PhD Fellows

RachelRachel is a PhD candidate in the department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Emory University, where she has also earned a certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies. Additionally, Rachel is affiliated with the Visual Scholarship Initiative. Rachel received a B.A. in Neuroscience at Colorado College and worked in a Genomics lab prior to coming to Emory. Her areas of scholarly interest include feminist and queer theory, history and philosophy of science, and psychoanalysis. Rachel’s dissertation, Faces of Babies: Negotiating Empirical Evidence on the Borders of Biology, Psychology, and Feminism, interrogates the ways facial expression becomes scientific evidence in psychology. She uses infant research as a case to explore epistemologies of emotion in the 20th century.
AAronAaron Goldsman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Emory University. He completed a B.A. in English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and an M.A. in English at the University of Toronto. His research interests include modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on post-WWII U.S. poetries; queer and feminist theory; and the relations among affect, the erotic, and practices of reading, writing, and textual dissemination. His dissertation, titled Queer Occasions: Scene and Series in Postwar American Poetry, explores the ways in which the occasional poetics of certain postwar figures—particularly those associated with the New York School and its environs—document and intervene into the social scenes of their composition, circulation, and address. The project is especially interested in the erotic and affective dimensions of such practices, tracing the dynamics of readerly seduction, solicitation, and refusal engendered by occasional modes. He has presented his work at a number of national conferences, including the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, the American Studies Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association. He is the author of a critical introduction to the work of artist, illustrator, and poet Joe Brainard, which appears in the 2016 supplement to Scribner’s American Writers series.