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Professor Audrey Brunetaux
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Professor Brendan Hennessey Professor Hennessey works primarily on Italian cinema, culture, and modern literature. He is currently authoring a book on filmmaker Luchino Visconti and philosopher Antonio Gramsci that examines the relationship between cinematic adaptations of literature and mass culture in Cold War Italy. His interests in cinema and intermediality have resulted in a recent article entitled “Theatrical Space in Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche (1957)” published in Modern Language Notes (2011). Another article, “Notes on a Queer Visconti: Auteurism, Identity, and Ambiguity in The Damned (1969)” will appear in the spring of 2012 from the Università di Palermo. An active translator, Brendan has collaborated on an English version of Adriano Spatola’s book of poetic theory, Toward Total Poetry (Otis Books/Seismicity, 2008), as well as translations of various modern Italian poets such as Leonardo Sinisgalli and Giorgio Orelli. Presently, he is completing an article entitled “The Dictator and a Jewish Barber in New York: Anti-Semitism and Charlie Chaplin in Prewar Italian Harlem.” This study analyzes the debate over Fascist anti-semitism that took place in Italian-American newspapers at the close of the 1930s. |
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Professor Allison Cooper Allison Cooper, Ph.D. UCLA, is the Paul D. and Marilyn Paganucci Assistant Professor of Italian Language and Literature. Her research is concerned principally with Italian modernism, and focuses in particular on literature and art in the aftermath of the Great War. Her manuscript in progress, entitled Disanimate Modernism: Literature, Painting and Aesthetics in Wartime and Post World War One Italy, examines the works of such diverse figures as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Felice Casorati, Massimo Bontempelli and Paola Masino in light of the multiple crises generated by the Great War, the futurist avant-garde and the modernist crisis of consciousness. Her chapter on Paola Masino appeared as an essay in the volume Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and the Avant-Garde (University of Toronto Press, 2004). In addition to her research on Italian modernism and the avant-garde, Professor Cooper works on contemporary Italian cinema and is a contributor to the forthcoming anthology Mafia Movies (University of Toronto Press, anticipated 2009) with an essay entitled “Growing Up Camorrista: Antonio and Andrea Frazzi’s Certi Bambini.” Professor Cooper teaches courses at all levels of the Italian Studies program, from elementary language courses to upper division courses on literature and culture. |
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Professor James Kriesel Professor Kriesel’s interests include medieval and Renaissance Italian culture, medieval literary theory, Neoplatonism, Boccaccio, and Dante. He is completing a book tentatively titled Boccaccio’s Allegory of Literature, in which he explores how Boccaccio develops a new understanding of allegory that allows him to resolve some of the most contentious literary, philosophical, and theological debates of 14th c. Italy. In support of his research, he has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (Italy, 2006-7); he was also named an Edward Sorin Postdoctoral Fellow (University of Notre Dame, 2008-10). He has recently published an article on Boccaccio, allegory, and the history of the Italian language (“The Genealogy of Boccaccio’s Theory of Allegory,” Studi sul Boccaccio), and is currently finishing another article on Boccaccio’s Renaissance reception (“Chastening the corpus: Bembo and the Renaissance Reception of Boccaccio”). |
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Professor Bénédicte Mauguière Professor Bénédicte Mauguière’s research lies primarily in the area of Francophone, post-colonial, diasporic and transcultural studies. Her publications focus on the literature and aesthetics of North American Francophone cultural production (theatre, film, literature of the “Francophonie des Amériques”), and of the Indian Ocean (Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion). She particularly explores the complex tale of cultural development, colonization, displacement, marginalization, memory and the construction of identity in works of transnational and/or bicultural writers such as J.M.G. Le Clézio, Ananda Devi and Quebecois writer Anne Hébert. Her article “Transgendered Identities in Anne Hébert’s Un Habit de lumière and Almodovar’s All About my Mother” has just been published in Anne Hébert: Essays on her Works (Editions Guernica, 2010). Another article on “Minorisation linguistique et émergence d’un théâtre cadien et franco-américain en français vernaculaire” is forthcoming in a special issue of International Journal of Francophone Studies (University of Leeds, UK) on Francophone North-American Theater. She also recently contributed a chapter respectively on Indo-Mauritian writer Ananda Devi and Malagasy writer Michèle Rakotoson to be published in the Dictionnaire des écritures migrantes en France depuis 1981 (Editions Honoré Champion, Paris). |
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Professor Mouhamédoul Niang Mouhamédoul A. Niang’s research focuses on contemporary Francophone African literature and cinema. His interests also include marronnage, Toussaint Louverture, le roman créoliste, post-colonial studies, the dectective novel and African philosophy. His focus is mainly on the representation of space and the body as they relate to nationalism, tribalism, occultism, gender, sport, medicine, hybridity, pedagogy, transnational migration, memory and language in both literature and film. The African detective novel features in his work, which deals primarily with authors such as Ahmadou Kourouma, Aminata Sow Fall, Mongo Beti, Sony Labou Tansi, Fatou Diome, Bolya Baenga, Calixthe Beyala, Driss Chraïbi, Yasmina Khadra, Rachid Mimouni, Malika Mokeddem, and Patrick Chamoiseau. He has recently published “Déconstruction et renouveau esthétique: une exégèse narratologique de l’hybride et de la traduction dans Les Soleils des indépendances et Solibo Magnifique.” Alternative francophone 1.3 (2010): 87-94; “Ascendance étatique ou l’institution du nationalisme républicain dans L’Honneur de la tribu de Rachid Mimouni.” Nouvelles Etudes Francophones 26.1 (2011): 150-165; “Modern Medicine, Excess and Tradition in L’Appel des arènes.” In Health and Mental Issues in the Literary Imagination. Dakar: Diaspora Academy Press, 2011. His article “Croisées narratives ou nouvelle translation du vécu spatial de l’immigré. Le post-épistolaire et le mémoriel dans Le Ventre de l’Atlantique de Fatou Diome” is forthcoming in L’écriture migrante au féminin: entre temporalités et spatialités multiples (Rocca & El Nossery, eds.). His article entitled An “Onomastic Reading of Ousmane Sembene’s Faat Kiné” is under review. His book Crossings Borders: A Reading of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Through Emile Zola’s Germinal (VDM Verlag, 2010) is now available. One of these projects deals with the the practice of marronnage in Lamartine’s play Toussaint Louverture. |
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Professor Adrianna Paliyenko
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Professor Erin Tremblay Ponnou-Delaffon Professor Ponnou-Delaffon’s research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, cinema, and thought. She is particularly interested in the intersections of ethics and aesthetics. Her recently completed dissertation explores how contemporary novelists and playwrights from Albert Camus to Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt contend with the problem of evil in an age of total wars, genocides, and challenges to traditional modes of religiosity. She is currently working on articles on memory and mourning in Sylvie Germain’s prose, applications of Levinassian thought in film studies, and representations of the massacre of the monks of Tibhirine during the Algerian Civil War. |