Karen Lurkhur

Ph.D. expected May 2010, with concentration in Medieval Studies

Research Interests: Medieval French romance; Old Icelandic historical sagas; gender

Dissertation: “Redefining Gender through the Arena of the Male Body: The Reception of Thomas’s Tristran in The Old French Le Chevalier de la Charette and The Old Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd.”

In Le Chevalier de la Charette, Chrétien de Troyes destabilizes the conventional relationship between body and gender in courtly romance. His questioning of the body as the basis of the self parallels the disconnection between body and gender in a work from a far different cultural milieu, the Old Icelandic Tristram Saga. This work de-emphasizes the male body as the grounds for masculinity because of its adherence to the system of gender drawn from another Icelandic genre, the historical sagas. The system of gender in the historical sagas, is not, however, purely performative. The central concern with lineage and genealogy in this genre suggests that male biology is still necessary in the construction of male identity. Comparing the model of masculinity in the Charette with that of the Icelandic Tristrams Saga highlights the innovativeness of Chrétien’s redefinition of gender.

Co-Directors: Prof. Karen Fresco and Prof. Marianne Kalinke

Committee Members:  Danuta Shanzer, Nancy Blake

Languages: French, German, Latin, Old French, Old Icelandic, Middle High German

Carolyn Hutchinson

Ph.D. expected May 2010

Research Interests: 20th century Latin American literature, Testimonial narratives, Feminist studies

Dissertation: A Sexualized Sacrifice: Tension between the Individual and the

Collective in Testimonial Narratives of Latin American Women

In the broadest sense, this dissertation examines the dialectical relationship between gender/sexuality and politics in testimonial narratives of Latin American women.  The first part of the dissertation looks specifically at the tension between personal and collective representations in one of the most well-known traditional testimonios, Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s “Si me permiten hablar…” Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (1978).  It explores why and how this tension reveals itself over and over again to be located at the woman’s female self (her femininity, sexuality, motherhood, wifehood, etc).  The second part of the dissertation looks at other forms of testimonial literature: Carolina Maria de Jesus’ Quarto de Despejo (1960) and Julia Álvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1995).  Neither Jesus’ diary of her life in the Brazilian favelas nor Álvarez’s fictionalized account of the Mirabal sisters who fought against the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic strictly follows the traditional form of a testimonio, yet both are narratives of survival that also testify to the sacrifice of the personal for the political.  In the end, this dissertation explores in all of the works the relationship between gender/sexuality and the tension between the individual and the collective in order to show that testimonial narratives of Latin American women reveal how the personal sacrifice for the political is repeatedly a sexualized one. 

Co-Directors: Michael Palencia-Roth, Dara Goldman

Committee Members:  Luciano Tosta, Alice Deck

Languages: Spanish, English, Portuguese, French (reading)

Eric Dalle

Ph.D. expected May 2010

Research interests: Modern Chinese and Literature and film. French-Chinese literary relations and intellectual history. Diaspora and Chinese-Francophone writers.

Dissertation: Environmental Nostalgia: Depictions of Ecological Destruction in Post-Deng Xiaoping Chinese Narrative.  

One of the tangible and negative results of full-throttle capital development and globalization following the Chinese Open Door policy has been accelerated ecological destruction. My dissertation posits that contemporary Chinese intellectuals address the environmental problems of the Mainland by framing a critique which assumes the form of nostalgia. This work explores individual writers and directors including Han Shaogong, Jia Zhangke, and Dai Sijie. My research examines their position vis à vis the state, and reads their texts to explore the boundaries of nostalgic representations. This analysis calls into question the relationships between nature, modernity, literature, and national/cultural identity to assert their interdependence.      

Co-Directors: Nancy Blake, Gary Xu

Committee Members: Maggie Flinn, Susan Koshy 

Languages: Chinese, English, French

Carola Dwyer

Ph.D. expected May 2010

Research Interests: Arthurian Legends, Studies in Medievalism especially Film, Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Shakespeare & Chaucer, Foreign Language Acquisition.

Dissertation: “Form and Function of the Grotesque Woman in Late Medieval English, French, and German Narrative.”

My research deals with the meaning of the grotesque in late medieval literatures in German, English, and French. Looking at monstrous females in four texts through the theoretical lens of gender and genre, I have developed my own definition of the grotesque as a critical framework which combines modern theory on postcolonial, feminist, and linguistic aspects with medieval cultural concepts, philosophy and theory. In modern scholarship, the grotesque is understood as an artistic space in which human society is turned on its head by the depiction of an outlandish creature or event with clearly discernable aspects relating to daily life, which are, however, portrayed in some excessive form. For a medieval text the rules are different insofar that the literature of this time period is riddled with extraordinary creatures, places, and events, and one has to distinguish between a literary commonplace and a grotesque occurrence.

My project adds to current scholarship on medieval subjects because it analyzes the use of the grotesque as a valid and intentional literary theme to point at something culturally amiss, which is – or should be – debated. To look at the medieval monstrous woman through the grotesque as a literary form is a new approach since the common approach we know is through the motif of the “loathly lady.”

Director: Prof. Karen Fresco

Other Committee Members: Anna Stenport, Marianne Kalinke, Claudia Bornholdt (Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.), and Nicola McDonald (University of York, York, England).

Languages: Modern and Middle High German, Modern and Middle English, French and Old French, Latin.

Daynalí Flores-Rodríguez

Ph.D. expected May 2010

Research Interests: 20th century Latin American literature,

Dissertation: Scattered and Resisting: Dictatorships, Resistance and Power Dynamics in Contemporary Latino-Caribbean Narratives

The dissertation analyzes narratives of contemporary Latino-Caribbean writers who examine the role of individuals as agents of resistance within the power dynamics established by a dictatorial regime. I argue that these writers, Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic), Dany Laferrière (Haiti) and Junot Díaz (Dominican Republic) challenge the traditional socio-cultural discourse on power, oppression and resistance by interpreting the dictatorial past of this region from a transnational position. Each writer, three of them born and, all of them raised in a Caribbean culture, now live elsewhere. Most writers on dictatorship focus on the individual figure of the dictator and on the collective oppression and victimization of the people he rules. Perhaps because of their personal and international history, these writers shift their approach. They no longer consider dictatorships exclusively in the light of the dictator figure, but reflect on its collectivity as well; while recovering people as individuals who can resist these structures of oppression. From their choice of language, characters and context, to their treatment of the dictatorial regime these authors ease the path for a new Caribbean aesthetic that broadens this region cultural reach and significance.

Director: Michael Palencia-Roth,

Committee Members:  Dara Goldman, Nancy Castro, Luciano Tosta

Languages: Spanish, English, Portuguese, French

Gautam Basu Thakur

Successfully defended August 28, 2009; Ph.D. to be conferred December 2009 (Diploma Unit for Criticism & Interpretative Theory, expected Fall 2009).

Research Interests: (Primary Areas) Nineteenth- & twentieth-century British Literature & postcolonial studies; cultural theory (colonial and globalized cultures, espc. India); empire in film & new media; Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis; critical theory; world literature in English. (Secondary Areas) media, culture, and the modern State; film and psychoanalysis.

Dissertation: Scripting Anxiety/Scripting Identity: Indian Mutiny, History, and the Colonial Imaginary, 1857-1911.

The dissertation studies the singularity of the event commonly known as the ‘Indian mutiny of 1857’ in terms of its impact on and affective reconstruction of colonial discourses between 1857 and 1911. I read and compare representations of anxieties associated with the uprisings in British, Indian, and subaltern writings to examine distinct social psycho-pathologies and incumbent ideological formations that emerge from the diverse ways by which each set of writing seeks to negotiate the phenomenon of the mutiny. My examination focuses on questions such as how anxiety affectively reconstructs the discourses of 1857; what are the causes and objects of these anxieties; and how does anxiety function to construct imperial and national imaginaries? These questions are important for understanding the distinct as well as the mutually complementary ways in which imperial and native bourgeois accounts represented the event for the ideological purposes of defining their respective imaginaries. In context of this transnational representational practice, the question of unearthing and exploring buried subaltern-rebel voices of 1857 also becomes crucial. I consider the latter not with the aim of rehabilitating them but of reading them against established imperial and national bourgeois discourses. Such examination of the multiple discourses of 1857 is important for analyzing the impact and singularity of the event in both nineteenth-century and contemporary contexts; the latter especially since recent discussions connect the mutiny with 9/11 to explain the present global crisis.

Co-directors: Nancy Blake & Lauren M.E. Goodlad.

Committee Members: Wail Hassan, Anustup Basu, Rajeswari Pandharipande.

Languages: English, Bengali, Hindi, French [reading].

Ana Vivancos

PhD expected May 2010. Minor in Film Studies.

Research Interests: 19th to 21st centuries Spanish, Catalan and North American Literatures and Film, Cultural Studies (representations of the nation from within and from the exile), popular culture (Spanish popular cinema during Franco’s dictatorship and its aftermath), French Cinema, Gender Studies and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Dissertation: Representation of Masculinities in Spanish Popular Cinema during the Late and Post-Franco “Transition” Period (1963-1982.)

My research deals with the decline and transformation of the figure of patriarchal masculinity. Popular films conform a coherent body of national narratives that help to map the slow transformation away from the traditional model supported by Franco’s regime’s ideological apparatus, into a new model of masculinity, open to more flexible gender roles and sexual orientations. This evolution entailed a difficult process, one that was complicated by the negotiation of new economic conditions as well as by the absence of a feminist movement in a society largely defined by its profoundly sexist attitudes.

Within a theoretical frame that includes Cultural Theory and Film and Gender Studies, I examine popular films of the period to see how stars’ narratives and film genres worked as vehicles to implement or to question the rigidity of gender roles. Genres like the Españolada (the Spanish folkloric musical), the “sexy” comedy and masculine melodramas progressively define the possibility of deviance from the traditional patriarchal model. At the same time, these filmic narratives also read the extraordinary social transformation that was a consequence of the economic (“el desarrollismo”) and political revolutions (the onset of democracy) experienced by the Spanish population during the 1960s and 70s.

Co-directors: Nancy Blake, Elena Delgado

Committee Members: David Desser, Robert Rushing

Languages: English, French, Spanish, Catalan.