Claudia Carroll

Graduate Fellow, 2022-23

Claudia Carroll is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, with a minor in Irish Studies. Her research focuses on the nineteenth-century British and Irish novel through a narrative theory and cognitive science lens. Her multi-disciplinary dissertation, “Why Character Seem Real”, uses approaches from computational text analysis and cognitive psychology to explain why we think about certain literary characters like real people—developing attachments to them, speculating about their behaviour in hypothetical situations, and feeling like we know them like we know our friends and family. Claudia’s other interests include fictional representations of history, cultural memory and narratology.