New Faculty in Academic Year 2017-2018

CFLLC welcomes new faculty with positions in Comparative Literature, German, Russian and Spanish. You can check out the courses they will be offering and learn about their teaching and research interests.


Sarah M. Allen

Sarah M. Allen

  • COMP 216 (F) Folk and Fairy Tales in Literature and Beyond
  • COMP 111 (S) Nature of Narrative

Sarah Allen is a specialist in medieval Chinese literature, especially tales and anecdotal literature, which allows her to read lots of stories about ghosts, adventurers, and animals disguised as beautiful women. Prior to coming to Williams, she taught (mostly pre-modern) Chinese literature, history, and language at Wellesley College. She was a visitor at Williams in 2016 and is happy to be back at Williams once again.

 

Walfrido Dorta

Walfrido Dorta

  • RLSP 235(F) A Survey of Hispanic Cinema from 1960 to 2010: Politics, Gender, and Memory
  • RLSP 403(S) Exemplary Monsters: Cannibals, Zombies, Ghosts and Vampires in Latin American Literature

Dorta’s research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean literatures and cultures, Latin American and Caribbean cinema, film and visual studies, critical theory, and intellectual history. He is more specifically concerned with issues such as postnationalism, globalization, and counter-hegemonic visual and literary discourses in Latin America and the Caribbean. His current book manuscript is Political Dynamics and Cultural Projects in the Cuban Post-Revolution (1989-2015): Paideia, Diáspora(s), and Generación Cero. In his second book project tentatively titled “Global Narratives in the Latin American and Caribbean Cinema”, he studies how recent films adapt several tropes (political oppression, migration, race) and reshape zombie stories, reality show scenarios, and hyperlink narratives to the particularities of Latin American and the Caribbean in order to defy stereotypical conceptions of these regions. Walfrido Dorta earned his Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures at The Graduate Center (CUNY) (2016).

 

Vivian Huang

Vivian Huang

  • COMP 218(F) Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Theater (THEA, WGSS)
  • COMP 267(S) Performance Studies: An Introduction (THEA)
  • COMP 313(S) Feeling Queer & Asian (WGSS)

Vivian L. Huang is developing her book project on racialized affect and queer & Asian sociality from her doctoral work in Performance Studies at New York University. She returns to Williams College after teaching at Harvard University as the College Fellow jointly appointed in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Theater, Dance & Media, 2016-2017, and serving as the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams from 2014-2016. Huang teaches in the intersections of performance studies, Asian American studies, and queer theory, and she holds additional degrees in English and Theater.

 

Vladimir Ivantsov

Vladimir Ivantsov

  • RUSS 103(F) Intermediate Russian
  • RUSS 203(F) 19th– Century Russian Literature
  • RUSS 202(S) Advanced Russian
  • RUSS 222(S) Russian Literature and European Existentialism

Vladimir Ivantsov is currently finishing his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “The Concepts of the Underground in Russian Literary and (Counter)Cultural Discourse: From Dostoevsky to Punk Rock”(McGill University, Canada, 2017). He received his Candidate of Sciences (kandidat nauk) degree in Russian literature from  St. Petersburg State University (Russia) in 2007. In 2007-2011 he taught Russian literature at St. Petersburg State University. In 2012 Ivantsov joined the Ph.D. Program in Russian Studies at McGill University, where he also worked as a course lecturer in Russian language and literature. Ivantsov’s research interests cover a broad spectrum of topics, including Dostoevsky, Russian modernism, Mikhail Bakhtin, existentialism, and rock and pop culture. He published a book on the contemporary Russian writer Vladimir Makanin (2008). Ivantsov is a recipient of the Québec Merit Scholarship for Foreign Students by Québec Fund for Research on Society and Culture (FRQSC) (2014) and  the McGill Faculty of Arts Graduate Student Teaching Award (2014).

 

Natalie Lozinski-Veach

Natalie Lozinski-Veach

  • GERM 102 (S) Elementary German
  • GERM 310 (S) The Holocaust in the German Imagination

Natalie Lozinski-Veach completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Brown University in 2016. Her research explores the intersections of language, animal studies, and aesthetics in modern German and Polish literature and theory. Additional teaching and research interests include Holocaust and trauma studies, gender, posthumanism, critical and literary theory, and film. Most recently, she has published the article “Embodied Nothings: Paul Celan’s Creaturely Inclinations” in the journal MLN.

 

Michele Monserrati

Michele Monserrati

  • COMP 273(F) Murder 101: Journey through the World
  • COMP 356(S) Myth of Venice
  • RLIT 101(F) Elementary Italian
  • RLIT 102(S) Elementary Italian

Michele Monserrati specializes in Italian literature of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.  With published articles on travel literature, Cold War literature, and ekphrasis in poetry, his current research draws on the field of Transnational Studies to examine the experience of Japan in works by Italian writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji restoration period (1868-1912) and during the subsequent opening of Japan’s relations with the West.  Previously, Professor Monserrati is the author of the book Le “cognizioni inutili”, saggio su “Lo Spettatore fiorentino” di Giacomo Leopardi [“Useless Cognitions”. Essay on the Journal “Lo Spettatore Fiorentino” by Giacomo Leopardi] (Florence: University Press, 2005) and the editor of a volume of correspondence, Benedetto Croce – Guido Mazzoni (Florence: SEF, 2007).  Having taught at Tulane University and Bryn Mawr College, Professor Monserrati is happy to be joining the faculty at Williams. He earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers University  and the University of Florence (Italy).

 

Mirta Suquet

Mirta Suquet

  • RLSP 320(F) Disease and Identity in Latin American Narratives of Self (D) (W)
  • RLSP 227(S) Afro-Caribbean Literature: Race, Gender and Identity (W)

Mirta Suquet obtained her PhD in Latin American Literature and Culture and Comparative Literature from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2016). She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Williams College. Her teaching and research interests focus on Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Latin American and Caribbean literature and cultures, representations of conflicts of the body and subjectivity (such as illness, mourning, loss), cultural studies, gender studies, and queer studies. Her current book manuscript, Faces of HIV/AIDS. Disease and Identity in Latin American Narratives of Self: Comparative Perspective, addresses a group of Latin American writers (Joaquin Hurtado, Marta Dillon, Pedro Lemebel, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, Miguel Ángel Fraga, among others), tracing the changes in the representations of HIV/AIDS over three decades of Latin American literature.