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

Jenny is a Ph.D. student in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. Her studies focus on health humanities and the rhetoric of health and medicine, and she is particularly interested in the role embodiment plays in illness and recovery narratives. Jenny is excited to be the graduate-student team lead for HHIVE’s Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome Foundation Patient Narratives Project.

MA Concentration in LMC

Gina Adatsi, MPH

MA Student, Concentration in Literature, Medicine and Culture

Gina is a highly skilled public health project manager with 4 years of experience in directing healthcare projects’ lifecycles. Her enthusiasm for the public health sector is unwavering. With a commitment to improving society and aiding those in need, she is dedicated to empowering others through healthcare excellence. She possess a proven track record in establishing detailed project management plans to track project progress and her ability to draft strategic project reports has led to her being an instrumental part in process improvements. She is dedicated to utilizing my strong leadership capabilities and communication skills to lead and coordinate projects in order to bring them to successful completion.

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.