Doctoral Career Paths

PhD graduates from Northeastern’s Department of English have secured positions in a broad range of careers both within and outside of the tenure track. The following information on first positions post graduation and current positions is meant to illustrate the diversity of opportunities in which our students have found professional success. We believe that presenting career path data transparently and comprehensively is especially critical in light of the current state of the academic job market, and we encourage prospective students to compare our data against other programs they may be considering.

Please visit our Job Search Resources and Professional Development webpages for more information on resources we offer to support both current and recently graduated students who are seeking employment in academia, industry, the non-profit sector, and beyond.

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Galen Bunting	“‘He Would Not Quite Be A Man’: Diagnoses Of Masculinity, Shell-Shock, And Gender Failure In Mondernist Literature”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Postdoctoral Teaching Associate, Northeastern University	See previous
Abbie DeCamp	“Queer Memes: Forms and Communities of Composition”	Professor Ellen Cushman	Postdoctoral Teaching Associate, Northeastern University	See previous
Rachel Lewis	“The Most Realest People: Writing, Prison Abolition, and Queer Solidarities”	Professor Chris Gallagher
David Medina	“Amores Amoxtli: Cultures of the Codex in Contact”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Rachel Molko	“Practicing Feminist Rhetorical Citizenship: Iconic Articulations of Solidarity, Self-Reflexivity, and Subversion”	Professor Elizabeth Britt	Lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology	See previous
Kyle Oddis	“Arriving at the Everyday: Building the NUWParc Public Digital Writing Program Archive”	Professor Neal Lerner	Adjunct Instructor of English, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences	See previous
Kenneth Oravetz	“The Innovation of Art Comics: Materiality, Community, and the Visual Turn”	Professor Hillary Chute	Lecturer of Critical Text Analysis, University of New Mexico	See previous

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Laura Kladky	“Female Egoism in George Eliot and Sensation Fiction”	Professor Laura Green
Jacob Murel	“(In)stability and (Re)creation in the English Print Reception of Vesalian Anatomical Illustrations: A Material-Hermeneutical and Text Analytic Study in Transnational Early Modern Bibliography”	Professor Erika Boeckeler	Postdoctoral Research Associate, Northeastern University	See previous
Gregory Palermo	“Re-Landscaping Digital Scholarship: A Computational Analysis of Citations in Digital Humanities and Writing Studies”	Professor Neal Lerner	Assistant Teaching Professor, English, Emory University	See previous
Samantha Przybylowicz	“”The red brand of murder”: Women Who Kill in Victorian Literature””	Professor Laura Green

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
William Bond	“Daemonic Allure: Material Experiences in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry”	Professor Theo Davis	[Not reported]	[Not reported]
Matthew Hitchcock	“Commemorative Objects: Tracing Memory, Meaning Making, and Uptakes Through Family Photographs”	Professor Ellen Cushman	Postdoctoral Teaching Associate, Writing Program at Northeastern University	See previous
Cara Marta Messina	“The Critical Fan Toolkit: Fanfiction Genres, Ideologies, and Pedagogies”	Professor Mya Poe	Assistant Professor of English (Professional Writing), Jacksonville State University	See previous

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Paul Babin	“The Drama of Cartography: Plotting Global, National, and Urban Map Spaces in Early Modern History, Tragedy, and Comedy”	Professor Erika Boeckeler	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	See previous
Arsalan ul Haq	“Graphic Acts: Narrative Desire and Design in Comics and Architecture”	Professor Hillary Chute	Postdoctoral Teaching Associate, Writing Program at Northeastern University	Lecturer, Writing Program at University of Southern California
Jonathan Osborne	“Difference within Difference: A Study of Modern Black Conservative Rhetoric”	Professor Ellen Cushman	Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Louisiana State University	See previous
Eric Sepenoski	“Land Claims and Community Literacies of the North Fork”	Professor Ellen Cushman	Fourth-Generation Farmer, Seps Farm	See previous

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Sarah Payne	“Women Writing Racelessness: Performativity and Racial Absence in Twentieth Century Women’s Writing”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Liberal Arts, Middlebury College	Instructional Designer, Office of Digital Learning and Inquiry (DLINQ) at Middlebury College
Elizabeth Polcha	“Redacting Desire: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Science in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Barra Postdoctoral Fellow, McNeil Center in Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania	Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Southern Mississippi
Laura Proszak	“Embodying, Producing, and Materializing Citizenship: A Rhetorical Education for Children of Immigrants at North Bennet Street Industrial School, 1880-1910”	Professor Ellen Cushman	Assistant Professor of English and Composition Coordinator, Mercy College	See previous
William Quinn	“Pauses in Production: Reader Activities in Magazine Culture, 1893-1922”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Semantic Data Specialist, Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University	See previous

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Kathryn Bloom	“Arguing Their World: The Representation of Major Social and Cultural Issues in Edna Ferber’s and Fannie Hurst’s Fiction, 1910-1935”	Professor Lori Lefkovitz	Instructor, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (BOLLI) at Brandeis University	See previous
Dania Dwyer	“Writing Genre, Writing Resistance: Uptake, Action and Generic Dissent in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry”	Professor Mya Poe	Assistant Professor of English, Austin Community College	Professor of English, Austin Community College
Heather Falconer	“Triple-Binds and Unintended Consequences: Exploring Discursive Identity Development in Science with Three Women of Color”	Professor Neal Lerner	Assistant Professor of Writing, Curry College	Assistant Professor of Professional and Technical Writing, University of Maine
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald	“Setting the Record Straight: Women Literary Journalists Writing Against the Mainstream”	Professors Carla Kaplan and Ryan Cordell	Assistant Professor of Humanities/General Education, Regis College	See previous
Kasra Ghorbaninejad	“Re/Imagining Imperial Narratives: Shakespeare’s Histories, Safavid Shāhnāmahs, and Anglo-Persian Alliance Building, 1590s-1620s”	Professors Marina Leslie and Erika Boeckeler	Visiting Fellow, Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria	Relational Database Manager, Borders in Globalization (BiG) Lab at the University of Victoria
Nicole Infanta Keller	“Making Her Case: Gendered Evidence and Women’s Astronomical Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century”	Professor Nicole Aljoe	[Redacted]	Faculty of Humanities, Integrative Center for Humanities Innovation at Chiang Mai University
Kevin G. Smith	“(Re)Making/(Re)Marking: Genre and Markup in the Writing Classroom”	Professor Chris Gallagher	Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia	See previous

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Frank Capogna	“Beyond the Frame: Modernist Ekphrasis and Museum Politics”	Professors Mary Loeffelholz and Guy Rotella	Lecturer in Rhetoric and Writing, Framingham State University	Senior Account Manager, The NPD Group
Erin Leigh Frymire	“State Violence and the Rhetoric of Other People’s Bodies: Visibility, Empathy, Agency”	Professor Beth Britt	Lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric, Trinity College	See previous
Sarah Hastings	“‘Women Are Words’: Marriage, Language, and the Production of ‘Woman’ in Eighteenth-Century British Women’s Fiction”	Professor Nicole Aljoe	Instructor I of Communication and Creative & Performing Arts, Rowan College of South Jersey	See previous
Dana Horton	“12 Years a Slave-Master: Gender, Genre, and Race in Post-Neo-Slave Narratives”	Professor Nicole Aljoe	Assistant Professor of English, Mercy College	Associate Professor of English and Race, Ethnic, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, St. Olaf College
Asimina Ino Nikolopoulou	“Senses and Sights of Dispossession: Contemporary Tales of the Black Diaspora and the Global South”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and English at Grinnell College	Visiting Assistant Professor, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and English at Grinnell College
Meg Tarquinio	“The Pleasure of the Intertext: Towards a Cognitive Poetics of Adaptation Studies”	Professor Kathleen Kelly	Curation Strategy Development Lead, Spotify	Director of Music Curation and Programming, Twitch
Kate Templeton	“The Radical Eye: Documentary Aesthetics in New Deal America”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	See previous
Ethan Whittet	“The Mass Production of Old New England”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	English Language Specialist, International Tutoring Center at Northeastern University	See previous

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Neval Avci	“Transatlantic Triangulations: Captivity Narratives and the Evolution of Anglo-American Identities from the Colonial to the Early National Period”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Instructor of English, University of Georgia	Quality Engineer, Allstate Identity Protection
Tabitha Clark	“Documentary Modernism and the Modern Storyteller”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	See previous
Jeffrey Cottrell	“Remapping the Politics of Space: Antebellum Countergeographies and Print”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Adjunct Professor, Portland State University	Product Manager, Penso Co.
Michael Dedek	“Practicing Change: Curricular Innovation and Change in Writing Programs”	Professor Chris Gallagher	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	See previous
Shannon Garner	“Into Something Rich and Strange: Early Modern English Romance and Ecotheory”	Professor Marina Leslie	Panel 4 Coordinator, Institutional Review Board at the University of Utah	Senior Specialist Technical Writer, L3Harris Communications
Kristi Girdharry	“Composing Digital Community Spaces: Design and Literacy Practices in/of the Archive”	Professor Chris Gallagher	Assistant Professor of English, Johnson & Wales University	Director of the Writing Center and Lecturer in the Arts & Humanities, Babson College
Laura Hartmann-Villalta	“Witness to War: Photography, Anglophone Women’s Writing, and the Spanish Civil War”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Adjunct Lecturer in English, Georgetown University	Director of the Master’s in the Engaged and Public Humanities (MAEPH), Georgetown University
Elizabeth Hopwood	“Eating the Atlantic: Nineteenth Century U.S. and Caribbean Literature and the Gastroaesthetic”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Acting Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities and Lecturer in English, Loyola University Chicago	See previous
Lauren Kuryloski	“Textual Deviants: Women, Madness, and Embodied Performance in Late Twentieth Century American Literature and Photography”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Lecturer, Humanities Department at the United States Coast Guard Academy	Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Engineering Education at the University of Buffalo
Charles Lesh	“Writing Spaces and Places: a Geoethnography of Graffiti Writing in Boston”	Professor Chris Gallagher	Assistant Professor in English, Auburn University	See previous
Jessica Nelson	“‘Good Education, Good Position, and Good Blood’: Creole Women’s Literature of the Nineteenth-Century British West Indies”	Professor Laura Green	Teaching Assistant Professor of English, University of Nevada at Reno	See previous
Victoria Papa	“The Invention of Survival: Time and the Transformation of Trauma in American Modernist Literature”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Assistant Professor of English and Communications, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts	See previous
Amanda Runyan	“The Dress and the Colonial Body in Transatlantic Texts, 1767-1853”	Professor Nicole Aljoe	Part-Time Instructor in English, Sierra College	Assistant Professor of English, Butte College
Kate Simpkins	“The Absent Agronomist and the Lord of Poison: Cultivating Modernity in Transatlantic Literature, 1758-1854”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Assistant Professor of English, Wallace Community College	Lecturer in English, Auburn University
Lauren Thacker	“‘Every Move is Punctuated’: Writing Identity and Space in Irish Poetry 1963-2016”	Professor Patrick Mullen	Adjunct Faculty, Moore College of Art & Design	Director of Advancement Communications, School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Emily Artiano	“Vexed Tongues: a Translingual Approach to Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Literature”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Associate Teaching Professor of Writing, University of Southern California	See previous
Brent Griffin	“Geographies of (In)Justice: Radical Regionalism in the American Midwest, 1930-1950”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Assistant Teaching Professor, Global Pathways and American Classroom programs at Northeastern University	See previous
Steven Kapica	“Permeable Boundaries: Rhetorical Delivery and the Negotiation of Obscenity”	Professor Chris Gallagher	Full-Time Lecturer of English and Director of Writing, Fairleigh Dickinson University	Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Director, Keuka College
Shun Kiang	“‘Only connect’: Friendship, Belonging, and Space in the Works of J.M. Barrie, E.M. Forster, and J.R. Ackerley”	Professor Laura Green	Assistant Professor of English, Bunker Hill Community College	Assistant Professor of English, University of Central Oklahoma
Anne Kingsley	“‘A Poem Among the Diagrams’: Poetry as Archival Work in Muriel Rukeyser, Susan Howe, and M. Nourbese Philip”	Professor Mary Loeffelholz	Assistant Professor of English, Diablo Valley College	Professor of English and Distance Education Coordinator, Diablo Valley College
Jim McGrath	“Borrowed Country: Digital Media, Remediation, and North American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities, John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University	Instructional Designer, Salem State University, and Part-Time Lecturer in History, Northeastern University
Duyen Nguyen	“Orphans, Immigrants, and Empire: Making and Unmaking Identity in the Victorian Novel”	Professor Laura Green	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	See previous
David Ober	“A Crisis of Sovereignty: Popular Sovereignty and Territorial Claims in Antebellum American Literature”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	See previous
Max White	“Sovereign Spirits: Debtors, Rebels, and Radicals in Early American Print”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	Visiting Full-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Gregory Cass	“Transatlantic Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century: Milton, Empire, and the Poetics of Liberty”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Part-Time Instructor, Wheelock College	Assistant Professor of Writing, Lasell University
Sarah Connell	“‘No Room in History’: Genre and Identity in British and Irish National Histories, 1541-1691	Professor Marina Leslie	Program Manager, Women Writers Project at Northeastern University, and Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	Assistant Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks & Women Writers Project at Northeastern University
Lana Cook	“Altered States: the American Psychedelic Aesthetic”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Program Administrator, Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Assistant Director of Strategic Initiatives, MIT Open Learning
Genie Giaimo	“Unable to Remember but Unwilling to Forget: Cognition, Perception, and Memory in the Contemporary American Memoir”	Professor Lori Lefkovitz	Assistant Professor of English and Writing Center Director, Bristol Community College	Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and Director of the Writing Center, Middlebury College
Tabitha Kenlon	“Performances of Womanhood in the Eighteenth-Century English Theatre and Novel”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Assistant Professor of English, American University in Dubai	See previous
Alicia Peaker	“‘Our English Ground’: Domesticity, Nationalism, and the Natural World, 1900-1950”	Professor Laura Green	Mellon CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Liberal Arts, Middlebury College	Associate Director for the Digital Humanities Center, Barnard College
Jenna Sciuto	“Postcolonial Palimpsests: Fragmented Subjectivities, Sexual Violence, and Colonial Inheritance in Tierno Monénembo, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, and William Faulkner”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature and Language, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts	Associate Professor of English and Communications, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Jennifer Sopchockchai Bankard	“Testing reality’s limits: ‘Mad’ Scientists, Realism, and the Supernatural in Late Victorian Popular Fiction”	Professor Laura Green	Lecturer, University of Southern California	Associate Professor (Teaching) of Writing, University of Southern California
Aparna Mujumdar	“Colonial Education and Forms of Counter Knowledge: Scenes of Schooling in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul, Erna Brodber, Amitav Ghosh and Julian Barnes”	Professor Patrick Mullen	Associate Lecturer of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston	See previous
Stephanie Pappas	“Research Shows: Recasting Research Instruction in Writing-About-Writing Approaches to First-Year Composition”	Professor Beth Britt	Contributor, Parent Co.	Writer, Snackdinner
James Richie	“Third Way Poets: Navigating the Streams of Modern and Postmodern Poetic Uncertainty”	Professor Guy Rotella	Adjunct Assistant Professor of English, Queens College	See previous
Danielle Skeehan	“Creole Domesticity: Women, Commerce, and Kinship in Early Atlantic Writing”	Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon	Assistant Professor of English and Comparative American Studies, Oberlin College	Associate Professor of English and Comparative American Studies, Oberlin College
Art Zilleruelo	“‘Severer Interventions’: William Wordsworth and the Play of the Line”	Professsor Stuart Peterfreund	Full-Time Lecturer, Writing Program at Northeastern University	Director of Education, Academy of Performing Arts in Orleans, Massachusetts

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Mary Balestraci	“Victorian Voices: Gender Ideology and Shakespeare’s Female Characters”	Professor Laura Green	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	See previous
Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze	“Ambivalent Recognition: Mapping Intimacies in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf”	Professor Laura Green	Adjunct Assistant Professor in English, Bentley University	Lecturer II, Comparative Media Studies/Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tanya Zhelezcheva	“The Poetics of the Incomplete in the Works of Thomas Traherne (ca. 1638-1674)”	Professor Frank Blessington	Assistant Professor of English, Queensborough Community College	Associate Professor of English, Queensborough Community College

Student Name	Dissertation Title	Dissertation Advisor	First Position Post Graduation	Current Position
Amy Carleton	“Eternal Palimpsest: Milton’s Rome”	[Unknown]	Part-Time Lecturer in English, Writing Program at Northeastern University	Lecturer II, Comparative Media Studies/Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hanna Musiol	“‘Objects of Emancipation’: The Political Dreams of Modernism”	Professor Carla Kaplan	Part-Time Lecturer in English, University of Massachusetts Boston	Associate Professor of English, Norwegian University of Science and Technology