About

Welcome! I’m Aspen Ballas, a first-year graduate student in English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where, I teach English composition and rhetoric. Additionally, I teach online courses in the arts and humanities at Northern New Mexico College, where I served on the Faculty Senate and won Adjunct Faculty of the Year in 2025.

My research interests include aesthetics of race and class politics, comedy and horror, film, media, and 19th century trans-Atlantic literature. More broadly, my research explores the relationship between genre, narrative, and revolution.

After receiving my BA in philosophy with a minor in film and media studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver, I attended the University of Colorado, Denver, where I earned my MH with an emphasis in visual media. These academic foundations ingrained my curiosity for critical interdisciplinary research methods and cross-media narratology.

Within Chapel Hill’s department of English and Comparative Literature, I work as a graduate research assistant in the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab, and organize campus-wide film screenings and discussions as a member of Kino Corner.

I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. In addition to reading and writing, I love nature, gardening, baking, tennis, yoga, basketball, watching movies, playing video games, and spending time with my family.