VIOLETA BANICA
Advisor: Susan R Suleiman
"The City and the Nazi Concentration Camps: Reading (In)Human Spaces"

In my dissertation, I investigate parallels, whether fictitious, perceived or remembered, between the Nazi system of concentration camps and human built environment as filtered through the survivors’ traumatic memory of the camps. By building on existing, albeit unsystematic, research by historians and art historians on the planning and architecture of Nazi concentration camps in relationship to National Socialist city planning and architecture, I analyze the uses and effects of these parallels in French literature and film produced by former political deportees. I further explore their role in establishing a distinctive relationship between reader and text in testimonial literature, as well as their role in shaping the postwar memory of the camps.
 

THERESE BANKS
Advisor: Tom Conley
Research Interests: Early Modern French literature, especially 16th-17th century literature and Agrippa d'Aubigné; Baroque Poetry and Ekphrasis.

 

MATTHEW BARFIELD
Advisor: Christie McDonald, [Sylvaine Guyot, Ann Blair (History)]
"French moraliste writing from Blaise Pascal to Joseph Joubert"

Situated somewhere between the fields of literary criticism, intellectual history, cultural history, philosophy and theology, my dissertation will study the development of French moraliste writing from the late seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century; from the works of renowned seventeenth-century moralists such as Blaise Pascal, François de La Rochefoucauld, Jean de La Fontaine, Jean de La Bruyère, and the Marquise de Sablé, to those of eighteenth-century authors such as the Marquis de Vauvenargues, Alexis Piron, Antoine de Rivarol, Nicolas Chamfort, and Joseph Joubert. I aim to re-examine the idea that moraliste writing arose chiefly from the late-seventeenth century political context of aristocratic writers disillusioned by their loss of feudal power under absolute monarchy, and theological context of these writers' Augustinian or "Jansenist" beliefs. Contrary to these assumptions' basis in the biographies of the great moralistes of the late seventeenth century, moraliste writing continued to thrive throughout the eighteenth century in a diverse array of political and religious (or even irreligious) contexts - Royalists and Jacobins; aristocrats and bourgeois; Catholics, neo-Epicureans and neo-Stoics. What, then, motivated writers with such disparate views to use a style typified by the earlier moralistes? How was moraliste writing influenced by the social milieu with which it has become inextricably linked, the aristocratic salons organised chiefly by female hostesses? And can these writers' often cynical witticisms inspire us to moral improvement, as individuals or as a society? These are just some of the questions that I hope to address.

 

JOHN D'AMICO
Advisor: Janet Beizer[Virginie Greene, Alice Jardine] 
Writing Ennui & Reorienting Attention in 19th Century France and Beyond: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Proust

 

EMILY EPPERSON
Advisor: Sylvaine Guyot
Research Interests: French Renaissance literature; national identity; music; poetry.

 

MATTHIEU GLAUMAUD-CARBONNIER
Advisor: Susan Suleiman
Research Interests: French contemporary literature; cultural history of contemporary France; representations of heroism in contemporary French literature and cinema; popular literature; the figure of the "Français moyen"; literature and politics; poetics of documentary.

 

IFIGENIA GONIS
Advisor: Sylvaine Guyot
Research Interests: Contemporary French theatre (the body in performance, limits of performance); Sociopolitical implications of performance. 

 

MEHDI IZADI DASTGERDI
Advisor: Tom Conley
Research Interests: Post-Enlightenment French Prose, Intersection of Literature and Philosophy through the Lens of Hermeneutic Phenomenology.

 

ÉMILE LÉVESQUE-JALBERT
Research Interests: 20th Century Literature, Intersection of Philosophy and Literature, Experimental Literature, Philosophy of Humor, French Cinema.

 

TUO LIU
Advisor: Janet Beizer
Research Interests: 19th century novel, especially realism and naturalism; intersection of medicine and literature; French renaissance poetry and its history.

 

GRÉGOIRE MENU
Advisor: Sylvaine Guyot [Tom Conley, Sophie Houdard (Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3)]
"Trafiquer le passé: élaboration et usages de figures exemplaires (1624-1660)"

 

NIKHITA OBEEGADOO
Advisor: Françoise Lionnet
Research interests: Contemporary francophone literature; migration and diaspora; insularity, border theory and cultural fluidity, especially in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean; the intersection of technology and the human experience; digital humanities. 

 

MATTHEW RODRIGUEZ
Advisor: Janet Beizer
Research Interests: 19th and 20th century literature, Marcel Proust, psychoanalysis, illness and suffering, grief, humanity and problems of justice.

 

HANNAH WEAVER
Advisor: Virginie Greene [Tom Conley, Daniel Donoghue (English)]

"Textual Mobility: The Medieval Journeys of Twelfth-Century Anglo-French Texts"

Works written in Plantagenet territory in the twelfth century traveled away from their site of production in both time and space, sometimes being copied centuries later in distant lands. Enthusiasts have long investigated the causes and contexts of the burgeoning literary production in the espace Plantagenet, but the medieval textual afterlife of texts produced in the Angevin empire has yet to be coherently studied. My study addresses this gap by tracing the mobility of a cluster of twelfth-century texts. These romans traveled between and across what we now perceive as nations, the lines of their itineraries knitting together a literary and historical past shared across Western Europe – including Britain.  I hypothesize that the transnational and enduring popularity of certain works has to do with their usefulness as sources of history in the medieval mode, when res digna memoria could be considered equal in value to res gestae. The routes texts took out of the Angevin empire created a map of shared knowledge and values validated by a common past. 

 

MADELEINE WOLF
Advisor: Janet Beizer
Research Interests: 19th-century literature; violence and cruelty; silence, absence, and nothingness; le fantastique; 20th & 21st-century literature

 

HYUN-KYUNG YUH
Advisor: Verena Conley
Research Interests: Contemporary French/francophone literature; migration and transnationalism; the intersection of literature, social theory, and law. 

 

EMMA ZITZOW-CHILDS
Advisor: Alice Jardine
Research Interests: 20th and 21st-century literature; musique et lettres, the performing body, the voice, temporality and loss, transgression, fascist thought in France.

MATTHEW COLLINS 
Advisor: Jeffrey Schnapp

Text and Image in Dante's Commedia and its Early Modern Illustrations (1481-1596)

My dissertation examines the early printed illustrated editions of Dante's Commedia, from 1481-1596. It explores the presence-- and absence-- of direct genealogical links between these engravings and the illuminated manuscripts and drawings of the Commedia that precede them. It also discusses the narratological implications of and the varying approaches to the transition from text to image among these volumes, and it examines what we can learn about early modern readers of Dante's poem through a study of the production and the use of these particular illustrated editions.
 

DALILA COLUCCI
Advisor: Francesco Erspamer 

Italian Visual Poetry’s Evolution from the Avant-garde to the End of the Twentieth Century

My dissertation focuses on Italian Visual Poetry’s evolution in the twentieth century, integrating traditional criticism with semiotic and technological aesthetics, visual culture, and cognitive sciences. Moving in the hybrid space of intermedia representation, I will examine poetic works in which a trespassing dynamic blurs the distinction between art and text, interacting with different types of creativity: Futurist metal books (L’anguria lirica, 1934); object-poems (like Balestrini’s Il sasso appeso, 1961, or Niccolai’s Poema&oggetto, 1974); collage poems (pursued in the 60s by Stelio M. Martini); sonorous and dynamic poetry of the 80s and 90s (exquisitely embodied by Lora-Totino’s performances).

 

CORRADO CONFALONIERI
Advisor: Jeffrey Schnapp
Research Interests: Epic Poetry; History and Theory of Literary Genres; Renaissance Culture; Ariosto and Tasso; Italian Contemporary Poetry; Montale; Zanzotto; Gadda; Literature and Philosophy.

 

VALENTINA FRASISTI
Advisor: Jeffrey Schnapp
Research Interests: Modern and contemporary Italian literature, comparative literature, theatre, philosophy.

 

MATTHEW GRIFFITH
Advisor: Jeffrey Schnapp
Research Interests: 20th and 21st C. Italian literature, videopoetry and net.art, experimental documentary media, aesthetics

 

AMELIA LINSKY
Advisor: Francesco Erspamer 
Research Interests: medieval and Renaissance cultures; history of science; historical costume; literary translation.

 

CECELIA SIGNATI
Advisor: Francesco Erspamer [Maria Grazia Lolla, Mary Ann McDonald Carolan(Fairfield University)
The Minor Character in Sicilian Literature

My dissertation will be an exploration of the minor characters and spaces that define late 19th and 20th century Sicilian literature, a literature which in spite of its marginal geographical origins may in fact be considered one of the great protagonists of Italian literature. The figures and spaces present in the works of Verga, De Roberto and Tomasi di Lampedusa will play a significant role in this inquiry into the minor protagonists of Sicilian literature.

 

CHIARA TREBAIOCCHI
Re-schooling Society. Pedagogia come forma di lotta nella vita e nell’opera di Franco Fortini (The Battle for Education in the Life and Works of Franco Fortini)

My dissertation focuses on Franco Fortini and his ideas on pedagogy, school and education. As one of Italy’s most prominent writers and poets of the XXth Century, Fortini’s works have been recognized and studied for their literary, social and cultural value, also in relation to other important authors and events of contemporary Italian literature (such as Elio Vittorini and the Politecnico; the years of Quaderni Piacentini; Pier Paolo Pasolini; Italo Calvino). I will consider Fortini’s writings through the lens of his pedagogical ideas, strictly connected to his Marxist and Gramscian ideology. Fortini’s scholastic anthologies, the refusal of “specialized knowledge”, the role of teachers in the school (in parallel with that of the intellectuals in society), the urgent need to preserve and pass to the younger generations an historical memory and a tradition as a way to protect cultural values and the humanities in times of crisis, the reflection on communicative writings: these are only some of the topics that I will discuss in my dissertation while analyzing the educational dimension in the life and work of Franco Fortini.

KACEY CARTER
Advisor: Josiah Blackmore
Research Interests: Contemporary Brazilian and Portuguese literature; constructions of gender and sexuality; modernism; avant-garde; constructions of reality and imagination

 

MARIYA CHOKOVA
Advisor: Josiah Blackmore
Research Interests: non-discrimination of gender and sexuality as human rights

 

MARIA GATTI
Advisor: Josiah Blackmore
Research Interests: Literary history in the context of Brazil-United States relations, during the period between World War II and the military coup in Brazil (1964). Travel writings produced by two Brazilian writers of Clarice Lispector and Erico Verissimo, and Elizabeth Bishop and John dos Passos. The relations between Brazil and the U.S. and those between History and Literature. National identity; fact vs fiction; the role of culture in foreign policies; authors' political views, and police investigations on writers.

 

ANA PAULA HIRANO
Advisor: Josiah Blackmore  
Research Interests: Contemporary Brazilian literature; contemporary Latin American literature; time, space, and memory in Brazilian and world literature; existentialism and magical realism; film studies; the relationship between cinema and literature

 

AARON LITVIN
Advisor: Josiah Blackmore
Research Interests: Portuguese and Brazilian literature and history; migration and transnationalism; documentary filmmaking

JUAN MANUEL ARIAS
Research Interests: Fables, framed stories and wisdom literature in the Middle Ages. I am also interested in the history of Medieval Iberia in general and the history and theories of translation. I have also been studying the representation of non-human animals in the Spanish Medieval tradition and in the works of Ramon Llull.

 

IGNACIO AZCUETA
Advisor: Mariano Siskind
Research Interests: Latin American literature from the 20th and 21st century, crime, terror and science fiction and their developments and intersections, transpositions in film and literature, tensions between modernism and avant-garde, constitutions of power and community in contexts of political struggles, biopolitics, world literature.

 

ALBERTO CASTILLO VENTURA 
Advisor: Mariano Siskind, [Sergio Delgado]
Research Interests: 20th-Century and Contemporary Latin American Narrative; Latin American Cinema; Aesthetics; Critical Theory; Film Studies

 

RACHEL COMBS-GONZÁLEZ
Advisor: Lorgia García-Peña
Research Interests: contemporary US Latinx literature and performance; Queer, Feminist, Post-Colonial and Critical Race theories; Diaspora; the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, nationality, etc.; the relationships between Apocalypse and Utopia as seen in contemporary US Latinx and Latin American literatures and performances; and Queer Utopianism.

 

JOSÉ A. De LEÓN
Advisor: Mariano Siskind
Research Interests: 19th century transatlantic studies; history of ideas; post-and decolonial studies; estudios canarios; marxism and theory.

 

JERÓNIMO DUARTE RIASCOS
Advisor: Doris Sommer
Almost the Same But Not Quite- The Prosthetic Condition in (Latin American) Artistic Practices

Research interests: Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature // Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory // Intersections of Visual Art and Literature in Contemporary Latin America // Media, reception, and spectatorship // Aesthetics and Politics // Art, Innovation, and Social Change // Critical Studies // Art Education // Art, Science, and Technology

 

CRISTINA GARCÍA NAVAS
Advisor: Doris Sommer
Research Interests: Contemporary Latin American literature, oral tradition and popular music in relationship with identity politics, violence, social and political struggle; the Hispanic romancero and its derivations throughout Spanish America; Colombian literature; decolonial studies; nation and region; education.

 

ERNEST HARTWELL
Advisor: Doris Sommer [Mariano Siskind]
Footnotes to Empire: Marginal Advantages in Puerto Rican, Cuban & Filipino Narratives

An analysis of historiography, folklore and travel chronicles written around the turn of the century in the three countries whose fate was at stake in the Spanish American war. Primary focus is on the rhetorical strategies employed by colonized writers that engage literarily in the struggle for belated political autonomy. I argue that through marginal literary practices, as opposed to centrally canonical novels and poetry, the authors attempt not only to legitimate their political and geographical marginality, but to turn it into the source of their cultural authority.

 

ALINA LAZAR
Advisor: Sergio Delgado
Research Interests: Twentieth century eco-literature, art and film; eco-criticism; landscape and affect; representations of urban nature; architecture and literature; utopian and dystopian environmental fiction.

 

ISAAC MAGAÑA G CANTÓN
Research Interests: 20th- and 21st- century Latin American Literature; Spanish and Latin American Poetry; Historical Avant-Garde and Contemporary Art; Institutional Critique; Cultural and Literary Magazines; Urban and Regional Studies; The Relationship between Politics, Memory and Aesthetics.

 

THENESOYA VIDINA MARTÍN DE LA NUEZ
Advisor: Bradley S. Epps
Research Interests: Transatlantic Studies, border spaces; isolation and periphery in Hispano-African, Canary Islands and Caribbean texts. Her research focuses on Hispano-African literature of Equatorial Guinea and the insular spaces within the transatlantic triangulation of Canarias-Africa-Caribbean. Her interests are linked by a single idea: the need of amplify our conventional understanding of Hispanism, and to include forms of cultural productions that have often been marginalized from academic discourse.

 

WILNOMY PÉREZ PÉREZ
Advisor: Luis Girón Negrón
Research Interests: Mysticism, Sufism, late medieval and Early Modern.

 

ADRIÁN RÍOS
Research Interests: Latin American literatures and cultures; comparative border studies; narratives of displacement, migration and diaspora; citizenship; performance studies; poetry and the body; artivism, spectatorship and civic engagement.

 

ANNA WHITE-NOCKLEBY
Advisor: Mariano Siskind
Crisis Aesthetics: Community and Critique in 21st Century Argentine Performance

My dissertation focuses on artistic production – theater, performance art, film and television – in Argentina following the country's 2001 economic crisis. I argue that innovative performances simultaneously waged critiques of the financial system and neoliberal politics, while also envisioning new forms of community.