Committee Members

University of Pittsburgh, University Center for International Studies and Affiliated Faculty

Caroline D. Eckhardt, Professor of English and Comparative Literature (University Park campus of Penn State), is head of the Department of Comparative Literature. Her academic field is medieval literature, and she has recently become interested in contacts between Europe and Asia in the medieval and early modern period. Administratively, she has initiated or facilitated multiple projects to promote the study of Asian and diasporic literatures within a comparative context. E-mail: e82@psu.edu.

Reiko Tachibana, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese (University Park campus of Penn State), is a specialist in Japanese literature in a comparative context. Much of her work to date has focused on Japanese and German postwar fiction. More recently, she has been working on transnational women writers of Japan, such as Japanese writers who have lived in the U.S., writers of Korean descent living in Japan, etc. She is coordinator of Penn State’s Japanese curriculum and has served as advisor to an Asian-American student organization on campus. E-mail: rxn6@psu.edu.

Sydney Aboul-Hosn, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature (University Park campus), specializes in the nineteenth and twentieth century short story, particularly as related to gender issues in character roles and narrative structures. Her publications include an analysis of character gender roles in Cortázar’s Rayuela. Current projects include an article comparing narrative structures in short fiction by Borges and Bierce and a book on world mythology. E-mail: sra113@psu.edu.

Yurong Yang Atwill, Asian Studies Librarian (University Park campus), is in charge of library acquisitions for Asia-related fields. She has had extensive experience in developing library collections and her assistance in acquiring materials related to this project will help to ensure that it has a sustained impact on faculty, students, and community members. E-mail: yya2@psu.edu.

Gabeba Baderoon, Visiting Scholar at Penn State, is finishing her PhD in Orientalism at the University of Sheffield, following studies in literature at the University of Cape Town. For her dissertation she has been focusing primarily on South African media, and her interests include Salman Rushdie and diasporic media studies. E-mail: gabebab@artslink.co.za.

David Atwill, Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies (University Park campus), is a specialist on Muslim minority groups in southern China. His courses include an introduction to Asian literature and culture, in which diasporic material can be included. E-mail: dgatwill@psu.edu.

Thomas O. Beebee, Professor of Comparative Literature and German (University Park campus), has published on the literatures of Europe, South America, and North America, and has co-translated a novel from the Chinese. He has co-directed our summer institute in world literature (a program for graduate students) for several years, has taught World Literature courses and included Asian literature in his teaching in a variety of contexts, and has presented a workshop for high school educators on ethnic diversity in world literature. E-mail: tob@psu.edu.

Roselyn Costantino, Associate Professor of Spanish and Women’s Studies (Altoona College campus), studies twentieth-century Latin American literature, with a focus on Mexico and on drama. Her fields of interest have included theatre, integrative arts, popular culture, performance art, and film, and she is completing a study of Mexican women’s writing. She teaches Latin American women writers in translation and is interested in including literature by writers of Asian heritage. rxc19@psu.edu.

Dorn Hetzel, Associate Professor of Film and Video Studies (University Park campus), focuses on Asian and international film, as well as film production and narrative techniques. His areas of interest also include the relations between visual and verbal representations of diasporic experience. E-mail: dxh11@psu.edu.

Kang Liu, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese (University Park campus and Duke University), is a specialist on Chinese literature in a comparative context, cultural studies, postmodernism, media studies, and minority cultures such as the Muslim minorities within China. He regularly teaches courses on Asian literature, ethnicity and other aspects of identity in world literature, and cultural studies. His current research includes the Chinese diaspora. E-mail: liukang@psu.edu.

Philip Mosley, Professor of English, Communications, and Comparative Literature (Commonwealth College, Worthington-Scranton campus), teaches film studies and literature courses such as Identity in World Literature, and Literature and Empire, in both of which courses he includes Asian materials. His publications reflect an interest in the ways in which cinema relates to cultural identity, and a focus on writers from Belgium, as a small nation within the European community. He is also a literary translator from French to English. E-mail: jpm11@psu.edu.

Suchismita Sen, Lecturer in Religious Studies (University Park campus), is a specialist in Hindu literature and folklore. Her research and teaching interests also include modern Indian authors, history of Indian culture and religion, and comparative religion. Recent publications have included "Shifting Sensibilities and a Bengali Ritual Tale" and "Tagore's Lokashahitya: A Translation and a Critical Discussion," both published in Asian Folklore Studies; as well as "Memory, Language and Society in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories," published in Contemporary Literature. E-mail: ssen@psu.edu.

Erbolati Sharipkan, Visiting Scholar (University Park campus and University of Wisconsin), is a native speaker of Kazakh and a scholar of Kazakh language and Muslim Kazakh culture, including the diasporic Kazakh communities in China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, India and Kashmir, Turkey, and Europe. E-mail: eus11@psu.edu.

Thomas Smith, Assistant Professor of English (Abington College campus), is particularly interested in the Indian diaspora, including in the Caribbean and in Africa. Indians have been living in former British colonies such as Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa for more than a century, and are often the target of resentment and anger because they are seen as reminders of British colonialism. About 10 years ago Prof. Smith initiated a course then called “Colonial and Postcolonial Literature,” which is currently English 182, “The Literature of Empire.” He is currently working on a project dealing with the narrative structure of Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things. E-mail: trs8@psu.edu.

Cathy Steblyk, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese (University Park campus), is a specialist on twentieth-century Japanese literature and film, including women’s cultural productions, and on autobiography, modernism, and the avant-garde internationally. In the Fall 2002 semester she created a new course on “Cultural Representations of Asia: Images of Women,” which includes texts and visual images in comparative and global contexts. E-mail: cps6@psu.edu.

Hulya Unlu, Senior Lecturer in German (University Park campus), specializes in 19th and 20th century German literature. Her book, Das Ghasel des islamischen Orients in der deutschen Dichtung (Peter Lang, 1991) examines the influence of Sufism on German literature. Ghazal poetry, migrant literature, feminist writings of and Islam in Germany, transnational literature and diasporic writings are among her research interests. She teaches courses on the language, literature, culture, ghazal writers, minority and feminist literature of Germany and Islamic feminist practices. E-mail: hnu@psu.edu.

Deberniere Torrey, Project assistant (University Park campus), is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature and an instructor of Korean language courses. She is interested in Korean, Chinese, and U.S. writers.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart is Professor of History at Brown University and Director of Brown's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Her research areas include diaspora theory Asians in the Americas. She is currently engaged in a large project whose goal is to recover the history of Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean, and to document and analyze the contributions of these immigrants to the formation of Latin/Caribbean societies.

Thomas LaMarre, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at McGill University, teaches Japanese literature, culture and cinema. His research and teaching interests also include Intellectual and Cultural History, visual culture and media analysis, classical Japanese texts, Comparative Philosophy and Cultural Theory, and Taoism and Esoteric Buddhism in early Japan. E-mail: tlamar@po-box.mcgill.ca.

Shuang Shen, Assistant Professor of English and a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University, is a specialist on the Chinese diaspora. Her interests also include emergent American literatures, modernism, cultural hybridity, "semi-colonial" contexts, women writers, and translation. E-mail: shuang.shen@worldnet.att.net.

K. D. (Kamal) Verma is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Currently editor of the South Asian Review, he is author of the book The Indian Imagination and other studies of English-language writing and the novel. His research and teaching interests include the Indian diaspora and recent literary theory. Email: kverma+@pitt.edu.

Karen Tei Yamashita, Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, teaches Asian American literature and creative writing. She is the author of four books that explore the Japanese diasporic experience with a US - Brazil - Japan triangulation, including Through the Arc of the Rainforest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, and most recently Circle K Cycles. Email: ktyamash@cats.ucsc.edu.

Katherine Carlitz, Assistant Director for Academic Affairs (Asian Studies Center), University of Pittsburgh

Michele Ferrier, Assistant Director for External Affairs (Asian Studies Center), University of Pittsburgh

Nicole Constable, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh

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