Our Literary Scholars

Lennard J. Davis is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and teaches in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Davis is the author of two works on the novel–Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Columbia U. Press, 1983, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Resisting Novels: Fiction and Ideology (Routledge, 1987, rpt. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). His works on disability include Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Verso, 1995), which won the 1996 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights’ annual award for the best scholarship on the subject of intolerance in North America, and The Disability Studies Reader.

Hannah Huber is Digital Technology Leader and Project Administrator at Sewanee: The University of the South. After completing a PhD at the University of South Carolina in 2019, she was a postdoctoral fellow in digital humanites at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2019-2020. Her research interests lie in 19th and early 20th century US literary and cultural studies, particularly in Southern Studies, African American Studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Alexander Dunst is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Paderborn University, in Germany. His research and teaching focus on 20th century literary and cultural history, as well as the digital humanities. He is the author of Madness in Cold War America (Routledge, 2016) and is currently completing a monograph titled “The Rise of the Graphic Novel: Computational Criticism and the Evolution of Literary Value”.

Carla Barger is a poet, lyric essayist, and digital humanist who hails from the farmlands of southwest Ohio. She holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently finishing her PhD in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she also teaches poetry and co-directs the Digital Humanities Initiative. Her work has appeared in decomP magazinE, Green Hills Literary Lantern, MidAmerica and elsewhere. She has received the 2019 David Diamond Writing Prize from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Malcolm Sedam Writing Award for Poetry from Miami University and has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project Award. Find out more about Carla at CarlaBarger.com.

Katie Brandt holds an MA in English literature from San Francisco State University and is currently a doctoral student in critical English studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also the graduate assistant director of the UIC Writing Center. Her areas of interest are the history of the novel, eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature, and the language of illness and wellness. Her current work focuses on the construction of the addicted subject in the nineteenth-century British novel. 

Travis Mandell is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, specializing in the Program for Writers. His critical work focuses on the novel and the process of writing fiction.

Justin Allen is a writer, designer and digital humanist. His fiction has been published in journals including Catamaran, Crannóg and most recently Stone Canoe. For the past five years, he has led development of data stories and interactive presentations for EdSource, winning multiple journalism awards for visual storytelling and web design. He is currently an MA student in English Studies at the University of Illinois.