Current Graduate Students

Meet some of our current M.A. and Ph.D. students and learn about their areas of interest.

Holly Burgess, Ph.D. candidate Areas of Interest/Study: 20th and 21st Century African American Literature, gender and LGBTQ+ studies, and film studies Holly Burgess earned her M.A. in English at Marquette and returned to the Ph.D. program in 2018. Burgess's dissertation examines police brutality, revolutionary violence, and hip-hop from The Black Power Movement to The Black Lives Matter Movement. In 2021, She presented a paper on Sara and Tegan Quin's memoir High School at MMLA. Her poetry is published in Straylight Literary Arts Magazine and Marquette Literary Review. holly.burgess@marquette.edu
Ayo Ibiyemi, Ph.D. candidate Areas of Interest/Study: Postcolonialism, African Diaspora Fiction, Environmental Studies, and Indigenous Studies ayo.ibiyemi@marquette.edu
Najma Ibrahim, Ph.D. candidate Areas of Interest/Study: Somali Women Literature, African and American Diaspora Literature najma.ibrahim@marquette.edu
Jose Intriago-Suarez, Ph.D. candidate Areas of Interest/Study: Post Colonial 20th-century Anglophone literature and its humor, contemporary popular culture, Flann O’Brien, and critical theory jose.intriagosuarez@marquette.edu
Maggie Patchet, Ph.D. candidate Areas of Interest/Study: 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature, War Literature magdalen.samuelson@marquette.edu Maggie is writing a dissertation on writings by female combatants in the Iraq War. She recently gave a conference presentation from this project at MMLA entitled “Repurposing Real Stories: The Function of the Frame in Helen Benedict's The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq.” In her time here, Maggi has served as an editorial assistant on Marquette’s Renascence journal.
Kate Rose, Ph.D. candidate Areas of Interest/Study: 21st century digital cultures and communities, transformative works, reception and adaptation, object based learning, fan studies and fan creation, popular culture and media k.rose@marquette.edu Kate’s dissertation focuses on the kinds of things that fans create and the various ways they’re compensated for it. The foundation of her dissertation is an exhibition of both fine art and fanworks at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art. More information about her exhibition, Affirmation/Transformation: Fandom Created, can be found at https://epublications.marquette.edu/fandom/Affirmationtransformation/
Julia Salkind Ph.D. candidate Areas of Interest/Study: Medieval literature studies with a focus on feminist and gender dynamics/studies and their intersection with power structures in medieval and early modern literature julia.salkind@marquette.edu
Emily Workman Keller, Ph.D. candidate Areas of Interest/Study: British Romanticism, Gothic novels and chapbooks, the literature of British imperialism, and Britain's national identity emily.keller@marquette.edu