French & Italian

           Full Professors: 

 

Jean-Godefroy Bidima.  Ph.D. Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Yvonne Arnoult Chair in Francophone Studies. Research includes continental philosophy, literatures and arts of the Francophone world, African philosophies, juridical anthropology and medical ethics. Publications include numerous articles and four books: Théorie critique et modernité négro-africaine: De l'Ecole de Francfort à la "Docta spes africana" (1993); La philosophie négro-africaine (1995); L'art négro-africain (1997); and La palabre: Une juridiction de la parole (1997).

 

Linda Carroll. Ph.D. Harvard. Research interests focus on the interaction between cultural and historical forces in Renaissance Italy. She is particularly concerned by the ways in which popular creative artists and leaders in the economic and political sphere(s) engaged one another to further their goals. A related interest is translating texts of the era. She is translator forVenice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, an anthology of important passages edited by Patricia Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White and published by The Johns Hopkins University Press (2008). She is currently preparing a new edition and translation of the works of Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante). Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzante), La prima oratione, edited and translated by Linda L. Carroll. Modern Humanities Research Association Critical Texts Vol. 16. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008.Her articles have appeared recently in  Renaissance Quarterly,  The Psychohistory Review, Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, Sixteenth Century Journal, and numerous conference proceedings.  Professor Carroll received the USG John Stibbs Award for Outstanding Faculty Member in 2007.  Linda Carroll's C.V.

Felicia McCarren. Ph.D. Stanford University. Professor. 19th -21st century French, English and comparative literature and literary theory; visual culture and performance; science and technology studies; history of medicine and psychoanalysis; film history and theory; Francophone studies and postcolonial theory. Publications include two books: Dance Pathologies; Performance, Poetics, Medicine (1998) and Dancing Machines; Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2003), articles on performance and cinema in Critical Inquiry and L'Esprit Créateur, and recent work on the cultural impact of immigration, transculturation and technology transfer in France and francophone countries: "Téléphone Arabe: From Child's Play to Terrorism; The Poetics and Politics of Post-colonial Telecommunications," (Journal of Postcolonial Writing) and "52 days to Timbuktu (62 days to Rabat)," (Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture).    

 

Elizabeth Poe. Ph.D. Princeton. Professor. Research interests include troubadour poetry, Occitan narrative, textual transmission, and manuscript studies. Within the Old French literary domain, she has worked on the lais of Marie de France, the fabliaux, and the salut d'amour. She is currently engaged in a project on medieval Occitan grammars. She has published two books: From Poetry to Prose in Old Provençal (1986) and Compilatio: Lyric Texts and Prose Commentary in Troubadour Mansucript H (2000).

 

 

Vaheed Ramazani. Ph.D. University of Virginia.  Professor. 19th-century French literature and culture.  His research is broadly concerned with psychoanalysis, rhetoric, and narrative theory.  His recent publications focus on the articulation of historical trauma through the intersecting tropes of gender and national identity.  His current work examines representations of terrorism and war in contemporary Western media. Professor Ramazani is the author of The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony (University Press of Virginia) and of Writing in Pain:  Literature, History, and the Culture of Denial (Palgrave Macmillan).  His articles have appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Romanic Review, PMLA, Boundary 2, Cultural Critique, SubStance, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

 

 

Associate Professors:

 

Thomas Klingler. Ph.D. Indiana. Associate Professor. Chair. French linguistics; Creole studies; Louisiana French; dialectology; lexicography. Recent publications: If I Could Turn my Tongue Like That: The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana (LSU Press, 2003); "How much Acadian is there in Cajun?" (2009); co-editor, Dictionary of Louisiana French as Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities (University Press of Mississippi, 2009).  

 

Assistant Professors:

 

Fayçal Falaky. Ph.D. New York University. Assistant Professor. 18th-century French literature; psychodynamics of law; political philosophy; Islam and secularism; philosophical vulgarization in 18th-century France and in the present day Arab world. Recent publications include "L'originalité du plagiat," (2009) in FLS and "Iconologie et idolâtrie en Islam : caricatures et figures," (2007) in La Voix du regard.     

 

 

Michael Syrimis. Ph. D. University of Chicago. Assistant Professor. 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature and cinema; early twentieth-century literature and technology; Italian avant-garde and modernism; film theory and history; Pasolini, writer and filmmaker; Italian modernism and classical Hollywood cinema. Recent publications include "From Nestoroff to Garbo: Pirandellian Humor in Its Cinematic Vernacular (2008) in Quaderni d'italianistica, and "Mechanical Giants, Futurist Laughs: From Gazurmah to Deed's Bully" (2009) in Annali d'Italianistica.

 

Visiting Professor

 

   

Leslie Barnes. PhD, UCLA (2010). Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first- century French and francophone literature (especially Vietnam), immigrant writers and minority discourse, contemporary metafiction in French, and narratives of the Southeast Asian sex-trafficking industry. She has published on these topics in Journal of Vietnamese Studies and French Forum.

 

Nathalie Dajko. Ph.D Tulane University. Her research focuses on French as it is spoken in Louisiana, with a particular interest in the American Indian communities of the coastal wetlands. You can read more about Louisiana French and access audio and video clips from her research at her website at www.tulane.edu/~ndajko.  Her other interests include dialectology, pidgins and creoles, and language death and revival.  She moonlights as a shrimpboat deckhand.

 

Wedsly Turenne Guerrier is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the department of French and Italian. He is currently teaching Haitian Creole I and Haitian Culture and Society.

 

 

 

 

 

Michele Monserrati 

Michele Monserrati is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at Rutgers University. He received his “Dottorato di ricerca in Italianistica” from University of Florence in 2007. In 2005 he published the book Le “cognizioni inutili”, saggio su “Lo Spettatore fiorentino” di Giacomo Leopardi [Useless Cognitions”. Essay on the Journal “Lo Spettatore Fiorentino” by Giacomo Leopardi](Florence: University Press). He is editor of the correspondence Benedetto Croce – Guido Mazzoni (Florence: SEF, 2007). He is author of articles on Giacomo Leopardi, Giovanni Pascoli and Aldo Palazzeschi, Antonio Fogazzaro. Presently he is writing a dissertation about the representation of Japan by Italian writers, ethnologists, anthropologists, who visited and lived in Japan during the Twentieth Century

Roberto Pesce. Ph.D  Università Ca' Foscari Venezia and Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University. Visiting Assistant Professor.  Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature. His interests and areas of expertise are Classical and Medieval philology; the representations of the self in the Middle Ages (including Francis of Assisi, Dante, and Petrarch); Medieval chronicles in Latin and Italian vernacular. He has published on these topics with the editors Brill and Centro di studi medievali e rinascimentali “E.A. Cicogna”.

 

 

Fleur Prade. Fleur was born in Paris, France but raised in Sarasota, FL. She received her Bachelor's in French and Italian Studies from the University of Delaware. She then spent a year in France studying with Middlebury College, VT for her Master's in French Studies. After her masters she went to Pennsylvania State University to do her Ph.D. in French Civilization. She specializes in contemporary french and francophone politics mostly linguistic politics in France, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland. She also researches and have presented on the Parity Law in France and Belgium.

 

Toby Wikström received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2010.  His research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature, European encounters with Muslim, sub-Saharan and Native American cultures in the early modern era, and literature and law.  Wikström’s dissertation, “Law, Conquest and Slavery on the French Stage, 1598-1685,” explores how the seventeenth-century French theater treated the complex legal issues that arose from cross-cultural acts of conquest and slavery in early modernity.  He holds a B.A. from Carleton College and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

 

 

       

Professors of Practice:  

 

 

Richard Cranford is a Professor of Practice in French, is researching espionage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries in view or preparing a study of intrigue in those centuries.

 

 

 

Bouchaib Gadir received his B.A. degree in Arabic Language and Literature from the Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines in Casablanca. His Diplôme d'études approfondies in Arabic Language and Literature is from the University of Mohammed V in Rabat. His Diplôme d'études supérieures in Arabic Language and Literature is from the Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines in Casablanca. He has a Ph.D in Francophone Studies from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He worked as an Assistant Professor of Arabic at Virginia Military Institute from 2006 through 2008. He is a former board member of "La Coordination des Chercheurs sur les Littératures Maghrébines et Comparées". His research focuses on language learning theories, Medieval Arabic literature, Polyphony in Modern Arabic novel and Identity and Exile in the Francophone Novel of the Maghreb. 

 

Alexandra Reuber is director of the Language Program and a Professor of Practice in French. She joined the Department of French and Italian in 2006. She received an M.A. in English and French literature from the RWTH-University, Aachen, Germany, an M.A. in teaching foreign languages from the Studienseminar Hagen, Germany, and a PhD. in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University. Her specialization is nineteenth-century literature, with special interest in gothic and fantastic writing. In addition to her various conference presentations and recent publications in Etudes françaises, Nineteenth Century Literature in English, as well as in The Journal of College Teaching, she is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the development of the uncanny in nineteenth-century literature.

 

 

Annette Sojic is a Professor of Practice in French. She joined the Department of French and Italian in 2006. She received an M.A. in English and Dutch literature from the University of Liège, Belgium and a PhD. in French Literature from Tulane University. Her specialization is19th-century French Literature,with special interest in the fantastic. Her article on Maupassant's “L’Inconnue” was published in the Cahiers Naturalistes (2006). She is currently working on the relationships between fantastic narration and schizophrenia.