the lab and use MRIs to light up how minds work, the Jameses were fascinated by the play of consciousness “in the wild” of social relationships fraught with intensities of belief and desire. The siblings used different genres — the personal diary (Alice), the ghost story (Henry), and the psychology lecture (William) — to illuminate how we make sense of the world and know the minds of people in it. The Jameses’ models for discovery were philosophical toys that tinker with perception: the magic lantern, the duck/rabbit illusion, the stereoscope, the thaumatrope (or wonder-turner), a spinning top. With childlike humor, the siblings’ intellectual playfulness is both message and medium, manifested in an expressive style that exploits incongruity, delights in absurdities, and sometimes, teasingly, inflicts the sting of critique.

Kym Weed

Director of HHIVE
Associate Director of Graduate Programs in Literature, Medicine, and Culture (LMC)

511 or 524 Greenlaw Hall
Email: kweed@unc.edu

Department of English and Comparative Literature | Website

PhD in English & Comparative Literature, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018
MA in English Language & Literature, University of Maryland, College Park, 2011
BS in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Lebanon Valley College, 2006

Dr. Kym Weed is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her academic specialties are health humanities, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American literature, literature & science, and disability studies. She is at work on a book, Microbe Fictions, which explores the intersection of nineteenth-century American literature and bacteriology from the germ theory through widespread use of antibiotics.

Virlana Shchuka

Assistant Director of HHIVE
Postdoctoral Fellow

Email: shchukav@unc.edu

PhD in Cell and Systems Biology, University of Toronto, 2022
MA in Medical History & Humanities, University of York, 2020
BS in English Literature & Cell Biology, University of Toronto, 2013

Dr. Virlana Shchuka is an SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at the Department of English and Comparative Literature’s HHIVE Lab. Her primary research project intersects medical, literary, and cultural narratives to uncover how the Romantic period understood childbirth and postnatal challenges, and how such ideas inform the way we think about labor today. With an interdisciplinary STEM and humanities background, her broader interests in the health humanities are spurring additional research initiatives in such subjects as bibliotherapy, stories of the cell, and expressions of pain in clinical settings.

Camile Menéndez

Marketing Assistant of HHIVE
Undergraduate Student

Email: camenend@unc.edu

B.A. in Media and Journalism, Advertising and Public Relations Track, Minor in Spanish for the Business Professions

Camila is a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill who is interested in pursuing a career in Social Media Marketing. She joined the HHIVE Lab during her freshmen year and has returned to continue working as the Marketing Assistant. She has strong interests in international business, marketing in a global context, cultural diversity, and intercultural communication and is eager to explore the dynamic intersections within these fields.