Joe Bender
Advisor: Tom Conley
Interests: subjectivity and space, particularly in West African crime fiction; 20th century novel; poststructuralism.

*Jean Eudes Biem
Advisor: Verena Conley
Dissertation topic: Globalization and the Cosmopolitan Reconfiguration of Modernity: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Politics
Interests: Francophone literature of Africa and the Caribbean; the complex aesthetics of the novel, especially as it mixes African orature and Western writing. Key authors here are Edouard Glissant, Werewere Liking, Patrick Chamoiseau, Georges Ngal, etc. Analysis of the intellectual and political significance of their interstitial position and strategies of hybridization in relation to the challenges of globalization.

Elizabeth Carter
Advisor: Janet Beizer
Interests: Shifting borders and their influence on identity; subversion of borders by certain 19th and 20th century personnages: wanderers, vagabonds, Gypsies.

*Adriana Chimu
Advisor: Tom Conley [Janet Beizer, Evelyne Ender]
Dissertation topic: Nerval, le Temple et le Théâtre. Etude sur le rapport du théâtre et du sacré dans l'oeuvre de Gérard de Nerval. (provisional title)
The conjunction of theatrical imagery with religious references in the literary works and theater reviews of French Romantic author Nerval. Nerval’s specificity in a larger Romantic context of inquiry over the potentials of literature to inject new spiritual content in post-Revolutionary French society, albeit in non-traditional secular forms.

Ian Fleishman
(ad hoc degree program with German Languages and Literatures)
Advisor: Susan Suleiman
Interests: memory and representations of mnemonic structures in literature, medicalization of memory (psychoanalysis, trauma theory, hysteria, etc.), nostalgia and mourning, traumophilia, ruinophilia, dynamics of the archive, experience in metropolitan modernity, intersections between French and German literature and theory.

Lauren Fortner
Advisor: Janet Beizer
Dissertation topic: Displacement and the Art of Female Portraiture in the Works of Mme de Staël, George Sand, and Berthe Morisot
Interests: 19th-20th century French literature and culture (and comparative perspectives with other countries, especially the Francophone world); questions of women and gender; 19th century art
history; displacement/exile/travel and artistic creativity; silence in literature; narrative theory and the structure of the novel (especially the idea of closure); melodrama

Brenton Hobart
Advisor: Tom Conley
Interests: Appearances and imaginations in the Renaissance literary text, with emphasis on the re-writing of the plague and plagues throughout Humanist Europe, including: recreations of the fictive disease by sedentary continental literary writers; differential and deviating definitions by writers of texts deemed objective such as essays and medical treatises; as well as references to, and opinions of, the plague when encountered in the journals of writers traveling abroad.

*Sara Kippur
Advisor: Susan Suleiman [Diana Sorensen, Christie McDonald]
Dissertation topic: The Translingual Self: bilingual autobiography in the works of Hector Bianciotti, Jorge Semprun and Raymond Federman
An exploration of ‘ambilinguals’—writers who have a significant body of work in two languages—and specifically their autobiographical projects. Focuses on two authors that consistently shift between languages (Jorge Semprun between French and Spanish; Raymond Federman between French and English) and Hector Bianciotti, who made a definitive shift from Spanish to French mid-way through his career. Examines how national and international traumas of the 20th century (the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, Peronism) and the cultural displacement they occasion pose challenges to the concept of national literatures. Explores how an obsessive rewriting of the self both transgresses linguistic, literary, and socio-political boundaries and signals the birth of innovative and experimental forms of self-expression.

*Séverine Meunier
Advisor: Susan Suleiman [Tom Conley, Christie McDonald]
Dissertation topic: Proust ou l’écriture de l’avant-garde: une écriture en reaction avec elle-même.
Avant-garde and modernity in the works of Proust, also using the works of Joyce and Svevo to compare the various ways in which the authors explore the possibilities of the "novel" (as a literary genre) but also push back its limits in a way that will mark the rest of the XXth century.

Khaleem Mohammed-Ali
Advisor: Susan Suleiman
Interests: 19th- and 20th-century French literature; Oscar Wilde (esp. "Salome"); opera (Wagner, Strauss, Debussy, Poulenc); representations of animality (diachronic); hybridity (siren, vampire, werewolf, chimera); modern philosophy (Descartes to Kant); 19th-century philosophy (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche); phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Ingarden).

*Alina Opreanu
Advisor: Janet Beizer, [Larry Kritzman (Dartmouth), Christie McDonald]
Dissertation topic: La Chambre noire de l’écriture: Mourning in French Literature (Barthes, Proust, Colette, Gide, Duras)
An examination of mourning in autobiographically nuanced works by Barthes (La Chambre claire), Proust (La Fugitive/Albertine disparue), Colette (La Maison de Claudine, Sido, La Naissance du jour), Gide (Et Nunc manet in te), and Duras (L’Amant). Beginning with a reflection on the photographic image of mourning in La Chambre claire, the ‘work of mourning’ for the unique being is analyzed in relation to the complexity of writing one’s grief. This ‘textual’ work of mourning substituting one image for another, representing the ambivalence of loss, and each author’s attempt to express the truth of remembrance against the pull of forgetting is read as a mode of literary creation that has left its mark on the philosophical debates and criticism surrounding twentieth-century French literature.

*François Proulx
Advisor: Susan Suleiman [ Christie McDonald, Judith Surkis]
Dissertation topic: Books and readers in the French novel of formation, 1870-1940
Examines representations of reading in the novel of formation in the French Third Republic (1870-1940). As contradictory discourses on the potential uses and dangers of reading circulate in late 19th- and early 20th-century France, concern over the proper socialization of young masculine subjects lead to the redeployment of the novel of formation as an often didactic genre. Considers Stendhal, held up by a number third-republic authors as the most pernicious novelistic influence on the youth of the time, in order to set up parameters for examining the theme of reading in the novel. Investigates how novelists from Barrès to Drieu la Rochelle attempt to negotiate (or try to discount) ideological ambivalence over the question of their medium, while others like Martin du Gard and Gide develop an ironic, self-conscious practice of citation of social and literary discourses on reading.

Cooper Renfro
Advisor: Tom Conley
Interests: Intersection of philosophy with literature; the literature of the fantastic and images of madness in 19th century literature; Autobiography and the concept of authorship; The study of binarism in post-colonial Francophone literature.

*Felisa Reynolds
Advisor: Tom Conley [Abiola Irele, Odile Cazenave, Maryse Condé.]
Dissertation Topic: “Almost the same, but not quite/Almost the same but not white”: The question of Literary Cannibalism" I propose that literary cannibalism occurs when Aimé Césaire takes Shakespeare’s The Tempest and gives us Une Tempête; when Assia Djébar seeks to right history in L’Amour la Fantasia by challenging the ‘official historical’ account of what occurred when the French invaded Algeria in 1830; when Boubacar Boris Diop takes on Mérimée by re-writing Tamango as Le Temps de Tamango; and when Maryse Condé re-writes Wuthering Heights as La Migration des cœurs. What is the effect achieved when francophone writers ‘cannibalize’ Western canonical literary works? In the re-appropriation and re-writing of these works, should we speak of literary cannibalism or should we speak of “colonial mimicry”, as Bhabha suggests? Quite simply, are we to interpret these re-appropriations as a violent act of revolt in keeping with the aggressive act of cannibalism, or merely as a submissive act—much like that of colonial mimicry?

Kathryn Rose
Advisor: Tom Conley
Interests: influences of science and medicine in literature.

*Loren Wolfe
Advisor: Alice Jardine
Interests: 20th century French literature, particularly the intersections and tensions between medical and literary discourses; Illness as metaphor, the figuration of the body as a site of meaning and signification; The 19th century formulation of hysteria as "la maladie du siecle"; the topos of auto-immunity in more recent literary works.

Stephanie Wooler
Advisor: Janet Beizer
Interests: 19th century prose fiction; gender identity; feminist theory; trauma and the French Revolution; nineteenth-century re-writings of the French Revolution; family structures; performance and identity
Proposed thesis topic: performative gender identity in representations of the actress in the French novel, 1870-1914

Tali Zechory
Advisor: Christie McDonald
Interests: 18th- and 20th-century aesthetics and epistemology; the relation of philosophy and literature; trauma, critique, epistemic regimes and regime change, and how the figure/metaphor of madness and/or the madman may be used to express these. Authors of interest: Rousseau, Diderot, Derrida, Foucault, Sarah Kofman.

ITALIAN

*Sonia Brighenti
Advisor: Francesco Erspamer [Stefania Lucamante, Giuliana Minghelli]
Dissertation Topic: "I have rebel blood in me" la trasgressione nei romanzi femminili italiani contemporanei.
In the last fifteen years, a group of Italian women writers has shown a tendency to include in their discourse a series of female subjects that are considered taboos: menstruations, incest, anorexia, extreme sex, and lesbianism. I refer to this inclusion of taboos as a form of transgression. My dissertation investigates the social and moral implications of transgression in literature, as well as what exactly is meant by the term, by looking at the works of seven contemporary Italian women authors: Elena Ferrante, Isabella Santacroce, Elena Stancanelli, Alessandra Amitrano, Simona Vinci, Tatiana Carelli and Marilù Manzini.

Paola de Santo
Advisor Lino Pertile
Interests: Early Modern Italian literature, namely political treatises, prescriptive literature, theater and theatricality especially Castiglione, Tasso, Petrarca, Machiavelli. Intersections between aesthetics and politics in visual as well as literary culture, particularly in the Renaissance epics of Tasso and Ariosto. The “Orient”, the printing press and the rise of popular “consumption” literature; Discourses of civility, identity and selfhood, aesthetics and politics. Critical and aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis and marxism.

*Elgin Eckert
Advisor: Francisco Erspamer [Franco Fido, Salvatore Nigro, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa]
Dissertation topic: Andrea Camilleri and the Modern Sicilian Aesthetic
The Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri has for the last 15 years been the best-selling author in Italy. My dissertation will place his work within the context of Italian and Sicilian narrative tradition as well as investigate how an author who writes in a language that is half dialect/half Italian and bases every one of his plots in the same small Sicilian community has managed to capture an audience in all age brackets and beyond the confines of Italy. How does Camilleri free his protagonists from stereotypes that have been (self)-imposed upon Sicilian character since the beginnings of Italian narrative?

*Stacy Giufre
Advisor: Lino Pertile
Dissertation Topic: Pavese and women
Interests: My work focuses on the representation of women in Cesare Pavese's complete works and examines the roles female characters play in shaping both individual and collective identity during the ventennio fascista and the post-war period.

Kyle Hall
Advisor: Lino Pertile
Interests: the role of the dialogue in Renaissance literature, the myth of America in the Italian mind, and the intersection of Renaissance art and literature.

Jimmy McMenamin
Advisor: Lino Pertile [Luis Girón-Negrón and Jan Ziolkowski]
Dissertation Title: The Sequence 'beginning-middle-end', Dante and Petrarch
This dissertation focuses on the pervasive presence of the triadic sequence beginning-middle-end in medieval Italian literature. I analyze its genesis, frequency, variation, philosophical ramifications and meaning in early Italian literature. I ultimately argue for a conceptualized usage of the sequence, viewed from a philosophical perspective, which I apply to two cardinal texts of the Italian canon – Dante's Commedia and Petrarch's Canzoniere – where we are able to see how both poets continuously engage the sequence, but in two very different ways.

**Caterina Mongiat Farina
Dissertation Topic: The Code of Imagination: Rethinking the questione della lingua.
Advisor: Francesco Erspamer [Lino Pertile, Diego Zancani]
Ever since the publication of Pietro Bembo's Prose della Volgar Lingua in 1525, the "questione della lingua", the debate over the appropriate form of literary language, has divided Italian writers into two factions: those who believed in strict linguistic standards, and those who imagined a more inclusive literature. In my dissertation I illustrate how talking about language these intellectuals developed and debated contrasting visions of the world and put the foundations for modernity.

*Antonio Morena
Advisor: Lino Pertile [Francesco Erspamer; Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU)]
Dissertation topic: 1932
A case study of the tenth year anniversary of the March on Rome, "from a distance": (1) youth in 1932, (2) school textbooks, (3) realism in 1932, (4) the popular novel in 1932, (5) Solaria in 1932.

Adam Muri-Rosenthal
Advisor: Lino Pertile
Interests: Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Film.

Cara Takakjian
Advisor: Lino Pertile
Interests: Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, Film and Music.

*Vickie Tillson
Advisor: Francesco Erspamer [Lino Pertile, and Antonio Vitti (Indiana University, Bloomington)]
Dissertation Topic: Demythifying Rome: A Socio-Spatial Examination of the "Down and out" In 1950s Italian Literature and Film.
I explore the desecration and debasement of Rome's reputation as the Eternal City during the Post World War II and early Economic Boom period. I utilize the short stories, novels, and films produced by major cultural figures, including Vittorio DeSica, Federico Fellini, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Alberto Moravia, and above all Pier Paolo Pasolini to construct an argument about the social and spatial displacement of the Italian capital city's most "down and out" population. I position Pasolini's first novel "Ragazzi di vita" at the crux of the transformation of Rome's mythical reputation, sustaining that it highly impacted the cultural climate and the works of his fellow writers and directors during the late 1950s and beyond.

*Daniele Turello
Advisor: : Lino Pertile [Francesco Erspamer]
Dissertation topic: The Self and the Interface : Identity and Technology in Italian Literature from Jacopone to Vico

Portuguese

Elena Campani
Advisor: Joaquim-Francisco Coelho
Interests: Specific aspects of the relationship between art (mainly painting) and literature and of the mutual influences between Portuguese and Italian literatures; Portuguese Renaissance; contemporary Brazilian poetry (Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond de Andrade); Brazilian national identity and travel literature from the Middle Ages to Renaissance.

Bruno Carvalho
Advisor: Joaquim-Francisco Coelho
Interests: Intersections between urban development and cultural production (music, poetry, film), especially in Brazil; race relations in colonial Latin America; influence of the "American Revolution" in independence movements in 18th century Minas Gerais; remnants of a "mystical" and "pagan" catholicism in contemporary rural Portugal and Brazil; authors: Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, João do Rio, Cesário Verde, Fernando Pessoa, Manuel Bandeira, Rubem Fonseca.

Christopher Lewis
Advisor: Joaquim-Francisco Coelho
Interests: Late-19th century through Modernist Brazilian Literature; Machado de Assis; The epic genre and the sonnet through history; Fernando Pessoa—o ortônomo; Formalism; Gaúcho Studies; Literary translation.

Spanish

*Daniel Aguirre
Advisor: Luis Fernández Cifuentes (Mary Gaylord; 3rd reader TBA)
Dissertation topic: "Descripción de la mentira": sentido y realidad del testimonio en la poesía de Antonio Gamoneda.
Interests: Spanish Poetry of all Periods; 20th-Century Latin American Poetry; Theories of the Lyric and the Self; Poetry and Exile; Comparative Poetry and Poetics; Symbolism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Post-modernism; Practice of Poetry Translation.

Alba Aragón
Advisor: Doris Sommer
Interests: Social Change, Feminism, Poetry, 20th century Latin American Literature.

Katie Auffinger
Advisor: Diana Sorensen
Interests: 19th-century Latin American literature, especially Argentine literature, representation of space and place, tensions between the representations of Buenos Aires and the expanses of the pampas, relationships between space and power under Rosas’s regime and in Roca's “Conquista del desierto,” representation of violence, Echeverría, Mansilla.

Lotte Buiting
Advisor: Mariano Siskind
Interests: Latin American contemporary literature, particularly that of the 19th century; Latin American and Spanish film and poetry.

Eric Calderwood
Advisor: Mary Gaylord
Interests: Spanish historiography; Hispano-Christian and Hispano-Arabic historiography of the Middle Ages; al-Andalus; colonial historiography (crónicas de Indias); Spanish Golden Age poetry and theater; Renaissance poetics; Renaissance Studies and literatures; Latin literature and its translation and reception in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Catalan literature and culture; legal history; Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).

*Christian Claesson
Advisor: Diana Sorensen (Brad Epps, Mariano Siskind, Julio Premat [Paris VIII])
Dissertation title: “Circumscriptions: Relations between Place, Space, and Meaning in Juan Carlos Onetti and Juan José Saer”
An exploration of the role of spatial relations in the production of meaning in the works of Juan Carlos Onetti and Juan José Saer. A parallel reading of the nature, effects and use of these relations will elucidate the links between Onetti and Saer and their respective literary contexts. It will also bring forth an understanding of how these authors use spatial configurations to outline a theory of doubt, as a way of circumscribing the sense of literature.

Javier de Taboada
Advisor: Diana Sorensen
Interests: Twentienth Century Latin American fiction. Latin American cinema. Cinema and
literature. Transatlantic relations within Europe and Latinoamerica in cinema
and literature.

*Margarita del Rosario
Advisor: Francisco Márquez [ Luis Girón, James Monroe.]
Dissertation topic: El mudejarismo en la obra de don Juan Manuel

*José Falconi
Advisor: Doris Sommer [Thomas Cummins, Nicolau Sevcenko]
Dissertation topic: Second Nature: An essay on Landscape in Latin American Literature and Culture
A study of the way in which (natural) landscape has been depicted in Latin American literature since Independence. The exploration of several key, canonical texts (Sarmiento, Arguedas, Rivera), examining the different ways in which authors have reacted to the fear produced by the exuberance and vastness of their natural environs. Why, in Latin American literarature there are very few cases of traditional "sublime" landscapes despite the traditional belief that Latin America is so exuberant and vast that its "reality exceeds (western) concepts".

Martín Leonardo Gaspar
Advisor: Diana Sorensen
Interests: The role of translation in contemporary Latin American fiction. The translator as character, writer, seeker; translation and cultural politics. Translation studies and literary criticism. Bilinguism.

Andrew Gray
Advisor: Luis Girón
Interests: Medieval and golden age poetry; theories of intertextuality; golden age prose narrative; allegory and satire; Cervantes's Don Quijote and the history of Quijote criticism; the sentimental romance and the pastoral; problems of imitation and originality.

Winston Groman
Advisor: Doris Sommer
Interests: 19th-century Latin American narrative; Caribbean and Central American literature; River Plate literature and Culture; The African Diaspora in Latin America; Mestizo and mulatto identities in Latin America; "Mestizaje" in Medieval Iberia; Iberoamerican dialectology and nationalism; Romance philology; "In-betweener" nations and languages (such as Andorra and Portuñol, respectively), Romance-based creole languages; Frontiers and margins as spaces of cultural and linguistic innovation or conservation; Transatlantic Studies; Translation; Multilingualism; Hybridity; Feminism and Race Theory; Post-structuralism, Postmodernism and Post-colonial studies.

Rebeca Hey Colón
Advisor: Doris Sommer
Interests: 20th Century Latin American and Caribbean literature (Hispanophone, Francophone, and Anglophone), postcolonialism, and hybridity. Minor in Portuguese.

Eduardo Ledesma
Advisor: Brad Epps
Interests: 20th and 21st century Peninsular Literature, Contemporary Catalan Literature, Film, and the interaction between the Visual Arts and Literature; urban genres and modes, such as the 20th century detective novel and the study of urban culture. Merging of visual arts and the written word in both the real-space urban context (i.e. graffiti, poster, magazine, art gallery), and cyberspace (i.e. Internet, ezines, video art, virtual hangouts, online coffeehouses).

Melissa Machit
Advisor: Mary Gaylord
Interests: Medieval and Golden Age literature, particularly poetry and manuscripts of the Iberian empire; the relationship between poetry and national identity; pastoral literature, imitation theory, authorial masks, Petrarchism in Spain and Portugal.

Nefer Muñoz Solano
Advisor: Diana Sorensen
Interests: 19th and 20th-century Latin American literature in Spanish and Portuguese. Prose and poetry. Intersections, common estrategies and differences between literary and journalistic discourses. Verisimilitude, legitimacy and authority of the "journalistic truth" and literary fiction. Authors: José Martí, Machado de Assis, Gabriel García Márquez, Tomás Eloy Martínez and Silviano Santiago.

*Manolo Núñez-Negrón
Advisor: Diana Sorensen
Dissertation topic: Political satire in Latin America and the public sphere (19th and 20th century)
Interests: Spanish American literature, with special emphasis on 19th and 20th centuries; intellectual, social and cultural history. Political satire in Latin America, poetry, journalism and the relationship between political thought and literary tradition. Intersections between literary and political discourse in México and Argentina.

*Maria Ospina
Advisor: Doris Sommer (Diana Sorensen, Francisco Ortega, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.)
Dissertation topic: Prácticas de memoria o cómo resistir el acabóse: Violencia y representación en la narrativa colombiana, 1985-2005.
This study will address the issue of violence in Colombia focusing on how literary and filmic products (La virgen de los sicarios, Delirio, Confesión a Laura and other texts) have intervened in the debates about civil turmoil from the 1980s to today, building memory practices, providing spaces for ethical inquiry and challenging the common thesis that Colombia is predisposed to a particular “culture of violence.”

César Pérez
Advisor: Luis Girón
Interests: Spanish American poetry, from the medieval to the contemporary, and its relations with the visual arts, the novel, the essay, how has it coped with the loss of its central position in the modern imagination; Medieval and early modern Spanish and Portuguese literatures; The connection between history and poetry; Theater and society; The intersection of different discourses (religious, philosophical, legal, etc.) in the literary field; Transatlantic connections during the baroque period.

*Jeronimo Pizarro
Advisor: Diana Sorensen, [Doris Sommer, Onésimo Almeida (Brown University)]
Dissertation topic: Editorial Agency.
Textual Criticism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Contemporary Latin-American and Portuguese Literatures.

Paul Politte
Advisor: Doris Sommer
Interests: 20th Century Latin American literature, with a focus in theater and performance
in Mexico and Argentina. Political theater, neoliberal discourse, and women
playwrights. Feminism, gender and sexuality, poststructuralism, and formalism. Sabina Berman, Vicente Leñero, Victor Hugo Rascón Banda, Rosario Castellanos, Emilio Carballido and Griselda Gambaro.

Itziar Rodriguez De Rivera
Advisor: Brad Epps
Interests: Contemporary literature and cinema, both Spanish and Latinoamerican; Catalan literature, especially twentieth century poetry and fiction, with a focus on the relationship between gender, nation and language; Gender studies and feminist theory.

*Joaquin Terrones
Advisor: Doris Sommer [Helen Vendler, Luis Girón or Arnaldo Cruz-Malave (Fordham U.)]
Dissertation topic: 1935-1938: The ethics of excess in Borges, Lezsama, Stevens, and Gorostiza.
The roles that gender, sexuality and national identity play in the formation of poetic and fictional subjects; Jorge Luis Borges' Historia universal de la infamia (Argentina 1935), José Lezama Lima's Muerte de Narciso (Cuba 1936), Wallace Stevens' The Man with the Blue Guitar (U.S. 1937) and José Gorostiza’s Muerte Sin Fin (Mexico 1938).

Cinthya Torres Nunez
Advisor: Luis Cárcamo Huechante
Interests: Interests: Literary Theory and critical thinking; Theoretical discourses applied to Colonial and Postcolonial Studies; Colonial and Latin American Indigenous Literatures; Andean Studies; Latin American Contemporary Literature; Contemporary Brazilian Literature.

*Esmeralda Ulloa
Advisor: Doris Sommer
Dissertation topic: The representation of the Inca and Aztec empires in contemporary Latin American poetry and narrative.
A study of the ways in which territoriality, discourses of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism interact with symbols of power of the precolombian empires of America. Interests: Colonial texts, mesoamerican codices, contemporary Latin American novel, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, Jose Maria Arguedas, Abel Posse, Homero Aridjis, and Carlos Fuentes.

*Juan de Dios Vázquez
Advisor: Diana Sorensen [Doris Sommer, Carlos Monsivais and John Womack].
Dissertation topic: Representations of crime and collective memory
Analysis of the literary forms Mexican intellectuals have employed in order to face traumatic events, and scrutiny of other forms of art such as film, television, painting and sculpture. Interests: Representations of crime shaped by cultural convergence.

* = Dissertation in Progress

Last updated on August 27, 2008