Nicole Sweeney Allen, State University of New York at Buffalo
A third year PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, Nicole is interested in 20th century Latin American literature and 20th and 21st century immigrant and border writing. She is currently exploring cross-cultural encounters in the context of the Americas. Specifically, she is researching the intersection of translation theory, border studies, and multilingual autobiography and memoir in order to ask questions about translation in relation to cultural hegemony and the possibility of justice. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from New Jersey City University.
Sarbani Banerjee, Western University
Sarbani completed her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Western Ontario (2011-15). She received her B.A. (2005-8) and M.A. degrees (2008-10) from Jadavpur University, India. Her project at Western was funded by the Ontario Trillium Scholarship. Her areas of specialization include Postcolonial Literatures and Theory, Canadian Literature and Culture, Post-Partition Bengali Literature and Cinema, Diasporic Literatures, and Subaltern and Gender Studies. In her thesis, Sarbani examined the Bengali socio-cultural markers, namely bhadralok and bhadramahila, and their class-caste Other, the chhotolok. Besides English, she has proficiency in Hindi and Bengali, and limited knowledge of French and Tamil.
Jeremy Bell, Trent University
Jeremy has recently completed his PhD in Cultural Studies at Trent University. With a focus on Eros noir, or the dark eroticism underpinning the work of certain key modernists of the 20th century, Jeremy shows the legacy of the Marquis de Sade throughout modernity and into various contemporary contexts. Besides his academic work, he has been an active participant in the subcultures of electronic music for many years as well, which has further influenced his writing and tastes. He is currently in the process of translating various texts by Pierre Klossowski.
Mansour Bouaziz, Western University
Mansour né en 1987 à Sfax (Tunisie). Il a quitté son pays en 2011 pour faire des études de lettres en France (Nice). Master en poche, il est parti au Canada en 2013, où il vit toujours et où il écrit une thèse (actuellement en préparation).
Jaime R. Brenes-Reyes, Western University
Jaime is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario. His research explores the fantastic in literature with an emphasis on the mystical, religious, and medical experiences it creates on the reader.
Dagoberto Cáceres-Aguilar, Western University
Dago is a PhD4 student in Hispanic Studies. Currently, he is a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Western. His dissertation project is on literary realism. Dago has completed two Master’s programs, from Universidad del Valle (Colombia) in 2008; and in the Europe Union from Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Université de Perpignan via-Domitia (France), and Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) in 2010.
Kris Conner, Western University
Kris is a PhD student in the Comparative Literature program at Western University. He heeds the dictates of the hallowed quadrangle of Frye, Bloom, Bahktin, and de Man in his investigations of Romanticism, Shakespeare, liberalism, and Canadian Literature.
Alexandre Desbiens-Brassard, Western University
Alexandre completed a BA in Études anglaises et interculturelles in late 2011 and a Master’s in Comparative Canadian Literature in 2015, both at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is beginning the second year of his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario. His Master’s thesis is titled “‘They’re Coming!’ Invasion and Paranoia in Post-World War II Literature in Quebec and the United States by Oliver Lange, Orson Scott Card, Mary Jane Engh, Paul Chamberland, Hubert Aquin and Claude Jasmin.” His doctoral thesis, for which he obtained a grant from the Fond de Recherche du Québec: Société et Culture (FRQSC,) explores the representation of capitalism as a monstrous figure in selected North American works of 20th century speculative fiction.
Cheryl A. Emerson, State University of New York at Buffalo
Cheryl is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo, with interests in phenomenology and aesthetic theory, especially Merleau-Ponty and the embodiment of language. Her recent project on Faulkner and Merleau-Ponty, “The Flesh Made Word: As I Lay Dying and Being Incarnate,” will appear in December 2015, in Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception (SUNY Press). Her works in progress include a study of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy as well as a critique of Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s reading of Merleau-Ponty in her work on baroque aesthetics, The Madness of Vision.
Dru Farro, Western University
“I am a writer and friend.”
David Ferris, University of Colorado at Boulder
David Ferris (PhD, SUNY-Buffalo) is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Previously he held concurrent positions in Comparative Literature, English, and German at the Graduate School and in Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York, in Comparative Literature and English at Yale University, and in English at Haverford College. His research and teaching emphasizes modern literature and critical theory. His recent work includes essays on Rilke, elegy and theology of language in Geoffrey Hill and Adorno, translation in Shelley’s “Adonais,” the moral image in Hawthorne, Agamben’s messianism, Diderot and Fragonard, the politics of the useless in Benjamin, Sebald and Proustian memory, aesthetic paradox in Jacques Rancière, life and interruption in Blanchot and Keats, and Schiller’s aestheticization of Greece. Recent lectures include “Hölderlin’s Oedipus: Tragic Time, Tragic Affect,” “Postcards from the Archive: Walker Evans and Walter Benjamin,” “Why Painting Matters,” and “Time to Compare.” He is also a contributor to the American Comparative Literature Association’s Ten Year Report on the Discipline, Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization (“Indiscipline”), and to the Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature (“Why Compare?”). He has received a Senior Faculty Research Fellowship from the ACLS, NEH Summer Research Grant, and has been a Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. He has also been a fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, UK and, most recently, he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, UK. He served as the external Keynote Speaker for (((Trans- & Trance))), the 17th annual graduate student conference of Comparative Literature, Hispanic Studies, and Theory and Criticism at Western.
Elizabeth Joy Gillespie, Florida Atlantic University
Elizabeth is a full-time Business Communications instructor at Florida Atlantic University, located in Boca Raton, Florida. She holds a Master of Arts in English, specializing in American Literature, and a Master of Science in Economics, specializing in International Economics. Currently, she is enrolled in a doctoral program, and her principal research areas include 19th and 20th century American and Latin American Literature, with secondary concentrations in philosophy and human rights. She is fluent in Spanish and travels frequently, oftentimes to developing nations to study emerging economies.
Barbara Guerrero, Western University
Barbara is an international student from Mexico, and she recently completed a Bachelor of Arts in English (Honours Program) at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She is currently in her first year of the Master’s program in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario. She is interested in 20th century English and Latin American literature, auto/biography, translation, and 20th century women writers.
Jonathan Hart, Western University
Jonathan Hart is a poet, historian and literary scholar who has, in recent years, held visiting appointments at Harvard, Cambridge, Leiden, and elsewhere. He is a core faculty member in Comparative Literature at Western University and a Life Member, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Recently, he gave lectures in China, including at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
His work has been translated into many languages and his most recent book is The Poetics of Otherness: War, Trauma, and Literature (2015).
Sheena Jary, Western University
Sheena is completing the second year of her Master’s degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She is currently writing her thesis entitled, “Being ‘Becomes You’: Actualizing Possible Worlds in Carroll, Flaubert, and Durrell,” a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Sheena’s research interests include metaphysics, epistemology, the aesthetics of mathematics, and rhetoric, and she is looking forward to expanding her research competencies to include biblical misreading and the impact it has on social structures.
Rafael Antonio C. San Diego, Ateneo de Manila University
Waps was born in Manila, Philippines. He began writing poetry in university after he joined a writer’s workshop as a fellow for fiction. His poems have appeared in several local anthologies and publications, and in 2010 he won 2nd place for his poetry in the country’s most prestigious literary competition, the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards. He has since been kicked out of law school, worked as a marketing specialist in a small tech firm, experienced the simple pleasures of farming and agriculture, and now works as a correspondence officer in the Office of the President of the Philippines. The poems that appear here are excerpted from his first book, The Second World, published in December 2013 by the University of the Philippines Press.
Joel M. Toledo, Miriam College
Joel M. Toledo is a Manila-based poet, author of three books of poetry, and winner of two Don Carlos Palanca Awards for Poetry. He is the first Asian to win the Bridport International Creative Writing Prize, and was a recipient of The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center residency in Bellagio, Italy in March 2011 and the International Writing Program (IWP) residency at the University of Iowa, USA (August to November 2011). He is a faculty member of the English Department at Miriam College.
Dylan Vaughan, Western University
Dylan is a second year MA student at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. His interests include literary theory, aesthetics, and the work of Jean-Franҫois Lyotard.
Sarah Warren, Western University
Sarah is a recent graduate from Western University’s Theory and Criticism program, an interdisciplinary forum for advanced study into theoretical problems and practices. Her research circumscribes the liminal space between objects and subjects; she is especially interested in how a number of paradigms from disparate fields of study could unite to provide an intuitive basis for respectful environmental practices. Her thesis, For the Good of the Thing, looks specifically at Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materialism, contending that blending Bennett’s notion of material agency with extended mind theory and a phenomenology of memory could lend Bennett’s vision practical traction.
T. G. L. Wicks, Western University
Tristan is a recent graduate of Western’s Master’s program in Classics, during the course of which he addressed theories of race in Latin literature in his major research project, entitled “Perfidia Punica: Race, Reception and Carthage in the Works of Livy and Plautus.” Although spending the coming academic year travelling and working, he intends to begin his PhD in the Fall of 2016. His primary area of research is the intersection of literary and historiographical theory, with a particular focus on Latin historiography interpreted through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Luce Irigaray’s theories of sexual difference.
PEER REVIEWERS FOR THIS ISSUE
Rebecca Blanchard
French Language and Culture
University of Toronto
Jaime R. Brenes-Reyes
Comparative Literature
Western University
Laryssa Brooks
English and Creative Writing
University of Windsor
John Casey
English
Brown University
Patrick Casey
English
Fanshawe College
Li-ping Chen
Comparative Literature
University of Southern California
Wenjia Chen
Comparative Literature
Washington University in St. Louis
Nandita Dutta
Hispanic Studies
Western University
Jacob Evoy
Women’s Studies and Feminist Research
Western University
Darcy Gauthier
Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
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Comparative Literature
Western University
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English
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Romance Languages and Literatures
École Normale Supérieure / Harvard University
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Italian Studies
Columbia University
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Comparative Literature
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ali Kulez
Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
University of Southern California
Katarzyna Peric
French Literature
University of Toronto
Paola Preciado
Comparative Literature
Western University
Andrea Privitera
Comparative Literature
Western University
Mattius Rischard
English
University of Arizona
Lily Ryan
Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages
City University of New York
Alexandra Tania Elizabeth Salyga-Reynolds
Comparative Literature
Western University
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Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
University of Southern California
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English
University of Toronto
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Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
University of Pennsylvania
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English
University of Toronto
Ke Xu
Comparative Literature
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey