C. William Moebius
Professor and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, B.A.,
Lawrence (Wis.), 1963; Ph.D., New York at Buffalo, 1970
Bill Moebius has taught in Comparative Literature—at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst—for forty years,
serving as Department Chair or Program Director for the past
fifteen years. His publications include
translations of all extant poetry of Philodemos for the Oxford/Penguin
edition of the Greek Anthology and of Sophocles’ “Oedipus
at Colonus” for a Bobbs-Merrill Anthology of Greek Tragedy. For
the past twenty-one years he has published articles (in English
and in French) on word and image or word and musical relations
in Word & Image,
Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, Children’s Literature and elsewhere,
lectured several times at the Institute International Charles
Perrault in Paris, as well as at universities in Sweden,
Finland, Germany, and
Belgium. His most recent publications include his first electronic
one: “La
paix bucolique et les calamités des nations: enquête sur
l'usage de la pastorale classique à l'heure du sacrifice (1914-1918)” in: La
Violence: Cahiers Électroniques de l'imaginaire, 2006, n°4
and “Aller ailleurs: vers un sujet civilisé dans
quelques albums de jeunesse d’entre les deux guerres.” in
Structures et Pouvoirs des Imaginaires (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2007).
Professor Moebius served as President of the Association
of Departments and Programs in Comparative Literature for
eight years, and
as an elected member of the Advisory Board of the American
Comparative Literature Association
from 2001-2005. He is on sabbatical leave for Spring, 2008.
David R. Lenson
Professor and Program Director, B.A., Princeton, 1967; M.A., 1970; Ph.D., 1971
David Lenson's research and teaching areas are: cultural studies, literature and society, poetry and poetics, philosophy and literature, American studies, and theory of tragedy. books include: On Drugs, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1995 (paperback 1999); The Birth of Tragedy: A Commentary, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1987; Ride the Shadow, L'Epervier Press, Ft. Collins, Colorado, 1979; The Gambler, Lynx House Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1977; Achilles' Choice: Examples of Modern Tragedy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975 (reprinted 1977). He is a former editor of the Massachusetts Review, and past President of the Massachusetts Society of Professors.
James Hicks
Lecturer and Graduate Program Director, B.A., Michigan State, 1982; M.A., University of
Pennsylvania, 1987; Ph.D., 1992
Jim Hicks is director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature. His research and teaching interests include cultural studies, representations of war, comparative studies in American literature, as well as modernist narrative and literary theory. He has studied in France, lectured in Italy, and taught in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a Fulbright Professor of English. He also directed an Educational Partnership Program with the University of Sarajevo as well as the American Studies Diploma Program at Smith College—a small, one-year graduate program for international students. He is the editor of the Massachusetts Review. His book Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2013.
María Soledad Barbón
Associate Professor; M.A. University of Cologne, 1993; Ph.D. 2000
Marisol Barbón holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research and teaching interests include the literature and cultural history of colonial Latin America, transatlantic studies, anthropophagy and colonial festivals. She is the author of Peruanische Satire am Vorabend der Unabhängigkeit (1770-1800) (Droz, 2001) as well as of articles on late colonial literature and culture. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript about monarchical celebrations in Lima under the Bourbon rule. She has received several awards including two research grants from the DAAD (German Academic Research Service) and a post-doctoral fellowship from the Andrew-Mellon Foundation for research at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Before joining the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures she held appointments at the University of Cologne, the University of Michigan and the University of Washington.
N. C. Christopher Couch
Lecturer, B.A., Columbia,
1976; M.A., 1980; Ph.D., 1987
N. C. Christopher Couch holds a
Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. He
is the author of numerous books and articles on
Latin American art and on graphic novels and comic
art, including The Will Eisner Companion: The
Pioneering Spirit of the Father of the Graphic Novel (with
Stephen Weiner), Will Eisner: A Retrospective (with
Peter Myer), Faces of Eternity: Masks of the
Pre-Columbian Americas, and The Festival
Cycle of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus. He curated
exhibitions at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library American
Museum of Natural History, the Americas Society,
the Oklahoma Air and Space Museum and the Smith
College Museum of Art. He was senior editor at Kitchen
Sink Press (Northampton), editor in chief at CPM
Manga (New York, and has taught at Amherst, Columbia,
Hampshire, Haverford, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges,
and the School of Visual Arts. Publications he edited
won or were nominated for 17 Eisner and Harvey Awards,
and he has held fellowships at the Institute for
Advanced Study, Dumbarton Oaks of Harvard University,
and the Newberry Library. Current publications include
the edited volume Conversations with Harvey
Kurtzman,
and a book on Batman artist and editorial cartoonist
Jerry Robinson.
Laszlo Dienes
Professor, Diploma, Eötvös Lóránd
University of Arts and Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, 1968;
A.M., Harvard, 1972; Ph.D., 1977
László Dienes's research
interests include Russian literature of the last two centuries,
literary theory and aesthetics in general, poetry and poetics,cultural
studies, and Russian and East European cinema. His book
entitled Russian Literature in Exile: The Life and Work
of Gaito Gazdanov (first published in Germany in 1982)
was translated and published in Russia itself. He is also
the editor of the first ever three-volume "Collected
Works" of this writer, published in Moscow in 1996.
His teaching interests include comparative culture and
literature courses, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and the themes
of exile and emigration, Russian film, especially the works
of Andrey Tarkovsky and Alexander Sokurov, spiritual cinema,
and a course on "Digital Culture", a look at
the new cyberarts and the artistic, social, political and
psychological implications of the digital revolution. His
recent publications include a contribution to a collection
of scholarly articles entitled Gaito Gazdanov I ‘nezamechennoe
pokolenie’: Pisatel’ na peresechenii traditsii
i kul’tur published by the Russian Academy of
Sciences in Moscow in 2005 for which he also served on
its editorial
board.
Regina Galasso
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, M.A. in Spanish, Middlebury College, B.A., Rutgers University
Regina Galasso's research and teaching areas of interest include literary and cultural relations between U.S. and Hispanic writers and artists, literature of the city, visual arts, literary translation, and 20th- and 21st-century Spanish literature. She has published articles on Felipe Alfau, Eduardo Lago, and José Moreno Villa as well as translations of the work of Miguel Barnet, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, and Alicia Borinsky among others. Together with Carmen Boullosa, she is the editor of a special issue of Translation Review featuring scholarly articles and literary translations associated with Hispanic New York. She is working on a book manuscript about the unique role New York City has played within Hispanic literary production. She holds a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University and degrees in Spanish from Middlebury College (M.A.) and Rutgers University (B.A.). She was Assistant Professor at The City University of New York (BMCC) before joining the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at UMass.
Edwin Gentzler
Professor and Director of the
Translation Center, B.A., Kenyon College, 1973; Ph.D.,
Vanderbilt, 1990
divides his time between conducting teaching
and research in Comparative Literature and directing the
Translation Center. His research interests include translation
theory, literary translation, and postcolonial theory.
He is the author of Translation and Identity in the
Americas (London: Routledge, 2007) and Contemporary
Translation Theories (London: Routledge, 1993), reissued in a revised
second edition (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001; Shanghai
Foreign Language Education Press, 2004). He co-edited (with
Maria Tymoczko) the anthology Translation and Power (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), which includes
essays by many of the distinguished guests participating
in the Translation Center's International Visitors series.
He
serves as co-editor with Susan Bassnett of the "Topics
in Translation" Series for Multilingual Matters, is
on the Board of Advisers to the Encyclopedia of Literary
Translation by Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers in England,
and is a member of the Advisory Board of several journals,
including Cadernos de Tradução, Across, Metamorphoses,
Journal of Chinese Translation Studies, and the Massachusetts
Review. Nominated for a distinguished teaching award for
his course "Translation and Postcolonial Studies," he
lectures widely on issues of translation theory and culture,
including most recently addresses in China, Mexico, England,
Italy, Austria, Ireland, Spain, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil.
He was the recipient with faculty in the Five College Canadian
Studies Program and Concordia University, Montreal, of
a $5,000 International Research Linkage Grant for Research
on Citizenship and Identity. The Translation Center recently
was awarded the Support Providers Export Achievement Award
by the Pioneer Valley Trade Council. He was also the Project
Investigator for a three-year $255,000 grant from the Trial
Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to develop certification
exams and provide training for court interpreters.
Kathryn Lachman
Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Ph.D., Princeton, 2008; B.A. and M.A., Yale, 1998.
Kathryn Lachman joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the fall of 2008, and teaches in both the French and Comparative Literature programs. A native of South Africa, she holds a Ph.D. in French from Princeton University and the M.A. and B.A. degrees in French from Yale University. She has received numerous research grants, including the George Lurcy Fellowship for research in Paris (2005-6), an Ecole Nationale Supérieure Fellowship (2005-6), and the Henry Hart Rice Fellowship for research in Beirut, Lebanon (1998-2000). She trained as a classical violinist with Erick Friedman at Yale, and earned the Premier Prix in violin performance and the Premier Prix à l’unanimité for chamber music and history of music at the Conservatoire de Paris in 1995. Her academic publications include an edited volume on Maryse Condé entitled Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism and the Caribbean Text (2006), articles in Research in African Studies and Music, Sound and the Moving Image, and various book chapters on African and Francophone literatures. Her manuscript on the intersections between music, transnational literature, and theory is forthcoming. Professor Lachman's research and teaching interests include contemporary North African literature, Caribbean literature, literary theory, Sub-Saharan African literature, Diaspora studies, and postcolonial opera.
Don E. Levine
Associate Professor, B.A., Columbia, 1964; M.A., Princeton,
1967; Ph.D., 1972
Don E. Levine’s research interests
besides avant-garde film and theory, include melodrama;
film noir; psychoanalytic
theory; gay and gender studies; 19th and 20th century French,
German, and American literature, film, and translation.
He is co-translator
and editor of The Selected Works of Antonin Artaud and
has edited numerous books by eminent writers and scholars
such
as Samuel Delany, Susan Sontag, Sam Weber, Peter Fenves,
and Marc Shell.
Annette Damayanti Lienau
Annette Damayanti Lienau is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University (2011). She is working on a book manuscript on language choice and ideology in the comparative literary histories of Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, based on materials in Arabic, French, Malay, and Wolof. Her current book project addresses questions of script change (from Arabic to romanized forms), the comparative legacies of devotional literature and sacralized language, and relationships between leftist transnationalism and vernacular print-culture. A portion of her research will be published in the forthcoming (Winter 2012) issue of the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Duke University Press). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies Mellon Early Career Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2010), the Social Science Research Council’s Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2009), and Enders and Macmillan grants from Yale University (2008). As a graduate of the Middlebury Language School in France (M.A. 2003), the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad program at the American University in Cairo (2007), and as a former student of the Center for Applied Linguistics at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, she is eager to advise students on language programs, international fellowships, and research projects overseas. She is also studying Persian, a language she hopes to incorporate into her teaching and research in the long-term. Annette’s teaching interests include: Modern Arabic Literature in Comparative Perspective, Comparative Literatures of the Indian Ocean, Cultural Studies and Leftist Transnationalism, Comparative “Third World” Cinema, Sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asian literatures, and Comparative Slave Narratives.
Elizabeth P. Petroff
Professor, B.S. Ed., Northwestern, 1960; M.A., California
at Berkeley, 1964; Ph.D., 1972
Elizabeth Petroff's research interests include medieval literature,
autobiography; and comparative mythology. She is currently
examining myths of feminine and their relation to representations
of the female subject in modern and post-modern texts. Her
publications include three books on medieval women and their
writings: Consolation of the Blessed: Women Saints in
Medieval Tuscany (1979); Medieval Women's Visionary
Literature (1986);
and Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (1994). She has also published translations from Italian
and Latin literature. Her teaching interests range from classical
and medieval texts to contemporary American and European
fiction and autobiography.
Catherine Portuges
Professor and Graduate Program Director;
Ph.D. University of California Los Angeles, 1981
Catherine Portuges is Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, Curator of the annual Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, and served as Graduate Program Director in Comparative Literature from 1995-2009. She was awarded the Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Teaching (2010), the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal (Republic of Hungary, 2009) for her contributions to Hungarian cinema, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2007). Her research interests include Central European and post-communist national cinemas; French and Francophone cinema; memory and Jewish identity; European minorities, migration, and gender; and cinematic representations of the city. Her books include Screen Memories: the Hungarian Cinema of Márta Mészáros (Indiana, 1993) and Cinemas in Transition: Post-socialist East Central Europe (co-edited with Peter Hames, Temple, 2012), and Gendered Subjects (1985, re-issued by Routledge, 2012). Her recent essays have appeared in Cinema's Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács (2012); The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe (2012); Blackwell Companion to East European Cinema (2012); and Blackwell Companion to Historical Film (2012); Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011); Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema (2009); Texte, Image, Imaginaire (2007), Caméra Politique: Cinéma et Stalinisme (2005); East European Cinemas (2005); and 24 Frames: Central Europe (2005).
She teaches French Film, Cinema and Psyche, and the Dissertation Research Seminar, and is a frequent lecturer at international conferences, an invited programmer, curator, juror and consultant for film festivals and colloquia, and a delegate to international film festivals. She serves on the editorial board of Studies in Eastern European Cinema (UK), Jewish Film and New Media: an International Journal, and AHEA: E-Journal of the American Hungarian Educational Association, and is a member of the Academic Advisory Board, Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies and Consultant for Eastern Europe, European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (UK).
Robert A. Rothstein
Professor, S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960;
A.M., Harvard, 1961; Ph.D., 1967
Robert A. Rothstein was trained in linguistics by Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Roman Jakobson, but also has a long-standing interest in folklore. In addition to publications in the field of Slavic linguistics, his bibliography includes such titles as "The Poetics of Proverbs," "Yiddish Songs of Drunkenness," "The Popular Song in Wartime Russia," "The Girl He Left Behind: Women in East European Songs of Emigration," "Klezmer-loshn: The Language of Jewish Folk Musicians," and "How It Was Sung in Odessa: At the Intersection of Russian and Yiddish Folk Culture." Since 2004 he has contributed a regular column on Polish language, literature and folklore to the Boston biweekly newspaper Bialy Orzel / White Eagle. A selection of these columns was published as Two Words to the Wise: Reflections on Polish Language, Literature, and Culture (Slavica Publishers, 2008). At UMass, where he directs the Program in Slavic and East European Studies, he has taught Polish, Russian, Yiddish, Belarusian, and Slovak, as well as courses in folklore, linguistics, and Yiddish literature and culture. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies and adjunct appointment in the Department of Linguistics and in the Program in German and Scandinavian Studies. In 2006 he was appointed the Walter Raleigh Amesbury, Jr., and Cecile Dudley Amesbury Professor of Polish Language, Literature, and Culture.
Maria Tymoczko
Professor and Interim Graduate Program Director, B.A., Harvard, 1965; M.A., 1968; Ph.D., 1973
Maria Tymoczko has an international reputation
in three fields: Translation Studies; Celtic medieval literature;
and Irish Studies, with a specialty in literature in both
Irish and English, including James Joyce. She is one of
the leading theorists in Translation Studies, setting new
directions for the field.
Her critical studies The Irish "Ulysses" (University
of California Press, 1994) and Translation in a Postcolonial
Context (St. Jerome Publishing,
1999) have both won prizes and commendations, the former co-winner of the 1995
Book Award for Literary and Cultural Criticism from the American Conference for
Irish Studies and the latter receiving the Michael J. Durkan Prize for the best
book published in Irish language and cultural studies from the American Conference
for Irish Studies and selected by Choice magazine as one of the most important
books published in 2000. Professor Tymoczko has edited several volumes including
Born into a World at War (with Nancy Blackmun, 2000), Translation
and Power (with
Edwin Gentzler, 2002), Language and Tradition in Ireland (with Colin Ireland,
2003), Language and Identity in Twentieth-Century Irish Culture (with Colin Ireland,
2003; special issue of Éire-Ireland), and Translation as Resistance (2006,
special section in the Massachusetts Review). Her most recent book is Enlarging
Translation, Empowering Translators (St. Jerome Publishing, 2007), a major reconceptualization
of translation theory.
Articles by Professor Tymoczko have appeared
in Target, The Translator, Babel,
Meta, TTR, Éire-Ireland, Studia
Celtica, Irish University Review, James
Joyce Quarterly, Yeats Annual, Comparative Literature, and Harvard
Magazine, among others. She has contributed chapters to recent anthologies
including
Translating Others (2007), Similarity and Difference in Translation (2004),
Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology (2003), The
Languages of Ireland (2003), Irish and Postcolonial Writing (2002), Crosscultural
Transgressions: Research Models in Translation Studies (2002), Re-Organizing
Knowledge, Transforming Institutions (2001), Changing the Terms: Translating
in the Postcolonial Era (2000), and Post-colonial Translation (1999), as well as classics such as Translation,
History and Culture (1990) and The Manipulation of Literature (1985). Her translations
of early Irish literature are published in Two Death Tales from the Ulster
Cycle (Dolmen Press, 1981).
Professor Tymoczko has held grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the American Council of Learned Societies and she has been a Fulbright
Scholar in France. In 2005-2006 she held a prestigious Samuel F. Conti Faculty
Research
Fellowship, awarded by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Maria Tymoczko
has served as president of the Celtic Studies Association of North America
and as a member of the Executive Committee of the American Conference for
Irish Studies.
She has lectured in many countries of the world including China, Japan, and
India, as well as countries throughout Europe and the Americas.
Trained as a
medievalist, Professor Tymoczko holds three degrees from Harvard University.
She teaches a wide variety of subjects including translation theory
and practice, modern and contemporary novel, postcolonial literature, fantasy
literature, medieval literature, and early Irish language and literature.
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