The Department of English is delighted to welcome five new faculty to our ranks in fall 2021. These appointments represent groundbreaking partnerships with the Initiative on Race and Resilience and with Notre Dame’s Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society. The new faculty will complement our existing strengths and help us to build in new areas of research, writing, and teaching. We are excited to expand our offerings in postcolonial and transnational literature, African American literature and culture, Caribbean studies, science fiction, the digital humanities, and the history of science and technology. We warmly welcome our new colleagues to South Bend and Notre Dame.
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal recently completed his PhD in English Literature, with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies, at the University of California, Davis. He had previously been a visiting fellow at the research Cluster “Media of Cooperation” in University of Siegen, Germany. Dhaliwal’s research, which traces the aesthetic and political entanglements of our technological cultures, lies at the intersections of science fiction studies, critical media theory, and histories of science and technology. He is the winner of the 2020 Edwin Bruns Prize from the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the winner of the 2021 best paper award from the Media, Science and Technology SIG at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. His research has been supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Linda Hall Library, and the Hagley Museum, among other institutions. He is currently working on a book project titled Rendering: A Political Diagrammatology of Computation.
Dionne Irving Bremyer is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Irving Bremyer writes both fiction and nonfiction that investigate and question received notions concerning the complex interplay of the social, personal, cultural, and national hybridity emergent in a postcolonial world. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. She earned her Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University. Her novel Quint will be published by 7.13 Books in August 2021 and her short story collection Islands is forthcoming from Catapult Books in 2022. Her edited collection, Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representations (Demeter Press), explores how cultural attitudes about mothering and female sexuality inform the way people understand, embrace, reject, and talk about breastfeeding. Irving Bremyer has been awarded two Tennessee Williams scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a scholarship and residency from the Voices of Our Nation Writers Conference.
Matthew Kilbane was the 2020-2021 Joseph F. Martino ’53 Lecturer at Cornell University, where he completed his PhD in the Department of Literatures in English. He works at the intersection of literary studies, media archaeology, and the digital humanities, with a special focus on modern and contemporary poetry in the U.S., and the relation of literature to music. His current book project, The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media, shows how literary scholars can look to media history to understand transformations in the social life of poetry, and how media archaeologists can read lyric forms for insight into the cultural history of technology. Kilbane’s work has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Beinecke Library, and his essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Journal of Modern Literature, College Literature, Post45:Contemporaries, and Jacket2.
Chanté Mouton Kinyon was the 2019-2021 Moreau Postdoctoral Fellow at Notre Dame, following her 2018-2019 tenure as NEH Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Her graduate work at University of Ireland, Galway was supported by a four-year Galway Research Fellowship for doctoral studies. Kinyon’s primary research explores transnational African American literature and culture, with a particular interest in the way in which African American culture and literature intersects with Irish culture and literature. Her book project studies the influence that Irish and African American artists have had on each other while theorizing the ways in which these artists signify and conceptualize race and marginality. Kinyon’s forthcoming publications include her article, “Foregrounding (Lost) Rituals and The Transatlantic Gesture: The Keen, The Cakewalk, and Disappearing Cultural Practices,” in Modern Drama and her Introduction to Black Matters: African American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories (Cornell University Press).
Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Recently named one of the writers to watch for fall 2021 by Publishers Weekly, Navarro Aquino holds an M.A. in English Caribbean Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of the forthcoming novel, Velorio from HarperVia/HarperCollins and HarperCollins Español in January 2022. His fiction has appeared in Tin House magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Guernica. His poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and is anthologized in Thicker Than Water: New writing from the Caribbean by Peekash Press. Navarro Aquino has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College.