STUDENT DIRECTORY LIST | 2011-2012

Jonathan A. Allan, PhD5
jonathan.allan [at] utoronto.ca
Dissertation: “The First Time and the Mourning After: A Study of Love, Loss, and Virginity”
- Research Interests: Flirting, Kissing, Virginity, Romance
- Northrop Frye, Roland Barthes, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Adam Phillips
- Literatures: The Popular Romance Novel in English (for example, the Harlequin/Mills and Boon novel); English Literatures; Latin American Literature (esp. Colonial and Nineteenth Century)

Olga Bazilevica, PhD2 (on leave, 2011-2012)
olga.bazilevica [at] utoronto.ca
- Academic interests: Nostalgia; Changes of Political Systems; Urban Landscape; European Cinema; Visual Art; Photography;  [Self] Representation of European Nations; Postcolonial Studies
- Literatures: modern German, Russian, Latvian
- Languages: Russian, Latvian, German, English, Spanish, French

Lauren Beard, PhD3
lauren.beard [at] utoronto.ca
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
- Crisis, form, and subjectivity in literary modernism
- English, French, Italian, and German modernist and fin de siècle literature; German literary theory; continental philosophy; temporality and form; modernism and allegory
- Languages: English, French, Italian, German (reading)

Myra Bloom, PhD4
myra.bloom [at] utoronto.ca
Dissertation: “Textual Transgressions: Confessional Discourse in Late Twentieth-Century Canadian and Québécois Writing”
- Academic interests: 20th-century Canadian and Quebecois literature, concrete poetry, confession, critical theory
- Languages: French, Spanish, Latin

Sam Caldwell, PhD1
sam.caldwell [at] utoronto.ca
- vectography, texturation of Besetzung, harmolodics
- philosophy of time and vice versa
- the dissolution of the sentence in 19-20th century America and France (Whitman, Melville, Stein, Olson; Mallarme, de Clerambault, Lacan)
- appropriations of the Hegelian speculative proposition (Theodor Adorno, Gillian Rose, Catherine Malabou) and their possible mobilization for literary criticism
- Hegel, Lacan; Berryman, Bosch, Bach, Brakhage, Shakespeare, Sappho, Stein
- Languages: English, Greek, Latin, French and German (in progress)

Yi Chen, PhD3
yitoronto.chen@utoronto.ca

Élise Couture-Grondin, PhD1
elise.couture.grondin [at] utoronto.ca
CGS Doctoral Fellow
- Academic interests: Contemporary Latin American literature, post-dictatorship writing; Quebec literature; women’s writing; feminism approaches, environmental criticism, intercultural relationships, epistemology. 
- Languages: French, Spanish, English, Portuguese

Roxanne Covelo, MA
roxanne.covelo [at] utoronto.ca

Adleen Crapo, PhD3
adleen.crapo [at] utoronto.ca
- Academic interests: feminism; Early Modern gender and genre
- subjectivity, the body, and disability in Early Modern literature
- the writings of John Milton; 17th-century and contemporary European women’s life writing
- the French fairy tale
- Languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Latin (reading) and Catalan (reading)

Joe Culpepper, PhD7
joe.culpepper [at] utoronto.ca
http://individual.utoronto.ca/mojoe/
Dissertation: “Reception and Adaptation: Magic Tricks, Mysteries, Con Games”
- Research interests: fantastic literature, the con artist in American culture, twentieth-century magic books, performance studies, adaptation theory, reception theory; Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, David Mamet, Marx.
- Languages: English, French, Spanish, and Italian

Ryan Culpepper, PhD4
ryan.culpepper [at] utoronto.ca
Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar
Dissertation: “Radical Desire: Fiction, Film, Politics and Psychological Writing of the Left, 1919-1939”
- Research Areas: Marxism; early American and Soviet cinema; socialist-realist and “proletarian” fiction; modernism and avant-garde literature; American and Soviet labour history; the history of psychology (especially psychoanalysis and behaviourism)
- Languages: English, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian; in progress: Macedonian

David Joseph Dagenais, PhD9
david.dagenais [at] utoronto.ca
- Research Interests: Early Modern Literature and Culture; Literary and Political Theory; Gender Studies; Montaigne; Shakespeare
- Languages: English, French, Latin, and ancient Greek”

Lara de Beyer, PhD1
lara.debeyer [at] utoronto.ca

Melanie Easton, MA
mj_easton [at] hotmail.com
- Film Studies, South Asian Studies, Indian Cinema (particularly Bollywood)
- Contemporary South Asian Literature
- Languages: English, French, Hindi (in progress)

Andrea Ennis-Booth, MA
andrea.ennis.booth [at] utoronto.ca
- the Russian novel and short story
- English readings of Russian literature during the modernist period
- translation
- Languages: English, Russian, French

Peter Franklin, PhD1
peter.franklin [at] utoronto.ca
Ontario Graduate Scholar

Darcy Gauthier, PhD3
darcy.gauthier [at] utoronto.ca
Dissertation: “Fiction in the Time of War”
- Academic interests: The temporality of crisis/war in relation to literature, film and photography; the relationship between text and visual media; memory, repetition, belatedness, trauma; Marcel Proust, Abe Kobo, Thomas Mann, Ibuse Masuji, etc.
- Languages: English, French, Japanese, German (in progress)

Melina Giannelia, MA
melina.giannelia [at] gmail.com   
- Academic Interests: Feminism, politics, post-colonialism, translation/translatability
- Languages: English, French, German.

Allen Haaheim, PhD6
allen.haaheim [at] utoronto.ca
- Subjects: East-West comparative poetry and poetics; Classical Chinese poetry, poetics and philological exegesis; Victorian poetry and poetics
- Interests: relations between prosody and lyricism, sound and metre; rhetorical configurations of prosodic pattern; cognitive poetics; affinity, incommensurability, and alterity in cross-civilizational contexts; comparative East-West cosmologies and ontologies; consilience and transdisciplinarity in literature; world literature; gestalt; fractals; mysticism; play and creativity in literature; genre mixing and poetic experimentation; folksongs and folk singing
- Subject Authors: Shen Yüeh (441-513), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), Six Dynasties poets and theorists, Victorian poets and theorists
- Languages: Classical Chinese, Mandarin, Japanese, French (reading only)

Yasmin Haj, MA
yasmine.anya88 [at] gmail.com
- postcolonial theory, literature, and film
- the avant-garde; subversive literature and cinema
- questions of invisibility
- Languages: English, Arabic, Hebrew, French

Nathaniel Heisler, PhD5
nathanielheisler [at] hotmail.com
- Book production, translation, the printing press and ideas of Renaissance, intellectual history and Islamic education
- Languages: French, Arabic, and Latin; Persian (in progress)

Isabella Huberman, MA
isabella.huberman [at] utoronto.ca
- interests: 16th- and 17th-century travel writing; encounters with nature and with the other; book history and print culture
- Languages: English, French, with knowledge of Spanish and German

Veronica Jimenez, PhD2
veronica.jimenez [at] utoronto.ca

Nefise Kahraman, PhD2
nefise.kahraman [at] utoronto.ca
Jackman Junior Fellow
- Academic Interests: literature and medicine; medicalization of literary language; historiography; narrative theory; metaphor; irony and satire; humor
- Languages: Turkish, Persian, English, French

Paula Karger, PhD4 (on leave, 2011-2012)
p.karger [at] utoronto.ca
Ontario Graduate Scholar
- late medieval Spain
- early colonial Latin America, specifically Brazilian and Mayan works
- Ramon Llull, la doncella Teodor
- trans-Atlantic exchange
- Languages: Spanish, German, Latin, Catalan (reading knowledge), Maya (in progress)

Galya Khaikin
galya.khaikin [at] utoronto.ca

Yan Lu, PhD4
yann.lu [at] utoronto.ca
- Diasporic Chinese literature
- Contemporary Chinese literature
- Translation, Postcolonialism
- Languages: Chinese, English, French

Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard, PhD1
jeanne.mathieu.lessard [at] utoronto.ca
CGS Doctoral Fellow
-humour, poetics of space, songs, travel writing
-Languages: French, English, Italian

Agnes Neier
agnes.neier [at] mail.utoronto.ca

Ronald Ng, PhD6
ronald.ng [at] utoronto.ca
- Post-war German and French trauma fiction. Holocaust films
- Trauma theory. Theories of representation. Visual theory
- Languages: German, French, Cantonese and Mandarin

Sarah O’Brien, PhD5
sarahjane.obrien [at] utoronto.ca
Dissertation: “Unnerving Images: Cinematic Representations of Animal Slaughter and the Ethics of Shock”
- animal studies, visual culture, film theory
- Languages: English, Spanish, French

Julie Parisien, PhD7
julie.parisien [at] utoronto.ca
- cognitive literary criticism, reader-response theories, metafiction, defamiliarization
- Derrida, Barth, Pynchon, Cortazar
- Languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian

Natalie Pendergast, PhD3
natalie.pendergast [at] utoronto.ca
Dissertation: “My Life in Sequence: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary French and English ‘AutobioBD’”
- 20th- and 21st-century literature and graphic novels, word and image, visual narratives
- Autobiography, performativity, queer theory, sexual subjectivities
- Languages: English, French, Italian; Alternate discipline: Art History

Jeannine M. Pitas, PhD3
jeannine.pitas [at] utoronto.ca
- Twentieth century Latin American literature, especially poetry and women’s writing
- Twentieth century Polish literature (especially postwar poetry)
- Relationships between literature, politics and religion
- Tentative Dissertation Title: “Blakean Intimations in the poetry of Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik and Marosa di Giorgio”
- Languages: English, Spanish, Polish, German (reading knowledge)

Sita Rao, PhD2
sita.rao [at] utoronto.ca
Dissertation: “Discourses of Desire: the Erotic Narrative in Contemporary British, French and Spanish Women’s Literature (1950s to present)”
- women’s writing, erotic literature, psychoanalysis, structuralism, feminism
- literary expressions of sexuality, desire, and intimacy; autofiction;
autobiography
- Languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian (in progress)

Vanessa Robinson, PhD6
vanessa.robinson [at] gmail.com
- Late-modern European and American poetry
- Semiotics and theories of the sign
- Modern and postmodern theory
- Phenomenology and philosophy of language
- Languages: English, French, Italian

Marketa Russell Holtebrinck, PhD2
marketa.russellholtebrinck [at] utoronto.ca
- Fictional worlds; Spaciality, Theatricality & Architecture of fiction
- Modernist/Expressionistic/experimental prose
- Research themes: Fiction of return (Saramago, Queirós, Kundera, Sebald); Faust, Pessoa, Švankmajer
- Other interests: Photography; Light, Baroque and Modernist Architecture
- Literary likings: Sá-Carneiro, Lasker-Schüler, Blatný, Kleist
- Languages: German, Czech, Portuguese, English, French (reading)

Teresa Grazia Russo, PhD6
teresa.russo [at] utoronto.ca
- Italian and English Literatures
-Thesis Topic: Myth, Memory, and Imagination: Allegory and Image Making in the Middle Ages
- The Art of Memory, Allegory, Humanism, Hermeneutics, Intertextuality
- Defense of Poetry from Boccaccio to Sidney, Mythology encyclopedias 1350-1450 and their reception in literature and art; literary images and image making in the Middle Ages
- Dante, Boccaccio, Bersuire, Walsingham, Chaucer, Christian de Pizan
- Languages: Latin, Old Italian, Old French, Middle English, Italian

Matteo A. Scardellato, MA
matteo.scardellato [at] utoronto.ca
- Nationalisms, regionalisms, traditionalism and “folk” culture in late nineteenth and twentieth century continental Europe
- The (re)construction of group identity and narrative via “comparative” mythology and philology
- Marxism, Structuralism and  Russian Formalism. Naturalism, Neorealism, Historiographic
Metafiction, Speculative Fiction and the Fantastic
- Languages: English, Italian, Spanish (in process)

Catherine Schwartz, PhD2
catherine.schwartz [at] utoronto.ca
- Collaborative program: Book History & Print Culture
- Nineteenth-century Canadian print culture
- Weather writing, almanacs, and national literary identity formation
- Readership, class, and popular books
- Languages: French, English, Spanish

Panagiota Siganou
penny.siganou [at] utoronto.ca

Tetiana Soviak, PhD6
tetiana.soviak [at] utoronto.ca
- Interests: Labour studies, representation of work and the worker esp. in cinema, socialist realism, Soviet culture and film esp. Stalin era film, politics and aesthetics
- Languages: Russian, Ukrainian, English; German in progress

Rachel F. Stapleton, PhD4
rachel.f.stapleton [at] gmail.com
SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Dissertation: “Scripting Social Selves: Petitionary Letters in Early Modern England and Spain”
- epistolary theory & genre; communication; letter writing manuals; artes dictaminis
- Manipulations of inter/personal subjectivities; social conduct; political and gendered language
- Languages: English, Spanish, French, Latin

Kristina Syvarth, PhD2
kristina.syvarth [at] utoronto.ca
- The Absurd, Surrealism, the historical avant-garde, theatre/drama, performativity
- Languages: Russian, French, German (reading)

Toshi X. Tomori, MA
Orpheusfx [at] yahoo.com
- Academic interests: Colonialism/Post-colonialism, Psychoanalysis, Trauma theory, Cinema, Film Theory, the body, among other things

Antonio Viselli, PhD3
antonio.viselli [at] utoronto.ca
- French Surrealism, 19th-century French and Italian poetry, Symbolism, English Modernism, Italian Film, Linguistics
- Visual and textual semiotics, Parody/Irony, Genetic criticism, Theories of Translation
- Languages: French, English, Italian, Spanish

Lukasz Wodzynski, PhD4
lukasz.wodzynski [at] utoronto.ca
Jackman Junior Fellow; SSHRC Doctoral Fellow
Dissertation: “Symbolist Romance in Polish and Russian Modernist Literature”
- the culture of European fin de siecle
- theories of modernism
- Northrop Frye, archetypal criticism, genre theory
- science fiction and fantasy literature
- Languages: Polish, Russian, English

Karen Yaworski, PhD2
k.yaworski [at] utoronto.ca
Connaught Fellow
Dissertation: “Camaraderies Thick and Thin: Transnational Blackness and Strategic Essentialism”
- Academic interests: diaspora, migration and transnationality; black cultural politics; race and ethnicity; identity formations; cultural studies; political strategy; hip-hop; postcolonial studies; immigrant advocacy.
- Literatures: contemporary Caribbean, African American, African Canadian, South Asian
- Languages: English, French, Spanish