Graduate Students
Graduate Research Leads
Valerie Burgess
PhD Student, Department of English & Comparative Literature
Diet Culture Team Co-Lead
Valerie Burgess (she/her) is a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century American literature, focusing on the intersections of mental health, gender, and labor. Her research examines how women writers engage with tropes of madness and psychosis, exploring how these narratives reflect broader cultural anxieties about feminity, autonomy, and economic survival. She is especially interested in how literary depictions of mental illness intersect with feminist, disability, and Marxist critiques of labor, tracing how structural forces shape women’s experiences of work, motherhood, and selfhood.
Spencer Doss
PhD Student, Department of English & Comparative Literature
Diet Culture Team Co-Lead
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.
Annie Elledge
PhD Candidate, Department of Geography and Environment
Weight Inclusive Wellness Team Lead
Annie Elledge (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include feminist political geography, critical geographies of fatness, critical disability studies, geographies of the U.S. South, and creative methods. Annie’s dissertation research examines the weight-inclusive wellness industry in North Carolina’s Research Triangle with an emphasis on fat people’s identity formation and place-making practices.
Jenny Horton
PhD Student, Department of English & Comparative Literature
RHSF Patient Narratives Team Lead
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
HHIVE Graduate Assistant, 2024-2025
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
HHIVE-Affiliated Graduate Students
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
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.