Working Papers - A graduate student publication of the UPenn Department of Romance Languages

Valerie Aguilar is a graduate student at Princeton University. She earned a bachelor’s degree in French Literature and Political Science, and a master’s degree in French Literature from the University of Notre Dame. At Princeton, the focus of her current research is on translators and the process and politics of translation in Renaissance France. Her academic and research interests include language theory and practice, multiculturalism, political philosophy, sacred texts, francophone theater, and sixteenth-century poetry.

Marcelline Block is a PhD Candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton. Her dissertation considers theories of trauma and the representation of women in exemplary French, English, and American texts and films of the 20th century. She has published numerous articlesand has presented papers at Brown, Harvard, NYU, Bucknell, and CUNY as well as at the conferences of the Northeast Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Program in the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton. She is an Associate Editor of LINE.

RubÉn Builes is a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon fellow in support of his dissertation at the Stanford Humanities Center. He specializes in Early Modern Castilian and Portuguese literature, history and culture. His interests also include Catalan literature, European history, and the history of cartography. He haspublished an article on Germán Espinosa's La Balada del Pajarillo, a reading guide for researchers on Tirant lo Blanc for the Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, and is currently working on a paper on self-reflexivity in the early modern Iberian cultures that will be published in 2009.

Steve Buttes is a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests are primarily 20th-century and contemporary Latin American literature and culture, especially the Southern Cone, though he has also presented research on Mexican, Central American, Spanish and U.S. Appalachian literature. His dissertation explores national stereotypes of poverty in relation to national identity and modernity and the literary debates surrounding regionalism and modernism. He has presented his work at various conferences including the national conferences of the MLA and the ACLA.

Hugh Cagle is a graduate student in History at Rutgers University specializing in Latin America and the Lusophone world. His areas of interest include the late medieval Mediterranean and the early modern Indian Ocean regions and he is particularly interested in issues of race and ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. His current research is comparative and traces the genealogy of social categories in these regions—chiefly through the prism of the plantation complex. This work emphasizes, first, the ways in which religion frames understanding and, second, the ever-improvised character of social hierarchies.

Jaclyn Cohen is in her fifth year as a PhD student in the German and Romance Languages and Literature Department at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include Early Modern Spain and women writers. She has a publication in the University of Florida online journal, Sin Frontera, entitled “Honor and the Home: Theatrical Representations of a Woman’s Space in La Estrella de Sevilla and Del Rey Abajo, Ninguno.”

Aisha Cort is a third-year Ph.D candidate at Emory University in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese where she holds the Emory Diversity Fellowship. Her areas of interest are contemporary literature of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and race/ diaspora theory. Recently she presented a paper entitled Negotiating Blackness and Latinidad in the U.S. at the “Pan-Africanisms” conference at Yale University. She is working on a project that explores the politics of color within the black American and Afro-Latino communities, and a project that reads the narratives of Afro-Latino identities against the black American narrative of passing.

Ariadne Costa is a doctoral candidate in Literary Studies in the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her primary interest is 20th century Latin American literature, with particular attention to the vanguard period in the Southern Cone. She is also interested in film studies. She is currently working on her dissertation about the work of the Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti.

Larissa Costa da Mata is a PhD student at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil, where she has also taken her MA degree, with a thesis on the works by Adalgisa Nery — a Brazilian writer and politician — and Maria Martins — a surrealist sculpture and poet, both set away by traditional criticism. She is interested in Brazilian Modernism in literature and arts in the 1940s, and early 20th-century international avant-garde movements.

Pablo Martínez Diente is a PhD Candidate at Vanderbilt University and Assistant editor of Afro-Hispanic Review. He holds a BA in English from the Universidad de Valladolid, Spain and an MA in Hispanic Literatures from West Virginia University. His research interests include trans-poetic protocols of global modernism, vanguardism and violence.

Jonathan Eskew is a graduate student at Columbia University. He received a BA in French from Reed College in 2006; his research interests include psychoanalysis and models of meaning and cognition in the sciences in Early Modern France, particularly in poetry and allegory.

Gustavo Furtado is a second-year PhD student in Romance Studies at Cornell University where he is specializing in Modern and Contemporary Spanish American and Brazilian literatures and cultures. His research interests include Brazilian modernismo, Spanish American vanguardias, Latin American intellectual history, and post-boom fiction. His primary focus of research is the interface between intellectuals, cultural productions and politics.

Laura Gandolfi is a PhD student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. She received her Laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Trieste in 2005 and her Laurea Specialistica from the same university in 2007. Her research interests include twentieth-century Latin American literature, Transatlantic Studies, Gender and Sexuality, and Sephardic literature in the Balkans.

MÓnica GonzÁlez is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. During 2005-2006 she was the editor in Chief of Lucero—the academic journal of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese—volume 17, an issue dedicated to Remapping the Idea of America. She is currently a Fellow of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, a distinction that aims at supporting her dissertation project on the role of colonialism and imperialism in the various narrations of the last Cuban War of Independence—also known as “the Spanish-American War.”

Claire Taylor Jones is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her area of specialization lies in the theological writings of French and German authors in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. She will be dissertating on the role of the voice and song in mystical thought — insofar as the voice connects the Christian to Christ as the Word, while song fosters that connection, enabling mystical experience.

Gayle Jones, originally from Temple, Texas, is a 2nd year Ph.D. candidate in French literature at the University of Virginia. She graduated from Davidson College in 2003 with a degree in Economics and French, and in 2005 she earned an MA in French from Middlebury College. Her primary academic interests include North African film and literature and 20th century French literature.

Renata Magdaleno is a PhD student in Literary Studies in the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her academic and research interests include contemporary and late twentieth-century Latin American literature. The focus of her current research is travel and displacement in contemporary literature.

Enric Mallorqui-Ruscalleda received a BA in Philology and an MA in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literatures before going to Princeton University to pursue a Ph.D. in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literatures. His research focuses on Medieval Iberian Literature and Culture, Mediterranean Studies, and Early Modern Hispanic Literatures from a Transatlantic and interdisciplinary perspective. He has delivered papers in professional conferences and congresses and has published articles on a variety of topics in professional journals in the USA, Europe, and Latin America.

Amanda Minervini is a second-year doctoral student in the Italian Studies Department at Brown University. She has a Laurea in Lettere from Universitá di Bari, Italy (2002), and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst. Her academic curiosity is currently directed towards contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema.

Maria Moreno graduated from the Universidad de Los Andes (Merida, Venezuela) with a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures. Prior to coming to Brown in 2004, she received an M.A. in French Literature and Pedagogy from the University of Arizona. Her research interests include twentieth- century French, Francophone, and Latin American literatures. She is working on a dissertation that treats fiction written in French and Spanish from the Caribbean region, in which she examines the role of language in the formation of a particular, Caribbean literary ethos.

AurÉlie NoËl received a B.A in English literature from la Faculté libre des Sciences Humaines de Lille (France) and an M.A from Washington University in Saint-Louis where she is currently a fifth-year Ph.D candidate. Her dissertation investigates the notion of (re)mediation in the works of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Michel Houellebecq and Frederic Beigbeder. She also has an interest in surrealist representations of marginal sexualities and more generally in constructive and destructive interferences between political, philosophical and literary narratives.

Erika Paoletti is a native of Florence. She pursued her undergraduate degree at the University of Toulouse Le Mirail (France) and an M.A. in French Literature from the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is currently a PhD candidate at Boston College in French and Italian Languages and Literatures. Her research interests are French and Italian Renaissance, women's theory, and theatre.

Elena Peregrina is a graduate student at Princeton University. Her main interests are Latin American, Brazilian and Spanish nineteenth- and twentieth-century Literature and Visual Arts. Her current research focuses on the relations and interactions between literature and photography in the Spanish speaking world.

Julia Perratore is a third year graduate student in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA in Art History from New York University. Her primary area of study is twelfth-century sculpture in Northern Spain.

Leinimar Alves Pires holds BAs in Philosophy from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and in Letters from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She completed a masters in Brazilian Literature at PUC-Rio, and in her dissertation she analyzed the concept of the "popular" in Brazil in the work of Chico Buarque de Holanda. At present, she is working toward her PhD in Brazilian Literature at PUC-Rio and analyzing texts concerned with the dialogue between philosophy and literature.

Namrata Poddar is a fifth-year graduate student in French at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, focusing on the islands in the Indian Ocean and Mauritius, in particular; and post-colonial studies. She is working on her dissertation, tentatively entitled, Paradoxes of Insularity in the Contemporary, Francophone Mauritian Novel.

Alejandro Quin Alejandro Quin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. His areas of interest include philosophy, critical theory, and 19th and 20th century Latin American literature and visual culture. His dissertation explores the multiple configurations of the nature-law philosophical divide, and the cultural mediations of sovereignty and biopolitics, in literary and visual production dealing with Latin American rainforest areas (the Amazon, Guatemala, and the misiones region in the Southern Cone) throughout specific historical moments ranging from late 19th century to the 1990s.

Ashley Rainey is a second-year PhD. student in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her primary area of interest is 17th century French literature with a focus on theatre and a special interest in Racine. She has also recently completed research projects in the areas of early modern English theatre as well as medieval hagiography. She is currently interested in notions of the offstage as a mediator for stage presence and absence in relation to spectatorship..

Yann Robert is a doctoral student in the French Department at Princeton University. Professional publications include works on Elizabethan theatre, Rabelais and the “claque” in nineteenth-century French theatre. Current work includes study of the interaction between philosophy, politics and theatre in France, from 1750 to 1850.

Norman Rusin is a 2nd-year Italian doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated cum laude in Communication Sciences and Journalism at the University of Trieste in 2007, and was appointed Cultore della materia in Italian Language and Literature. The same year he won the International Journalism Prize “Maria Grazia Cutuli”. So far, he has analyzed journalistic language, focusing on language of embedded war reporters, through a semiotic perspective, based on Louis Hjelmslev’s linguistic theory. Norman is interested in Italian emigrant culture and its relationship with host cultures. He has been working as a freelance journalist in Italy since 2001.

Javier Sampedro studied Spanish Philology at the University of Havana until 2003, and received at Master in Arts from the University of Florida in 2007. Currently he is completing a PhD program at the Romance Languages Department of the University of Pennsylvania. His research is currently focused on national/cultural identity, transnational languages and Immigration in 20th century Latin American Literature.

Atia Sattar is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include the intersection of medicine and literature in late nineteenth-century France, England, and Germany. She is currently researching the manifestations of scientific experimentation at the Grand-Guignol, France's original theater of Horror.

Judith Sierra-Rivera is a graduate student in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA in Latin American Studies and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico. Her interests include 19th and 20th Latin American and Caribbean literature, architecture, and music. She explores the connections between intellectual voice, memory, and the space of catastrophe, particularly in Mexico, Chile, and the Hispanic Caribbean.

Lucy Swanson is a second-year graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated from Whitman College in 2004 with a BA in French. Her interests include representations of families in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, especially sibling relationships.

Dawn Taylor is a graduate student in the Comparative Literature Department at the Pennsylvania State University, specializing in Latin American literatures (in Spanish and Portuguese). My main interests are translation studies and theories, modernism in Brazil and Argentina, and religion and spirituality in Brazilian literature.

Gaspard Turin is an assistant and a doctoral student at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is writing his doctoral thesis on the literary lists of the French twentieth century. His areas of interest are mainly contemporary and late twentieth- century French literature, fragmentary literature, stereotypes in fiction, and other forms of relationships between fiction and reality.

David K. Vassar is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia, where he is currently writing his dissertation, Writing the Rites: Exploring Ritual in Contemporary Spanish American Autobiographical Fiction. A resident of Houston, Texas, David has interest in Southern Cone fiction, Cuban culture and literature, as well as Latino writing and thought.

Rebecca Wolpin is a PhD candidate in the Spanish Department at Princeton University. She is working on her dissertation about memories and experiences of ex-militants in 1970s Argentina.

Lucas Wood is a third-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is focused primarily on medieval French romance and vernacular allegorical traditions, but he tries to keep his work on the Middle Ages in dialogue with his interests in 20th-century philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of history and historiography. His current project examines models of secular interpretation in the “Queste del Saint Graal” and Crusade-era historical fictions from a perspective informed by the thought of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.

Stephanie Wooler completed her undergraduate and Masters degrees at Oxford University and is a now third-year doctoral student in French Literature in the Romance Languages department at Harvard. Her main areas of interest are the nineteenth-century novel, feminist theory and female writers, and her proposed dissertation will consider the topic of performative identity and the representation of the actress in the Belle Epoque novel in France.

Enea Zaramella received a Laurea Specialistica degree in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Trieste (Italy) and now is a doctoral candidate in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. His research interests fucus on the relationship between music (especially jazz music) and contemporary Latin American literature.

Eliza Zingesser is a doctoral candidate in the French Department at Princeton University. Her work focuses on the intersections of medieval Occitan and French literature. Her research explores lyric and its diffusion, contrafacture, and the history of the book. Authors and texts of particular interest to her include Machaut, Froissart, Nicole de Margival, Flamenca and the Roman de Fauvel.

David G. Barreto is a graduate student in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a M.A. from the University of Michigan. His research focuses on new lyric studies in 20th and 21st century transatlantic poetry. His other interests include ethics, aesthetics, contemporary continental and American philosophy, and critical theory.

Benedetta Gennaro is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University; her research interests include Italian women’s history, Risorgimento, colonial writers and travelers, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual history, and opera.

Tina-Marie Ranalli is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania and specializes in medieval French literature. Her research interests include codes for gender roles and representations of sex, violence, and the body. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the romances of Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy using a late fourteenth-century manuscript as the point of departure.

Joan PÉrez-Rodriguez is a third-year graduate student in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.