Savannah DiGregorio is a Ph.D. Candidate and Russell G. Hamilton Fellow in English at Vanderbilt University where she studies African American/Diasporic literature and the environment. Savannah’s current project combines literary analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and legal studies to uncover more-than-human rituals of race in the US South and beyond. Her critical and creative work can be found in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment, Épistémocritique: Revue de littérature et savoirs, The Offing, HAD, and elsewhere.

Dr. Christina Xan is a Bridge Humanities Fellow at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches English and Ethics. Her scholarly work explores the ways women break temporal, spatial, and affective boundaries of domestic- and eco-femininity across contemporary literature and media—with a predilection for the American South. Xan is an editor, publisher, and presenter of both creative and scholarly work, and, most importantly, is a “single mom who works two jobs” to five cats: Fitzgerald, Thoreau, Sesame, Apollo, and Ottilie.

Sterling Neill is a first year PhD student in two different programs, English at Georgia State University and Pharmaceutical Science at Mercer University. She has engaged in many different types of classes, ranging from English literature to Biology, learning a multitude of ways to conduct research, both literary and scientific. As part of the ESO Council she hopes to merge her two educational paths to offer a novel perspective on the intersections between the issues found within both fields. She has recently won the SSSL  Wharton Lowe award conference for her work on “Night Doctors” a tale of historical abuse and psychological warfare on Black bodies in the U.S. South.

Dr. Yesmina Khedhir holds a PhD in English Language and Literature—focus in American Studies—from the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. She received her BA and MA in English from the Faculty of Letters, Arts, and Humanities of Manouba, Tunisia, and was a Fulbright scholar (FLTA) at Stanford University in 2011-2012. Her research project examines the multiple aspects of memory, trauma, and healing in Jesmyn Ward’s fictional and non-fictional works. While she is currently working on turning her dissertation into a monograph, Yesmina has also published several articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her areas of interest and research include, but are not limited to, African American literature, history, and culture, Southern studies, Black feminism/womanism, ecocriticism/ecowomanism, memory and trauma studies, and Blue Humanities. 

Dr. Laura Wilson received her PhD in English from the University of Mississippi, with a dissertation entitled “On Southern Soil: The Art and Ecology of Racial Uplift, 1895- 1950”, which she is now turning into her first monograph. She was a 2020-2022 Council on Library Information and Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in African American Studies at Fisk University. Having moved back home to England from the States in 2022, Laura currently works at the British Library. She has published on Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston, and is the co-editor of a collected volume entitled The Living Legacy of African American Studies: Its Past, Its Present, and Its Future(s), under contract at UGA Press. Laura sits on the SSSL Tech and Media Committee and is Treasurer of the William Faulkner and Eudora Welty Societies respectively. Her latest project investigates contemporary responses to the plantation. 

If you would like to contact the ESO executive council, please send an email to [email protected]. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter/X 

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