Foreign Languages and Literatures at University of New Mexico

FLL Faculty

FLL Programs
All faculty offices are located at Ortega Hall, unless otherwise noted.
 
Arabic back to top
Mohamed Ali - Lecturer
Mohamed Ali
Lecturer III

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: MVH 4015
277-2538
Emma Trentman
Emma Trentman
Assistant Professor
Emma Trentman's research is in the field of Applied Linguistics. Her main research project uses the theoretical concept of imagined communities to examine the interaction between identity and language acquisition in the context of study abroad to Egypt. This research is based on two years of fieldwork in Cairo and Alexandria. In the future, she is interested in exploring the use of technology, games and ethnographic training to enhance the study abroad experience, including pre-program training and post-program reflection. She also conducts research on the acquisition of Arabic diglossia, and her most recent paper, published in the L2 Journal, is one of the first empirical studies in this area. Emma teaches all levels of Arabic classes, and is particularly interested in following proficiency-based approaches that incorporate Arabic linguistic variation into the language classroom in a sociolinguistically authentic fashion.
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Office Hours
Room: 309
 
Chinese back to top
Xiang He (Ellen)
Xiang He (Ellen)
Assistant Professor
By exploring literary and filmic emergence of the “new man”, Xiang’s dissertation critically investigates the cultural and social dynamics of the first decade of Socialist China. The central question she poses is the contradiction between the socialist “new man”, a universal and philosophical ideal to overcome alienated labor, and particular over-determination of it in the Socialist China, such as the tension-charged geopolitics and mixed modes of production. Her research and teaching fieldsfocus on modern Chinese literature and film, critical theory, and intellectual thought. Currently her research project is about literary and cinematic representation of the (post)socialist modernity, especially the questions of everyday life, gender equality, and desires of cosmopolitanism. Her recent publication includes “Meditator and Doer: On the Socialist New Man in Liu Qing’s Novel The Builders”, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, Beijing: Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH (2012). As a member of the translation group of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, she has translated “Haussmannization, Barricades Fight”. She is also a contributor to the move review column of Shucheng (Book Town), a well-known cultural magazine based in Shanghai.
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Office Hours
Room: 315C
 
Jinghu Pei, Lecturer
Jinghua Pei
Lecturer II
Having taught Chinese to extensive and diverse groups of learners, I did my master’s degree at University of Iowa in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, with a specific focus on communicative pedagogies as well as Chinese literacy pedagogy. With an eye on the holistic learning of Chinese, I seek to develop the students’ language skills in all the four aspects including speaking, listening, reading and writing. Given the special feature of Chinese writing system and the role it plays in Chinese learning, I am interested in exploring varied and mostly implicit ways to develop students’ literacy. I also actively seek to incorporate artistic as well as kinesthetic ideas from traditional Chinese education into the teaching of Chinese as L2.
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Office Hours
Room:320
 
Classics back to top
Monica Cyrino - Professor
Monica Cyrino
Director of CL/CS

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
 
Lorenzo Garcia, Jr. - Assistant Professor
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
 
Osman Umurhan, Assistant Professor
Osman Umurhan
Assistant Professor
Osman’s primary research focuses on verse satire and other literature of the Roman Empire, with a concentration on the shifting correspondences between geographical boundaries and those of cultural and political identity. He has published articles and books chapters on the second century CE Roman satirist Juvenal that include his poetic self-representation (Arethusa 44.2) and his engagement with traditions of the New Testament (Brill 2013). Currently, he is working on several projects: the Roman politics of food and consumption, the anatomical politics of Aristophanic comedy, the reception of Classics in metal music, as well as a monograph on how Juvenal’s Satires offers a snapshot into a Roman culture’s response and negotiation of a globalizing Mediterranean world of the second century CE.
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Office Hours
Room: 315B
 
Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies back to top
Carmen Nocentelli - Assistant Professor
Carmen Nocentelli
Director of Undergraduate Studies

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
 
French back to top
Stephen Bishop - Associate Professor
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
Pamela Cheek
Director of Graduate Studies

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
 
Marina Peters-Newell - Lecturer
Marina Peters-Newell
Lecturer III

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: 319B
277-0525
 
Walter Putnam - Chair
Walter Putnam
Chair

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/229A
277-3713
 
Raji Vallury - Assistant Professor
Raji Vallury
Associate Professor

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.

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Office Hours
Room: 319C
 
German back to top
Susanne Baackman - Associate Professor
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
 
Katja Shröter - Graduate Director | Associate Professor
Katrin Schröter
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
 
Jason Wilby - Visiting Assistant Professor
Jason Wilby
Lecturer III

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: 311
 
Italian back to top
Rachele Duke - Lecturer
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
 
Japanese back to top
Machiko Bomberger - Instructor
Machiko Bomberger
Lecturer II

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
 
Lori Brau - Associate Professor
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
 
Russian back to top
Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan - Assistant Professor
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 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.

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Office Hours
Room: 353B