Faculty

• Dr. Hugo Achugar
  Professor
  Contemporary Latin American literature and culture
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-12
  • 305-284-7267

  Ph.D., University of Pittsburg, 1980.  He has previously taught at Universidad de la Républica (Uruguay) and  Northwestern University, held distinguished visiting appointments at UC Irvine and Dartmouth (among others), and been the recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities grants.  He is the author of Ideologías y estructuras narratives en José Donoso (1950-1970) (1979), Poesía y sociedad (Uruguay, 1880-1911) (1986), La balsa de la Medusa (1992), La biblioteca en ruinas: reflexiones culturales desde la periferia (1994), Planetas sin Boca: Escritos sobre arte, cultura, y literature (2003) and Cultura en Situación de Pobreza (2007).

  Link to, La biblioteca en ruinas: reflexiones culturales desde la periferia
• Dr. Heather Allen
  Assistant Professor
  Applied Linguistics, Literacy and Language Learning, Motivation and Language Learning in Study Abroad
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 212-05
  • 305-284-7263

  Heather Willis Allen holds an M.A. in French Literature from the Louisiana State University (1998) and a Ph.D. in Educational Studies and French from Emory University (2002). Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Miami, she was Lecturer of French and French Language Program Coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh (2002-2006). At UM, she specializes in second language acquisition and French and directs the French Basic Language Program. Her research interests include motivation and languge learning in study abroad contexts, teacher development, and literacy-based approaches to teaching and learning. Her research on motivation and language learning during study abroad has appeared in several journals including Foreign Language Annals (2003 and forthcoming, 2010), the Journal of Studies in International Education (forthcoming, 2010) and an edited volume entitled Identity and Second Language Learning (2007). Her research on teacher development and literacy-based approaches to language learning has appeared in journals including the NECTFL Review (2008),the French Review (forthcoming, 2009) the Modern Language Journal (forthcoming, 2010), ADFL Bulletin (forthcoming) as well as From Thought to Action: Exploring Beliefs and Outcomes in the Foreign Language Program (2007) and Principles and Practices of the Standards in College Foreign Language Education (2009). She serves on the Executive Board of the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of Foreign Language Programs (AAUSC) as French Section Head and will co-edit the AAUSC's 2011 volume entitled Educating the Future Foreign Language Professoriate for the 21st Century with Hiram H. Maxim (Emory University).

• Dr. Christine B. Arce
  Assistant Professor
  
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-09
  • 305-284-9274

  Christine Arce received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. She has a Masters in Spanish Literature from Middlebury College(2000), and completed her undergraduate work at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She also holds a Masters in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach (2001). Arce works on 19th and 20th Century Latin American Literature with an emphasis on Mexico, the Caribbean, and Brazil and has interests in cultural studies and gender studies. 
  
  Christine Arce currently works on contemporary Mexican literature and culture, with a special interest in popular balladry in the form of the corrido, as well as music and film.  In addition, she has a vital interest in indigenous epistemologies and questions of memory and national identity. In 2007 she wrote a book chapter in the anthology Arquitetura da Memória: Ensaios sobre os romances Relato de um certo oriente, Dois Irmãos e Cinzas do Norte de Milton Hatoum on the contemporary Brazilian writer Milton Hatoum, an article on trauma in Southern Cone post-dictatorial literature in LUCERO (2003) and co-authored several interviews of contemporary writers such as Diamela Eltit, Sabina Berman and Junot Díaz.  She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the representation of Mexico’s historical “others”, such as the soldadera and Blacks in Mexico, across various forms of cultural production.

• Dr. Suzanne Braswell
  Assistant Professor
  French Literature
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-22
  • 305-284-7268

  Ph.D., French, University of California, Santa Barbara (2005). M.A., French Literature, San José State University (1998).

• Dr. Steven F. Butterman
  Associate Professor
  Twentieth-Century Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture, Queer Theory, Cultural Studies, Aesthetics and Literary Theory
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 212-07
  • 305-284-7221

  Steven F. Butterman, Associate Professor of Portuguese and Director of the Portuguese Language Program,
  teaches Portuguese and Brazilian Literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures,
  and Queer Studies in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Miami. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000.  A recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a winner of the Brazilian International Press Award, Provost's Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2004 University of Miami Scholarly and Creative Activity Award, he has published articles on a wide range of topics, including 19th and 20th century Luso-Afro-Brazilian Literature and Culture; Contemporary Brazilian Poetry and Music; Queer Theory; Women's Studies; Postmodernism; and Aesthetics. A member of the Executive Committee of BRASA (Brazilian Studies Association) and the Luso-Brazilian Executive Division of the MLA (Modern Language Association), Butterman is the author of" Perversions on Parade: Brazilian Literature of Transgression and Postmodern Anti-Aesthetics in Glauco Mattoso,"published in 2005 by San Diego State University Press / Hyperbole Books. Butterman's current research project reconsiders Brazilian cinematic production under dictatorship (1969 - 1971), focusing on the internal dialogues between cinema novo and cinema marginal.

• Dr. Christina Civantos
  Associate Professor
  19th and 20th-Century Spanish American and Arabic Literary and Cultural Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-19
  • 305-284-7265

  Christina Civantos received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999.  She researches and teaches in the fields of 19th and 20th-century Latin American and Arabic studies.  She is particularly interested in migration and diaspora; Orientalism and cross-cultural representation, primarily in the context of South-South relations; and the politics of literacy.  In terms of regions, she focuses on the Southern Cone, the Hispanic Caribbean, and the Levant.  Her publications include Between Argentines and Arabs:  Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (SUNY Press, 2006) and articles in Latin American Literary Review, Latin American Theatre Review, Revista Iberoamericana, and Middle Eastern Literatures. 

• Dr. Jane Connolly
  Professor
  Medieval and Golden Age Spanish Literature, Romance Philology
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-03
  • 305-284-7260

  Jane Connolly received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1986. Her areas of interest for research and teaching are Medieval Iberian literature, Romance philology, hagiography. Her publications include Translation and Poetization in the ‘Quaderna Via’: Libro de miseria d'omne; Los miraglos de Santiago: Estudio y edición; Saints and their Authors: Studies in Medieval Hispanic Hagiography in Honor of John K. Walsh (with Alan Dayermond and Brian Dutton). She has three forthcoming monographs: Leonor López de Córdoba and her Critics; Reading a Life: the ‘Memorias’ of Leonor López de Córdoba; San Ginés de la Xara: Study and Edition.

• Dr. Anne J. Cruz
  Professor
  Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture, Gender Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-05
  • 305-284-5585

     2010 NEH Summer Seminar

  Anne J. Cruz holds a Bachillerato en Letras from the Instituto Bethania, Santa Tecla, El Salvador, and an AB, AM, and PhD from Stanford University.  Before teaching at the University of Miami, she taught at the University of California, Irvine; the University of Illinois, Chicago; and, as visiting professor, at Stanford University.  She has published on the Petrarchism of Garcilaso de la Vega and Boscán (Purdue University Monographs on Romance Languages), and on the Spanish picaresque novel (University of Toronto Press); her current project, to be published by The Other Voice, is a study of the seventeenth-century religious poet and missionary Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza.  She has authored over 90 essays on issues of gender and genre in early modern theater, poetry, and prose, and edited or co-edited eleven anthologies on the literature, culture, and history of early modern Spain and the New World.  Her most recent publication is The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe (eo-edited with Mihoko Suzuki; University of Illinois Press, 2009).  Her co-translation of  Chimalpahin’s Conquest:  A Nahua Historian’s Rewriting of Francisco López  de Gómara’s  La conquista de México, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. An ongoing project is the on-line data bank BIESES (Bibliografia de Escritoras Españolas), on which she collaborates with a Spanish university research team.  
  
  Professor Cruz has been awarded fellowships by the Mellon Foundation, Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Academic Leadership Program. A recipient of several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has been awarded  grants to direct two  NEH Summer Seminars for Teachers on "Literary Pícaros and Pícaras and Their Travels in Early Modern Spain" in Madrid, Salamanca, Toledo, and Sevilla. In Spring 2009, she hosted the symposium "Educating Gender: Women's Literary in Early Modern Spain and the New World" at the Instituto Cervantes and the  University of Illinois, Chicago. She was recently elected the 2010 William R. Jones Outstanding Mentor of the Year by the McKnight Graduate Fellows.
  
  An editor of HISPANISMS, a series with the University of Illinois Press, Professor Cruz is currently president of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry and Vice President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.  She is proud to have chaired the Modern Languages and Literatures Department from 2003 to 2008.

• Dr. Tracy Devine Guzmán
  Assistant Professor
  Latin American literary and cultural studies
  

  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-17
  • 305-284-3239

  Devine Guzmán has a BA from the University of Virginia in Foreign Affairs and French Language and Literature, an MA in Government from the College of William and Mary, and a Ph.D. in Romance Studies/Latin American Studies from Duke University. Her research interests include intellectual and cultural history, politics, social theory, and literature in Brazil and the Andes, especially as they relate to constructions of race and ethnicity. She has worked in qualitative and quantitative research and political advocacy in the Americas since 1993, and served as a translator and consultant for Save the Children-UK in Peru from 2003 to 2007. (http://www.ninosdelmilenio.org).

  Devine Guzmán has spent several years living and working in Brazil, Peru, and Spain, and has conducted research in Guatemala, Bolivia, Mexico, and Argentina. She has received funding for research and program building from the Ford Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, FLAS, FIPSE/CAPES, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her articles appears in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Latin Americanist, Revista Trajetos, Latin American Research Review (forthcoming), and other specialized publications in the U.S. and Latin America. Her essay, “Diacuí killed Iracema: Indigenism, Nationalism and the Struggle for Brazilianness,” was awarded the 2006 prize of the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She is finishing a book on the role of indigenous peoples and indigeneity in Brazilian cultural and intellectual history called, “The Indian is the People.”

  Devine Guzmán teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the departmental programs in Portuguese and Spanish, as well as in the UM program in Latin American Studies.

  
  

• Dr. Viviana Díaz Balsera
  Professor
  Colonial Latin American and Spanish Golden Age Literatures, Postcolonial Cultural Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-14
  • 305-284-7222

  Viviana Díaz Balsera received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Yale University in 1989.  She has taught and researched in the fields of Spanish Golden Age and Spanish American Colonial Studies, with emphasis in Mexico.  Her areas of interest are cultural translations, memory, writing and performance in New World contact zones, and the constitution of colonial subjectivities.  Díaz Balsera is the author of Calderón y las quimeras de la Culpa:  alegoría, seducción y resistencia en cinco autos sacramentales  (Purdue University Press 1997), and of The Pyramid Under the Cross:  Franciscan Discourses of Evangelization and the Nahua Christian Subject in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2006).  Her articles have appeared in Colonial Latin American Review, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Neophilologus, Hispanófila, and other journals.

• Dr. David R. Ellison
  Professor and Chair
  Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Studies, Critical Theory, Philosophy, German Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 212-02
  • 305-284-5585

  David Ellison is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.  His areas of interest for research and teaching are:  French literature of the 19th and 20th centuries; narrative and narratology; German-French literary relations; literature and philosophy; Marcel Proust.  He is the author of The Reading of Proust (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), Understanding Albert Camus (The University of South Carolina Press, 1990), Of Words and the World:  Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction [Essays on Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Duras, Sarraute, Blanchot, and Beckett] (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature:  From the Sublime to the Uncanny [Essays on Kant, Kierkegaard, Freud, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Alain-Fournier, Proust, Kafka, Gide, Conrad, Woolf, and Blanchot] (Cambridge University Press, 2001 hardback, 2006 paperback).  He has published articles and essays on nineteenth-century French poetry and on the realist and modernist European novel in a comparative perspective.  With his colleague Ralph Heyndels he has edited volumes on Victor Hugo and Arthur Rimbaud.

       David Ellison has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.  He was designated Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques by the government of France in 1994 in recognition of his service to French culture.  In 2003 he received the Provost’s Award for Scholarly Activity, and in 2006 was appointed a Cooper Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences.

       Ellison has directed and co-organized international symposia while at the University of Miami, including “Carmen 2000,” “Les Modernités de Victor Hugo” (2002), “Les Afriques de Rimbaud” (2004), and “Situating French/Situer le français” (2006).  He has worked to create a sharing of events and resources between the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami and the Alliance Française and the Consulat Général de France.  He was department Chair from 1992 until 2003.

• Dr. Yvonne Gavela
  Assistant Professor
  Modern and Contemporary Spanish Literature, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Spanish Women Writers, Spanish Short Story
     Email     Merrick Bldg. 210-28       305-284-7229

  Yvonne Gavela holds a Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary Spanish Literature from the Pennsylvania State University, an MA in Modern Languages from West Virginia University, an MA in English Philology from Universidad de Valladolid, and a BA in Humanities from the Universidad de Burgos. As Visiting Professor she has taught at Mount Holyoke College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Miami, and Penn State University (teaching a graduate seminar on Literature and Film in Contemporary Spain: from Transition to the 21st century).
  
  Her research and teaching interests include Modern and Contemporary Spanish Peninsular Narrative, Spanish Films, Spanish Short Story, and Spanish Women Writers. Dr. Gavela's current research explores two main areas: the significance of filmic discourse in Spanish generation X youth narratives, and Spanish film adaptations. Her research appears in an edited volume (Memoria histórica, género e interdisciplinariedad, 2008), Hesperia (2008), the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (forthcoming), and is working on a book manuscript analyzing Spanish Generation X fiction.

• Dr. Laura Giannetti
  Associate Professor
  Renaissance Italian Literature and Culture, Renaissance Drama, Gender and Sexuality, Women's Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-23
  • 305-284-7227

  She holds a PhD in Italian Renaissance Literature from the University of Connecticut and a Laurea in History and Philosophy from Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy. She has taught both in Italy and the United States.
  
  

  Her main area of research has been Italian Renaissance comedy; her first book, titled Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy is in press with University of Toronto and scheduled to appear in November 2009.  She has published articles in Modern Language Notes, Italica, Sixteenth Century Journal, Quaderni d’italianistica and Renaissance Drama on literary representations of gender, sexuality, food culture and play. In 2003 she published Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins), five comedies newly translated and edited with Guido Ruggiero. Her new research project, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Renaissance Italy was awarded the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance in Florence. The grant allowed her to spend the year 2008-2009 at the Villa in Florence happily working on her new book research. 

  Her teaching interests include:  The Novella tradition from Boccaccio to Bandello, Renaissance Theater, Women, Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Italian Literature, Women and Gender in Contemporary Italy, Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry and Novels.
• Dr. Elena Grau-Lleveria
  Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
  Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Spanish and Spanish American Literature, Hispanic women writers, theories about literary history, and transatlantic studies.
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 212-11
  • 305-284-7241

  Elena Grau-Lleveria, Associate Professor of Spanish, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Austin (1997) with a specialization in twentieth-century Spanish-American and Spanish Literature.  Her research focuses on 19th and 20th century women writers. Her areas of interest for research and teaching are:  narratology, the revision of literary history, and the feminist analysis of the cultural processes that generate discourses of power excluding women and their writings from leading literary movements. She studies women writers both within and outside the canon of the Spanish American and Spanish literatures through a transatlantic studies perspective that acknowledges the complex interactions of cultural forms across national boundaries. Her articles appear in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Romanische Forschungen, Romance Notes, Neophilologus, Crítica Literaria and Iberorromania among others. She is the author of Las olvidadas: Mujer y modernismo. Narradoras de entre siglos (PPU 2008).

• Dr. Ralph Heyndels
  Professor
  Classical, Modern and Contemporary French and Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Philosophy, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Gay Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-10
  • 305-284-7262

  Ralph Heyndels (Ph.D. University of Brussels), has lectured and has been an invited Visiting Professor at numerous universities in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, and, most recently, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and the University of Cape Town. He received the King’s Prize and was a Laureate of the University Foundation (Belgium), has hold the French Community of Belgium Chair at Laval University (Quebec), and was designated “Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques” by the French Government, among other awards. He has been Director of the Centre de Sociologie de la Littérature at the University of Brussels, and of the Comparative Literature Program and Center for Critical Studies at the University of Maryland, and has been Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at U.M. He has organized and co-organized over 45 international conferences at UM and other universities
  
  

  He is the author, editor or co-editor of Lire le texte littéraire; La Société: de l' école au texte; Opérativité des Méthodes Sociocritiques; Ecriture française et identifications culturelles; Ecrire: dit-elle. Imaginaires de Marguerite Duras; L'Impensable imaginaire; L'Autre au XVIIème siècle; Littérature, Idéologie et Signification; La Pensée fragmentée: Pascal, Diderot, Hölderlin; Le "Voyage du Monde de Descartes" du Père Gabriel Daniel; Les Modernités de Victor Hugo; Les Afriques de Rimbaud; Arthur Rimbaud, Anthologie illustrée; Modernité, chagrin d'enfance; Jean Genet: poétique et politique du désir ; La Belgique et la Suisse. Littératures et cultures francophones de Belgique et de Suisse ; Les écrivains français devant le monde arabe, among other titles. He has published numerous essays on literary theory and sociology of literature and culture, sociocriticism, dialectical hermeneutic ; postcolonial French multiculturality; literature  and culture of the Maghreb;  homotextualities and gay studies; the hermeneutics of visual representation, cinema and photography; the rhetoric of public speech; and Descartes, Racine, Pascal, Madame de la Fayette, Jeanne Guyon, Diderot, Rousseau, Sade, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Neel Doff, Rimbaud, Hugo, Mérimée, Gracq, Aragon, Beckett, Chaplin, Duras, Genet, Adorno, Blanchot, Levinas, Barthes, Rachid O, Abdellah Taïa, Banier, Hervé Di Rosa, etc.  Heyndels is also the editor of the series "Transatlantique" at Schena / Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne and Alain Baudry  & Cie.

• Dr. Celita Lamar
  Associate Professor
  Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Theatre, Women's Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-04
  • 305-284-7220

  My research to date has focused on the works of late twentieth (since 1968) and twenty-first century French and Francophone women playwrights writing for the French and Quebec theatres.  My 1991 book: Our Voices, Ourselves: Women writing for the French Theatre introduced a number of women authors previously unknown outside of Paris. Four articles, three on Hélène Cixous and one on plays written by several women authors (on the occasion of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution) “uncovering” women heroines of that Revolution completed my research in France.

  Since 1994 I have turned my attention to the rich Quebec theatrical scene where women playwrights, Quebec natives as well as “migrant” writers from countries such as Lebanon and Egypt, have been enjoying an unprecedented success. My conference papers, articles and essays during this period have analyzed the contributions of these women dramatists from a primarily feminist perspective, emphasizing gender and cultural differences.  My current book project seeks to add to the critical reception of the rich tapestry of theatrical production by women in the past three decades. It includes studies of established playwrights such as Jovette Marchessault, Marie-Claire Blais, Marie Laberge, Anne-Marie Alonzo, Abla Farhoud, Denise Boucher, Michelle Allen, Pol Pelletier and Carole Frechette, as well as more recent authors such as Emmanuelle Roy, Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf, Evelyne de la Chenelière and Isabelle Leblanc.

• Dr. Andrew Lynch
  Assistant Professor
  Sociolinguistics, bilingualism, heritage language education, and Spanish language contact
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 212-10
  • 305-284-3229

  Andrew Lynch holds the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Hispanic Linguistics, with concentrations in sociolinguistics and second language acquisition, from the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on Spanish language variation and language contact, Spanish-English bilingualism, and the acquisition of Spanish as a second and heritage language in the US setting. His studies appear in such journals as Spanish Applied Linguistics (1998), Hispania (2001), Heritage Language Journal (2003), Lingüística Española Actual (2005), and Foreign Language Annals (2008). He has published chapters in numerous volumes, including Research on Spanish in the United States (Cascadilla Press, 2000) and Mi lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States (Georgetown UP, 2003), and is a contributor to the Enciclopedia del español en los Estados Unidos published by the Instituto Cervantes (Madrid, 2008). A forthcoming book, titled El español en contacto con otras lenguas, co-authored with Carol Klee, will be published by Georgetown University Press in 2009. Professor Lynch serves as director of the Spanish heritage language program at the University of Miami, and teaches courses related to bilingualism, Spanish language and linguistics. Prior to coming to the University of Miami, he formed part of the graduate faculty at the University of Florida (2001 to 2005).

• Dr. Lillian Manzor
  Associate Professor
  Twentieth-Century Latin American Studies, Latino/a and Caribbean Studies, Gender Studies, Performance Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-07
  • 305-284-7314

  Lillian Manzor. Ph.D., Spanish, USC (1988). B.A., Spanish and French, UM (1978). Previously taught Comparative Literature at UC-Irvine. Research and teaching interests: Latin American and Latino/a cultures, performance studies, gender studies, literature and the visual arts. Her publications include Borges/Escher, Cobra/CoBrA: Un encuentro posmoderno, and Latinas on Stage. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Marginality Beyond Return: U.S.-Cuban Performance Politics, and on a web-based Cuban Theater Archive. She is actively involved in developing US-Cuba cultural dialogues through theater and performance. Currently She is the Director for the Program in Latin American Studies.

• Dr. Eduardo Negueruela
  Assistant Professor
  Sociocultural Psychology, Semiotically-Mediated Cognition and Emotion, Spanish Second Language Acquisition, Language Pedagogy and Teaching Methodology, Technology Enhanced Language Learning
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 212-14
  • 305-284-3237

  Eduardo Negueruela holds a BA and MA degree in Philosophy , Literature, Linguistics and Philology from the Universidad de Valladolid (Spain), and MA degree in Modern Languages from West Virginia University,  and a  Ph.D. degree in Applied Linguistics and Spanish from the Pennsylvania State University, with an emphasis on Sociocultural theory, second language acquisition, and language pedagogy.   Professor Negueruela is the director of the Spanish language program at the University of Miami, and teaches courses in second language teaching methodology,  second language learning theories,  Sociocultural theory,  Spanish second language acquisition,  and advanced writing, reading, and grammar courses in Spanish.

  Before coming to the University of Miami, he formed part of the graduate faculty at the University of Massachusetts (2003 to 2006) where he directed several doctoral dissertations and MA theses.  In his research program, Professor Negueruela explores the connection between mind, language, and culture through the creation of semiotic artifacts that mediate first and second language development.  At the core of his research program is the following proposition: Second Language development is a conceptual process that depends upon the construction, consciously or non-consciously, of conceptual orienting categories.  His research program is aimed directly towards answering the following two questions: 1. What is the relationship between thinking and speaking in the process of learning a second language? 2. What is the relationship between formal instruction and second language development? 

  His research appears in leading journals such as the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, as well as chapters in several edited volumes: Spanish Second Language Acquisition. Tthe Art of Teaching (Georgetown University Press, 2006),  Sociocultural Theory and Language Teaching (Equinox, 2008)  Gesture: Second Language Acquisition and Classroom Research and Language Learning  (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008)  and Approaches to the Teaching of Grammar  (AAUSC, Heinle and Heinle 2009). He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Second Language Development and the Sociocultural Mind.

• Dr. Gema Pérez-Sánchez
  Associate Professor
  Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Feminist Theory
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-20
  • 305-284-7313

  Gema Pérez-Sánchez, current Director of Graduate Studies, holds a Ph.D. (1998) in Romance Studies from Cornell University and an MA in English literature from Bucknell University (1992).  Her research focuses on contemporary Spanish narrative, cultural studies, immigration studies, and queer theory.  She is the author of Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to la movida is forthcoming in the Series for Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture of SUNY Press.  Her second book project, “Perilous Straights: Immigration, Sexuality, and Race in Contemporary Spanish Culture” analyzes the resurgence in Spain of xenophobia and racism against recent Sub-Saharan African and Arab immigrants as represented in contemporary films and narrative.  Her research on gay and lesbian Spanish films on immigration; Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi; Spanish writer Ana María Moix; women comic book artists of la movida; laws regulating homosexuality during Franco’s regime; and her book reviews has appeared in University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform; Michigan Journal of Race & Law; Hispamérica; The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies; Letras Femeninas; and several essay collections.

  Her teaching interests include: Contemporary Peninsular literature, popular culture, and film; modern Hispanic women writers; comparative literature; and literary theory, women's studies, queer theory, immigration and cultural studies.  She has been nominated several times for the University of Miami Teaching Excellence Award and received it in 2005.

• Dr. Maria Galli Stampino
  Associate Professor
  Italian and French Renaissance and Baroque Literatures and Cultures, Performance Studies. University Excellence in Teaching Award (2002)
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-21
  • 305-284-7264

  Maria Galli Stampino holds an MA in American Studies from the University of Kansas (1990) and an MA and Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature from Stanford University (1996). Her research centers on the emergence of modern Western theater in Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries. In addition, she studies the Petrarchan lyrical tradition in Europe, and early modern women writers.

  She is interested in the period between 1550 and 1650, the so-called birth of Western theater, performances, women writers, and, in a more recent period,  issues linked to Italian identity. She is the author of Staging the Pastoral: Tasso's Aminta and the Emergence of Modern Western Theater (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 2005) and the editor and translator of Lucrezia Marinella's 1635 Enrico, or Byzantium Conquered: A Heroic Poem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). She is currently completing the critical edition in Italian of the same text.
  
  Her teaching interests include: Italian poetry of the Renaissance and 17th century; novels into film; women writers of the Renaissance; theater and opera; 20th-21st-century novels; representations of Italian on film and in literature

• Dr. Subha Xavier
  Assistant Professor
  Migrant Literature, Francophone African Literature and Culture, Postcolonial Theory, Cultural Studies
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-13
  • 305-284-5408

  Subha Xavier received her PhD in French and Francophone Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2007). She has a MA in French Literature and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on the politics and economics of immigration writing in France and Quebec. Other research interests include theories of nationalism and postcolonialism, trauma theory, cosmopolitanism and diaspora literature. She teaches classes in African Sub-Saharan literature and culture, African diasporic writing and film.
  
  She has published articles on Ying Chen (International Journal of Canadian Studies) and Dai Sijie (Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies), as well as essays on Leïla Sebbar and Tahar Ben Jelloun. She is co-editor of La littérature migrante subsaharienne (Éditions Dominique Guéniot, Paris) and is collaborating on Passages et Ancrages: Dictionnaires des écritures migrantes en France depuis 1981, both forthcoming in 2009. She is currently at work on a book-length manuscript theorizing migrant French literature from a sociological and literary standpoint.

• Dr. George Yudice
  Professor
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-18
  • 305-284-7261

  
  
  

  Ph.D., Princeton University, 1977. Recently Director of the Title VI Center for Latin American Studies at New York University. His research interests include cultural policy; globalization and transnational processes; the organization of civil society; the role of intellectuals, artists and activists in national and transnational institutions; comparison of diverse national constructions of race and ethnicity; contemporary Central America. He is the author of Vicente Huidobro y la motivación del lenguaje poético (Buenos Aires, 1977); Cultural Policy, co-authored with Toby Miller (Sage Publications, 2002); The Expediency of Culture (Duke UP, 2004). He has in press  Música, tecnología y experiencia (for Editorial Gedisa, 2007), and Cultura y política cultural en América Central: 1990 a 2007 (for Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica). He is also co-editor (with Jean Franco and Juan Flores) of On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1992) and co-editor of the “Cultural Studies of the Americas” book series with the University of Minnesota Press. He has done consultancies for the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture; the Mexican President’s Council for Culture and Art; the Associação Internacional Arte Sem Fronteiras-São Paulo; UNESCO; the Asociación Cultural InCorpore, Costa Rica; the Costa Rican Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport; the Salvadoran President’s Council for Culture and Art; the UNDP, El Salvador; and several other organizations. He has been an editor of the journal Social Text and is currently an advisory editor for Cultural Studies, Found Object, and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

• Dr. Markus Zisselsberger
  Assistant Professor
  Nineteenth and twentieth century and contemporary Austrian and German literature and culture; the Holocaust and post-1945 German-language literature; philosophy and literature; photography and visual culture; literary and critical theory; translation and translation theory.
  
  • Email
  • Merrick Bldg. 210-08
  • 305-284-7226

  Markus Zisselsberger received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Binghamton University, SUNY (2008). He holds a M.A. in Philosophy from Binghamton University and a B.A. in comparative literature from California State University Fullerton. With Gisela Brinker-Gabler, he is the co-editor of “If we had the word.” Ingeborg Bachmann. Views and Reviews (Ariadne Press, 2004). He has published articles on Musil, Heidegger, and Sebald, and has recently guest-edited a special issue of Modern Austrian Literature on the topic, “W.G. Sebald and Austrian Literature.” He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the relationship between reading, literary criticism, and literature in the work of W.G. Sebald.