University Park Faculty

Fields of specialization: Interested in the complete lifecycle of cultural products, from the process of conception through multiple receptions. My work foregrounds the historical contexts to literary production and consumption, while maintaining a space for those discursive meanings that transcend a particular time or place. My recent articles have appeared in Japan Forum, Comparative Literature Studies, Asian Cinema, and Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. My translation of Azuma Hiroki's Animalizing Postmodernity: Japanese Society seen through Otaku will be published by University of Minnesota Press in 2009. I will be completing my book entitled “Archiving Censors: The Preservation and Production of Banned Japanese Literature, 1923-1970” while a Fellow at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies 2008-2009.

E-mail:jea17@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: nineteenth- and twentieth- century short story in French, English and Spanish-American traditions, particularly as related to gender issues in character roles and narrative structures. Publications include an analysis of character gender roles in Cortázar’s Rayuela. Current projects include: editing a textbook and creating an on-line version for CMLIT 108 (World Mythology).

Office: 444 Burrowes (814.863.7383) | Email: sra113@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: African and Caribbean literatures, colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial and cultural theory, African and Caribbean women's writing, feminist theories. Publications include articles and chapters on Calixthe Beyala and Maryse Condé, on La Fontaine, Fagunwa and cultural isomorphism, on the reception and impact of Francophone literatures in South Africa, on "Herstory's Bifurcated Trajectory in Francophone Africa," and others, including translations.

E-mail: pius_adesanmi@carleton.ca | Phone: (613-520-2600, ext. 1175)

Thomas O. Beebee was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1955. Seeing that the future was wildfires and blackouts, he fled as far east as possible, and received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and both his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He taught German at Bowdoin College from 1984 to 1986, when he joined the faculty at Penn State. He became Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & German in 1991, Professor in 2000, and Distinguished Professor in 2008. His fields of specialization in research and graduate teaching are: European literatures of the early modern period; criticism and theory; epistolarity; translation studies; millennial studies; and law and literature. His publications include the books Clarissa on the Continent (1990), The Ideology of Genre (1994), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999), Geographies of Nation in Modern European and American Fiction (2008), and Millennial Literatures of the New World, 1492-2002 (2008).Visit his personal web page.

Office: 445 Burrowes (814.863.4935) | Email tob@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: the Renaissance, especially Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare; Virgil, Ovid, and theories of imitation and intertextuality; scholarly editing and textual scholarship. Books include: Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career; and Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood. Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (forthcoming); and Marlowe's Republican Authorship: The Early Modern Art of Political Representation (forthcoming). Co-edited collections include: Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age; Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry; European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance; Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton; volume 18 of Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual; The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (forthcoming); and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry (forthcoming). A co-edited edition, The Collected Works of Edmund Spenser, is under contract with Oxford University Press, as is a co-edited edition of The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe.

Office: 6 Burrowes (814.865.9283) | Email: pgc2@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: U.S. Literature, Colonial, 19th and 20th centuries; Inter-American literature; Modernism; Classical Mythology; Herman Melville studies. Publications include The Shape of the Whale: Flukes and Other Tales in Leviathan, A Journal of Melville Studies;  Lessons on Landing: Odysseus and Aeneas. In Interruptions: Essays on the Poetics / Politics of Space, Eastern Mediterranean University Press. All in All: Melvilles Poetics of Unity. : Entries and Introductions to Pindar, Processional Song: On Delos,  Homeric Hymn to Apollon,  Lucian, A True History. In Beyond the Floating Islands, A COTEPRA Reader, Theory and Praxis of Literary Translation, University of Bologna; Phantom's Last Words: Twentieth Century Avatars of Helen of Tory and Cassandra. Classical and Modern Literature.

Office: 160 Burrowes (814.865.6418)| Email: jcd9@psu.edu

Visit his personal web site.

Office: 437 Burrowes (814.863.0968) | Email: jpe11@psu.edu

Fields of Specialization: medieval literature, especially Chaucer and late medieval chronicles. Author of journal articles and chapters on the Arthurian legend, Chaucer, Provençal poetry, and medieval romance and chronicle, and ed. of books The Prophetia Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth: A Fifteenth-Century English Commentary; Essays in the Numerical Criticism of Medieval Literature; and Chaucer's General Prologue: An Annotated Bibliography. Main ongoing project is a critical edition and study of a previously unpublished fourteenth-century legendary history: Castleford's Chronicle, or, The Boke of Brut (Early English Text Society, Oxford University Press), volumes I and II published, volume III in progress.

427 Burrowes (814.863.0589) | Email: e82@psu.edu

Ruth Edelstein has taught the Hebrew Language at all levels in Israel and the United States. In Israel, she taught Hebrew for Ethiopian immigrants and in the United States, she introduced Hebrew and Judaica in the teaching curriculum of the Congregation Emanu-El in Houston, Texas and at the Jewish Community Center in Richmond, Virginia. She is a member of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew and participated in several advanced workshops at Brandeis University, University of Minnesota, and Stanford University. Currently, Mrs. Edelstein teaches all levels of Hebrew at Penn State University.

Office: 405 Burrowes (814.863.6523)| Email: ree11@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: medieval literature, especially Middle English, Romance, and Latin literatures; drama and lyric poetry; and literary criticism and theory.  Author of journal articles in those fields and of books Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity; The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in Chaucer's Early Narrative ; Ratio and Invention: A Study in Medieval Lyric and Narrative; The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli; The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama; editor of John Lydgate’s Troy Book: Selections and of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes; editor of Art and Context in late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr.; co-editor of Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society; and of The Olde Daunce: Essays on Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World.

Office: 136 Burrowes (814.863.9642) | Email: rre1@psu.edu

Nergis Ertürk's research interests include modern Turkish literature, Ottoman print culture, theories of modernity, postcolonial studies, comparative modernisms, and deconstruction. She is the author of Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, a study of Turkish language politics and comparative methodology, under contract to Oxford University Press. Her articles have appeared in PMLA and are forthcoming in boundary 2, Modernism/Modernity, New Literary History, The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism, and The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Before coming to Penn State, she was Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, SUNY, from 2006-2008. She was a fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society during spring semester 2007, and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, during fall semester 2008.

Office: 440 Burrowes (814.865-0067) | Email: nue5@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: Classical and medieval Japanese literature; Buddhism and the literary arts; contemporary Japanese fiction; the fantastic; theories of orality, body, memory and performance. Publications: Articles on Hayashi Fumiko; Kishimo, a Buddhist child-protecting deity; and the intersection between folklore, nativism, and Meiji era literature. Book project underway: A study of body and gender in Buddhist "explanatory tales" (setsuwa).

Office: Burrowes 438 (814.863.4933) | Email: cde13@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: Nineteenth-century French literature; Hugo studies; utopian studies.  Publications include The Early Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetics of Harmony  (1986), Figuring Transcendence in Les Misérables: Hugo's Romantic Sublime (1994), and Les Misérables: Conversion, Revolution, Redemption (1996), as well as articles on "'Angleterre et France mêlées': Fraternal Visions in Quatrevingttreize and A Tale of Two Cities" and "Through a Glass Darkly: Utopian Imagery in Nineteen Eighty-Four," "The Ideal Community of Geoge Sand's La Petite Fadette," and Le Shakespeare de la France? sur la trace du Barde dans Les Travailleurs de la mer."  Work in progress a book on the last three novels of Hugo's maturity--Les Travailleurs de la mer, L'Homme qui rit, and Quatrevingt-Treize. 

Office: 319 Burrowes (814.865.3532) | Email: kmg2@email.psu.edu

A co-founder of the African Literature Association in 1974, Thomas Hale co-edited, with Richard K. Priebe (Virginia Commonwealth), two volumes of selected papers, The Teaching of African Literature (1977, 1989), and Artist and Audience: African Literature as a Shared Experience (1979).  While a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Niamey, Niger, in 1980-81, he recorded The Epic of Askia Mohammed (1996) which first appeared in a bilingual Songhay-English format in  Scribe, Griot, and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire (1990).  Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent, an anthology of excerpts from 25 African epics, came out in 1997, co-edited with John Johnson (Indiana) and Stephen Belcher (Penn State). An NEH Fellowship in l991-92 enabled Hale to interview 100 bards in Gambia, Senegal, and Mali for Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (1998, 2007).

He is currently working on five books: with Kora Véron (Paris III-La Sorbonne Nouvelle), a completely new version of his first book, Les Ecrits d'Aimé Césaire (1978),  tentatively titled "Les Ecrits d'Aimé Césaire: nouvelle bio-bibliographie commentée";  with Aissata Sidikou (Princeton),  two volumes on women's songs from West Africa, an anthology of 200 songs and a set of conference papers; with Wendy Belcher (UCLA), an edition of African literary texts written in African languages from 3,000 BCE to 1900; and a critical analysis of francophonie  titled "France, Francophonie, and Africa: From the Politics of Culture to the Culture of Politics."

Office: 325 Burrowes (814.865.1054) | Email: tah@psu.edu

Hayot's work focuses on the transnational history of literary and cultural forms, the historical relations between East and West, particularly the Asian diaspora, and a temporally and geographically expansive version of modernism. He is the author of Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quel (Michigan, 2004) and The Hypothetical Mandarin (Oxford 2009) and the co-editor of Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota, 2007); his essays have appeared in Representations, Contemporary Literature, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, PMLA, and Comparative Literature, among others; and he is a regular contributor to the online blogzine  Printculture. Visit his personal web site.

Office 441 Burrowes (814.865.1188)| Email: ehayot@psu.edu

Office 439 Burrowes (814.863.4934) | Email: acyhuang@psu.edu

Her dissertation treated the grotesque in the Symbolist writer F. K. Sologub’s novel The Petty Demon. In August 1973 Dr. Ivanits joined the Department of Slavic Languages at Penn State where she taught a variety of courses on Russian language, literature and folklore. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and Russian folklore. She has written a number of articles on F. K. Sologub and F. M. Dostoevsky. Her major work to date is the book Russian Folk Belief (M.E. Sharpe, 1987). She is presently completing book on the role of the Russian people in the work of Dostoevsky. Dr. Ivanits has also served Associate Editor for Literature and Folklore of The Slavic and East European Journal and as Series Editor for Folklores and Folk Cultures of Eastern Europe published by M.E.Sharpe.

Office: 408 Burrowes (814.865.1681) | Email: lji1@psu.edu

Founding president of the International American Studies Association. Fields of specialization: American culture, Inter-American literatures, globalization, literary history, literary theory, public discourse, and institutional formations. Author of books including The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays in Latin American's Writing Culture (Purdue UP, 1993); Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology (Univ. of California P, 1992); Questing Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance (Univ. of Minnesota P, 1986); and Juan Carlos Onetti (Twayne, 1977). Past member of the Editorial Board of PMLA and editor of a special issue of PMLA "America: The Idea, the Literature" (January, 2003). Editor of special issue Comparative Literature Studies on "Globalization and World Literature" (2004). Co-editor of Other Modernism in An Age of Globalization (Carl Winter Verlag, 2002). Co-editor of The Longman Anthology of World Literature (Longman, 3 vols. 2003). Co-editor of Literary Cultures of Latin America (Oxford UP, 6 vols. 2004).

Office: 449 Burrowes (814.863.9629) | Email: kadir@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: German, Italian, and Anglo-American modernism; Expressionism; comparative poetics; Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Brecht, Pound; Mediterranean studies; theater East-West; European detective literature.  Martina Kolb’s publications include articles on the uncanny in Uwe Johnson, Ezra Pound’s prison poetry, Brecht’s appropriation of Oriental theater, and Freud’s Mediterranean journeys.
Current book project: Mediterranean geo-poetics.

Before joining Penn State, Martina Kolb taught as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities Core Curriculum at Bilkent University in Ankara.  She is the recipient of a number of awards, among them a Giles Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, two Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Universities of Konstanz and Bologna, as well as an Individual Faculty Grant and a Residency at Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

Office: 416 Burrowes ( 814.865.0068) Email:muk23@psu.edu

Brian Lennon’s work focuses on post-1945 and contemporary North American and transnational literature and culture, with additional emphases in literary and cultural theory and new media literary arts. He is the author of In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States, forthcoming in 2010 from the University of Minnesota Press, and articles on topics in media theory, new media art, literary multilingualism, the genre of the essay, and contemporary innovative poetry. His current project is a book on the legacies of literary and cultural theory, to be entitled Genrecide: Research and Temporality. Visit his personal web page http://www.personal.psu.edu/bul5

Office: 216 Burrowes ( 814.865-6261) Email:blennon@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: post-colonial Latin American literature, inter-American studies, comparative cultural studies, gender studies, film and media studies and critical theory. Publications include, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures (Purdue UP 2004), a book in progress, Ariel Dorfman:  An Aesthetics of Hope, as well as a collection, co-edited with Earl E. Fitz, Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America (Purdue UP 2004), in addition to book chapters and articles.

Office: 448 Burrowes (814.865.0032) | Email: sam50@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: Theatre, Latin American Literature, Film Studies, cultural studies, and posttraumatic culture. He has published on the use of the Internet by the Mexican EZLN and is currently working on the effects of traumatic events on theatre, music and literature in Latin America. His most recent work is a co-edited volume of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture entitled “Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror". His next book project entitled Posttraumatic Theatre will be an examination of theatre written and performed as a response to traumatic events in Argentina, Chile, and Spain.

Office: 448 Burrowes (814.863.4927) | Email: morello@psu.edu

Before coming to Penn State, John Ochoa was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Riverside. He held a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in in 2001-02. Fields of specialization: Mexican literature, literatures of the Americas. His book, The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity, which was published by the University of Texas Press in 2005, explores the thematic relationship between the awareness of failure and its impact on cultural identity in Mexico. His next book-length study will pair readings of works from North and South America to consider questions of self-definition and how the "canon" helps forge national culture. He is also interested in Latina/o cultural production in the U.S.

Office: 342 Burrowes (814.865.8786) | Email: jao13@psu.edu

Toni Pressley-Sanon holds a B.A. from Hamilton College, an M.A. from the New School for Social Research, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with West Africa and the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean as her primary research areas.  Her fields of interest are West African and Caribbean literatures, trauma and memory, black speculative fiction/science fiction, and African and Caribbean film studies.  She is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Grant, A Nave Research Grant and a University of Wisconsin Dissertation Grant.   She takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of collective trauma , memory, memorialization, and healing vis-à-vis the transatlantic slave trade in Africa and the African diaspora. Visit her personal website: www.bwakayiman.com

Office: 455 Burrowes (814.86) | Email: aup24@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: Post-Kantian Philosophy, Hermeneutic theory, Ancient Greek Philosophy and Literature, Aesthetic theory, Contemporary literary theory and criticism, translation theory and practice.  Books include: The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger and the Entitlements of Philosophy (1988); On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (2000); Lyrical and Ethical Subjects: Essays on the Periphery of the Word, Freedom and History (2005); translator of Ernst Bloch's Naturrecht und menschliche Wuerde (1986); editor of Hermenetics and the Poetic Motion (1990); co-editor of Hermeneutisch Wege: Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten (2000); general editor of the SUNY Press "Series in Continental Philosophy"(over 100 titles in print).  Current book project:  On Memory and Responsibility: Becoming who one is.

Office: 209 Sparks (814.863.1234) | Email: djs61@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: Modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Sinophone literature of the twentieth century, Chinese diaspora literatures, Asian American literature, postcolonial literature and theory. Publications include Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai (Rutgers University Press, 2009) and English and Chinese articles in leading academic journals and edited volumes.

Office: 456 Burrowes (814.865.4408) | Email: sxs1075@psu.edu

Fields of specialization:  literary theory, translation, and twentieth century European literature.  Publications include Agonies of the Intellectual; and Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge.  Professor Stoekl has also translated major works by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul Fournel.

Office: 318 Burrowes (814.863.7499) | Email: ais3@psu.edu

Fields of specialization: twentieth  Century Japanese   literature, transnational writers of Japan, East-West literary relation,  Japanese  and  German   postwar   fiction. Publications include a book Narrative as Counter-Memory:  A Half-Century of Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan (1998) and articles, such as "On Two Interviews Between Gunter Grass and Oe Kenzaburo;” "The Obsession to Destroy Monuments:  Mishima and Boll;” "Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Oe Kenzaburo's My Tears: A Study in Convergence,"  "The Documentary Novel:  Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain and Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries;"  "Hiroshima in Oba Minako's Urashimaso: Desire and Self-Destructiveness; ” "Seeing Between the Lines:  Imamura Shohei's Kuroi Ame (Black Rain);" Oe Kenzaburo’s "Shiiku" (Prize Stock); and “Nomadic Writers of Japan: Tawada Yoko and Mizumura Minae.” She is working on a book on translational women writers.

Office:  443 Burrowes (814.863.4932) | Email: rxn6@psu.edu

Cedric Tolliver is completing his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.  His scholarly interests include Africana literary and intellectual history, and Francophone and postcolonial literary theory. His dissertation, "Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diasporic Cosmopolitan Culture, 1947-1962," puts the life and work of writers such as Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, and Aim Csaire at the center of diasporic and cosmopolitan culture built in the wake of World War II. He is currently an Africana Research Center Post-Doctoral Fellow and Research Associate in Comparative Literature and English at The Pennsylvania State University.

Office:  457 Burrowes (814.863.9630) | Email: crt15@psu.edu

Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, served as head of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures from 2001 to 2008. He is a native speaker of (Swiss) German with an M.A. in French philology from Zurich University and a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Columbia University. His research interests include symbolism, literary relations between Russia and Western Europe, the translation of poetry, utopian and genre studies, and Russian translingual writers. He has published numerous articles in Slavic and comparative literature journals and is the author of two monographs: Baudelaire in Russia (University Press of Florida, 1996), and Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (Northwestern University Press, 2003). In addition he has published five editions of Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian poetry in his German verse translation. Prof. Wanner is spending the 2008/09 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Peter Szondi Institute for General and Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin, where he is writing a book on translingual Russian literature.
E-mail:ajw3@psu.edu

Office: 407 Burrowes (814.865.1097) | Email: ajw3@psu.edu.