

I teach lower-division Arabic language courses as well as Egyptian, African, and North African literature courses in English. In the last three years, I attended several institutes on the interactive, student-centered, technology-enhanced teaching of Arabic as a less commonly taught, and now the top critical, language. Some of these institutes involved the teaching of Arabic to heritage students and how to assess learning. The teaching of Arabic along with the translation of a few lesser known Arabic novels and short stories into English are among my main interests now. My intersession Egypt Study Tour proved to be a step in the right direction. More interaction between both the American and Arab cultures through similar programs will decrease tensions and increase mutual understanding.




Dr. Cyrino’s current research focuses on Classics and popular culture, especially film and television. Her book Big Screen Rome (2005) surveys several films on the image of ancient Rome. She has published numerous articles on ancient films, including Gladiator, Troy, Alexander, 300, and Black Orpheus. She is the editor of a volume on the HBO series, Rome, Season 1: History Makes Television (2008). Dr. Cyrino has appeared as a consultant on The History Channel. Dr. Cyrino’s literary research centers on eros in ancient Greece, including a book In Pandora’s Jar: Lovesickness in Early Greek Poetry (1995), and numerous articles on Greek lyric, tragedy and myth. Her latest book is Aphrodite (2010), on the meaning of the goddess of love. Dr. Cyrino teaches Classics courses to several hundreds of students, and Greek and Latin seminars. She is the author of a widely-used textbook, A Journey Through Greek Mythology (2008). Dr. Cyrino was awarded the American Philological Association’s Excellence in Teaching Classics award (1999).

Lorenzo is currently working on articles on the political dimensions of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, The semiotics of food in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis, and gift exchange in Book 4 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. He is also working on revising his dissertation into two monograph projects: one on time and the forces of decay in The Iliad, and one applying film practice and theory to a reading of the "visual" elements in the Homeric poems.


Dr. Nocentelli holds a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching interests include cross-cultural contacts and early modern colonialisms, travel literature, drama, and epic poetry. She has published in Nuevo Texto Crítico, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Rereading the Black Legend (U of Chicago P, 2007) and has an article forthcoming in PMLA. Her current book project focuses on Europe’s fascination with the erōs of "India" — as the coastal stretch from the Gulf of Oman to the South China Sea was called during the early modern period - and explores how it shaped the ways Europeans imagined and represented their own racial and sexual identities.

My professional orientation is in Francophone literature and legal discourse, exemplified in my book, Literature and Legal Storytelling: The Irony of Legal Opposition in Cameroon (Lexington Books, 2007), which examines ways in which people contest the dominant legal and social order in Cameroon through reading and writing legal stories that ironically portray the inadequacies of current government policies. Aside from a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in French, Comparative Literature, Africana Studies, and European Studies, I teach a Summer study abroad course, taking groups of students to Paris and south France, including the Cannes Film Festival.

I have taught courses on contemporary literary theory, Paris, travel literature, the 18th-Century novel, early modern French theater, and Caribbean women writers, as well as introductory French language courses. My book Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex (2003) addressed the discursive relationship between French and British eighteenth-century sexual and national identity within a global framework. My current research focuses on late eighteenth-century women writers and on representations of and technologies for the management of identity in modernity. I currently serve in the department as the graduate French advisor.

My research interests involve French medieval and sixteenth-century literature; more specifically, the subject and the metaphors it inhabits, the increasing complexity of these metaphors and the enhanced credibility and authority of the subject through the centuries. The approach is predominantly semiotic, relying on the theories of language as those developed and elaborated on by writers such as Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida. The ensuing confrontation between the classical and postmodern worlds is an inevitable by-product of my research.

My doctoral training in comparative literature led to two book-length publications: one on Franco-British literary cosmopolitanism (Gide and Conrad), the other on modernist French poetry (Paul Valéry). The early work on Gide and Conrad dealt with questions of literary exchange, translation and Africa; it was this latter area that became my more central concern throughout the 1990s when I devoted considerable attention to European representations of Africa and to the residual image of Africa that has permeated much western cultural production: literature, cinema, popular culture, travel narratives, museum collections, etc. A parallel interest in animals as literary and cultural figures evolved into my current scholarly project titled "The Colonial Animal."

Dr. Vallury obtained her B.A. in French Literature from the University of Bombay, India, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century French literature, the North African novel of French expression, feminist studies, literary theory, and post-colonial and cultural studies. She is the author of Surfacing the Politics of Desire: Literature, Feminism, and Myth (University of Toronto Press, August 2008), and has published articles in edited volumes with Duke University Press, Les Presses Universitaires de Rennes, and the journal Novel. The common thread linking Dr. Vallury’s varied research interests is the specific question of the relationship between literature and politics, or how literature ‘does’ politics. She is currently preparing a book manuscript on the politics of national allegory in the Algerian novel.

Dr. Baackman's first book Erklär mir Liebe. Weibliche Schreibweisen von Liebe in der Gegenwartsliteratur ( Explain Love to me. Women Authors Rewrite the Lovestory, Berlin 1995) is concerned with female interventions in the discourse of love. Her second book, co-edited with Hilary Sy-Quia, examines Conquering Women. Women, War, and the German Cultural Imagination (Berkeley: IAS Press, 2000). She has published numerous articles on contemporary women authors and filmmakers, as well as on visual artists, most recently on Thomas Demand. Currently, Dr. Baackman is working on a book-length study about discourses of memory and commemoration in re-unified Germany, entitled Memories of War, Wars of Memory.

Katrin Schröter holds an interdisciplinary Ph. D. in German Studies and Modern Culture & Media. Her area of specialization is German cinema, and specifically representations of national identity in German films after World War II.
Her book, Border Crossings: National Identity and Nation Formation in German Films, 1980 – 2000 (2004) focuses on a number of West German films produced between 1980 and 2000 that address issues of national identity by fictionalizing border crossings between the two Germanys. Her current research explores the correlation between the activation of cinematic genres and constructions of new identity formations after German unification.
On the graduate level she has taught a variety of courses in German and English, including classes on the literature and culture of the Weimar Republic, the German Democratic Republic, and Germany after unification, as well as seminars on Film Theory and German Cinema. She currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of FLL, and as undergraduate and graduate advisor for the German program.

Jason Wilby comes to the University of New Mexico from California, where he recently completed his Ph.D. in German Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation project, Searching for a German National Self: Journeys through Transitional Spaces, 1770-1815, brings together political theory, Enlightenment thought, identity theory, and psychoanalysis to address the question of the emergence of a political notion of German national identity during the late eighteenth century. Prior to his time at UC Irvine, Jason completed a Master’s degree in German and English Philology at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, with a thesis on German Realism and Ideology from a Gender Studies perspective. His research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature, philosophy and culture, Gender Studies, psychoanalysis and literature, and SLA theory and teaching pedagogies.

My interests are the Classics, from Homer to Vergil, as well as Medieval Latin, and Dante Studies. I have done extensive research on biblical commentaries from Ireland, Germany and Italy, and edited Medieval Latin manuscripts.
As a native of Sardinia I have always been interested in Bronze Age archaeology. I am working on a book on the migrations of the Sherden, one of the Sea Peoples tribes, from the Caucasus to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean area. I'm exploring the connections between the Minoan civilization and the cultures of the Western Mediterranean, including the Etruscan culture and its yet undeciphered language.

I have taught Japanese language with research interests in sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence development. The focus is set to overcome the difficulties of learning foreign sounds and the complexity of usage. I incorporate traditional and popular culture in teaching.

I teach Japanese 201/202 and classes on Japanese culture primarily oriented to undergraduates. My research interests include Japanese oral narrative, theatrical traditions, music, and popular culture. In addition, I study food in Japanese popular culture, in particular, comic books (manga). I advise students for the Japanese minor and am the advisor/director of the Asian Studies program.

The focus of Dr. Ivanova-Sullivan’s research is Slavic linguistics, particularly morphosyntax and semantics. She has worked on Russian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The latter approach is featured in her dissertation on the translation principles in 14th-century Church Slavonic manuscripts translated from Greek (The Ohio State University, 2005). She has published in such venues as Annuaire de L’Universite de Sofia, Ohio State Working Papers in Slavic Studies, Fordham Series in Medieval Studies, Heritage Language Journal, and others.
Dr. Ivanova-Sullivan is presently working on a book-length project investigating the language of Russian heritage speakers. The main focus of this experimental work is the interpretation and production of null and overt anaphoric pronouns. Apart from linguistics, Dr. Ivanova-Sullivan’s interest in cultural studies has resulted in an article (co-authored with Yana Hashamova) on the development of the crime fiction in Bulgaria.

Professor Kolchevska’s research interests lie in the areas of 20th century Russian literature and culture. She has published widely on women’s literature, women’s memoirs, literature from the Gulag, and post-WWI forms of alternative fiction. Most recently, she co-edited (with Angela Brintlinger) Beyond Little Vera: Women's Bodies, Women's Welfare in Post-Socialist Russian, Central and Eastern Europe, which appeared in 2008 as Vol. 7 in the Ohio Slavic Papers, published by Ohio State University Press.
Other recent publications include Angels in the Home and at Work: Russian Women in the Khrushchev Years, in Women’s Studies Quarterly, (2005), and The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Eugenia Ginzburg's Writing of the Gulag, in The Russian Memoir: History and Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2003). She also has an article forthcoming in a volume on violence in Russian culture, as well as several articles on contemporary Russian culture that will appear next year in The Encyclopedia of Russian Culture (Routledge, 2007). Dr. Kolchevska has also published a two-volume translation (with Mary Zirin) and scholarly edition of S. Kovalevskaia’s Nihilist Girl (Modern Language Association Texts and Translations Series, 2001).