Department of English

Teaching and Research Areas:

• World and comparative literature
• 19-21st century Russian, Slavic, and American literatures
• Russian, Soviet, and American cinema
• Horror, the gothic, science fiction, and the fantastic
• Environmental humanities
• Posthumanism, animal studies, and critical plant studies

Education:

• Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of California-Riverside
• M.A., Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago
• B.A., English; B.A., Russian Language and Culture, University of Florida

Monographs in Progress:

• Becoming-With: Ecological Ethics and the More-Than-Human Worlds of Russian and American Horror
• The Disintegration of the Real: Glasnost’ and Late Soviet Science Fiction 

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters:

• “‘I’m Dying in Russia’: Necropolitics and the Mournful Undead in the Horror Music Videos of IC3PEAK.” Contemporary Slavic Horror Across Media: Cursed Zones, edited by Lev Nikulin and Agnieszka Jezyk, Manchester University Press, 2023 (in press).
• “Russian-Language Science Fiction.” The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, and Sherryl Vint, Routledge, 2023 (in press).
• “‘This Bird Made an Art of Being Vile’: Ontological Difference and Uncomfortable Intimacies in Stephen Gregory’s The Cormorant.” Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles, Penn State University Press, 2021, pp. 174-94.
• “Between the Living and the Dead: Vegetal Afterlives in Evgenii Iufit and Vladimir Maslov’s Silver Heads.” Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation, edited by Katherine Bishop, David Higgins, and Jerry Määttä, University of Wales Press, 2020, pp. 81-104.
• “Human Trespass, Inhuman Space: Monstrous Landscapes in Carter Smith’s The Ruins.” The Spaces and Places of Horror, edited by Francesco Pascuzzi and Sandra Waters, Vernon Press, 2019, pp. 55-73.
• “Helping Eleanor Come Home: A Reassessment of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, no. 16, 2017, pp. 67-93.

Selected Recent Papers Presented:

• “If You’re Not a Beautiful Monster, You’re a Villager’: Becoming-Werewolf and the Posthuman-to-Come in Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels.” International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, 2022 (Orlando, FL).
• “Crossing the Invisible Circle: Anthropocentrism, Speculative Realism, and the Occulted Universe of Aleksandr Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse.” American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 2022 (Philadelphia, PA).
• “‘I’m from a Terrifying Russian Fairy Tale’: Horror, Disaffection, and Dissent in the Music Videos of IC3PEAK.” Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2021 (New Orleans, LA).
• “The Soviet Anthropocene: Desiccation, Desertification, and the Horror of Animality in Dmitri Svetozarov’s Hounds.” Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, 2021 (virtual).
• “Ecological Intimacies in the Anthropocene: Horror, Ethics, and the Shadow of Nonhuman Difference.” American Comparative Literature Association, 2021 (virtual).
• “‘The Underground People’: Meditations on the Last Humanists in Konstantin Lopushansky’s Letters from a Dead Man.” Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2020 (virtual).
• “Advertising for the Void: Consumer Capitalism and the Collapse of the Real in Viktor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens.” London Science Fiction Research Community, 2020 (virtual).

Fall 2023 Classes:

• ENG 2040, World Literature Since 1650
• ENG 2360, American Literature and the Arts

Biography:

Dr. Roberts joined Appalachian State University in Fall 2023. Prior to joining App, she taught at Southeastern Louisiana University and lived in Florida, Illinois, California, and Louisiana. Her research and teaching center on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian and American literature and cinema, particularly the genres of horror and science fiction, with additional research and teaching interests in animal studies, critical plant studies, the environmental humanities, and Soviet and post-Soviet studies. Her monograph-in-progress, titled Becoming-With: Ecological Ethics and the More-Than-Human Worlds of Russian and American Horror, conducts a comparative analysis of  Russian and American horror literature and cinema focusing on how the genre has offered posthumanist alternatives to anthropocentrism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A second book project is in its early stages, titled The Disintegration of the Real: Glasnost’ and Late Soviet Science Fiction, which examines Soviet science fiction
cinema within the cultural and political contexts of the late Soviet era. An avid horror and science fiction fan as well as outdoor enthusiast, Dr. Roberts enjoys reading,  filmgoing, hiking, and exploring North Carolina.