Student News Fall 2025

Colin Bishoff’s short story “Five Minutes of Pure Cinema” appeared in failbetter in February 2025. An entry on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth is set to appear in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare later this summer. In January, Colin presented at the 2025 MLA National Convention. Following a recommendation from UGA Professor Emerita Elizabeth Kraft, Colin also taught a class for UGA’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) in February. In March, Colin worked alongside fellow CW students O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, Daniel Barnum, Maxime Berclaz, Erik Brown, and Abhijit Sarmah in hosting the poet Joy Priest for a graduate-led reading event. In April, he gave a reading at Café Apollinaire, an Athens event hosted by the Georgia Fine Arts Academy. In June of this year, he (along with his wife) will participate in the Michigan Studies Summer Institute—a weeklong, funded residency on Korean literature that will take place in June of 2025.

Chelsea Cobb has been awarded the Alice C. Langdale Award for her outstanding achievements as a graduate student in English. She also successfully defended her creative dissertation, The Shape of Things Unknown, a hybrid collection or poetry and prose that reimagines Greek myths through the lens of Black feminist poetics.

Jessica DeMarco-Jacobson successfully defended her MA thesis, "Cornelia Turner's Transnational Risorgimento." Her short story, "The Tie-Snake," was a fiction finalist at the 2025 Agnes Scott Writers' Festival and was published in the Festival Magazine. Jessica was also selected as a Graduate Fellow for the 16th International D.H. Lawrence Conference in México City and will receive full funding to attend the conference. She was also one of the recipients of the 2025 Christy Desmet Award. Jessica is planning to attend the University of Oxford for her English DPhil, starting in October 2025.

Under their pen name, Genevieve Guzmán published a poem, “Heliocentric” in Blue Flame Review and a review of Leah Nieboer’s Soft Apocalypse in Annulet. They also published a history of the Liverpool botanic garden in Hidden Compass under the title “The Glamor & Tragedy of Orchids” based on research they undertook at the University of Liverpool in May 2023 sponsored by the UGA Office of Global Engagement. They made semifinalist for the Fulbright US Student research-arts award to France and the poetry shortlist for the 2025 Agnes Scott Writers’ Festival and the Disquiet Literary Prize. They will graduate with their PhD in August.

Jamie Lewis presented her paper, “Romancing the Robot: Love, Simulacra, and Posthumanism in Machines Like Me” at the 2025 Southern Humanities Conference in Greenville, South Carolina, in January.

Kaitlin Thurlow was awarded the Emmet Larkin Interdisciplinary Fellowship at the American Conference for Irish Studies Annual Meeting in February in Savannah, Georgia. The research award is given to a master’s or Ph.D. student conducting work on an Irish topic at a North American institution. For issue 62.1 of the James Joyce Quarterly, Kaitlin reviewed two works published by the University of Florida Press: Joyce without Borders: Circulations, Sciences, Media and Mortal Flesh edited by James Ramey and Norman Cheadle and Beating the Bounds: Excess and Restraint in Joyce’s Later Works by Roy Benjamin. Editor Jeff Drouin describes how the issue as “an impromptu cluster of new research on ways in which Joyce’s work refracts the public. The articles cohere around a theme of law, order, and ethics” in the journal’s introduction.