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 typically refer to year of appointment and/or dissertation)
2026
Jiyon Byun
Dissertation: "Transpacific Criminalities: Korean American and Korean Crime Fiction in the Post-9/11 Era"
Christopher Cassidy
Dissertation: "Practicing Kingship: Scenes of Counsel as Heuristic Drama in Gower and Shakespeare"
Megan Cole
Assistant Professor of English, Cypress College
Dissertation: "Fossil-Fueled Fictions: Coal, Oil, and The Making of American Literary Modernity (1900-1955)"
Garrett Bridger Gilmore
TT Assistant Professor, University of Alabama
Dissertation: "The White Man's Magic Word: Southern Knowledge and White Racial Melancholy"
Vincent Hiscock
Dissertation: "Mystic Realism"
Jung Soo Lee
Lecturer, Korea University
Dissertation: "Take Care: Making and Re-Making Disability in Contemporary Science Fiction"
Jean Little
NTT Assistant Professor, Western Oregon University
Dissertation: “Statistical Fictions: Nineteenth-Century Narrative and the Probability of Change”
Amanda Malone
Scholarship Domain Lead, Meridian University
Dissertation: "Muse of the Word/World: Epics by Women in the 20th and 21st Centuries"
Letizia Mariani
Dissertation: "The Social Life of Poetry"
Patrick McBurnie
English Instructor, Orange Coast College
Dissertation: "Fugitive Letters: Runaways, Refugees, and Maroons in the Atlantic Novel, 1750-1860"
Louise McCune
English Faculty: Upper Division, Stevenson School
Dissertation: "Social Analysis and Modernist Form in Women’s Fiction of the Popular Front"
Sarah O'Dell
MD/PhD. Resident Psychiatrist, University of California, Irvine.
Dissertation: "Gothic Therapies: Literature, Sacrament, and The Physic of The Imagination, 1760-1820"
Bridget O'Reilly
Dissertation: "Reading Recessed Narrative in the Modernist Novel"
Leah Senatro
Assistant Teaching Professor of English, Santa Clara University
Dissertation: "Breath: A Rhetorical History"
2025
Nathan Allison
Financial Representative, Northwestern Mutual
Dissertation: “The Drama of Determinism”: The Evolution of Naturalism in Fiction and Social Thought"
Maureen Brouwer
Writing Instructor, Loyola Marymount University
Dissertation: "The Ruins of Labour in Early Modern English Literature and Landscapes"
Claire Burdick
Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing (American Literature), Hamilton College
Dissertation: "Indian Lyric: Nineteenth-Century Indigenous Poetics and the Making of American Literature"
Juan Carlos Fermin
Lecturer in Asian American Studies, California State University, Fullerton
Lecturer in Asian and Asian American Studies, California State University, Long Beach
Instructor for the Asian American Youth Leadership Program, Irvine
Dissertation: "Imperialist Realism: Colonial Ways of Seeing and the Artifice of Empire"
Anna Finn
Chief of Staff to the Provost, Texas State University
Dissertation: "Changing Times: Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, and the Measure of Modernity"
Brian Flores
Full-time Lecturer in the First Year Experience Program and the English Department, Nevada State University
Dissertation: "U.S. Central American Literature: Writing Beyond the Latine Dyad"
Alexandra Harrison
Dissertation: "State Power and the American Family: Family Dissolution in Contemporary Women’s Literature"
Toni Hays
TT Assistant Professor in the Asian American Studies Department, California State University, Long Beach
Dissertation: "Racial Site: Landedness and Settler Colonial Fantasies of Home in Asian/America"
Leo Hoar
Founder, UXR Institute
Dissertation: "Beyond Stage and Screen: The Making of the Scene in Modernist Fiction"
Stephen Howard
Assistant Professor of English, Peru State College
Dissertation: "Our Lives Sing Ballads: Folk Genres in Twentieth-Century Black Poetics"
Isis Huang
Dissertation: “Mental Illness as the Case Against Agency: Refusing the Recovery Narrative in Memoir"
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
Assistant Professor of English, Vassar College
Dissertation: "Philippine Anglophone Literature in the Age of Reproductive Labor"
Erin Pearson
Associate Professor of English, Elon University
Dissertation: "Savage Hunter: Cannnibalism and the Discourse on Slavery in the United States and Caribbean"
Loretta Ramirez
Associate Professor of Latinx Rhetoric & Composition, 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."
Madeleine Read
Assistant Professor of English, Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey
Dissertation: "London, 1988: Premillennial Theater and the Limits of Utopia"
Dominque Shank
Assistant Professor of English in African American and Black Diasporic Literature, California State University, Long Beach
Dissertation: "Black Gothic Genealogies in the Atlantic World"
2024
Tyler Dean
Freelance Writer, Artforum International Magazine
Adjunct Faculty, Pasadena City College
Dissertation: "Distended Youth: Arrested Development in the Victorian Novel"
Brian Fonken
Associate Professor, Austin Community College
Dissertation: "Gothic Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literature"
Ian Jensen
Instructor for School of Writing and Literature & Film, Oregon State University
Dissertation: "The Wilderness of Language: Toward a ‘Wild’ Reading of American Nature Writing"
Sharon Kunde
Assistant Professor of Academic Studies, Maine College of Art & Design
Dissertation: "Race, Place and Literary Practice in The United States from Thoreau to Ransom"
Franziska Tsufim
Assistant Teaching Professor, Wake Forest University
Dissertation: "Business and Belongingness: How the Female Entrepeneur Revised the Victorian Canon"
Thomas Williams
Dissertation: "Miserable Capitalism: Intersubjectivity, Left-Wing Melancholia, and The Novel"
2023
Jasmine Lee
Associate Professor, California State University, San Bernardino
Dissertation: "Appraising Our Investments in Youth: Rhetorical Education in the Age of Neoliberalism"
Takahiro Sakane
Professor, Kwansei Gakuin University
Dissertation: "Manners of Contradiction: Economy and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Narrative"
2022
Maria Bose
Assistant Professor of Global Studies, Providence College
Dissertation: "Race Writing in the Internet Age"
Danilo Caputo
Professor of English, Irvine Valley College
Dissertation: "Shakespearean Resilience: Disaster & Recovery in the Late Romances"
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, University of Alabama
Dissertation: "Feeling Like We Belong: College Students' Countercurricular Rhetorical Education"
Sheiba Kaufman
Assistant Professor of English, Saddleback College
Dissertation: "The Hospitable Globe: Persia and the Early Modern English Stage"
Taylor McCabe
Freelance Writer and Editor
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"
Cristina Rodriguez
Associate Professor, Providence College
Dissertation: "Find Yourself Here: Neighborhood Logics in Twenty-First Century Chicano and Latino Literature"
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"
Margaret Speer
Lecturer in Composition, UCI
Dissertation: “Women Alone and Together in the British Cultural Imaginary”
Tae Sung
Professor and Dean of Student Success, California Baptist University
Dissertation: "Pragmatism and the Gift: Toward a Charismology of Dynamic Gifts in American Literature and Religion"
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"
Maureen Fitzsimmons
Visiting Rhetorical Arts Fellow, Loyola Marymount University
Dissertation: "Raciolinguistic Ideologies in the Rhetoric of Early California Statehood"
James Funk
Department of Linguistics Graduate Advisor and Program Coordinator, University of California, Santa Cruz
Dissertation: "Unity Defective: Figurations of Sovereignty in Early Modern English Literature"
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"
Michael Mahoney
Dissertation: "Crisis Tendencies: Contemporary Fiction and the Political Economy of Mental Health After 1980"
Miguel Ramon
Professor of English, 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
Nicholas Joseph
Critical Writing Program Lecturer, University of Pennsylvania
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”"
Maia Krause
Founder, Lodestar College Counseling
Dissertation: "Dangerous Investigations: Experiment as Deep Play in Eighteenth-Century British Literature"
Gerald Maa
Editor, The Georgia Review, University of Georgia
Dissertation: "“Thomas De Quincey's Theatric Prose: Theater, Rhetoric, and Literature after the British Enlightenment”"
Daniel Matlock
Teacher, St. Margaret's Episcopal School
Dissertation: "Viable Crimes and Victorian Gentlemen: Rhetorics of (In)Consistency and the 19th-Century Novel"
Rachel Mykkanen
Teacher, St. Margaret's Episcopal School
Dissertation: "Militarized Desires: Consumerism in American Literature, 1939-1955"
Katherine Ryan
English Composition Instructor, Chemeketa Community College
Dissertation: "Modernism's Suicidal Impulse: Psychic Contamination and the Crowd"
2018
Jens Lloyd
Assistant Professor, Director of First-Year Writing, 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
CC 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
Vanessa Garcia
Playwright, Novelist, Journalist & Screenwriter, Abre Camino Collective
Dissertation: "My Cuban Routes"
2016
Danielle Domzalski
English Instructor, Sierra Canyon School
Dissertation: "‘The Language of Trade’: Rhetoric, Power, and the Commercial Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction"
Judy Joshua
Assistant Professor, San Bernardino Valley College
Dissertation: "Body and Tool: An Enactive Approach to Perceptual Entrainment in Fiction and Science Fiction"
2015
Rebecca Balon
Honors Department Adjunct Faculty, Northern Arizona University
Dissertation: "Kinless of Queer: Racial Antagonism and Nonnormative Sexuality in Contemporary African American Literature"
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 Associate 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 Garcia
Assistant Professor, Long Beach City College
Dissertation: "‘Everything Was Strange’: Regional Nationalism and Ironic Identities in Early National American Fiction"
John Nieman
Lecturer, UCI
Dissertation: "‘This New Species of Affliction’: Self-Destruction and the Eighteenth-Century Ethic of Self-Improvement"
Erin Sweeney
Lecturer, UCI
Dissertation: "Dwelling in Possibility: American Literature, Architecture, and Domestic Innovation, 1850-1900"
2014
Lance Langdon
Lecturer, UCI
Dissertation: "Feeling Engaged: College Writers as Literacy Tutors"
Brent Russo
Lecturer, Chapman University
Dissertation: "Romantic Liberalism"