The UCI PhD Program in English has placed graduates in a wide range of careers, from tenure-track appointments at research universities to "alt-ac" positions in humanities education and university administration to opportunities in private-sector employment. 

The placement information below offers detail on the positions obtained by our graduates alongside information about their dissertation research.

(Dates refer to year of appointment rather than year of graduation.)

2024

Megan Cole
Assistant English Professor at Victor Valley College
Dissertation: "Fossil-Fueled Fictions: Coal, Oil, and The Making of American Literary Modernity (1900-1955)"

Sarah O'Dell
Dissertation: "Gothic Therapies: Literature, Sacrament, and The Physic of The Imagination, 1760-1820"

Thomas Williams
Dissertation: "Miserable Capitalism: Intersubjectivity, Left-Wing Melancholia, and The Novel"

Jung Soo Lee
Dissertation: "Take Care: Making and Re-Making Disability in Contemporary Science Fiction"

2023

Nathan Allison
English Instructor, Mt. San Jacinto College
Dissertation: “The Drama of Determinism”: The Evolution of Naturalism in Fiction and Social Thought"

Jean Little
Adjunct Assistant Professor and Writing Specialist, Mt. Hood Community College
Dissertation: “Statistical Fictions: Nineteenth-Century Narrative and the Probability of Change”

2022

Margaret Speer
Lecturer in Composition, UCI
Dissertation: “Women Alone and Together in the British Cultural Imaginary”

Anna Finn
Associate Chancellor, Chief of Staff, and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer (CECO) at UC Santa Cruz
Dissertation: "Changing Times: Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, and the Measure of Modernity"

Austin Carter
Dissertation: "An Unoccupied Woman: American Women's Writing, The Literary Spinster, and Feminist Care"

Peter Cibula
Lecturer, UCI Composition
Dissertation: " Intervals of Grace: Shakespeare and Chaucer’s Existential Romances and the Repair of the Past"

Allison Dziuba
Assistant Professor of English in the Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies (CRES) Program at the University of Alabama
Dissertation: "Feeling Like We Belong: College Students' Countercurricular Rhetorical Education"

Taylor McCabe
Dissertation: Girls Never Grow Up: Generic Impossibility and Narrative Tension in the late-Nineteenth Century Maturation Serial"

Shyam Patel 
Term Assistant Professor, George Mason University
Dissertation: "More Like Life: Politics and the Organic Metaphor in Late-Victorian Aesthetic Cultures"

Andrew Shipley
Academic Support Coordinator of the Writing Studio, Vanderbilt University
Dissertation: "Still Hidden in the Future: Allegory and Metalepsis in British Fiction in the Long Nineteenth Century"

Franziska Tsufim
Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dissertation: "Business and Belongingness: How the Female Entrepeneur Revised the Victorian Canon"

Danilo Caputo
Assistant Professor, Irvine Valley College
Dissertation: "Shakespearean Resilience: Disaster & Recovery in the Late Romances"

2021

Devan Bailey
Dissertation: "Kindred by Chance: Spontaneous Art and Neoliberal Order"

Jacob William Baumgartner
Associate Director, Purdue Online Writing Laboratory (OWL).                                                       
Dissertation:  "Literature in the Age of Wellness"

Christopher Dearner 
Dissertation: "Tongues in Trees and Sermons in Stones: The Landscape of Affordances"

Andrew Hill
Howard E. and Susanne C. Jessen Postdoctoral Instructor in English, Caltech
Dissertation: "Of Shadow and Substance: Sadakichi Hartmann, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Photo-Poetic"

Maureen Fitzsimmons
Visiting Rhetorical Arts Fellow, Loyola Marymount University
Dissertation: "Raciolinguistic Ideologies in the Rhetoric of Early California Statehood"

Michael Mahoney
Dissertation: "Crisis Tendencies: Contemporary Fiction and the Political Economy of Mental Health After 1980"

Miguel Ramon
Professor of English at Santa Rosa Junior College 
Dissertation: "Advertising, Affect, and the Avant-Garde: The Aesthetics of Interruption and Identity Formation in American Fiction of the 1920s"

Scott Streitfeld
Lecturer, UCI Composition
Dissertation: "Return to Normalcy: Modernist Prose and the Quantification of Sexuality"

 

2020

Loretta Ramirez
Assistant Professor, California State University, Long Beach
Dissertation: "Textual and Visual Rhetorics of the Generative Wound: A Historical Genealogy from Medieval Iberia to Contemporary Chicanx Self-Representation Strategies and Pedagogies."

Nicholas Joseph
Lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania's Critical Writing Program
Dissertation: "Finding Themselves By Two: Serial Poetics in Whitman, Oppen and Baraka"

 

2019

Christopher Taekwan Kang
Assistant Professor, College of Wooster
Dissertation: "“Zero Ecology: A Study of British Romantic Poetry”"

Gerald Maa
Editor, The Georgia Review, University of Georgia
Dissertation: "“Thomas De Quincey's Theatric Prose: Theater, Rhetoric, and Literature after the British Enlightenment”"

Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
Assistant Professor, Rice University
Dissertation: "Philippine Anglophone Literature in the Age of Reproductive Labor"

 

2018

James Funk
Visiting Assistant Professor, Clemson University
Dissertation: "Unity Defective: Figurations of Sovereignty in Early Modern English Literature"

Garrett Bridger Gilmore
Lecturer, University of Alabama
Dissertation: "The White Man's Magic Word: Southern Knowledge and White Racial Melancholy"

Jasmine Lee
Assistant Professor, California State University, San Bernardino
Dissertation: "Appraising Our Investments in Youth: Rhetorical Education in the Age of Neoliberalism"

Jens Lloyd
Assistant Professor, Drew University
Dissertation: "Campus Life: Rhetorical Education and College Writing amidst an Evolving Geography"

Dana Murphy
Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English, Caltech.
Dissertation: "Divine Quiet: Phillis Wheatley's Gentle Mastery of Meter, Genre, and Address"

Brendan Shapiro
Assistant Professor, College of Southern Nevada
Dissertation: "Closed Minds and Open Systems: Narrative Voice and Institutional Complexity in the Late Modern Novel"

Selamawit Terrefe
Assistant Professor, Tulane University
Dissertation: "Dissociative States: The Metaphysics of Blackness and the Psychic Afterlife of Slavery"

Jessie Wirkus
Performance Consultant, Allen Communications
Dissertation: "The Hand: Grasping Embodiment in British Literature 1690-1746"

 

2017

Maria Bose

Assistant Professor of English, Clemson University
Dissertation: "Race Writing in the Internet Age"

Sharon Kunde

ACLS Emerging Voices Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University UC Riverside
Dissertation: "Race, Place and Literary Practice in The United States from Thoreau to Ransom"

2016

Danielle Domzalski
English Instructor, Sierra Canyon School
Dissertation: "‘The Language of Trade’: Rhetoric, Power, and the Commercial Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction"

Leo Hoar
Honors Collegium Program Manager, Ohio State University
Dissertation: "Beyond Stage and Screen: The Making of the Scene in Modernist Fiction"

Judy Joshua
Assistant Professor, San Bernardino Valley College
Dissertation: "Body and Tool: An Enactive Approach to Perceptual Entrainment in Fiction and Science Fiction"

Sheiba Kaufman
English Instructor, Saddleback College
Dissertation: "The Hospitable Globe: Persia and the Early Modern English Stage"

 

2015

Hillary Branman
Freelance Writer and Editor
Dissertation: "For the Record: Gendered Collective Memory in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Abraham Cahan"

Elizabeth Catchings
Teaching Assistant Professor, University of Denver
Dissertation: "Composing (In) Commensurable Publics: Dual Sponsorship and Askesis in the Writings of Detained Youth"

Tracy Cummings
Lecturer, San Diego State University
Dissertation: "A Call to Act: Witness, Testimony, and Political Renewal in Shakespeare's Plays"

Brian Fonken
Curriculum Development Specialist & Instructor, University of Texas at Austin
Dissertation: "Gothic Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literature"

Brian Garcia
Assistant Professor, Long Beach City College
Dissertation: "‘Everything Was Strange’: Regional Nationalism and Ironic Identities in Early National American Fiction"

Ian Jensen
Lecturer, UCI
Dissertation: "The Wilderness of Language: Toward a ‘Wild’ Reading of American Nature Writing"

John Nieman
Lecturer, UCI
Dissertation: "‘This New Species of Affliction’: Self-Destruction and the Eighteenth-Century Ethic of Self-Improvement"

Erin Pearson
Lecturer, Harvard University
Dissertation: "Savage Hunter: Cannnibalism and the Discourse on Slavery in the United States and Caribbean"

Cristina Rodriguez
Assistant Professor, Providence College
Dissertation: "Find Yourself Here: Neighborhood Logics in Twenty-First Century Chicano and Latino Literature"

Erin Sweeney
Lecturer, UCI
Dissertation: "Dwelling in Possibility: American Literature, Architecture, and Domestic Innovation, 1850-1900"

 

2014

Tyler Dean
Adjunct Professor of Writing, Whittier College
Dissertation: "Distended Youth: Arrested Development in the Victorian Novel"

Maia Krause
Academic Counselor, HS2 Academy
Dissertation: "Dangerous Investigations: Experiment as Deep Play in Eighteenth-Century British Literature"

Lance Langdon
Lecturer, UCI
Dissertation: "Feeling Engaged: College Writers as Literacy Tutors"

Daniel Matlock
Lecturer, UCI
Dissertation: "Viable Crimes and Victorian Gentlemen: Rhetorics of (In)Consistency and the 19th-Century Novel"

Rachel Mykkanen
English Field of Study Coordinator, Beijing Bayi School
Dissertation: "Militarized Desires: Consumerism in American Literature, 1939-1955"

Brent Russo
Lecturer, Chapman University
Dissertation: "Romantic Liberalism"

Katherine Ryan
Assistant Professor, San Jacinto College
Dissertation: "Modernism's Suicidal Impulse: Psychic Contamination and the Crowd"

Takahiro Sakane
Assistant Professor, Kwansei Gakuin University
Dissertation: "Manners of Contradiction: Economy and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Narrative"

Tae Sung
Assistant Professor, California Baptist University
Dissertation: "Pragmatism and the Gift: Toward a Charismology of Dynamic Gifts in American Literature and Religion"