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MA Concentration in LMC

Gina Adatsi, MPH

MA Student, Concentration in Literature, Medicine and Culture

Starting in January 2024, Gina will complete a 9-month Fullbright fellowship studying reproductive health education among teenagers in Sierra Leone.


Reece Carter

MA Student, Concentration in Literature, Medicine and Culture
MD Student, UNC School of Medicine

Reece is a fourth-year medical student at UNC School of Medicine interested in pursuing Emergency Medicine. Originally from Raleigh, he received his B.S. in Neuroscience from The Johns Hopkins University and is currently pursuing the master’s degree in Literature, Medicine, and Culture. He is broadly interested in disability studies, queer theory as it relates to medicine and embodiment, and rhetoric of health and medicine.


James Walker

BA/MA Student, Concentration in Literature, Medicine and Culture


Graduate Certificate in LMC

Isabel Spencer Landis Doss

PhD Student, Department of English and Comparative Literature

Spencer Doss (she/her) studies British literature of the long the narrative interventions of medical ideology and rhetoric, movements such as sensation fiction and the fin-de-siècle on the intersections of medical and aesthetic frameworks of wave feminist novels. More broadly, Spencer is interested in history of gynecology, particularly from its late-nineteenth-century establishment as a medical specialization to the present, and its fraught relationship with questions of agency,heteronormativity, and pathology.

Camille Kroll

PhD Student, Department of Anthropology

Camille is a second-year PhD student in anthropology with a obtained a master’s in medical humanities and bioethics from master’s in public health from Washington University in St. structural factors broadly construed limit chronic pain’s care and pain management clinical encounters. Relatedly, she and class inequity in the treatment of chronic pain and are reproduced, normalized, and propagated in these institutional settings.

Ariana Ávila

PhD Student, Department of Anthropology
Graduate Certificate in Literature, Medicine, and Culture

Ariana Ávila is a doctoral student in medical/sociocultural anthropology interested in how U.S. immigration policies affect access to health care for individuals and families with undocumented or precarious immigration status, particularly among farmworkers from Haiti working and living in the agricultural hubs of Southwest Florida. She is also interested in the collective agency in responding to barriers in health and systems of power. As a part of the Graduate certificate in Literature, Medicine, and Culture, she is interested in strengthening her creative writing skills as a way to share her research. She is from Arcadia, Florida, an agricultural town in Southwest Florida. She earned her B.S. in Biomedical Sciences from the University of South Florida and her MPH from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Prior to beginning her doctoral program, she was a Global Health Fellow with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.


Paul Blom

PhD Student, English & Comparative Literature
Graduate Certificate in Literature, Medicine and Culture
LMCC Co-Chair

Paul Blom is pursuing his PhD in English at UNC-Chapel Hill. Originally from LaGrange, GA, he received his BA in English from Birmingham-Southern College and his MA in English Literature from DePaul University. Paul’s research focuses on twentieth-century American literature and its intersections with health humanities and literary trauma studies, primarily the ethical and political implications of representations of psychological trauma in literature and other media. His research has also involved extensive work with underserved populations regarding trauma, illness, embodiment, and representation. He currently serves as the co-director for UNC’s Literature, Medicine, and Culture Colloquium.


Mindy Buchanan-King

PhD Student, English & Comparative Literature
Graduate Certificate in Literature, Medicine and Culture
LMCC Co-Chair

Mindy Buchanan-King is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. Mindy is originally from Virginia and received her B.A. from Emory & Henry College and her M.A. from the College of Charleston. Her master’s thesis focused on Edith Wharton’s use of Romanticism in conceptualizing the artistic self in Hudson River Bracketed. Her graduate research is currently focused on women authors of late 19th-/early 20th-century American fiction and the function of science and medicine in such works. She’s also interested in representations and interpretations of the body in wartime medical photography.


Elisabeth McClanahan Harris

PhD Student, English & Comparative Literature
Graduate Certificate in Literature, Medicine and Culture

Elisabeth McClanahan Harris is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at UNC Chapel Hill, with a focus on 19th century American literature and medicine. She received her B.A. in Humanities from Columbia International University, and her M.A. in English from George Washington University. Her graduate research studies how changing theories of mental illness and its treatment were encoded in congregate care institutions over the course of the 19th century. She draws on a varied archive of patient memoirs, journalistic exposes, and fictional depictions of congregate care, to investigate entanglements of race, gender, and disability in questions of mental healthcare.


Mariana Nájera-Millary

PhD Student, Department of Religious Studies
Graduate Certificate in Literature, Medicine and Culture

Headshot of Mariana Najera

Mariana Nájera-Millary is pursuing her PhD in Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Though born and raised in northeastern Mexico, Mariana received her BA in Religion and Anthropology from Rice University in Houston, TX. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion and medicine in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial Mexico (then New Spain) and seeks to address methodological gaps in the search for subaltern narratives within inquisitorial documents. More specifically, Mariana examines the inquisitorial prosecution narratives in search of syncretic care practiced by lower class women of color and pastoral care enacted at a larger scale by the Holy Office of the Inquisition to demonstrate the latter had its own healing agenda.


Ellen Perleberg

MS Student, Library Sciences
Graduate Certificate in Literature, Medicine and Culture

Ellen Perleberg is a Master of Science in Library Science Certificate in Literature, Medicine, and Culture, she is also Middle Eastern Studies and is serving as the 2024-2025 Studies Public Humanities fellow. She researches digital upcoming master’s paper looks at global ideologies of work on the PFAS team at HHIVE this year!

 


Paddy Qiu, MS

MPH Student, Concentration in Health Equity, Social Justice, and Human Rights
Graduate Certificate in Literature, Medicine and Culture

Paddy Qiu (they/he) is a second-year MPH candidate specializing in Health Equity, Social Justice, and Human Rights at the Gillings School. They recently obtained their B.S. in Behavioral Neuroscience with a minor in Creative Writing at the University of Kansas. Paddy has actively contributed to several research projects, including studies on transgender gerontology, the impact of race-related racism during the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of social justice films in education, and translating research findings into actionable solutions.