English Research and Creative Works

Katherine Hill is a novelist and critic whose work explores contemporary life through narrative form, literary tradition, and collaborative criticism. Her novels include The The Violet Hour (Scribner, 2013) and A Short Move (Ig Publishing, 2020), a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is also co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2020), which received the PROSE Award for Literature and an Honorable Mention for the MLA Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship. Her fiction essays and reviews appear widely in publications including The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, The Nation, n+1, Tin House, and Bookforum, and her work has been supported by the New York Public Library, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Yaddo.

René Steinke, PhD is a novelist whose work explores identity, history, and cultural memory through fiction that blends historical imagination with contemporary narrative. Her novels include Friendswood (Riverhead, 2014), named one of NPR’s Great Reads and an Amazon Book-of-the-Month, Holy Skirts (HarperCollins, 2005), a National Book Award finalist, and The Fires (William Morrow, 1999). She is the recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her essays and criticism appear in publications including The New York Times, Vogue, Bookforum and 4Columns. She is a professor of English and director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Adelphi University.

Michael Matto, PhD is a scholar of early modern literature whose work focuses on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama and the relationship between performance, politics and culture. His research examines how literary texts engage questions of power, authority and representation, with attention to historical context and contemporary interpretation. His work also explores adaptation and the ongoing relevance of early modern texts.

Lahney Preston-Matto, PhD is a scholar of the medieval North Atlantic world, with research focused on fosterage, hostageship, and alternative family structures in the 12th–14th centuries. Her work examines kinship and social obligation outside traditional family systems and how the medieval past is reinterpreted in contemporary culture through modern political and ideological frameworks.

Kelly Swartz, PhD is a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and philosophy, focusing on the rise of the novel and the relationship between Enlightenment science and literary imagination. Her work explores how literary form develops alongside shifting ideas about knowledge, perception, and the human subject, with additional interests in queer and trans theory and lyric studies. She is the author of Maxims and the Mind: Unknowing in the Early Novel from Bacon to Austen (University of Virginia Press, 2025).

Marcos Gonsalez, PhD is a writer and scholar whose work explores queer and trans Latinx identity, cultural theory, and the politics of rest, leisure and refusal. He is the author of Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land (2021) and Revolting Indolence: The Politics of Slacking, Lounging, and Daydreaming in Queer and Trans Latinx Culture (2024). His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation, and his writing appears in publications including Literary Hub, BOMB Magazine, Public Books and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Victoria Muñoz, PhD is a scholar of Anglo-Spanish literary and political relations, empire and colonialism in early modern European literature and drama and the history of fairy tales. Her work examines how literature shaped and reflected ideas of empire, cultural exchange and political power in the early modern world. She is the author of Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy: Tudor and Stuart Black Legends, which explores narratives of empire in early modern Spain and England. Her current research project, under contract with De Gruyter Press, examines the revival of Seneca in early modern Spain and England and its relationship to conquest, philosophy and imperial thought.

Eric Dean Wilson, PhD is a writer of creative nonfiction whose work examines climate, infrastructure, technology and embodied experience, with a focus on how systems of comfort and environment shape contemporary life. He is the author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort (Simon & Schuster, 2021), described by The New York Times as “ambitious [and] delightful” and by Amitav Ghosh as “essential reading for the planetary crisis.” His essays appear in The Baffler, Orion, Esquire, and Time, among others. His current book-length project explores public space, ecology and queer experience through narrative nonfiction.

Igor Webb, PhD is a writer whose work moves between poetry, fiction, memoir, and literary criticism, with a focus on memory, displacement, and the intersections of personal and cultural history. His work includes Rereading the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Against Capitulation (Quartet Books, 1984), Christopher Smart’s Cat (Dos Madres Press, 2018), a hybrid work blending memoir, criticism, and fiction, and Buster Brown’s America (The Fortnightly Review, 2022), a collection of nonfiction including This Old Writer: A Journal of a Plague Year. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), The Hudson Review, Stand Magazine, and The Hong Kong Review, and his story “Reza Says” was selected for Best American Short Stories (2012). His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Jan-Henry Gray, MFA is a poet whose work explores migration, queer identity, language, and systems of documentation and record-keeping. His poetry collection Documents, winner of BOA Editions’ A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and finalist for the Thom Gunn Award, and his chapbook Selected Emails reflect these concerns across formally experimental work. His work appears widely in major anthologies of contemporary poetry, including Undocupoetics: An Introduction (2025), Permanent Record (2024), Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry (2024), Queer Nature (2022), and Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color (2018), and in journals such as the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Foundation, and The Rumpus. His essays and reviews engage questions of poetry, language and cultural life. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and Undocupoets, along with recognition from the Academy of American Poets and other literary organizations.

Emily Lee Luan is a poet whose work explores memory, migration and transformation through lyric and experimental forms. Her collection 回 / Return won the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and she is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and Pushcart Prize recipient. Her work appears in The American Poetry Review, Lithub, and The Best American Poetry 2021.