About the Speakers

Dr. Mary Caton Lingold has been serving as Director of the MATX Program since 2023. An Associate Professor of English at VCU, she is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the literature, culture, and music of the early African Atlantic world, as well as the fields of sound studies and digital humanities. Mary Caton is the author of African Musicians in the Atlantic World: Legacies of Sound and Slavery (UVA 2023) and she also co-edited Digital Sound Studies (Duke 2018). In addition to traditional academic writing, she collaborates with artists and employs multimedia to bring research to public audiences.

Allison Bennett Dyche is Teaching Professor in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), starting the role in August 2024. She is teaching media literacy and introduction to journalism & nonfiction, and will be helping to envision and build a new multidisciplinary journalism program at Pitt. Allison spent the past 16 years advising collegiate student media programs at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Appalachian State University and Virginia Commonwealth University, working with student-run media outlets including digital media, newspapers, feature and literary magazines and radio stations, and also served in elected leadership roles in national college media advising organizations. Additionally, she served as an adjunct journalism instructor at Appalachian State University, where she taught audio storytelling & podcasting, multimedia storytelling, news reporting & writing, and intro to journalism. Allison has spent time working as a professional journalist as well in newspapers, magazines, radio and television. She holds a B.S. in Journalism from Georgia Southern University, an M.A. in Documentary Photography from SCAD, and graduated with her Ph.D. in Media, Art, and text from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023.

Michael Means graduated in 2012 with an M.A. in English Literature. Michael completed his doctoral studies in the MATX program at VCU and defended his dissertation, “Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices and Radical Adaptation in Multi-Ethnic American Literary and Visual Culture,” in the Spring of 2019. Michael is an associate professor of English at Brightpoint Community College, where he's been teaching courses in literature and composition full-time since Fall 2019. Michael's research and teaching interests include: Adaptation Studies, Multi-Ethnic American Literature and Visual Culture, African American Literature, World Literature, Media Literacy, Comparative Literature, and Composition Studies. His work emphasizes the role of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and sexuality as they intersect in the production of culture. He is currently working on articles that examine the adaptive legacies of Harlem's gay rebel, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass.

Paul L. Robertson is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Marshall University. Originally from Hardy, Virginia (at the juncture of Roanoke, Bedford, and Franklin counties, in the Virginia Blue Ridge), Dr. Robertson earned master’s degrees in Appalachian Studies and English from Appalachian State University, and holds a Ph.D. in Media, Art, and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University. He taught courses in Appalachian literature, Appalachian folklore, and multiethnic literature at VCU for seven years before coming to Marshall in the fall of 2023, as an Appalachian literature specialist. Dr. Robertson has also worked for Southern and Appalachian-related archives at Appalachian State and at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. His research interests vary widely, from Appalachian balladry to Appalachian-themed comic books, but primarily concerns contemporary representations of Appalachian identity in mass media and literature. He has been published in The North Carolina Folklore Journal and The Journal of Popular Culture. He is currently working on a book, The Mountains at the End of the World: Subcultural Appropriations of Appalachia, 1990- 2010. He lives in Huntington with his wife, Simms, and two savage rat terriers (aka: “Appalachian feist-dogs”).

Tracy Stonestreet is the Director of UMW Galleries at University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and the Academic Director of SECAC, the Southeastern College Art Conference. Tracy’s research pursuits have focused on the global artistic shifts toward action during the twenty-first century, and the evolving relationship between performance art and long-lasting art objects. After graduating from the MATX Program in 2019, Tracy served as Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Performance at VCU Qatar before moving to UMW. She lives in Richmond with her wife and two children.