Research

Our faculty conduct research in a variety of fields. You can learn more about individual research interests in the faculty directory, or check out our areas of expertise below.

Arabic

Arabic language, Literature, and Translation

• Safa Elnaili: Libyan literature, literary translation, folktales, the Arabian Nights, stylistics analysis, critical discourse analysis.

Classics

Gender Studies

• Tatiana Tsakiropoulou-Summers: Homeric epics; women in Classical Antiquity, women’s social & political status in Antiquity, women in Greek democracy; archetypal literary criticism & myth criticism; ancient civilization & history.

Religion

• Kirk Summers: Reformation (especially the Reformed/Calvinist movement), Neo-Latin, Roman religion, Lucretius, and Cicero.

French

African Studies, Women’s Studies, Middle Eastern Studies

• Cheryl Toman: African women’s writing (Central Africa and Mali), Arab women writers, feminisms, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, immigration.

Applied Linguistics

• Isabelle Drewelow: second language acquisition, intercultural competence, attitudes, beliefs and stereotypes, empathy, affective dimensions of foreign language learning, project-based learning, French for specific purposes.
• Maxime Vignon: linguistics, Francophone studies, international trade, geopolitics, second language acquisition.

Environmental humanities

• Gina Stamm: 20th and 21st century literature, ecocriticism, ecopoetics, queer theory, modernism, psychoanalysis.

Gender Studies

• Jennifer Carr: contemporary French/Francophone literature; women writers of the 20th/21st centuries; theories of gender and sexuality; feminist theory and politics; intersections of race, gender, class.

Literature

• Bruce Edmunds: 17th century French literature.
• Carmen Mayer: 19th century French literature, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Joris-Karl Huysmans, narrative, naturalism, adaptation, utopianism, cultural history.

Literature & Thought

• Jean Luc Robin: 17th-Century Literature & Thought: Descartes, French classical literature and scientific revolution, Molière

German

German Studies

• Rasma Lazda-Cazers: Medieval German studies, Early Modern, representation of war, intercultural literature.

Linguistics

• Douglas Lightfoot: Historical Germanic linguistics, word-formation, affixoids, grammaticalization, lexicalization. Foreign language teaching and learning. Scholarly writing.

Literature

• Matt Feminella: German literature from 1650 to 1850, theater cultures, actors and acting, theater historiography, literary history, intellectual history, pseudotranslations.
• Thomas C. Fox: 19th and 20th century literature, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, women writers, East German literature, and Holocaust studies.
• Regina Range: 19th to 21st century literature and film; German-speaking émigré writers, filmmakers, and scriptwriters in the United States; authors and filmmakers of the Weimar Republic; female autobiographical texts; script writing and film scripts as texts.

Italian

Comparative Literature and Translation

• Fabio Battista: early modern European culture; translation studies; history of Italian theatre and performance; the relationship between fact and fiction.

Early Modern Studies

• Jessica Goethals: medieval and early modern literature and theater; gender and women’s writing; literary representations of military-historical events; spectacle and performance; print and manuscript history; prophecy and eschatology; rhetoric; intersections of Italian, Spanish, and French cultural production

Film Studies

• Claudia Romanelli: Italian cinema in a transnational context, film history and theory, screenwriting practices, international co-productions, collaborative authorship, contemporary Italian literature, postcolonial studies, mixed- and intermedia.

Italian Studies

• Alessandra Montalbano: modern and contemporary Italian literature, culture, philosophy, and history, literary criticism, aesthetics, phenomenology, and gender and trauma studies.

Russian

Literature

• Andrew Drozd: 19th century Russian literature, Chernyshevskii, old Russian literature, Russian history, Czech language and literature, East European history, and Slavic folklore.

Spanish

19th- and 20th-century Latin America

• Sarah Moody: Modernismo and women’s writing in Latin America; feminism, gender theory, aesthetics, and intellectual networks.

20th- and 21st-century Latin America

• Micah McKay: environmental discourse and cultural production, literature and film in the context of the Anthropocene.

20th- and 21st-century Spain

• Ana Corbalán: Literature and Culture, Film, Visual Arts, Memory and Trauma, Spanish Civil War, Women Writers, Cultural Studies, Transatlantic Studies, and Gender Studies.

Bilingualism

• Bryan Koronkiewicz: bilingualism, code-switching, methodology, processing, pronouns, second language acquisition, and syntax.

Colonial Spanish American

• Constance Janiga-Perkins: Female Spiritual Autobiography, semiotics, the materiality of manuscripts, and Digital Humanities.

Early Modern Spain

• Bill Worden: Cervantes, early modern literature, teaching pedagogy.

Gender Studies

• Xabier Granja: Gender Studies, Women Writers, Early Modernity, Social Justice, Hegemony and Power, Queer Theory.

Sociolinguistics

• Erin O’Rourke: intonation, sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology, and languages in contact.

Theoretical linguistics

• Alicia Cipria: theoretical and applied issues of tense; Spanish aspect and Aktionsart/actionality; Spanish-English contrasts; contact of Spanish with other languages; language attitudes.

US Latino studies

• Ignacio F. Rodeño: US Latina/o, Caribbean, and Mexican literatures and cultures; Hispanic autobiography and narratives of the self; literary theory, and transatlantic studies.