FLL Faculty
- FLL Programs
- All faculty offices are located at Ortega Hall, unless otherwise noted.
- Arabic back to top
- Mohamed Ali
- Lecturer
- 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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 351B
- 277-2538
- Chinese back to top
- Lisha Xu
- Lecturer
- I teach Chinese with research interests in foreign language pedagogy, material development, acquisition of L2 Listening, culture in the L2 classroom, and teaching with multimedia technology.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 351B
- 277-2538
- Classics back to top
- Monica Cyrino
- Professor
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).
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- Office Hours
- Room: 347B
- 277-1181
- Lorenzo Garcia, Jr.
- Assistant Professor
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 351C
- 277-3617
- Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies back to top
- Carmen Nocentelli
- Assistant Professor
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: HUM 349
- 277-8944
- Achim Oberst
- Lecturer
- Information coming soon...
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- Office Hours
- Room: HUM 560
- 277-7412
- French back to top
- Stephen Bishop
- Associate Professor
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 323C
- 277-6344
- Pamela Cheek
- Associate Professor
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 327B
- 277-3810
- Marina Peters-Newell
- Lecturer
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 319A
- 277-0525
- Walter Putnam
- Professor
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."
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- Office Hours
- Room: 323B
- 277-1182
- Raji Vallury
- Assistant Professor
Focusing upon French literature, culture, and cinema, Raji Vallury specializes in 19th-century French Literature, and her teaching and research interests include 19th- and 20th-century French Literature, literary theory, and gender and postcolonial studies. Her book, ‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire: Literature, Feminism and Myth (University of Toronto Press, 2008), is situated at the intersection of philosophy, politics and literature, and questions some dominant feminist approaches to the literary representation of gender. Starting from a confrontation in which literature exceeds the analytical paradigms of feminist thought, ‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire reevaluates the sexual politics practiced by male authors of the nineteenth century, and works through the consequences that must then be drawn for a feminist politics and aesthetics. Dr. Vallury is currently preparing a book on metaphors of nation in the Algerian 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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 319C
- 277-1179
- German back to top
- Susanne Baackmann
- Associate Professor
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 349C
- 277-3206
- Katrin Schröter
- Graduate Director | Associate Professor
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 347C
- 277-9115
- Jason Wilby
- Visiting Assistant Professor
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 349B
- 277-7363
- Italian back to top
- Rachele Marongiu Duke
- Lecturer
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 327C
- 277-7321
- Japanese back to top
- Machiko Bomberger
- Lecturer
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 351B
- 277-2538
- Lorie Brau
- Associate Professor
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.
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- Office Hours
- Room: 353C
- 277-3683
- Russian back to top
- Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan
- Assistant Professor
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 comprehension and production of null copies of pronouns and NPs in subject and object positions. 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 crime fiction in Bulgaria (under review in Modern Language Quarterly).
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- Office Hours
- Room: 353B
- 277-3708
- Natasha Kolchevska
- Chair Professor
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).
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- Office Hours
- Room: 229A
- 277-3713