Faculty





  • Dr. Christine B. Arce
    Assistant Professor

    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

    Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century French Literature, Poetry and Poetics, the Arts and Literature, Women's Studies, Fantastic Literature

    Suzanne Braswell received her Ph.D. in French from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005.  In her teaching and research, she is particularly interested in interdisciplinary and cultural studies of 19th- and 20th French literature, systems of thought, popular culture, and the plastic and performing arts. She has published articles in French Forum, Australian Journal of French Studies, Dix-Neuf and Flaubert. Revue critique et génétique (in press). She is currently working on a book-manuscript, whose provisional title is 'Kinepoetics: Dance and Poetic Consciousness.' In it, she posits the centrality of danced movement on the emergence of a modernist poetics of mobility, from Balzac to Cendrars.

  • steven Dr. Steven F. Butterman
    Associate Professor
    Twentieth-Century Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture, Queer Theory, Cultural Studies, Aesthetics and Literary Theory

    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 and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Spanish
    19th and 20th-Century Spanish American and Arabic Literary and Cultural Studies

    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 Spanish American and Arabic literary and cultural studies and is the founding Director of the department's Arabic Studies program. She specializes in migration and diaspora; Orientalism and cross-cultural representation, primarily in the context of South-South relations; and the ethno-racial and gender politics of literacy. She has studied or conducted research in Spain, Argentina, Chile, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Professor Civantos is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship Award for her project on Elias Khoury and Gabriel García Márquez. 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, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture, and Middle Eastern Literatures

  • Dr. Jane Connolly
    Professor
    Medieval and Golden Age Spanish Literature, Romance Philology

    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

    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 twelve  anthologies and journals on the literature, culture, and history of early modern Spain and the New World.  Her most recent publication is Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World  (eo-edited with Rosilie Hernández; Ashgate, 2011). She has co-translated  Chimalpahin’s Conquest:  A Nahua Historian’s Rewriting of Francisco López  de Gómara’s  La conquista de México (Stanford UP, 2010), and The Life and Times of Mother Andrea (edited by Enriqueta Zafra; Tamesis, 2011), a bilingual edition of an anonymous seventeenth-century picaresque novel. A co-translation (with Elias L. Rivers) of Juan Boscán’s and Garcilaso de la Vega’s poetic manifestos was published in the January 2011 issue of PMLA.  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 2010, she was elected William R. Jones Outstanding Mentor of the Year by the McKnight Graduate Fellows.

    Professor Cruz is the series editor of NEW HISPANISMS: Cultural and Literary Studies, a series with Ashgate Press. She is also co-editor (with Mary Lindeman and Mihoko Suzuki) of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary  Journal. She has recently been appointed to the PMLA Publications Committee (2010-13).  In 2011-12, Dr. Cruz will be Acting Director of the College of Arts and Sciences Center for the Humanities. She is proud to have chaired the Modern Languages and Literatures Department from 2003 to 2008.

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

    Devine Guzmán holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia (Foreign Affairs and French Language and Literature); an M.A. from the College of William and Mary (Government); and a Ph.D. from Duke University (Romance Studies/ Latin American Studies). Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of intellectual and cultural history, politics, social theory, philosophy, and cultural production in the Americas, especially as they relate to indigeneity. 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 worked for many years 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, the Fulbright Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her articles appear in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Latin Americanist, Latin American Research Review, and other specialized publications in the U.S. and Latin America. In 2006, Devine Guzmán won the essay prize of the LASA Brazil Section for her article “Diacuí killed Iracema: Indigenism, Nationalism and the Struggle for Brazilianness.” Her essay “Rimanakuy ’86 and Other Fictions of National Dialogue in Peru,” received the 2010 José María Arguedas Prize of the LASA Peru Section.

    Devine Guzmán is the author of Native and National: Representing Indigeneity in Post-Independence Brazil, under contract with the University of North Carolina Press for publication through the Mellon-Founded First Peoples Initiative (http://firstpeoplesnewdirections.org/).   

    Her current project, “Trans-American Indigeneities: North by South by North,” traces how the concept of indigeneity has developed across the Americas since the early-twentieth century through a comparative study linking creative cultural production, state and regional policy, academic discourse, and institutional histories.

    Prof. Guzmán teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the departmental programs in Portuguese and Spanish and in the UM Program in Latin American Studies.


  • Dr. Viviana Díaz Balsera
    Professor
    Colonial Latin American and Spanish Golden Age Literatures, Postcolonial Cultural Studies

    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.

  • david Dr. David R. Ellison
    Professor
    Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French Studies, Critical Theory, Philosophy, German Studies

    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), 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), and A Reader's Guide to Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time (Cambridge University Press, 2010).  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, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation.  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. In 2010 he was promoted to Officier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques.

         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 Modern 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. He was reappointed as Chair in Fall 2008.

  • Dr. Yvonne Gavela-Ramos
    Assistant Professor
    Modern and Contemporary Spanish Literature, Film Studies, Memory Studies, Cultural Studies, Film Adaptations

    Yvonne Gavela-Ramos 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 taught at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Miami, and the Pennsylvania State University.

    Prof. Gavela-Ramos works on three main lines of research: Film and media culture in Contemporary Spanish youth narratives; Collective Memory in Spanish films on the Spanish civil war and the postwar years; and Spanish film adaptations and intermedial relations between literature and film. Her research appears in journals such as Hesperia. Anuario de filología hispánica, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (forthcoming). She has written book chapters in refereed edited volumes: Memoria histórica, género e interdisciplinariedad (2008) and La literatura y el cine hispánicos en el bicentenario de las independencias iberoamericanas (forthcoming). She is currently working on a book manuscript analyzing Film and Media Culture in Spanish Generation X fiction.

  • Dr. Laura Giannetti
    Associate Professor
    Renaissance Italian Literature and Culture, Renaissance Drama, Gender and Sexuality, Women's Studies

    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.
  • elena Dr. Elena Grau-Lleveria
    Associate Professor
    Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Spanish and Spanish American Literature, Hispanic women writers, theories about literary history, and transatlantic studies.

    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).

  • ralph Dr. Ralph Heyndels
    Professor
    Classical, Modern and Contemporary French and Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Philosophy, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Gay Studies

    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. Andrew Lynch
    Associate Professor and Associate Chair
    Sociolinguistics, bilingualism, Spanish language and linguistics

    Andrew Lynch (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1999) specializes in Spanish language and linguistics, general sociolinguistics, language contact and issues of bilingualism. His reading and research over the past decade have been focused on the linguistic particularities of Spanish contact dialects throughout the world, topic of the book El español en contacto con otras lenguas (Georgetown University Press, 2009). He has published numerous articles and essays on the situation of Spanish in the United States, particularly the city of Miami, and the acquisition of Spanish among the Hispanic/Latino heritage population of the United States as well as aspects of Spanish second language learning. His publications have appeared in such journals as Spanish Applied Linguistics (1998), Hispania (2001), Heritage Language Journal (2003), Lingüística Española Actual (2005), Foreign Language Annals (2008), Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (2009), and Language Sciences (2009). He is a contributor to the Enciclopedia del español en los Estados Unidos published by Spain’s Instituto Cervantes (Madrid, 2009). He has given more than thirty talks or invited lectures at local, national, and international academic conferences, and has spoken on National Public Radio, BBC London, Radio Nederland, CNN en español, and ‘Oppenheimer Presenta’. Professor Lynch has directed the Spanish heritage language program at the University of Miami since 2005, and teaches courses on topics of Spanish in the United States, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and translation. He has also worked as a translator and a forensic linguist in various state and federal court cases, and has served as a consultant to the American Council on Education in Washington, DC. Prior to coming to the University of Miami, he formed part of the graduate faculty at the University of Florida (2001 to 2005).

    El español en contacto con otras lenguas (Georgetown University Press, 2009)

     

  • lillian Dr. Lillian Manzor
    Associate Professor
    Twentieth-Century Latin American Studies, Latino/a and Caribbean Studies, Gender Studies, Performance Studies

    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-Azarola
    Assistant Professor
    Sociocultural Theory, Spanish Second Language Acquisition, Foreign Language Teaching Methodology, Technology Enhanced Language Learning

    Eduardo Negueruela-Azarola holds a licenciatura from the Universidad de Valladolid (Spain), and M.A. 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-Azarola is the director of the Spanish basic language program at the University of Miami, and teaches courses in foreign language teaching methodology, Sociocultural theory and second language development, 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-Azarola 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 and professional publications such as the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Language Awareness, the Modern Language Journal, Revista de Estudios de Lingüística Inglesa Applicada, Annual Volume of the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators, and System, as well as chapters in refereed edited volumes: Spanish Second Language Acquisition. The Art of Teaching (Georgetown University Press, 2006), Sociocultural Theory and Language Teaching (Equinox, 2008), Gesture: Second Language Acquisition (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008), Electronic Discourses in Language Learning and Language Teaching (John Benjamins, 2009), Hispanismo y Lingüística (Axac, 2010), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Wiley-BlackWell, 2013). He is currently completing a book titled Second Language Development and the Sociocultural Mind. Prof. Negueruela has also explored his ideas about language, mind, and culture in creative writing. He has published several poems in creative writing journals, and his book of poems Tropología (2009) won the prize Nuevos valores de la poesía hispana 2008.

  • gema Dr. Gema Pérez-Sánchez
    Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
    Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Feminist Theory

    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.

  • maria Dr. Maria Galli Stampino
    Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in French and Italian
    Italian and French Renaissance and Baroque Literatures and Cultures, Performance Studies. University Excellence in Teaching Award (2002)

    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

    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 world literature. She teaches classes in African Sub-Saharan literature and culture as well as immigrant and diasporic writing and film in France and Quebec.

    She has published articles on migrant writers Ying Chen (International Journal of Canadian Studies), Dai Sijie (Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies) and Mehdi Charef (The French Review). She has also published essays on Leïla Sebbar and Tahar Ben Jelloun. She is co-editor of La littérature migrante subsaharienne (Éditions Dominique Guéniot, Paris, forthcoming 2010) and collaborated on Passages et Ancrages: Dictionnaires des écritures migrantes en France depuis 1981. She is currently at work on a book-length manuscript theorizing migrant literature from a sociological and literary standpoint.

  • Dr. George Yudice
    Professor and Chair



    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.

    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.