Emmanuelle Beaufort
ebeaufort@umail.ucsb.edu
Emmanuelle Beaufort received her MA in English at the University of Bordeaux Michel de Montaigne, focusing on Jewish American writers. She was also awarded the prestigious “agrégation” in English in 2003. Her interests include 20th century American literature and North African francophone writers, war and resistance narratives, and the relationship between the individual, the couple and the family unit in the context of social or political turmoils. Her practical and theoretical emphases are psychoanalysis, and the question of pedagogy and its encounters with anarchist and socialist thoughts.

Marcel Brousseau
marcel_brousseau@umail.ucsb.edu
Marcel Brousseau is exploring indigenous North American literature, with a focus on Mexican and American Indian poetry, fiction, and oral history. He is particularly interested in the hybrid art forms wrought by Colonialism, gender and power dynamics, and how literature depicts humanity’s relationship with the landscape.

Anne-Claire Cain
anneclaire@umail.ucsb.edu
Anne-Claire’s research interests include Nineteenth-Century British and French literature. She is currently working on the historical evolution of the family, its role of integration into the wider social structure, the influence of Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, fraternity, and the role of normative images of the family in literature. Her project is to explore the representations of the Jewish family vs. isolated Jewish figures, in the Nineteenth-Century British and French Novel.

Christina Cheng
christina_cheng@umail.ucsb.edu
Christina Cheng’s research interests include 18th-century British literature, Chinese vernacular novels, and Asian American immigrant literature. For her first field exam, she would like to explore the theme of diseased bodies in 18th-century British literature, focusing on the plague, the deviant female body, and medical practices.

Erik Eppel
eceppel@umail.ucsb.edu
Erik Eppel is currently working in the domain of modern Italian literature, from the Unification until present, as it pertains to “The Southern Question,” as well as to the issue of Italian national identity. He also focuses on Italian social movements of the ’60s and ’70s, and more specifically, on the Italian free radio revolution. Erik’s other national literature is German.

Eli Evans
elisevans@umail.ucsb.edu
Eli Evans has an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Arizona and an MA in criticism and theory from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. His interests include Spanish literature since 1976, and also sports and gold. Look for his regular collaborations with magazines such as n+1, in the US, and Quimera, in Spain.

Mary Garcia
magarcia@umail.ucsb.edu

Rosie Kar
rkar@umail.ucsb.edu
Rosie Kar’s research interests include 20th century Franco-Caribbean literatures, South Asian/East Indian literatures, and North American literatute, intersections of popular culture with high theory, notions on madness, film, music and individuation associated with hybrid identities.

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
kkelpstebbins@umail.ucsb.edu
Katie Kelp-Stebbins is interested in examining the translation and reception of classical texts in modern languages. Her research interests include Greek and Latin literature, translation theory, reception theory and comics theory.

Linda Kick
lkick00@umail.ucsb.edu
Linda L. Kick explores the aesthetics-ethics rapport in French, German, and Anglo-American women’s novels. Analyzing texts from Romanticism through the twentieth century, she employs twentieth-century French and American feminist theory to rethink aesthetics in experimental authors such as Dorothea Schlegel, Mary Shelley, George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Charlotte Delbo, and Helene Cixous.

Karin Kröger
karin_kroger@umail.ucsb.edu
Karin is a graduate exchange student from the University of Erfurt, Germany. In her undergraduate studies she focussed on Russian and combines this in her current studies with other literatures as well as Literary Theory, ‘Representation’ and the ‘alphabet’. Her special interest lies in intersections between literature and mathematics.

Danielle La France Borgia
daniellelafrance@umail.ucsb.edu
Danielle is working on her dissertation, which compares feminist subtexts in ghost stories published by serious women authors in literary magazines in New York, Texas, and Mexico City in the first half of the twentieth century. Her fields are late 19th & early 20th century U.S, Mexican, and Argentine literatures, and Feminist/Gender Studies.

Elizabeth Lagresa
elagresa@umail.ucsb.edu
Elizabeth Lagresa’s research interests include Spanish, English and Italian early modern literature, with a particular focus on Spanish Baroque and colonial Latin American literature. Some of the topics she is interested in researching are the role of comedy and tragedy in the works of Lope de Vega, Machiavelli and Shakespeare, analyzing their diverse political and historical contexts; how gender roles developed from antiquity through the Renaissance, as exemplified through literature and the visual arts; translation studies focusing on the domain of cross-cultural communication; and how societies/natiions affirm and reshape their identity and values through literature.

Christopher K. Lee
chris_lee@umail.ucsb.edu
Christopher Lee is a Ph.D. candidate currently working in the intersections of media, literature, and the psychoanalytic theory of mourning.  Following the post-Freudian framework prepared by Abraham and Torok’s works on cryptonymy, Christopher seeks to draw out the determining relationship between technology/ techno-culture and the difficulty of mourning our losses, all within a broad purview of Western/ westernization culture informed by an education and interests as various as his undergraduate training as a classicist and a serious, non-condescending interest in popular culture.  Christopher’s current work on the dissertation covers a period roughly contemporary to modernist literature, his first interest in and entry into literature.  All the same, despite the focus on familiar names such as August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf, his work reveals that the old refrain of everything has been read is true only to the extent of our avoidance of mourning.

Kuan-yen Liu
kuanyen_liu@umail.ucsb.edu

Anne Marcoline
a_marcoline@umail.ucsb.edu
Anne Marcoline’s research focuses on the intersections of French and German literature, music and aesthetics from the late-18th century to the mid-20th century. In particular, she has focused on the function of music in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Sand, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Thomas Mann. The central thread throughout her doctoral studies thus far is on the Faustian legend in literature and music, including the canonical works of Goethe, Berlioz, Gounod and Thomas Mann, as well as the non-canonical works of George Sand, Louise Bertin and Paul Valéry. Her work on Thomas Mann’s _Doktor Faustus_ brings together the strands of her larger study of music, literature and musical aesthetics in the Germanic tradition, spanning from Beethoven to Berg, Goethe to Mann, and Schopenhauer to Adorno and Dahlhaus.

Marzia Milazzo
marzia@umail.ucsb.edu
Marzia Milazzo earned her Master’s degree in English and Romance Philologies at the Albert Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany, with a thesis titled “Indigenous Identity Constructions and Representations of the Indian in Chicano/a Literature.” Apart from Chicano/a Literature, her research interests include African American literature, Hispanic Latin American literature (especially Mexican, Peruvian, and Cuban), Spanish literature, and Brazilian literature. Marzia is also interested in music, film, theatre, popular culture and she enjoys writing multilingual poems.

Kieran Murphy
kieran@umail.ucsb.edu
Kieran Murphy’s research interests include French novel (nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries), Caribbean and African literature (with a focus on Haiti and the figure of the zombie), media theory, psychoanalysis, film studies, science, pseudo-science and the occult.

Emily Parsons
eparsons@umail.ucsb.edu
Emily Parson’s research interests include Latin American literatures particularly the Jewish literatures of Argentina and Chile, 19th and 20th century German literatures, as well as Holocaust Studies.

Nanette Pawelek
nanette@umail.ucsb.edu

David Platzer
davidplatzer@umail.ucsb.edu
David Platzer’s research interests include colonial radio, Nigerian and Ghanaian video film, Onitsha Market literature, Francophone and Anglophone African novels, the history of melodrama, cognition, semiotics, and much else. While his interests can be disparate, they are ultimately untied by two overarching concerns: the division of cultural production into “high” and “low” fields, and the way in which narrative art structures and complicates global subjectivities.

Allison Schifani
aschifani@umail.ucsb.edu
Allison Schifani’s research interests include Twentieth Century Latin American and U.S. literature and culture, intersections of space and text, cultural geography and environmental theories and representations.

Meaghan Skahan
meaghan_skahan@umail.ucsb.edu
Meaghan Skahan’s interests include twentieth-century poetry and short story, specifically examining the construction of the city and intersections of gender, navigation, and displacement, the evolution of ” le flaneur ” and its gender implications, and the neo-fantastic.

Lily Wong
lilywong@umail.ucsb.edu
Lily Wong is a third year M.A./Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include (post)colonial theory and literatures, globalization and media theories, language and translation theories; paying close attention to notions of affect, the body, performativity, and historical writing. Her current project focuses on cross-cultural translations of local narratives through literary, filmic, and music representations of prostitution culture in the regions of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and beyond.

Claudia Yaghoobi Massihi
cyaghoobimassihi@umail.ucsb.edu
Claudia earned her Masters degree in English Literature at California State University of Los Angeles with a thesis titled “The Little Blessings of Life: The Sisyphean Character in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.” She has always been enchanted with the Absurd Literature and The Theatre of the Absurd, particularly the French triangle of Beckett, Ionesco and Genet. Besides the Absurd, her research interests include English Medieval Literature, Persian Medieval Literature, the rise of Mysticism in the Middle ages, Western-Christian Mysticism and its impact on English Medieval literature vs. Eastern-Islamic Mysticism and its role in Persian Medieval literature, and ultimately tracing the commonalities in Western and Eastern Literatures in the context of Mysticism. She is also interested in psychoanalysis and feminist study of the medieval religious women.

Recent Graduates

Karen Bishop, PhD September 2008
kebishop@fas.harvard.edu
Karen Bishop’s research interests include twentieth-century Latin American, North American, French and Francophone literatures, modern poetry and poetics,exile studies, torture, philosophies of history, philosophies of space and place, and translation studies.  Her current book project, Mapping Disappearance: Representing the Absent in Modern Argentine Fiction, examines the appearance of disappearance as an inter-related aesthetic and political category in twentieth-century Argentine literature.  She maintains an academic website at www.kebishop.wordpress.com.

Amber Godey, PhD December 2007
rosambra@umail.ucsb.edu
Amber Godey’s research interests include early twentieth-century Italian, English and French Literature, with a particular focus on autobiography and storytelling as it relates to fascist control and propoganda.

Yan Liang, PhD December 2008
yliang@umail.ucsb.edu
Yan Liang’s research interests include Chinese vernacular novels; popular culture, including web literature and media study; and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novel narratology.

Paulo Moriera, PhD September 2007
paulodaluzmoreira@yahoo.com
Paulo Moreira’s research interests include twentieth-century U.S., Brazilian, and Hispanic Latin American literature. He also has a marginal interest in nineteenth century literature and wrote his dissertation on the work of William Faulkner, Juan Rulfo, and João Guimarães Rosa.

Randall J. Pogorzelski, PhD December 2007
pogorzelski@umail.ucsb.edu
Randall Pogorzelski investigates connections between classical and modernist literature, not only studying the influence of the classics on modernist texts, but also finding ways in which modernist texts and theories of modernism and postmodernism guide readings of classical texts. He wrote his dissertation on nationalism in Virgil’s Aeneid and Joyce’s Ulysses. Randall began a lectureship in the Department of Classics at UC Irvine in Fall 2008.

Mary Seliger, PhD June 2008
m-a-s@umail.ucsb.edu
Mary Seliger’s research interests include Latin American and Iberian Studies as well as twentieth century discourse which explores the dialogue between American literary and legal narratives on the issue of minority rights.

Lisa Swanstrom, PhD June 2008
swanstro@umail.ucsb.edu
Lisa Swanstrom’s research interests include twentieth-century Latin-American and American literatures, the literature of the fantastic, history of science, media theory, and science-fiction film and literature. Swanstrom is a member of the development and editorial team of The Agrippa Files: An Online Archive of Agrippa (a book of the dead). She recently completed her dissertation, which examines the relation between network technologies and subjectivity in 20th and 21st century expression. A more comprehensive academic profile is accessible at www.swanstream.org. Starting in Fall 2008, Lisa will be a Postdoctoral Scholar at Brandeis University holding the title of Florence Kay Fellow in the Digital Humanities.

Stacey Van Dahm, PhD September 2007
svandahm@writing.ucsb.edu
Stacey Van Dahm completed her dissertation, titled “Nationalism and Narrative of Subjectivity in the Cold War Imaginary” during Summer 2007 and took a position as a Lecturer in the Writing Program at UCSB. Starting Fall 2008, she will be an Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing at Philadelphia University.