Personal Profile
Research interests: 19th and 20th century American literature, queer studies, aromantic theory, alternative care networks and meaning-making outside of the nuclear family, digital humanities, pedagogy, and born-digital archives
Education
Master of Arts in English (In Progress), University of Virginia, August 2023 – May 2025
Bachelor of Arts in English, Wesleyan University, September 2018 – May 2022
Research Experience
2024-2025: “The Queer Possibilities of Aromantic Literary Studies”
Masters degree thesis, supervised by Professor Mrinalini Chakravorty at the University of Virginia. A close reading of Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor and several shorter works including Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “A Moral Exigency,” demonstrating the value and relevance of exploring aromantic themes in queer literary scholarship.
2024-2025: Literature in Context
Research assistant for the inter-university, NEH-funded digital humanities project “Literature in Context,” supervised by Professor John O’Brien. Used literary research and XML coding skills to create reliable, free digital editions of commonly studied texts for use by students, teachers, and professors.
2024: Queering the Collective Biographies of Women Database
Digital humanities research project, supervised by Professor Alison Booth at the University of Virginia. Applied principles of queer theory to Alison Booth’s ongoing digital humanities project Collective Biographies of Women to evaluate the database’s searchability by researchers and useability by project collaborators in order to determine realistic next steps for improvement.
2023-2024: “Shared Fantasies & Deviant Desires: Paratextual Intimacies in Fan Fiction”
Conference paper presented at UVA’s “Intimacies” Graduate Symposium in March 2024. Considered the language fans use to describe their fantasies and express their physical and affective responses to dark and erotic fan fiction in order to analyze the “deviant” intimacies that emerge within these collaborative creative communities.
2021-2022: “Hunters, Cowboys, & Eco-Saboteurs”
Undergraduate thesis, supervised by Professor Sean McCann at Wesleyan University. Analyzed several influential writers throughout American history who transformed conservation into an American political mythology by using the wilderness to clarify the problems they found in society.
Cameron Berry 