Home

Current Graduate Students

Susan (Jane) Alexander is a PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill in the Dept of English and Comparative Literature. She graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1995 with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in English. She returned to academia after seven years of naval service. Her research interests include European Renaissance literature with a specific focus on English, Spanish and French lyric poetry and drama. She earned the Masters of Arts degree from UNC in 2006 with her thesis entitled "Translating Desire: A Comparative Analysis of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Joachim Du Bellay’s Imitations of Petrarchan Lyric Poetry." She has also been a recurring participant in Liberty Fund literary colloquia on liberty and responsibility. Jane is currently teaching at the Raleigh Latin School, a private high school with a classical focus on education but has also taught in UNC’s Freshman Writing Program for two years.
jane_alex28@hotmail.com

Eileen Anderson is currently a PhD. Candidate at UNC - Chapel Hill. She is finishing her dissertation entitled, "Resisting Anglicization: Strategies of Identity Formation in Irish and Puerto Rican Communities in the United States". She completed her M.A. in Hispanic Literature in New York University's Program in Madrid, Spain in 1999. She received a FLAS grant to study Irish Gaelic in the summer of 2001 and Mellon Dissertation Research grant in 2006. Her research interests include the Nuyorican Poetry Movement and exploring the intersections of Latino and Irish studies in the United States. She is currently working on a chapter for Lost Colonies: Ireland and the American South for Four Courts Press about Irish and Mexican labor relations in the early 20th century, which is due for publication in 2008.
emanders@email.unc.edu

Amy Banks
aebanks@email.unc.edu

Melissa Birkhofer
birkhofe@email.unc.edu

Maria Celina Bortolotto graduated from Universidad Nacional de La Plata at Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1993 with a degree of Teacher of English Language and Literature. She came to the U.S. on the Fulbright Teacher Exchange and began her master/doctoral program at UNC in 2002. Her research areas include gender/queer studies, affect theory, postcolonial criticism, Latin American and Caribbean contemporary fiction. She teaches a Spanish Linguistics course at UNC and hopes to graduate in May 2008.
bortolot@email.unc.edu

Kinitra Brooks studies 20th Century African-American, Franco-Caribbean and Spanish-Speaking Caribbean Women's Literature, and Mother/Daughter Relationships. Her languages include English, Spanish, French.
kdbrooks@email.unc.edu

Emily Bunner received her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Latin from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 2005. Her research interests include Medieval Latin and Italian poetry, allegory, Latin paleography, midwifery studies, and everything Petrarchan and/or Ovidian. Her languages are Latin, English, and Italian.
bunner@email.unc.edu

Sarah K. Cantrell (Phi Beta Kappa) earned her B.A. French and Elementary Education from Centre College in 1999. She received her Master's Degree in French from Vanderbilt University in 2002. She taught French at Emory and Henry College in Emory, VA and at Moorestown Friends School (Moorestown, NJ) prior to coming to the Curriculum of Comparative Literatures in 2005. Her national languages are French, English and Spanish. She enjoys presenting her work at conferences, teaching undergraduates and children's literature.
scantrel@email.unc.edu

Rania Chelala studies early 20th century American, French, and Arabic Literatures, as well as short fiction and a new interest in travel narratives from and to the US. Rania received her BA in English Literature and Language from the Lebanese University of Fanar in 1998. Being the valedictorian, she was entitled to a study abroad scholarship. In 2003, Rania completed her MA in American Literature at North Carolina Central University, Durham, N.C. Rania is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and has already taught English Language and Literature back in Lebanon, as well as Arabic and French languages and tutoring at the Writing Center at UNC Chapel Hill. She has presented two papers at Graduate students conferences: "Reponse ou Representation: L'Identite chez Amin Maalouf et Mohja Kahf dans le Contexte Orientaliste," in 2005 at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and "L'inter langue 'franco-arabo-berbere' de Nina Bouraoui dans Garçon Manque" in 2006 at the Carolina Conference for Romance Languages, at UNC-CH.
chelala@email.unc.edu

Jason Cisarano
cisarano@email.unc.edu

Catherine Clark is currently a PhD candidate in the Program of Comparative Literature. She received her Master's at UNC-Chapel Hill (entitled "Reading Motherhood: A Study of Maternity in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin and Colette"). Her first literature is French, followed by American and British, with some background in Classical Greek and Spanish. In the summer 2002 she received a FLAS to study French at the Ecole Francaise at Middlebury College. She worked in Paris as the Graduate Assistant for UNC's Study Abroad program the summer of 2004 and the Spring 2006 semester. She presented a paper at the Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures March 2007 called "Reel et Irreel : Le regard de deux filles maghrebines." She is currently a Teaching Fellow in French, and her areas of study are Sapphic modernism and Modernist poetry in Paris and London.
coclark@email.unc.edu

Marco de Oliveira
marcoliv@email.unc.edu

Nilanjana Dutta
ndutta@email.unc.edu

Kevin Eubanks received a B.A. in English and German in 1994 and an M.A. in English in 1998 from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. After several years of subsequent graduate study at Duke University, where his academic focus was Russian language study and critical theory and philosophy in the German intellectual tradition, he joined the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC in Fall 2004. Broadly defined, his areas of academic interest include critical theory and cultural studies, literary and philosophical modernism, as well as contemporary film and popular music and culture. Kevin's current research traces points of intersection across national modernism(s) between theories of time and theories of tragedy, and his dissertation focuses explicitly on the congruence of these themes in the works of Thomas Mann and Martin Heidegger.
keubanks@email.unc.edu

Donato Fhunsu is like a cat, with many incarnations and interests. In his previous incarnations, he lived and studied in Africa, Europe and South America before materializing, like Dorothy, in Lawrence, Kansas. After earning a B.A. in French and Spanish, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Kansas, he studied at the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University, where he received an M.A. in Translation (French, Spanish, English). He then taught French as a lecturer at the University of Dayton, and went on to study French and Francophone Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also taught French. He joined the Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2005. His research interests are language mediation (translation and interpretation); religion, spirituality and literature, and the literatures of the African Diaspora in French, Spanish, English, and African languages (in Africa, Europe, and the Americas). Donato is a language aficionado, a professional translator and interpreter, and teaches Spanish, French, and Lingala at UNC. To better understand the sources of violence in the human psyche and to help build a more peaceful world, he studies and practices a variety of martial arts. He has a black belt in the Korean martial art of Tae Kwon Do.
dfhunsu21@unc.edu

Jennifer Flaherty
jpf215@yahoo.com

Emily Frankenberg
emilyfrankenerg@yahoo.com

Kara Getrost
getkara@email.unc.edu

Anne Gillingham
annegil@email.unc.edu

Jesse Gray
jdgray@email.unc.edu

Euan Drew Griffiths was born and raised in the south of England near the city of Salisbury. He read French and German at the University of Exeter where, under the tutelage of Dr. A. Williams, developed a keen interest in Medieval Literature. Euan subsequently received a graduate school scholarship and pursued a Master's Degree in Medieval Studies at Exeter. His MA Thesis was a comparative study of three medieval French texts from the 'Vulgate' or 'Lancelot-Grail' cycle in which he examined the interrelation of Physical and Spiritual themes. After completing his MA in August 2002, Euan left for Okinawa, Japan where he spent two years teaching ESL to High School students. Whilst in Japan, Euan felt compelled to continue his studies and applied to UNC so that he might have the opportunity to study under Dr. E. Kennedy, a specialist in Arthurian Romance and former Chair of Comparative Literature. Since arriving at UNC in August 2004, Euan has taught beginner and intermediate level French and will soon be teaching English Composition and leading recitation sections for Great Books and a CMPL film class. Euan's primary research interests include Arthurian Romance in the French, English and German traditions. As of Fall 2007, Euan will be taking his PhD exams and writing his dissertation as a comparative study of a French and English Arthurian Literature incorporating Translation Theory.
euangrif@email.unc.edu

Frances Higgins
fhiggins@email.unc.edu

Wilson Kaiser
wkaiser@email.unc.edu

Heather Klomhaus Hracs
klomhaus@email.unc.edu

Sean Knierim
sknierim@email.unc.edu

Yv Maciel studies Russian, Brazilian, and English Realism.
ymaciel@email.unc.edu

Melody Marlow
mlgmarlow@hotmail.com

Carrie Matthews
crmatthe@email.unc.edu

Jasmine McKewen received her B.A. Phi Beta Kappa and with highest academic honors from Douglass College, Rutgers University in 2002 with a major in French literature and minors in women's studies and political science. As an sophomore she spent a year in France at the Universite de Pau studying modern languages and literatures at the DEUG level. Post-graduation she worked for a year with an AmeriCorps program in Philadelphia and then moved to Paris to complete an MA in French through Middlebury College at the Universite de Paris III. Her MA thesis is entitled "Le meurtre du desir chez Marguerite Duras". Since coming to UNC in 2004 Jasmine has been teaching French levels 101-204 and completing coursework largely focused on 20th century French and English narrative. Her current areas of interest include European and American strains of modernism as well as French and American feminist theory.
mckewen@email.unc.edu

Dustin Mengelkoch
mengelko@email.unc.edu

Sarah Miller is currently working on her dissertation, "Virgins, Mothers, Monsters: Medieval Readings of the Female Body Out of Bounds," which analyzes how several imaginative, medical, and theological texts written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries represent female corporeality as unstable, permeable, and overflowing. In past years, she has worked on ancient gynecology, Classical Latin poetry, eighteenth-century English literature, and psychoanalytic literary theory. Before entering the graduate program in Comparative Literature at UNC, she studied Latin and Classical Civilizations as an undergraduate at UNC. She now lives in Pittsburgh, where she is completing her dissertation. She has delivered the following scholarly papers: "Bodies in the Pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula" to the American Philological Association, Boston, MA (January 2004); "Bodies and Souls in Vergil's Underworld" to the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Lexington, KY (April 2003); "Reading Clarissa's Metamorphosis: Another Daphne" to the Southern Comparative Literature Association, Chapel Hill, NC (September 2001); and "Metamorphosis in Milton's Comus" to the Association of Graduate English Studies, Chapel Hill, NC (March 2001).
sarahalisonmiller@unc.edu

William Nolan studies cinema, zoos, literary theory, photography, 19th century cultures of display, technology, and psychoanalysis.
wanol@email.unc.edu

Anna Panszczyk received a BA cum laude in English from Boston University. From UNC-CH, she received her MA in comparative literature in 2004 after a completing her thesis: "The Elasticity of Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Wislawa Szymborska." Her languages are English, Polish and Spanish. Her main areas of interest are 20th century English language and Polish poetry, children's literature as well as literature's relationship to the visual arts. She is writing her dissertation on representations of dolls in modernist works, but specifically focusing on dolls in poetry, picture books and shadowboxes.
amp@email.unc.edu

Sarah Parker is working on the ways that contemporary understandings of medicine and the body influence 16th century Renaissance texts in France and England, especially Montaigne. Her languages include English, French, and Ancient Greek.
sparker@email.unc.edu

Camille Passalacqua
passalac@email.unc.edu

David C. Phillips graduated summa cum laude from Virginia’s Hampden-Sydney College in 2000 with a BA in Political Science, and with Honors in Political Science and English for his Senior Fellowship thesis "Nabokov’s New World Order: Reality, Art, Politics, and the Individual." As an undergraduate he was inducted into Pi Sigma Alpha, Omicron Delta Kappa, and Phi Beta Kappa honorary societies. He began his post-graduate studies in Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2001, focusing on twentieth-century Anglo-American and French literature (with Spanish as a third language). In December 2005 he received an MA for a master’s thesis entitled Artists and Lovers: The Epithymic/Erotic Dynamic in Nabokov’s Lolita and Duras’ L’Amant. He married in the summer of 2007 and currently lives in Clemmons, NC with his wife. He has finished his course work toward the Ph.D. and is preparing to take his major exam (scheduled for May 2007) in the area of twentieth-century metafiction. During his time at UNC, he has presented papers on Nabokov and Beckett at various conferences. Additional interests include twentieth-century literary theory and criticism (primarily Formalism and Structuralism), and philosophy of language and theory of fiction. He has taught in the English Department Writing Program since Fall 2002, and has additionally taught ENGL 127 (Writing About Literature); he will be teaching ENGL 128 (Major American Authors) in Spring.
dcphillips33@hotmail.com

Diana Pitt
diana.pitt@gmail.com

John Ribo
jdribo@email.unc.edu

Samantha Riley received her first BA with honors in Comparative Literature with emphasis in French, German, and Film studies from University of Iowa in 2000. She earned two additional BA degrees from The Albert-Ludwigs Universitaet at Freiburg, Germany in German Literature and Linguistics and in English literature and Linguistics, with emphasis on German and American Romanticism, modern linguistics, and the history of language and linguistics. Her research interests include English, American, German, and French literature of the 18th-21st centuries, Romanticism, film theory, post-modernist literary theory, queer theory, post- and transgender studies, sexuality studies, post-humanism, transhumanism, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
smriley@email.unc.edu

Jonathan Risner graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a B.A. in English and a minor in Spanish in 1999. He began his graduate studies at UNC in 2001 and was awarded a MA in 2003. His M.A. thesis is entitled "Of Flesh and Bone: the Animal-Human Parallel in Echeverría's El Matadero, Sinclair's The Jungle and Coe's Dead Meat." His research interests, at this moment, include Latino/a Studies, Latin American studies, and film studies.
stroach@hotmail.com

Michael Rulon earned his B.A. Phi Beta Kappa in English and French at the University of Delaware. After graduation, he worked in Switzerland for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. His current research interests are Africa and the African Diaspora, including Creoles and racial passing, women and postcolonial warfare, and race and sexuality in postcolonial literature. His languages are French, English, and Arabic. His conference presentations include "(De)Gradations of Alterity: Race, Masculinity, and the Africanist Presence in The Thousand and One Nights and Voyage en orient" at the 2005 Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures; "Warfare and Welfare: The Female Body as Locus of Communal Healing in Assia Djebar and Hanan al-Shaykh" at the 2006 SCLA Conference; and he is currently preparing "Pasé pou Blan, Pasé pou Nwè/Passing for White, Passing for Black: The Creole Woman and the Narrative of Racial Passing in Martinique" for the upcoming 2007 SAMLA Conference.
mrulon@email.unc.edu

Jeff Russell
jwr@email.unc.edu

Alexis Seccombe is from Monterey, California. She received her undergraduate degree in history from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her languages are Spanish, French and some Italian.
aseccombe@hotmail.com

Tom Spencer received a B.A. in Comparative Literature with emphasis in German and Italian from Brigham Young University in 2000, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2003. His main research interests are British and German romanticism. His master's thesis investigates the influence of post-revolutionary history on romantic lyrical conventions in Heine and Byron. He works in German, English, French, and Italian, and spent two years in southern Italy as a missionary. He likes to arrange choral music. He is writing his dissertation on the problem of the divine in romantic thought, focusing specifically on the work of Friedrich Hölderlin and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
tspencer@email.unc.edu

William Taylor came to Carolina in 2004 after studying Philosophy and English at Utah Valley State College, where he wrote his senior thesis on Freud and Aeschylus. His Master's thesis compared Nietzsche's Ueber die Zunkunft unserer Bildungsanstalten to Plato's Republic in order to draw out Nietzsche's dependence on and variance with Platonism and to understand what value Nietzsche places on the study of the Greeks. William continues reading German Hellenists and the Greeks, hoping to one day take his exams and get to work on a dissertation that will likely continue his study of the Germans' uses and abuses of antiquity in the formation of their aesthetic and ethical notions. His favorite thing is being with his wife Jamie, and he wants to believe that his bearing falls somewhere between Michael Corleone and Jeffrey Lebowski (the Don and the Dude).
zoso@email.unc.edu

Derek Thiess studies the history and philosophy of science, Neo-colonial/subaltern studies, and science fiction. His languages include English, Spanish, and German. thiess@email.unc.edu

Jose Luis Venegas
venegas@email.unc.edu

Will Washburn got his B.A. in Classics from Columbia University, followed by an M.A. in the same field from Yale University. His research interests include Classical and English literature, translation studies, poetics, linguistics, and the study of languages in general.
wwashbur@email.unc.edu

Toby Weisslitz earned her B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature from UNC - Chapel Hill. Her research interests include contemporary Brazilian and Colombian literature and film, ethical criticism, human rights and literature, favela studies, and ethnography. Her languages are Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew. She presented her paper "Re-defining Family Units: The Portrayal of Gamins in 'La Vendedora de rosas' and 'Pixote'" at 2006 ACLA conference at Princeton, and will present her paper, tentatively titled "Criminal Kinships and Guiding Gangsters in Colombian and Brazilian literature and Film" at the 2007 ICLA conference in Rio de Janeiro.
tobyw@email.unc.edu

Jacob Wilkenfeld
odara@email.unc.edu

Paul Worley
pworley@email.unc.edu