Members of UT’s Medieval and Renaissance Club for Undergraduate Students (MARCUS) and students in Professor Mary Dzon’s English Lit class had the opportunity to meet with UT alumna Jenny Bledsoe while she was visiting campus in September 2018.

Professor Bledsoe graduated from UT in 2011 with a BA in English literature and religious studies, and minors in Latin and history. After leaving UT, she received a master’s degree in religion, literature, and culture from Harvard University, and then completed her PhD in English at Emory University in spring 2019. During the 2018-19 academic year, she also was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Agnes Scott College. Bledsoe is currently an assistant professor of English at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma. Her research and teaching focus on book history and material culture, medieval and early modern literature, religion, the history of emotions, and gender.

In fall 2018, the Marco Institute invited UT alumnus Andrew Eichel to campus to speak with graduate students about his experiences transitioning from graduate school to working in university administration.

Eichel completed his PhD in English at UT in 2016, where he wrote a dissertation titled “Patristic Precedent and Vernacular Innovation: The Practice and Theory of Anglo-Saxon Translation.” Following his graduation from UT, Eichel worked first as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and, since 2018, he has been a learning specialist and academic coach at the Georgia Institute of Technology.