Current Students

Jacqueline Abrams
Major Interests: Mourning, revenge, and ressentiment; Spectral encounters, hauntings, Ouija boards; Opaque German and French philosophers; and Brazilian Samba dancing
jacqueline.abrams@emory.edu

Josh Backer
Major Interests: Modern French Thought (Foucault, Lyotard, Levinas, and Derrida); English and German Romanticisms; art and aesthetics; ethics and the affect in Lyotard; rethinking textual authority and authorship; psychoanalysis; 18th-20th century English, French, and German literatures
jbacker@learnlink.emory.edu

Naomi Beeman
Major Interests: German and French 19th and 20th century literature; Avant garde movements; Aesthetic theory; and Psychoanalysis
nbeeman@emory.edu

Patrick Blanchfield
Major Interests: 20th century French literature and philosophy; psychoanalysis (particularly Lacan and Loewald); questions of universality and translation; philosophy of science and problems of epistemological change; religion and phenomenology (especially themes of givenness, entelechy, and apophasis)
pblanch@emory.edu

Scott Branson
Major Interests: Ethics of reading; Figures of the reader and writer, citation and nostalgia; Freud, Derrida and de Man, 19th century French and 20th century British literature; and Rock and roll music
sbranso@emory.edu

Lucas Donahue
Major Interests: Ideology and history; deconstruction; classical Athens, and English and German Romanticisms; tragedy and repetition; literariness
ldonahu@emory.edu

Colleen Dunne
Major Interests: 20th Century American poetry; French film and Film theory; 19th and 20th Century French poetry; Constructions of Gender and Subjectivity; Metaphors related to vision and sight in literature and critical theory; Deconstruction and autobiography
cdunne@emory.edu

Asher Haig
Major Interests: Human machine-life networks; mimesis, psychoanalysis and the materialism of desire, social gravity and the somatic law, film as fantasy-image, post-human perception, cybernetic intelligence, cyborgism, subjectivity, and repetition
ahaig@emory.edu

Jacob Hovind
Major Interests: History and theory of the novel; personality and subjectivity in literary language; the ontology of literature and the idea of literariness; the relationship between hermeneutics and poetics; modern European literature, particularly in English and German
jhovind@emory.edu

Christine Kalleeny
Major Interests: Forms of decadence and mysticism: the transgressive and the pergessive in the Medieval Arab poetic tradition (mainly the wine song), also troubadour lyric and late 19th century French literature; Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions of thought in Arab tradition; and Arabic and French languages
ckallee@emory.edu

Maria Kepler
Major Interests: Ethics, novelistic dialogue, tragedy, intersections of literature and philosophy, and the continuing influence of classical languages and literatures
mkepler@emory.edu

Maya Kesrouany
Major Interests: Exchanges between literary modernisms; 19th century Arabic narrative; 19th century French literature; 20th century French Thought (Derrida and Lyotard); Post-colonial Discourse; and The Frankfurt School
mkesser@emory.edu

Anna Kowalik
American and Caribbean literatures, memory studies, trauma theory, literature and ethics, representation of the Holocaust in literature and film, women's studies
anna.kowalik@emory.edu

Christina Leon
Major Interests: Queer theory; Feminist theory; Performativity; Trauma studies; Cuban and Cuban-American studies; U.S. Latina/literature
cleon@emory.edu

Mirja Lobnik
Major Interests: Twentieth- and twenty-first-century literatures of the Americas and South Asia, including Native American, African American, Caribbean, Canadian, and Indian literatures; comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to memory, history, orality, music, and myth; literary theory (semiotic, postcolonial); and English, French, and German languages
mlobnik@emory.edu

Armando Mastrogiovanni
Major Interests: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in English; German, and French (modernism); deconstruction; psychoanalysis (ethics aesthetics and politics); ontersection of literature and philosophy around questions of rights, sovereignty, and citizenship (deconstruction and political theory)
ammastr@emory.edu

Deborah Mayrhofer
Major Interests: 19th - 20th century French and American literature, with special focus on revolutionary or political texts; and French, German and English languages
dmayrho@learnlink.emory.edu

Ronald Mendoza-De Jesus
Major Interests: 20th century French thought (Derrida, Foucault, Levinas); 19th and 20th century German thought (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger); 19th and 20th century Latin American literature; 18th and 19th century French literature; Political theory (sovereignty, biopolitics, radical democracy); Literary and Psychoanalytic Theory; Paul de Man
rmendoz@emory.edu

Jennifer Orth
Major Interests: Literature, aesthetics, ethics, and politics, especially in relation to totalitarian regimes; trauma theory; Holocaust and genocide studies; Ignazio Silone, Manes Sperber, and Albert Camus; French, German and Italian languages, literature, and films
jorth@emory.edu

Christina Parker
Major Interests: Sexuality/Gender studies and Feminist theory; Japanese language and culture; Psychoanalysis; 19th century French literature; Prostitution and pornography; Gothic literature and the horror film
cmparke@emory.edu

David Ritchie
Major Interests: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, Critical Theory, German Studies, Political Theory, Derrida, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Wilde, and American Literature
dritchi@emory.edu

Matt Roberts
Major Interests: Greek Tragedy, 19th - 21st Century German and French Philosophy and Literary Theory, 20th Century European Theater, Contemporary Progressive Metal
mjrober@emory.edu

Adam Rosenthal
Major Interests: Literary theory; French post-structuralist tradition; Textuality
arrose4@emory.edu

Ariel Ross
Major Interests: 19th - 20th century Russian literature; French lyric poetry; Ethical philosophy; Biblical interpretation and religious hermeneutics; Psychoanalytic theory; and Ancient Greek, French and Russian languages
ajross@learnlink.emory.edu

Andrew Ryder
Major Interests: Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, sovereignty, French modernism, historical materialism, surrealism, existentialism, Christianity and its discontents
aryder@emory.edu

Taylor Schey
Psychoanalysis; Literature of the Americas; Comparative modernisms; The production and ordering of knowledge
tschey@emory.edu

Jessica Sellountos
Major Interests: 18th - 20th century American and French literature; 19th - 20th century century French literary theory; Philosophy of history; Political and Psychological realism; Literature of revolutions (American and French); Catastrophes (Greece/Asis Minor); andFrenchand Modern Greek languages
jsellou@emory.edu

John Selvidge
Major Interests: Drama and theater; various Romanticisms; Post-structuralist theory; Psychoanalysis and its discontents; Genre Theory; and Writing Pedagogy
jselvid@learnlink.emory.edu

Brian Smith
Major Interests: 20th century American and world literature; media studies; the philosophy of technology and communication; the interpretation of music; post-humanism and post-modernism; image-sound-text; 911 studies
basmit3@learnlink.emory.edu

John Steen
Major Interests: The lyric tradition and speculative poetics; French and American verse 1850-present; anxiety and mourning; psychoanalytic and post-structuralist perspectives on literature, ethics and 'a politics, perhaps'; and long-distance running
johnsteeniv@gmail.com

Sarah Stein
Major Interests: 18th and 19th century British and French literature and the religious; Semiotics and translation theory; Epistolary writing; The Bible as literature
sbstein@emory.edu

Irene Suleman
Major Interests: Trauma theory, post-Holocaust (and survivor) literature and philosophy, including Levinasian ethics, feminist theory, esp. in relation to the literary work of women in Muslim-Arab societies, political theory, the problem of terror in relation to patriarchal terror (political terror and terror against women)
isulema@emory.edu

Tze-Yin Teo
Major Interests: literature and philosophy; the early modern; poetry and poetics; trauma theory; psychoanalysis; book culture; critical and affective pedagogy; and laughter
tteo@emory.edu

Sean Tommasi
Major Interests: Literary Hermeneutics; Psychoanalysis; Literature and Philosophy; German and British Romantic traditions (literature, philosophy, and literary criticism and theory); 20th Century Philosophy (phenomenology); 20th Century German and Austrian literature
stommas@emory.edu

Robert Vork
Major Interests: Psychoanalysis; Trauma theory; Subjectivity and madness, especially regarding psychotic and fascist structures; Sexuality and gender; and Revolution, carnival, and law
rvork@emory.edu

Alex Weil
Major Interests: 18th-20th century American and German literature; and Journalism and travel writing
acweil@emory.edu

Seth Wood
Major Interests: Literary Theory; Aesthetics; Continental Philosophy; 20th-century poetry and novel (British, American and French); 19th century American Literature; Pedagogy; Psychoanalysis
srwood@emory.edu

Eugene Brent Young
Major Interests: Paradox in the work of Gilles Deleuze; Literary Paradox in Carroll, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Blanchot. Religious motifs in literary and philosophical contexts. French and German languages
ebyoung@emory.edu

 

Alumni

Tanya Augsburg (1996)
Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies, University College at Arizona State University
Dissertation Title: Private Theatres Onstage: Hysteria and the Female Subject from Baroque Theatricality to Contemporary Feminist Performance

Jennifer Ballengee (2002)
Associate Professor of English, Towson State (University of Maryland)
Dissertation Title: The Art of Pain: Torture and the Literary

Olga Bardina
Thesis Title: Postmodernism in American and Russian Poetry: Theoretical Background and Experiments

Linde Marie Brocato
Dissertation Title: Communicating Desire: Self and Discourse in LA CELESTINA

John Caligiuiri (2008)
Dissertation Title: Language and Being in Heidegger and Hölderlin

Brooke Campbell (2008)
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, Colby College
Dissertation Title: "Woman" for Sale: Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Question of Sex Work

Ian Campbell (2003)
Assistant Professor of Arabic, Middle East Institute, Georgia State University
Dissertation Title: The Raveling of the Labyrinth:Spatiality and Subjectivity in 20th century Meghrebian Autobiographical Narratives

Svetlana Babushkina-Corwin (2008)
Assistant Professor of English, Belmont Abbey College
Dissertation Title: Eximate Existence: The Uncanny Poetics of Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak

Costantini Costantino (2001)
Assistant Professor of Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas, Bilkent University at Ankara (Turkey)
Dissertation Title: "L'attesa e il Nulle. Poesia, comico e sublime nel movereuto italiano"

Alberto Curotto
Program Assistant II, Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS), University of California, San Francisco

Sunita Dhurandhar
Thesis Title: Ghosts in the Mirror: Identity and History in Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory

Nicholas Ealy (2005)
Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages, University of Hartford
Dissertation Title: Speculations of Desire: Narcissism and Love Imagery in the Literature and Iconography of Medieval France and Iberia

Philip H. Gochenour(1998)
Dissertation Title: Fixing a Shadow: Doppelgangers, Photography, and the Disciplined Subject, 1775-1926

Stefanie Harris(1999)
Assistant Professor of German, Texas A&M University
Dissertation Title: Technologies of Representation: Literature and Media 1895-1930

Christian Holland (2004)
Dissertation Title: Time for Paul: Lyotard, Agamben, Badiou

Rob Hughes (2003)
Assistant Professor of English, Ohio State University
Dissertation Title: Writing Out of Death: Literature, Ethics, and the Beyond of Language

Angela Hunter (2004)
Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies, Department of Philosophy and Liberal Studies, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Dissertation Title: Subjects of Love and the Vicissitudes of Reading: Rousseau, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Derrida, Barthes

Luis Miguel Isava (1996)
Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela
Dissertation Title: Worlds out of Words: Wittgenstein, Kraus and Valery. Towards a Paradigm for Poetic (Rhyme &) Reason

Jennifer Jeffers (1994)
Associate Professor of English, Cleveland State University
Dissertation Title: Repetition and the Theater: Production of Difference in Beckett

David Kelman (2007)
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Comparative Literature and Linguistics, California State University, Fullerton
Dissertation Title: Conterfeit Politics: The Conspiracy Narrative in Twentieth Century U.S. and Argentine Literature

Raina Kostova (2006)
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jacksonville State University
Dissertation Title: Poetic Text and Socio-Political Reality in the Work of Wallace Stevens and Osip Mandelstam

Dan Leshem (2009)
Program Manager of HDOT.org and Assistant Administrator of iTunesU, Emory University
Dissertation Title: The Language of Suffering: Writing and Reading the Holocaust

Qian Ma (1997)
Dissertation Title: Ideality and Reality: Feminist Utopias and the Patriarchal World in Eighteenth-Century Chinese and English Fiction

Ruxandra Mandoiu (2009)
Dissertation Title:Literary Representations of Family and Nation In the Writings of Joseph Roth, Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, and Ingeborg Bachmann

Janet McAdams (1996)
Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry and Assistant Professor of English, Kenyon College
Dissertation Title: "This Blood is a Map": Voice and Cartography in Contemporary Native American Poetry

Brian McGrath (2006)
Assistant Professor of English, Clemson University
Dissertation Title: Future Reading: Romanticism, Aesthetics, Politics

Laura Martin
Lecturer, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, German, University of Glasgow
Dissertation Title: Narrative feminine identity and the appearance of woman in some of the shorter fiction of Goethe, Kleist, Hawthorne and James

Holly Martin (2002)
Assistant Professor of English, Appalachian State
Dissertation Title: Betwixt and Between: Bicultural Characteristics of Minority Literature in the United States

Maya Maxym (2003)
Dissertation Title: Modes of Accompaniment: Paul Celan's Language of Loss

Ben Miller (2009)
Lecturer, Writing and Humanistic Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dissertation Title: Testimonial Media

Paul Miller (1999)
Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese; Associate Director, Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies, Vanderbilt University
Dissertation Title: Where was Aufklarung? The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Derrilyn Morrison (2004)
Assistant Professor of English, Macon State College
Dissertation Title: Shifting Poetics: Creolization, Migration, Relation

Serigne Ndiaye (2002)
Resident Director of Program in Senegal, Council on International Educational Exchange
Dissertation Title: "White Lies"and Black Mythopoeia: The Politics of Memory and Representations of Africa in Contemporary Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures

Benjamin M. O. Odhoji (2000)
Dissertation Title: "Restorying" the Margins: Patterns of Self-Representation in Contemporary Black South African and African American Autobiographies

David Pehlke (2002)
Dissertation Title: The Failures of Romanticism

Mary K. (Cassie) Premo (1996)
Consulting Faculty, University of South Carolina
Dissertation Title: We Heal from Memory: Trauma, History, and American Women's Writing

David Price (1992)
Dissertation Title: Heresiarchs of History: Carlos Fuentes, Micel Tournier, and Salman Rushdie

Cay Sophie Rabinowitz(2002)
Senior U.S. Editor, Parkett Publishers, NY, NY
Thesis Title: Photomontage from Weimar to Reich: Hannah Hoch and Heinrich Hoffman

Esperanza Roncero (2002)
Assistant Professor of Spanish, Hartwick College
Dissertation Title: The Impact of Violence on Language, and Language's Resistance in the Novel Lumperica

Petra Schweitzer (2003)
Assistant Professor of German/French, Department of Foreign Languages, Shenandoah University
Dissertation Title: Art Under Duress: Trauma, Language and Witness in Charlotte Delbo and Paul Celan

Melissa Sexton (2008)
Post Doc, Transforming Community Project, Emory University
Dissertation Title: Playing, Beyond the Fields of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary and Multi-Media Approach to Reading Thanatos and Eros in Psychoanalysis, Literature, Science and Technology

Martyn Smith (2006)
Assistant Professor, Religious Studies Department, Lawrence University
Dissertation Title: How to Build Places with Words: The Narrative Construction of Sacred Abydos, Delos, and Mecca

Theodora Taylor (1995)
Dissertation Title: The Non-Linear Plot: Italo Calvino, John Fowles, and Patrick Modiano

Eszter Timar (2009)
Post Doctoral Fellowship, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University
Dissertation Title:Queer Citizens: the Structual Similarity between the post-Revolutionary Citizen and the Figure of the Homosexual

Apostolos Vasilakis (2004)
Lecturer of Philosophy, Texas A&M University
Dissertation Title: Mnemotechnologies: Memory, and Experience in Late 20th Century Philosophy and Literature

Albena Lutzkanova Vassileva (1999)
Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Brooklyn College
Dissertation Title: Reference, Trauma, and History: The Testimonies of Western American, British) and East European (Russian, Bulgarian) Postmodernisms

Patrick Wheeler (1997)
Dissertation Title: Culture at Work: Representations of the Economic in Medieval French Literature

Kathryn Wichelns (2007)
Visiting Assistant Professor in Women's Studies, University of New Mexico
Dissertation Title: Enacting Sexual Difference: Re-visions of Henry James in the Writing of Marguerite Duras and Emily Dickinson

Leah Wolfson (2008)
Applied Research Scholar, Center for Advanced Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Dissertation Title: A Path Through the Abyss: Re-inventing Testimony Through Post-Holocaust Survivor Poetry, Memoir, and Video Oral Histories

Nader Uthman (2001)
Fellow of the Faculty/Doctoral Student, Department of Middle East & Asian Languages & Cultures (MEALAC) and Center for Comparative Literature & Society (CCLS), Columbia University
Thesis Title: Sharq al-Mutawassit: Munif, East of Mediterranean and the Felicity of Malice

Lili Zhang (2005)
Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, Nazareth College
Dissertation Title: The Cultivation of the Self: Critique of Technical Practice within and without Chinese Chan Buddhism