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. Kathryn B. Gore Chair in French Studies. 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).  

 

 

 

Michael Syrimis.  Ph. D. University of Chicago. Associate Professor. Italian cinema and literature; early 20th-century literature and technology; Italian avant-garde and modernism; film theory and history; Italian cinema of the 1930s and classical Hollywood cinema; Pasolini, writer and filmmaker. Recent publications include: The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod: Reflections of Cinema in Early Twentieth-Century Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); “’Squarci di notti romane’: Pasolini’s Early Authorial Confessions,” Romance Notes 52.1 (2012): 89-96.

 

 

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.     

 

 

 

Oana Sabo. Assistant Professor. PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Southern California. 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature (especially non-postcolonial writers from Eastern Europe and Québec). Her current work examines the production, circulation, and reception of contemporary "migrant literature" in French and English in a global literary marketplace. More broadly, she is interested in postcolonial studies, transnationalism and diaspora, literary translingualism and European cinema.

 

 

 

Toby Wikström received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2010. His research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, with a particular emphasis on cross-cultural encounters, literature and law, performance and early modern Orientalism. Wikström is currently at work on a monograph entitled Legal Scenes: Law, Conquest and Slavery on the French Stage, 1598-1685. In this book, he explores how the seventeenth-century French theater treated the complex legal issues that arose from intercultural acts of conquest and slavery in early modernity. His article “The Ambivalence of New World Conquest: Jacques Du Hamel’s Acoubar ou la loyauté trahie (1603)” will appear in winter 2012 in a collective work published by Brepols, Découvrir de nouveaux mondes et les définir juridiquement (du Moyen Âge aux débuts de l’Âge moderne). In 2013, Wikström will publish the article “Erotic Empire: The Glorification of Ottoman Sexual and Legal Practices in Montfleury’s Le Mary sans femme” in a special issue of Esprit créateur on the subject of the “Turk of Early Modern France.” In addition, his book chapter “Was There a Pan-European Orientalism? Comparing the Representation of the Muslim “Orient” in Captivity Narratives from Iceland and the Spanish Netherlands (1628-1656)” will appear in the edited volume The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe.

 

 

Visiting Professors:

 

Nayana Abeysinghe received her Ph.D in French from Columbia University in 2009. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Intergenerational Memory in the Work of Caribbean Women Writers explores the expression and transmission of individual and cultural memory in the works of francophone women writers of the Caribbean. Since the completion of her doctoral work, Dr. Abeysinghe has been involved in the publication of a critically acclaimed photo book entitled Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent (August 2010) by award-winning photojournalist Mario Tama on the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and Louisiana. She has also published articles (Romanic Review, Tiresias: Culture, Politics and Critical Theory) and presented papers on Caribbean spiritualities, sexualities and migrations. She is currently working on a book on transcolonial travels in the Caribbean, which takes her research beyond her focus on the francophone Caribbean to a comparative framework that includes the hispanophone and anglophone Caribbean. Before her arrival at Tulane University as Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, Dr. Abeysinghe has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in French and Francophone literature, culture and cinema, as well as French language at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and at SUNY New Paltz.

   

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,  Ph.D. in Italian Studies, Rutgers University, 2012. “Dottorato di ricerca in Italianistica”, University of Florence, 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. His current research examines images of Japan in works by Italian writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun from the beginning of the Meiji restoration (1868) and during the subsequent opening of Japan’s relations with the West. The title of his last article is “Little Italy, Big Japan: Patterns of Continuity and Displacements”, in Italian Studies in Southern Africa. Vol. 25, n. 1 (2012): 9-18.

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.

 

 

Teresa Villa-Ignacio is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. Her interests include contemporary French, Francophone, and U.S. American poetry and literature, ethical philosophy, translation, postcolonial studies, and literatures of immigration. Her current book project, Poethical Import: Translationships in French-American Poetic Exchange, examines the centrality of ethics in relations of translation and collaboration among France- and U.S.-based contemporary experimental poets. She is also working on a comparative study of immigration’s role in shaping and changing poetics of community in France and the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2010, and has taught in the History and Literature program at Harvard University and the Romance Studies department at Boston University.

 

       

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.

 

 

Franz Voelker holds an M.A. in Law as well as an M.A. in Italian and French Literature from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He received his Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. While completing his doctorate, he taught language classes in both French and Italian, as well as several classes aimed at introducing students to French culture and literature. His dissertation research examined contemporary French poets Jude Stéfan, James Sacré, and Dominique Fourcade’s use of the elegy genre. His current research interests include French and Italian poetry, migration and nostalgia in francophone literature, and foreign language teaching methodology. He has published two articles, one on Michelangelo Buonarroti, and one on James Sacré.