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.

Linguistics

• Thomas Carlton: Historical French linguistics, comparative Romance language development, negation, syntax and structure, grammaticalization, phonetic representation across writing systems
• David Tezil: Variationist sociolinguistics, phonology, phonetics, morphosyntax, contact linguistics, French-based pidgin and creole languages

Environmental Humanities

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

Gender Studies

Literature

• Bruce Edmunds: 17th century French literature.
• Carmen Mayer: Cultural History (maternity, sport, solar power, auxiliary language, utopianism) and Genetic Criticism (the study of notes, plans, and correspondence to understand the emergence and development of authorship and great works).

Literature & Thought

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

German

German Studies

Linguistics

• Douglas Lightfoot: Historical Germanic linguistics, word-formation, affixoids, grammaticalization, lexicalization. Foreign language teaching and learning. Scholarly writing.
• Cori Crane: World language pedagogy and curriculum development; language program administration; systemic functional linguistics; second language writing; language teacher education; reflective teaching and learning; transformative learning

Literature

• Matt Feminella: German literature from 1650 to 1850, theater cultures, actors and acting, theater historiography, literary history, intellectual history, pseudotranslations.
• 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.
• Renata Fuchs: 18^th through 21^st century literature, intellectual history, philosophy, German-Jewish literature, Holocaust studies, women’s writing, minority literatures, translation studies.

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.