University Park Faculty
Jonathan Abel
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Japanese
B.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.A., Columbia University; Ph.D., Princeton University

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.
Office: 441 Burrowes (814.865.2263) | E-mail:jea17@psu.edu
Sydney Aboul-Hosn
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature.
B.A. University of Minnesota; M.A. Université de Poitiers; Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University, 1998.

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: 453 Burrowes (814.863.7383) | Email: sra113@psu.edu
Andrea Bachner
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies (Chinese)
M.A., Munich University, Germany; A.M. Harvard University, Ph.D., Harvard University

My research explores comparative intersections between Sinophone, Latin American, and European cultural productions in dialogue with theories of interculturality, sexuality, and mediality. My first book, Beyond Signology: Alterity, Mediality, and the Sinograph (under review), analyzes how the Chinese script has been imagined in recent decades in literature and film, visual and performance art, design and architecture, both within Chinese cultural contexts and in different parts of the "West." My current project, Virtual Inscriptions, explores the concept of inscription as one of the key imaginaries of contemporary literature, theory, and visual art. I have published (and forthcoming) articles in Comparative Literature Studies, Concentric, German Quarterly, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Taller de Letras.
E-mail: asb20@psu.edu
Gabeba Baderoon
Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and African American Studies, and affiliate faculty member of Comparative Literature.
B.A. University of Cape Town , M.A. University of Cape Town, Ph.D. University of Cape Town.
Gabeba Baderoon publishes on representations of Islam, slavery and the construction of 'race' and sex in South Africa, and on South African literature in general. She has held fellowships at the African Gender Institute, the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, the Nordic Africa Institute, and the University of Sheffield. Visit her personal web site. Office: 102 Willard (814.865.2372) ] Email: gxb26@psu.edu |
Thomas O. Beebee
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German
B.A. Dartmouth College; M.A., P.h.D University of Michigan, 1984.

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
Riadh Bounatirou
Lecturer in Arabic, Coordinator of Arabic Language program
Maîtrise, English, Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis.
M.A., English Language and Literature, University of Manouba in Tunisia.

Office: 405 Burrowes (814.865-8481 ) ] Email: rub142@psu.edu |
Patrick Cheney
Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature
B.A. University of Montana; M.A., Ph.D. University of Toronto, 1979.

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
Juana Celia Djelal
Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, Departments of Comparative Literature, English, & Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies
Ph.D. Purdue University.

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 (814.865.3142)| Email: jcd9@psu.edu
Jonathan P. Eburne
(Director of Graduate Studies)
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English
B.A. Dartmouth College; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Eburne's fields of specialization include the study of international
modernism; surrealism, the avant-garde, and other intellectual movements and
groups; literary and cultural theory; and U.S. literature since 1865. He is
author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Cornell University Press, 2008);
his essays have appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction
Studies, PMLA, Symploke, Yale French Studies, Contemporary French Civilization,
Sites, Studies in the Novel, and Pleine Marge, among others. He is co-editor
of special issues of the journals New Literary History ("What is An
Avant-Garde?", with Rita Felski, 2011) and Modern Fiction Studies ("Paris,
Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic," with Jeremy Braddock, 2005), as well
as co-editor of a special section of African American Review on Chester Himes
(with Kevin Bell, 2010). He is currently working on a book entitled Outsider
Theory.
Office: 446 Burrowes (814.863.0968) | Email: jpe11@psu.edu
Caroline D. Eckhardt
(Department Head) Professor of Comparative Literature and English.
B.A. Drew University; M.A. Indiana University; Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1971

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.
430 Burrowes (814.863.0589) | Email: e82@psu.edu
Ruth Edelstein
Lecturer in Hebrew
Graduated in 1987 from the David Yellin, Jerusalem Seminar for Teachers with a Bachelor in Education

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
Robert Edwards
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Fellow, Institute for Arts and Humanities; Life Member, Clare Hall
B.A., M.A., Ph.D. University of California, Riverside, 1972

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: 4 Burrowes (814.863.9642) | Email: rre1@psu.edu
Hoda El Shakry
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
B.A., Rutgers University, 2001; Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2012
Hoda El Shakry's teaching and research interests lie in twentieth century literature, criticism and visual culture of the Middle East and North Africa. Her scholarship traverses the fields of modern Arabic and Francophone North African literature, Islam and secular criticism, postcolonial studies, narrative theory, as well as philosophy. Her current research explores the political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the confluence of modern Arab literature with Islamic Thought. Her dissertation and now book project examines Islamic discourses in relation to Arabophone and Francophone literature of the Maghreb. During 2012-2013, Hoda El Shakry is an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. Her publications include: “Apocalyptic Pasts, Orwellian Future’s: Elle Flanders’ Zero Degrees of Separation ” in GLQ (2010) and “Revolutionary Eschatology: Islam and the End of Time in al-Tahir Wattar’s al-Zilzal ” in the Journal of Arabic Literature (2011).
Office: 437 Burrowes (814.865.7671) | Email: hze107@psu.edu
Nergis Ertürk
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
B.A., Harvard University, 1999; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D, Columbia University, 2006.

Nergis Ertürk's research interests include modern Turkish literature and culture, modern Azerbaijani literature and culture, theories of modernity, postcolonialism, comparative modernisms, and deconstruction. She is the author of Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her work has also appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, boundary 2, and New Literary History. Before coming to Penn State, Ertürk 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 Professor in the Humanities at the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, during fall semester 2008. During 2012-2013, she is a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow for Transregional Research on Inter-Asian Contexts and Connections, writing a book on the translation of communist thought and practice in the Muslim Caucasus.
Office: 440 Burrowes (814.865-0067) | Email: nue5@psu.edu
Charlotte Eubanks
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies.
B.A. University of Georgia; M.A. Indiana University; Ph.D. University of Colorado

I am an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies. My research centers on the intersections of material culture, performance studies, and ethics in literature. My first book, entitled Buddhist Textual Culture: Miracles of Book and Body in Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), is a study of the relationship between human body and sacred text in the Buddhist literary tradition, focusing on reading as a performance-based act which bridges the text-flesh barrier. The book explores questions concerning the nature of text, the place of writing, and the sensual aspects of religious experience. My second book project (tentatively titled Archival Memory: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture in Trans-War Japan) moves to the modern period to examine links between visual art, human rights, and testimonial narrative, with a particular emphasis on the development of an "atomic ethics." I have articles (published and forthcoming) in ADFL Bulletin, Asian Folklore Studies, Book History, Critical Asian Studies, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, and PMLA.
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
Thomas A. Hale
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of African, French, and Comparative Literature
B.A., M.A. Tufts University; Ph.D. University of Rochester, 1974

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: 316 Burrowes (814.865.1054) | Email: tah@psu.edu
Eric Hayot
Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies
B.A., M.A. Georgetown University; Ph.D. U Wisconsin – Milwaukee, 1999

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; co-winner of the 2010 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize) and the co-editor of Sinographies: Writing China (Minnesota, 2007). His new book, On Literary Worlds, will appear from Oxford in 2012. He currently serves as Second Vice President of the American Comparative Literature Association. Visit his personal web site.
Office 444 Burrowes (814.865.1188)| Email: ehayot@psu.edu
Linda J. Ivanits
Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature
Ph. D. in Russian Literature, University of Wisconsin, 1973

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
Djelal Kadir
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature
B.A. Yale, 1969; Ph.D. University of New Mexico, 1972

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

Luz Angélica Kirschner, http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/%28de%29/ZIF/FG/2008Pluribus/kirschner.html, is a permanent Full-Time Lecturer in the Department of American and Inter-American Studies at the Universität Bielefeld in Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with a minor in Literary Theory, Criticism, and Aesthetics, at Penn State in 2008; her dissertation on minority women’s writing in Argentina, Germany, and the U.S.A. was directed by Sophia A. McClennen. Since completing her degree, she has been teaching U.S., Latin@, and Latin American literatures, film, and cultural studies from Inter-American and Transatlantic perspectives at Bielefeld. Her research focuses on the ways in which comparative literary studies of ethnicity, race, gender, and identity formation have been impacted by contemporary socio-economic manifestations such as neoliberalism and globalization. Her edited volume Expanding Latinidad: An Inter-American Perspective has just been published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier / Bilingual Press (Arizona State University). Her current research projects include a book manuscript with the working title “Transnational Subjects: Spectres of Essentialism” and a volume “Diversifying Jewish Experience in the Americas.”
Office: 453 Burrowes | Email: lak273@psu.edu
Martina Kolb
Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Ph. D. Yale University
M. Phil. Yale University
Staatsexamen University of Tübingen
M. A. University of Oregon, Eugene

Fields of Specialization: International Modernism; Comparative (Geo-)Poetics; European Studies; Mediterranean Studies; Travel Literature, Theater East-West; Detective Literature; Psychoanalysis. Publications include articles on the Uncanny in Uwe Johnson, on Ezra Pound’s Prison Writing, on Bertolt Brecht’s Appropriations of Oriental Theater, on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Presence in Sigmund Freud, and on Gottfried Benn's dealings with Italian Futurism; Book Project on Mediterranean Geo-Poetics.
Before joining Penn State, Martina Kolb taught as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities Core Curriculum at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She is the recipient of a number of awards, among them a Giles Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, two Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Institutes of Advanced Studies at the Universities of Konstanz (ZWN) and Bologna (ISA), 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
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Ph.D., Columbia University; M.F.A., University of Iowa; B.A., Wesleyan University

Brian Lennon has published articles on topics in contemporary literature, literary theory, and media studies, as well as two books: In Babel's Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and City: An Essay (University of Georgia Press, 2002).
Visit his personal web page http://www.personal.psu.edu/bul5
Office: 216 Burrowes ( 814.865-6261) Email:blennon@psu.edu
Sophia A. McClennen
Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature
B.A. Harvard; M.A. and Ph.D. Duke University

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: 454 Burrowes (814.863.4927) | Email: morello@psu.edu
John Ochoa
Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1999

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
Dennis J. Schmidt
Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and German
B.A. Bucknell University, Ph.D. Boston College, 1980

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 (814.865.1919) | Email: djs61@psu.edu
Shuang Shen
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese
B.A. Beijing University, People’s Republic of China; M.A. Beijing University, People’s Republic of China; Ph.D. The City University of New York, Graduate Center
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
Scott Thompson Smith
Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Ph.D. English, University of Notre Dame, 2007; M.A. Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 2001; M.A. English, Truman State University, 1996; B.A. English, Truman State University, 1992, with a minor in Medieval Studies

Scott T. Smith has research interests in the intersection of legal and literary discourses in early medieval England and in the function of rhetorical ornament in vernacular and Latin writing. His book, Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. He has also published articles in JEGP and inAnglo-Saxon England and his work has appeared in essay collections dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and to critical theory in Anglo-Saxon Studies. Smith is also part of the editorial collective for Graphic Medicine, a new interdisciplinary series on comics studies and medicine to be published by the Pennsylvania State University Press.
Smith's teaching interests include medieval literature, comics and graphic novels, supernatural literature, and horror.
Areas of Specialization: Medieval Literature with particular interests in Anglo-Saxon literature and History of the English Language; Book History and Textual Studies; Visual Culture: Medieval manuscripts, comics studies.
Office: 133 Burrowes (814.865.6855) | Email: sts12@psu.edu
Alan Stoekl
Professor of French and Comparative Literature
B.A., M.A. University of Wisconsin, 1973; Ph.D. State University of New York at Buffalo

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
Reiko Tachibana
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies
B.A. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, M.A. New York University, Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University, 1991

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
Pauli K. Wai
Visiting Lecturer of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies (Chinese)
B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2012
Teaching interests: Classical Chinese language. Early and medieval Chinese works in these genres—the Classics, prose essays and narratives, biographies and memorials, poetry and rhapsodies, commentaries, Tang-Song “ancient prose” essays. Late imperial Chinese drama, vernacular and classical fiction, miniature essays. Survey of modern Chinese literature, film, and music.
Research interests: Questions of interpretation in pre-modern Chinese commentarial traditions; processes by which texts accrue or lose authority and status; hermeneutical issues in classical scholarship, traditional literary, and historical criticism. My dissertation, upon which I base my book project, is entitled Merging Horizons: Textual Authority and the Zuo Tradition from Western Han to Western Jin (2nd c. BCE – 3rd c. CE). This project examines the central forms of textual authority in early to early medieval China, focusing on the reception history of the Zuo Tradition during the period before it attained definitive authority (in early Tang, 7th c. CE). My research tracks the evolving conceptions of the Zuo Tradition through successive stages of scholarly debates about the nature and value of texts whose claim to status lie in the recognition of their interpretative authority on the Classics.
Office: 437 Burrowes (814.865.7671) | Email: pkw12@psu.edu
Adrian Wanner
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature.
Lic. Phil. (M.A.), Zurich University, Switzerland; Ph.D. Columbia University, 1992

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.
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