Area of Specialization - Literature Faculty and Emeriti

Rae ARMANTROUT Professor of Writing: Poetry and Poetics

Section Head, Writing

Jack BEHAR Associate Professor Emeritus of American Literature

Ronald BERMAN Professor of English Literature: Restoration Literature; Shakespeare; American Literature.

John BLANCO Associate professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Cultural Studies

Carlos BLANCO-AGUINAGA Professor Emeritus of Spanish Literature

Linda BRODKEY Linda Brodkey came to the UCSD in 1992 where she is a Professor in Department of Literature and the Director of the Warren College Writing Program. She teaches graduate courses on writing research and pedagogy and undergraduate courses on essay writing. She is widely known for her books--Academic Writing as Social Practice and Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only--and essays--"I Site," "Modernism and the Scene(s) of Writing " and "Writing on the Bias"--on literacy and composition.

Director: Warren College Writing Program

Sarah Shun-lien BYNUM Associate Professor of Writing: Fiction Writing; The Novella; Hypertext; Fabulism; Theory for Writers

Robert CANCEL Associate Professor of African and Comparative Literature: Oral Literature; Modern African Literature and Film; Caribbean Literature.

Director: Third Word Studies Program

Steven CASSEDY Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russian, French, German and Yiddish Literature; Early Twentieth-Century Literary Theory; Russian Jewish Intellectual History; Jewish Immigration to America.

Associate Dean of Graduate Studies
Director: Russian and Soviet Studies Program

Diego CATALAN Professor Emeritus of Spanish Literature

Dennis R CHILDS Dennis Childs is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2004-05. His dissertation, Formations of Neoslavery: The Cultures and Politics of the American Carceral State, focuses on the institutional processes whereby forms of subjugation, forced labor and incarceration of black people persisted after Emancipation, and deals with ways in which African American culture registers these processes and resistance to them in literature and in song.

Alain J.-J. COHEN Professor of Comparative/French Literature & Film Studies: Psychoanalysis (from Freud and Lacan to the present); Cinema (analysis, history, æsthetics); Semiotics (Peirce to Greimas); Applied Semiotics (art, narratology, digital special f/x); history of æsthetics; French philosophy (phenomenology, structuralism, postmodernism)

Richard COHEN Associate Professor of South Asian Religious Literatures: Buddhism; Religiosity in South Asia; Theory in the Study of Religion

Director: Program for the Study of Religion

Jaime CONCHA Jaime Concha, Professor of Latin American Literature, trained in Chile and France, author of several books and a good number of essays on contemporary poetry, nineteenth-century narrative, and sixteenth-century political ideas.

Charles COOPER Professor Emeritus of Writing

Stephen COX Professor of English Literature: Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature; Blake; History of Liberal Ideas; The New Testament and Its Literary Influence.

Director: Humanties Program

David CROWNE Associate Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature

Michael DAVIDSON Distinguished Professor of American Literature: Modern Poetry, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Disability Studies.

Bram DIJKSTRA Professor Emeritus of American and Comparative Literature

Page DUBOIS Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature: Greek; Feminist Theory and Psychoanalysis; Cultural Studies.

Thomas DUNSEATH Associate Professor Emeritus of English Literature

Anthony EDWARDS Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Homer; Greek Comedy; Classical Rhetoric.

Director: Classical Studies Program

Fatima EL-TAYEB Assistant Professor of African-American Literature and Culture: African Diaspora Studies, Queer Theory, Transnational Feminism, Film Studies, European Migrant and Minority Cultures, Queer of Color Critique, Visual Cultural Studies, Media Theory

Camille F. FORBES Camille F. Forbes is an Associate Professor of African-American Literature and Culture. She received her Ph.D. in American Civilization from Harvard University, an M.A. in History from Harvard University, and a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University. Her teaching and research interests include: Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature and Culture; African-American Performance; American Literature; Cultural Studies.

Richard FRIEDMAN Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature and Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization: Hebrew Bible; Near Eastern Languages and Literatures.

Rosemary GEORGE Rosemary Marangoly George is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. She is also an Affiliated Faculty member of the Ethnic Studies Dept. and the Critical Gender Studies Program at UCSD. Her teaching and research interests cover South Asian Studies; Global Literatures in English; Diaspora Studies; Postcolonial Literary & Cultural Theory; Gender & Sexuality Studies in a Transnational Context; Minority Literatures in the US and UK; British Discourses of Empire.

Director of Graduate Studies, Literature Department

Amelia GLASER Russian Literature (19th and 20th Century); Modern Yiddish Literature; Comparative Literature; Cultural Studies; Transnational Jewish Literature; The Literatures of Ukraine.

Course Syllabi: LTTH 115 | Course Syllabi: LTWL 180

Larissa N HEINRICH Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies; Visual Culture; Literary and Cultural History; Cultural and Literary Studies of Medicine and Science; Transnational Culture.

Marcel HÉNAFF Professor, Philosophy & Anthropology French Section; Adjunct Professor, Department of Political Science; Continental Philosophy; Cultural Anthropology; Political Philosophy; Narrative Forms; Visual Arts; Theater; Architecture and Urbanism; Cultural Cognition

Fanny HOWE Professor Emerita of Writing and American Literature

http://www.fannyhowe.com

Alexandra ISFAHANI-HAMMOND

Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature, PhD in Comparative Literature (UC Berkeley, 2000)

Stephanie JED Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature: The Renaissance; History of Writing; Women's Studies. Italian Renaissance literature; medieval Italian literature; Italian humanism; comparative Renaissance literature (Italian, French, English); Renaissance travel writing; paleography, the history of libraries, the history of writing; historiography and literature; modern and contemporary Italian literature; Italian women's writing; Italian feminist theory; research methods; transnational feminism; folk and fairytales; first- and second-year Italian; stylistics and conversation; Italian culture; introduction to Italian literature.

Director: Italian Studies Program

Sara JOHNSON Sara Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Literature of the Americas. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and African American Studies from Yale University. Her current book manuscript explores the culture legacy of the Haitian Revolution in the extended Americas. She is the co-editor of Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Studies in Dance History Series, 2006), which was named one of the top ten arts books of 2006. She has performed extensive research abroad, living in Senegal, Cuba, Haiti and Martinique. Recent fellowships include those from the Ford Foundation, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Program, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Hellman Fund. Her research and teaching areas include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literature and theory; inter-American studies; African-American literature and cultural studies of the African Diaspora.

Dayna KALLERES Dayna Kalleres received her Ph.D. in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University, with a specialization in Early Christianity, in May of 2002. Her dissertation was entitled Exorcising the Devil to Silence Christ’s Enemies: Ritualized Speech Practices in Late Antique Christianity. After finishing her doctorate, Dr. Kalleres spent three years as an Andrew Mellon Stanford Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow; during 2005-06, she held an appointment as a lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford as well as an Assistant Professor at the University of the Pacific.

Susan KIRKPATRICK Nineteenth and twentieth-century Spanish literature and questions of gender.

Misha KOKOTOVIC Associate Professor of Latin American Literature:
Andean Literature and Culture; Central American Literature; Latin American Political Economy and Cultural Theory

Todd KONTJE Todd Kontje received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and has been a member of the Literature Department since 1991, where he is Professor of German and Comparative Literature. Teaching interests include German literature of all periods and contemporary critical theory. He has published books on Schiller’s aesthetics, the German Bildungsroman, and German women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and edited a volume of essays on 19th-century German Realism. German Orientalisms considers various manifestations of Orientalism in German literature from the Middle Ages to the present in their distinction from one another and in their contribution to Germany’s sense of national identity. More recent articles have examined the works of E. Marlitt, Sophie Mereau, Gottfried Keller, Günter Grass, and Thomas Mann.

Lisa LAMPERT-WEISSIG Lisa Lampert received her Ph.D. in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley. She has published on Middle English Literature and modern German-Jewish literature. Her teaching interests include medieval and early modern English literature, medieval women writers, Middle High German literature, literary representations of Jews and Judaism, and feminist theory.

Director: German Studies Program

Jin LEE Associate Professor of Korean and Comparative Literature: Modern Korean Literature; Gender Studies; Korean Diasporic Cultures.

Seth LERER Seth Lerer joins the Literature Department in January 2009 as Distinguished Professor. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago and taught at Princeton and Stanford. His teaching and research address Medieval and Renaissance literature, the history of the English Language, Children's Literature, and the history of scholarship. At UCSD, he will serve a five-year term as Dean of Arts and Humanities beginning in January 2009.

Ping-hui LIAO

Margaret LOOSE Assistant Professor of English Literature with teaching and research interests in Victorian literature and culture; working-class literature; poetry and poetics; Chartism; gender studies; and the novel.

Lisa LOWE Professor of Comparative Literature

James LYON German Literature

George (Jorge) MARISCAL Professor of Spanish and Chicano/a Literature: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture; Chicano/a Studies; U.S. Literature of the Viet Nam War

Faculty Equity Advisor, Division of Arts and Humanities
Director: Chicano/a~Latino/a Arts and Humanities (CLAH) Program

Luis MARTIN-CABRERA Assistant Professor of Peninsular and Latin American Literature and Culture: TransAtlantic Studies, Spanish Film, Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Theory.

Louis MONTROSE Rebeca Hickel Professor of Elizabethan Studies and Distinguished Professor of English Literature: Elizabethan writing, performance, and visual cultures; Early Modern Studies; Cultural History and Theory

Eileen MYLES Professor Emerita of Fiction Writing, Poetry Writing, Short Fiction, Poet's Novel, Writing between Genres, The Libretto, and Pathetic Literature.

William Arctander O'BRIEN Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature: Romanticism; Philosophy and Literature; Critical Theory.

Max PARRA Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, Mexican literature and culture; regional studies; popular poetics.

Director: Executive Director of Casa de la Universidad de California in Mexico City
Director: Director of the Education Abroad Program, Mexico Study Center

Roy Harvey PEARCE Disinguisthed Professor Emeritus of Literature (A/S): American Literature

Babak RAHIMI Assistant Professor of Iranian and Islamic Studies: Shi'i Islam; Medieval and (early) modern Iranian culture and society, public sphere, civil society; Democracy and modernity.

Fred RANDEL Associate Professor Emeritus of English Literature: English Romantic Period; Milton; Intertextualities; Geosymbolism; the English Essay

Roddey REID Professor of French Studies and Cultural Studies; affiliated faculty, Science Studies Program and Critical Gender Studies Program. Faculty Director, European Studies Minor. Modern cultures and societies of France, the U.S., and Japan; print culture and visual media; interdisciplinary studies of science and medicine; globalization and public health.

Vice Chair, Department of Literature
Director: European Studies

Cristina RIVERA-GARZA Professor of Writing
Poetry and Fiction writing; history and literature; border cultures; hybrid writing

Jerome ROTHENBERG Professor Emeritus of Literature and Visual Arts
Internationally renowned poet, performance artist, critic and scholar

Marta SÁNCHEZ Associate Professor Emerita of Chicano, Latin American, and U.S. Ethnic Literature: Chicano Women's Literature; Race and Gender Theory.

Rosaura SÁNCHEZ Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature: Critical Theory; Cultural Studies; Third World Studies; Gender Studies.

Kathryn SHEVELOW Associate Professor of English Literature:
Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture; Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Theatre; British Women’s Literature; Biography; Autobiography; the Novel

Anna Joy SPRINGER Assistant Professor of Writing: Writing of Fiction, Hybrid Forms, and Graphic Texts.

Shelley STREEBY Shelley Streeby is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. She is also an Affiliated Faculty member of the Critical Gender Studies Program at UCSD.

William TAY Professor Emeritus of Chinese and Comparative Literature

Nicole TONKOVICH Associate Professor of American Literature: U.S. Women's Literature; nineteenth-century American Studies; Cultural Studies.

Quincy TROUPE Professor Emeritus of Writing and American Literature

Pasquale VERDICCHIO Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature: Modern Literature; Poetics; Italian Cinema; Cultural Studies; Environmental Movements and Literatures.

Cynthia WALK Associate Professor Emerita of German: 20th Century German Literature and Culture; Film Studies; Gender Studies.

Don WAYNE Don Wayne did graduate work at Hunter College (CUNY) and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (Paris) before receiving his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego in 1975. He taught at Ohio State University prior to joining the UCSD faculty in 1975. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the ACLS. His research interests include: early modern studies; US culture from 1945-60; history of literary studies in education; theory and interdisciplinary studies. He is known for his work on Ben Jonson, and has published essays on the social construction of literary and cultural studies in the US and the UK.

Provost, Revelle College

Donald WESLING Professor Emeritus of English Literature: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Poetry; Poetics and Metrics; Prose and Poetry of the Natural World; Modern Scottish Literature; Mikhaïl Bakhtin and Dialogism

Director: Clarion Workshop

Meg WESLING Assistant Professor of American Literature: Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature; Modern Fiction; U.S. Imperialism; Postcolonial Theory; Popular Culture; Cultural Studies; Critical Gender Studies

Winifred WOODHULL Associate Professor of French: Literatures in French, including African and Caribbean Literatures; Feminist/Critical Theory; Postcolonial Studies; Film Studies.

Andrew WRIGHT Professor Emeritus of English Literature

Wai-lim YIP Distinguished Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature: Classical and Modern Chinese Poetry; Comparative Poetics; Modernism East and West; Translation Theory.

Lisa YONEYAMA Lisa Yoneyama received her B.A. in German Language Studies and M.A. in International Relations at Sophia University, Tokyo, and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University, California. She has been a member of the Department since 1992 and taught Cultural Studies, U.S.-Japan Studies, Asian American Studies, and Critical Gender Studies. Her research interests center on the history and memory of war and colonialism, gender and militarism, and the cultural dimensions of transnationalism, neo-colonialism, and the Cold War and post-Cold War U.S. relations with Asia.

Yoneyama's first book Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (University of California, 1999) examined the politics of remembering and forgetting the Japanese history of colonialism, the Asia-Pacific War and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima. Through the exploration of city space, nuclear ruins, survivors' testimonials, and ethnic, colonial and gendered narratives around various memorial icons, including the Korean victims’ memorial and the monument dedicated to mothers and children, the book identifies ethno/nationalization, feminization, globalization and other cultural forces that come into play in the struggles over Hiroshima memories. Hiroshima Traces was translated and published in Japanese: Hiroshima kioku no poritikusu, Ozawa Hiroaki, et. Al., trans. (Iwanami Shoten, 2005).

Director: Critical Gender Studies Program

Yingjin ZHANG

Professor of Modern Chinese Literature:

Chinese Literature; Comparative Literature; Cinema and Media Studies; Visual Culture; Literary and Cultural History; Urban Studies; Transnational Cultural Politics

Director: Chinese Studies Program

Oumelbanine ZHIRI Professor of French Literature: Medieval and Renaissance French Literature; Renaissance Historiography and Geography; Comparative Studies in European and Arab Cultures.

Chair, Department of Literature
Director: Middle East Studies Program