University Park Faculty

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. Visit his personal webpage.

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

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 nd creating an on-line version for CMLIT 108 (World Mythology).

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

Fields of specialization: criticism and theory; epistolarity; eighteenth century literature; translation (theory, practice, and literary mimesis); mental maps in literature; American millennial and apocalyptic cultures; and law and literature. Publications include, Clarissa on the Continent (1991), The Ideology Of Genre (1994), and Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999), and articles such as "The Decadent Plantation in William Faulkner and José Lins do Rego;" "Bob Dylan: Balladeer of The Apocalypse;" "They Built Millennium: Jesuits and Guaranis 1610-1768;" and "Ways of Seeing Literature: Goethe's Italiensiche Reise and its Counter-Narratives." Books on "true imaginary places" in post-1800 European and American fiction, and one on New World apocalypse are in progress. Editor of Comparative Literature Studies. Visit his personal web page.

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

Fields of specialization include pre-modern Chinese drama, performance theory, and language pedagogy. Publications include essays on Peony Pavilion, Ming & Qing drama miscellanies, and the grammaticalization of Mandarin idioms. Dissertation: Staging the Worlds: Representations of Otherness on the Late Imperial Chinese Stage.

Office: 428 Burrowes (814.863.4930) | Email: luc12@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: Chinese traditional Opera, East/West music composition.

Office: 454 Burrowes (814.867-2273) | Email: cud15@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. 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; Phantoms 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

Fields of specialization: Modernism; Surrealism and the Avant-Garde; Literary and Cultural Theory; American Literature since 1865; Crime Fiction and Film; Transatlantic Studies of Literary and Cultural Exchange. Publications include essays on pre- and post-World War II Surrealism; Leonora Carrington and paranoia (forthcoming); Marcel Duchamp and film; Chester Himes and the Série Noire; Raymond Chandler and T.S. Eliot; and William Burroughs and the Beat Generation.  Co-editor of special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, “Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic.” Book projects underway:  Surrealism and the Art of Crime; an anthology, Theory Against Theory, co-edited with Jean-Michel Rabaté; and an edited collection of scholarly essays, The Use-Value of the Avant-Garde. 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 of books The Prophetia Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth: A Fifteenth-Century English Commentary; ed., 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

Mrs. Edelstein taught the Hebrew Language at all levels in Israel and the United States. In Israel, she taught Hebrew for the Ethiopians 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 Hebrew Professors 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

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

Hale came to Penn State in 1973 to teach African literature.  A co-founder of the African Literature Association in 1974, he 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: 211 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 co-editor of two collections, Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota, 2007) and The EverQuest Reader (Wallflower, 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. He is currently finishing a book titled The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, China, and the Fate of the Modern Human. Visit his personal web site.

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

Fields of specialization: (1) Shakespeare and Renaissance English drama; (2) literary culture of China and the Chinese diaspora (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, US); (3) the questions of race and nation in intercultural performance (cinema and theatre). Huang's teaching and publications (in English, Chinese, and German) focus on the interactions between writing and visual culture. He has contributed to MLQ, Shakespearean International Yearbook, Asian Theatre Journal, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Theatre Journal, Shakespeare (BSA), and Shakespeare Yearbook, among others. He has completed a book on visuality and Shakespearean appropriation. Further book projects underway include a book on Shakespearean in Hollywood, Asia, and the cyberspace, and a book on transnational epistemologies and modern Chinese drama.

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

Field of specialization; Japanese linguistics, second language pedagogy

Office: 454 Burrowes ( 814-863-9537) Email:yuk11@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: 19th and 20th centuries French literature especially French authors with diverse backgrounds such as: Andrée Chedid, Nathalie Sarraute, Lucette Desvignes, Yasmina Reza. Currently in charge of expanding the Arabic program and establishing a minor in Arabic.

Office: 405 Burrowes (814.865.8481) | Email: ium2@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

Fields of specialization: the relation between the historical avant-garde and the emergence of the artistic, cinematic and literary neo avant-garde movements in the sixties and seventies in Germany, Italy, and France; European contemporary travel accounts; post-Wende authors and films; and the Italian Reception of Critical Theory. She has reviewed seminal texts on Walter Benjamin and on the neo-avant-garde, and published a few articles on Dada, German travel to Italy today, food and German culture, German feminist theory, and specific writers such as Uwe Timm, Jeannette Lander, Karin Struck, Primo Levi, Gianni Celati, as well as the Stasi debate in Germany. She has translated into Italian a variety of authors, from Alexander Kluge and Norbert Gstrein to Russell Page, Jurek Becker, Martin Walser, and Uwe Kolbe.

Office: 427 Burrowes (814.863.2138) | Email: cin1@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

Fields of specialization: Comparative Semitics, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic, historical linguistics. Publications include Grammaticalization and Comparative Semitics (Eisenbrauns, forthcoming in 2005), and articles dealing with the grammar of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Ancient Egyptian. Currently completing a book entitled S.D. Luzzatto's History of the Hebrew Language (forthcoming).

Office: 221 Weaver (814.863.8941) | Email: arubin@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:  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

Fields of specialization: Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially Symbolist poetry; literary relations between Russia and Western Europe; theory and practice of translation; utopian studies. Books: Alexander Blok-Gedichte (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990); Baudelaire in Russia (University Press of Florida, 1996); Innokentj Annenskij-Die Schwarze Silhouette (Pano Verlag, 1998); Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (Northwestern University Press, 2003); Miniaturwelten: Russische Prosagedichte (Pano Verlag, 2004); Liliana Ursu: Im Spiegel der Schmetterlinge (Pano Verlag, 2005); Der Klang von Sonnenklarinetten: Drei Lyriker der ukrainischen Moderne (Pano Verlag, forthcoming 2008). Current project: Study of Russian writers writing in languages other than Russian.

Office: 403 Burrowes (814.865.5481) | Email: ajw3@psu.edu.