DISSERTATION TOPICS AND FIELDS OF INTEREST
* = Dissertation in Progress
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French/Francophone
Italian
Portuguese
Spanish
KHALEEM ALI
Advisor: Susan Suleiman [Alice Jardine, Christie McDonald]
Dissertation topic: "Je fais l'impossible": Body, Voice and Self in Samuel Beckett's Works
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
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 HARLEY
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.
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 [Tom Conley, Christie McDonald]
Dissertation topic: Resonant Silences: The Poetics of Listening in the Works of Germaine de Staël and George Sand
Interests: 18th-19th century French literature, Romanticism, 19th century art history, silence/wordless communication in literature, sentimentality, melodrama, closure in the structure of the novel, theories of listening, ethics, and community.
*BRENTON HOBART
Advisor: Tom Conley [Virginie Greene, Mary Gaylord] Tom Conley
Dissertation topic: L’Imaginaire de la peste dans la littérature française du XVIe siècle
Imaginative representations of the plague through the writings of Early Modern French authors, including François Rabelais, Clément Marot, Nostradamus, Pierre de Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau, Ambroise Paré, Michel de Montaigne, Théodore de Bèze and Agrippa d’Aubigné.
*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.
*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: Victims of the Book: Reading Anxieties in the French Novel of Formation, 1880-1913
KATHRYN ROSE
Advisor: Mylene Priam
Interests: Influences of science and medicine in literature
*LOREN WOLFE
Advisor: Alice Jardine [Janet Beizer, Christie McDonald]
Dissertation topic: From Immunity to Mutiny: French Modernity and the Undoing of Self
I am working on an interdisciplinary project investigating connections between the science of immunology and the literary imagination in post-World War II France. I am exploring how the emerging concept of immunity in twentieth century medicine relates to an epistemological shift in the definition and delineation of the self in contemporary French literature. To explore this relationship, I have chosen a number of authors (Albert Camus, Hervé Guibert, Jean-Luc Nancy and Yasmina Khadra) whose writing coincides with specific “breakthroughs” in immunology, and who privilege illness to reassess selfhood. This correspondence between literary product and scientific innovation suggests a promising yet unexplored path of inquiry that problematizes the dialectic between belonging and non-belonging, between self and other in the modern literary French corpus.
*STEPHANIE WOOLER
Advisor: Janet Beizer [Alice Jardine, Patrice Higonnet]
Dissertation topic: Performative gender identity in representations of the actress in the French novel, 1870-1914
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.
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.
*SONIA BRIGHENTI
Advisor: Francesco Erspamer [Stefania Lucamante, Giuliana Minghelli, Patrizia Tomacelli]
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: menstruation, 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?
Advisor: Lino Pertile [Francesco Erspamer]
Dissertation topic: Pavese and women.
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.
ADAM MURI-ROSENTHAL
Advisor: Francesco Erspamer
Interests: Italian Cinema and Contemporary Literature.
Advisor: Lino Pertile
Interests: Modern and contemporary Italian literature, film and music.
*DANIEL TURELLO
Advisor: Lino Pertile [Francesco Erspamer]
Dissertation topic: The Self and the Interface : Identity and Technology in Italian Literature from Jacopone to Vico.
Analysis and translation of texts from the rich literary tradition of war and resistance, primarily prior to and during World War II, in the context of a tapestry of thematic writings including those of Gentile, Croce, Gramsci, Jahier, Pavese, Fenoglio, and Calvino.
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.
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.
*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.
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 [Doris Sommer, Mariano Siskind]
Dissertation topic: Space and state power in representations of the Paraguayan War
A study of the portrayal of the Paraguayan War (or War of the Triple Alliance, 1864-1870) in works of fiction and non-fiction, with a focus on the representation of national space and state power during this conflict of territorial conquest. Treatment of the war in period texts, state discourse, memoirs, and the twentieth-century historical novel.
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 [Luis Girón Negrón]
Dissertation topic: "The Reconquest of the Word: Historiographic Conflict in Iberia, 1450-1550"
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).
*JAVIER de TABOADA
Advisor: Diana Sorensen [Doris Sommer and Mariano Siskind]
Working title: "Cineastas y escritores europeos en Latinoamérica: un estudio del contexto de producción".
*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 [Luis Fernandez-Cifuentes, Joaquim-Francisco Coelho, David Rodowick]
Dissertation topic: The Historic Avant-garde and the Digital Age: Experimental Literary Forms inBarcelona, Madrid and Lisbon
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 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 [Doris Sommer, Joaquim F. Coelho and Mariano Siskind]
Dissertation topic: The Politics of Humor: Aesthetic and Satirical Discourse in 19th century Latin America
The research project examines how humor and satire engage with the public ground of politics and the aesthetic ground of literature. It considers essays, columns, novels, and other forms of cultural productions (such as cartoons and caricatures) in order to conceptualize notions of citizenship in 19th century Latin America. Through the lens of humor and laughter, I examine the role of political discourse in authors and intellectuals like Fernández de Lizardi, Juan B. Alberdi, Ricardo Palma and Machado de Assis.
*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.
*PAUL POLITTE
Advisor: Doris Sommer [Mariano Siskind, Patricia Ybarra (Brown University)]
Dissertation topic: La risa y la revolución
Humor in 20th Century Mexican theater.
*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.
CINTHYA TORRES NUÑEZ
Advisor: Doris Sommer
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 November 10, 2009
