Graduate Teaching Assistants

Claudia Amadori
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Areas of interest: Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Theory

Alok Amatya
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Areas of interest: Anglophone Postcolonial Literature and Contemporary Transnational Film

Catherine Baker
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Catherine Baker’s areas of interest include 18th-century British and Irish literature, satire, gender and sexuality, and transatlantic studies. Catherine has a BA in forensic psychology from John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has presented conference papers at the 2009 North American James Joyce Conference in Buffalo, NY; the 2009 South Atlantic MLA Conference in Atlanta; and the 2010 International James Joyce Symposium in Prague. Her conference paper for the 2010 Southwest Texas Popular and American Culture Association was selected for publication in a collection entitled Gender and Sexuality Identity by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Alisa Bé
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Alisa Bé received her MA in English Language and Literature from Pusan National University, South Korea in 2008. Her main area of interest is Victorian literature and culture. Her research currently focuses upon Victorian periodicals, the serialization of novels, cultural exchanges between America and Britain, and the transnational circulation of literary texts in the 1850s.

Eric Behrle
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Eric Behrle’s research interests include British literature of the Restoration and cultural materialism. In 2009 he received his MA in Education from LaSalle University, where he was a member of Lambda Iota Tau, an honor society for educators. He has taught English at a low-income public school in Philadelphia, as well as parochial and charter schools.

Adam Berzak
Graduate Teaching Assistant
adam.berzak@umail.miami.edu

Adam Berzak’s research interests include American fiction after 1940, science fiction, masculinity, and technology’s relationship to the body. He received his BA and MA in literature from Florida Atlantic University.

Nagendra Bhattarai
Graduate Teaching Assistant

David Borman
Graduate Teaching Assistant

David Borman received his BA from Bellarmine University in 2007 and his MA from the University of Louisville in 2009. He focuses on transnational, Atlantic, and African literature. His dissertation explores international literary representations of Africa as a space of origin and aims to position the continent as a place with complex and often contradictory claims upon contemporary identity formation across racial, cultural, and national lines.

Brian Breed
Graduate Teaching Assistant
brian.breed@gmail.com

Brian Breed received his BA in English from Biola University and his MA in English from the University of Miami. His areas of interest include 19th-century American literature, Marxism, narrative theory, and criminality in literature.

Nicole Carr
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Briana Casali
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Briana Casali’s areas of specialization are 20th-century British and Irish literature, James Joyce, American literature, and food studies. She received her BA from Southern Methodist University (2007) and her MA from the University of Central Arkansas (2008), where she completed a thesis on James Joyce and exile. She is currently the consulting editor for the Rivista di Studi Americani, the official journal of the Italian Association of North American Studies. Briana presented a paper titled, “Seamus Heaney Putting the ‘Land’ in Homeland: Digging for Meaning in the Irish Soil,” at the 2012 national meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Her article, “Prostitution in Nationalist Discourse: Female Outcasts in Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley and The Beginning and the End,” is forthcoming in the journal Middle Eastern Literatures. Briana’s dissertation explores narrative technique, meta-fiction, and storytelling in the works of James Joyce.

Barry Devine
Graduate Teaching Assistant
b.devine@umiami.edu

Barry Devine received his MA in 2009 from University College Dublin in Anglo-Irish literature and drama. His areas of concentration are manuscript genetics and creative development of James Joyce’s Ulysses, transatlantic modernism, and 20th-century Irish literature. Barry is the co-student organizer of the 2013 “Miami J’yce” conference.  In 2011-12, he has served as assistant editor for The James Joyce Literary Supplement; he will be managing editor in 2012-13. In March 2012, he presented “James Joyce and Popular Culture: The Genesis of ‘Hades’” at the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) in New Orleans, LA.

Marta Fernández Campa
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Marta Fernández Campa received her MA from Complutense University in Madrid in 2008. That same year, she received a Fulbright Fellowship and entered the graduate program in English at the University of Miami. Marta’s dissertation focuses on counter-memory and mourning as acts of critical engagement in Caribbean literature and visual art. She has presented papers at the Caribbean Women Writers Conference (London 2007, 2011); the African Literature Conference (Burlington, VA 2009); the Caribbean Studies Association (Jamaica 2009, Curaçao 2011); and the Caribbean Philosophical Association (Miami 2009). She is the current Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies Research Assistant (2011-2012) and assists with the editorial process for the journal, Anthurium. Marta has been awarded a Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship for Spring 2013.

Devi Prasad Gautam
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Area of interest: Postcolonial Literature

Jennifer Garçon
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Jennifer Garçon’s main areas of interest are Caribbean literature, historical trauma, and memory studies. Her work explores the politics of immigration and identity as a conduit to investigating the impact of transnationalism on group identity, conceptions of “home” in relation to the diaspora, and notions of the “West.” Jennifer received her BA in literatures and cultures in English with a focus in gender and sexuality from Brown University, and her MA in English and American literature from Hunter College. She is the recipient of a University of Miami Center for Latin American Studies Distinguished Fellowship.

Elizabeth Goddard
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Barbara Hoffmann
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Barbara Hoffmann’s areas of interest are modern and postmodern Irish and Australian literature, and post-colonial literature. She received her BS in English education and BA in political science from Boston University in 2001, and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Sydney in 2003. While living in Sydney, Barbara worked for the Federal Minister of Education of Australia, as well as the non-profit agency The Smith Family. She returned to the United States to teach English at a high school near Boston for eight years; she taught advanced placement literature, Shakespeare, and American literature and served as the lead teacher of the English department.

Allyn Howey
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Rebecca C.W. Hu
Graduate Teaching Assistant
AsianShakespeare@gmail.com

Rebecca Hu’s main research interests are early modern studies, cross-cultural Shakespeare, and critical race theory. She earned her BA in English and Japanese from Rutgers University and her MA in comparative literature from Pennsylvania State University, where she focused on translations and adaptations of Shakespeare in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Japanese. Rebecca’s interest in figures of the “other” and “race” in early modern England began shortly after completing a research assistantship at National Taiwan University, where she explored how Shakespeare is taught and adapted in Asia. Thereafter, she conceived of and subsequently organized the Shakespeare in East Asia Conference at Rutgers University. Since then, Rebecca has presented papers on cross-cultural Shakespeare studies, nationalism, and issues of diasporic identity at various venues, including the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon and the American Comparative Literature Association. Currently, Rebecca is working on expanding her project on race in Shakespeare to pursue its impact on American democracy today.

Elizabeth Kelly
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Elizabeth Kelly specializes in early American studies, Caribbean literature and history, and postcolonial theory. She earned her BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU’s Gallatin School, and her MA from Florida Atlantic University, where her thesis considered the forms of radicalism and resistance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Trinidadian and British pirate novels. Since then, she has presented her work in the 2010 Science Fiction Research Association and 2011 Eaton conferences. She has also contributed to a number of composition publications, including the Instructor’s Manual accompanying Emerging a Reader. Elizabeth received a US Department of Education FLAS award to study Haitian Creole at the 2009 Haitian Summer Institute at Florida International University and is currently working on the relationship between disembodied subjects and sovereignty in early US and Haitian literatures.

Joseph A. Mendes
Graduate Teaching Assistant
j.mendes1@umiami.edu

Joseph Mendes specializes in Irish literature and modernism, with particular interests in the literature of the Irish Revival and the Irish Gothic period. He maintains parallel interests in medieval British literature, modern adaptations of medieval Irish heroic literature, and historical Celtic languages and literatures. He earned his BA from Boston College in 2005, an MA from the University of Connecticut in 2009, and another MA from the National University of Ireland Maynooth in 2010. Joseph has been the recipient of the Research Bursary at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He has recently presented the following papers: “For Love of a Wanton Woman: Fatherhood, Fealty, and Betrayal in Fingal Rónáin” at the New England Conference for Irish Studies; “‘Gape agans þe son:’ The Pilgrimage of Violence as the Vehicle of Salvation in the Wakefield Play of the Crucifixion” at the Boston College Colloquium; and “Irishness, Identity, and Outcasts in Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Account” at the 2012 national meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS). Joseph is currently serving as the co-director of the 2015 ACIS national conference and will be assistant editor for the James Joyce Literary Supplement in 2012-2013.

Ng’ang’a wa Muchiri
Graduate Teaching Assistant
n.muchiri@umiami.edu

Ng’ang’a wa Muchiri received his BA in English and Engineering Studies from Lafayette College in 2009. His research interests range from gender questions in contemporary Caribbean fiction and popular culture, to African texts written in English, French, Kikuyu, and Swahili. He is currently preparing for his dissertation project, which focuses on the question of natural/national resources, especially land, in Eastern Africa. Using literary, legal, and visual texts, he investigates the debate between state regimes and their subjects on “who” gets “what” piece of the national pie. He has presented the following conference papers: “Shailja Patel’s Poetry on Stage: Language, Protest, and 21st-Century African Activism” at the 2010 African Theatre Association; “Violence in African Literature: The Technology of War” at the 2011 International Society for African Philosophy and Studies; and “Human Rights Discourse and Congolese Fiction” at the 2012 African Literature Association meeting.

Sydney Owens
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Lauren Petrino
Graduate Teaching Assistant
l.petrino@umiami.edu

Lauren Petrino received her BA in English and Women’s Studies from Pace University in 2008, and an MA in English from Rutgers University in 2009. Her areas of interest include early modern English literature and drama with a particular emphasis on gender and sexuality. In 2008, she presented a paper, “Female Criminals and Colonialist Discourse in Early Modern English Drama,” at the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. As an adjunct instructor, Lauren has taught composition, literature, and women’s studies at Pace University and The College of Staten Island. Her current work focuses on representations of women’s privacy in early modern English literature.

Lauren Riccelli
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Lauren Riccelli received her BA in English from the University of Minnesota in 2005. Her work focuses on gender, sexuality, and theories of space in non-canonical modernist literature, primarily texts authored by African American writers and women. She presented a paper at the Southern Writers/Southern Writing conference at the University of Mississippi in 2011.

Frederick Richmond
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Areas of interest: Modernist Literature; Philosophical Approaches to Literature

Sarah Ritcheson
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Areas of interest: Renaissance Literature and Gender Studies

Brad Rittenhouse
Graduate Teaching Assistant
B.C.Rittenhouse@gmail.com

Brad Rittenhouse received his BA in English from Allegheny College. His interests include postmodern American literature, television and film, contemporary South American literature, and the intersections of philosophy and theoretical physics. He recently presented a paper, “All of This Has Happened Before and All of This Will Happen Again or Error, Error, Does Not Compute: Identity Performance in the Age of Cylon Replication,” at the 2012 University of Rhode Island Graduate Student Conference.

Carmen Ruiz-Castañeda Chiappetta
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Carmen Ruiz-Castañeda Chiappetta received her BA from Villanova University (2004) and her MA from the University of Miami (2007). She is currently working on her dissertation, “The Baroque Imagination of Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney: Folding the Periphery into a Center.” In 2007, she coordinated the Caribbean Literary Studies Conference, “Archaeologies of Black Memory,” which was held at the University of Miami in conjunction with the Caribbean journal Small Axe and funded by the Ford Foundation. She has published two journal articles in Lucayos: “Playing Conquistador and Searching for El Dorado in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps and Derek Walcott’s Omeros” and “The Fuguing Fictions of Erna Brodber and Elizabeth Nunez: Responses to Trauma in Louisiana and Beyond the Limbo Silence.”

Stephanie Selvick
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Stephanie M. Selvick received her MA in English from Simmons College in 2007. She specializes in Anglophone African literature, postcolonial theory, and gender and sexuality studies. Her chapter, “Queer (Im)possibilities: Alaa Al Aswany and Wahid Hamed’s The Yacoubian Building,” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in Dr. Christopher Pullen’s edited collection, Transnational Identity and Media (March 2012). Stephanie has been the recipient of a Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship, as well as an archival research grant through the University of Miami. The latter enabled her to excavate primary materials at the Gay and Lesbian Archives in Johannesburg, South Africa. These materials helped form her current project, “Interrogating Violence and Sexuality in South African Literature and Culture.”

Katrina Smith
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Monica Urban
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Monica Urban specializes in early and 19th-century American literature. Her areas of interest include material culture, gender, transatlantic studies, and the theory of the novel. She received her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Josune Urbistondo
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Areas of interest: Caribbean and Latin American Literature

 Carolina Villalba
Graduate Teaching Assistant
c.villalba1@umiami.edu

Carolina Villalba received her BS in Communications, BA in English, and MA in English literature from Florida International University. She specializes in African-American, ethnic, and diasporic literatures. She has presented papers at the 2010 Texas A&M University Hispanic Studies Symposium, and the 2011 and 2012 MELUS conferences.

Kurt Voss-Hoynes
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Kurt Voss-Hoynes received his BA from Kent State University (2008) and his MA from the University of Miami (2010). He focuses on twentieth-century Irish literature, postcolonial literature and theory, transatlantic modernisms, urban studies, and animal studies. He served on the editorial staff of the James Joyce Literary Supplement for two years (Fall 2010-Spring 2012) and is currently working on his dissertation. His project explores representations of urban space in the works of James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Robert McLiam Wilson, and Glenn Patterson and aims, through an exploration of modernist techniques, to put the urban literature of Dublin and Belfast into conversation with each other.

Izabela Zieba
Graduate Teaching Assistant
i.zieba@umiami.edu

Izabela Zieba received her MA in English from the University of Wroc?aw, Poland in 2008. She specializes in contemporary American literature, with a particular interest in multi-ethnic authors. She has been the recipient of the annual Mary K. Parker Prize for the best essay of 2010-2011, and she presented at MELUS and SAMLA conferences in 2011.