Graduate Students

Madalina Meirosu (Ph.D. 2017) has accepted a tenure-track position in Romanian Studies at Arizona State University. Madalina was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Swarthmore University.

mhalanazi@umass.edu

Mohammad Alanazi is a literary translator and lecturer at the University of Hafr Albatin. He received a BA in English Language and Literature from the Northern Borders University and an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester. His current research interests include literary translation, modernist and contemporary Arabic literature, poetry and comparative poetics, postcolonialism, world literature, and Middle Eastern studies.

aaslan@umass.edu

Adile Aslan is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, and has been working as a lecturer at Georgetown University-Qatar since 2017. She has a BA degree in Western Languages and Literatures (Bogazici University), an MA degree in Comparative Literature (Istanbul Bilgi University), and a second MA degree in Cultural Studies (Sabanci University). Her publications have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultura, CLCWeb (Purdue University), Cadernos de tradução and DeGruyter. Her research interests are comparative modernisms, the Ottoman literatures, the Habsburg literatures, Middle Eastern Studies, psychoanalysis, world literature and Global South. She has worked as a lecturer, visiting instructor, teaching assistant, and translator at various institutions and universities in Turkey, Spain, Qatar, and the USA. 

ebarber@umass.edu

Emily is a PhD student in Comparative Literature. Originally from Martin, Tennessee, she received her BA in Philosophy from Grinnell College in 2021, and has spent the last two years living in Madrid, Spain, and Bloomington, Indiana, working as an English and reading teacher at the high school and elementary school level. Emily’s research interests include South African literature, postcolonial theory, Latin American literature and theory, and racial identity formation. In her free time, Emily likes to engage in political activism for causes around social and racial justice, and take long walks outside.

jcabrerapons@umass.edu

Juan Carlos Cabrera Pons was born in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. He joined the program in 2017. He received a BA in Literature and Linguistics from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana (Mexico City), with a focus on Translation Studies, and an MA in Cultural Studies from the Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, with a focus on Socio-cultural Language Studies. His research interests revolve around colonial Latin American literature and discursive identity constructions in post-colonial contexts. As a poet, he has been awarded the National Poetry Award "Merida" 2008, and grants from the State Council for the Cultures and the Arts of Chiapas (CONECULTA) and the National Fund for the Cultures and the Arts (FONCA) of Mexico.

jditeman@umass.edu

Jeff Diteman is a literary scholar and translator working in French, Spanish, and English. A PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst, Diteman’s scholarly interests include translation studies, cultural hybridity, experimental poetics, children in literature, feminism, and postcolonial theory. His chapter “Embodied Ethics in Los ríos profundos and La Rue Cases-Nègres” was included in the book Growing Up in Latin America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). His translation of The Anarchist Who Shared My Name by Pablo Martín Sánchez was published in 2018 by Deep Vellum. Diteman has also translated poetry by Raymond Queneau and regularly translates children’s literature and journalism. His current project is a collaboration with poet Shanta Lee to translate the writing of Colombian author Amalialú Posso Figueroa.

gdorgan@umass.edu

Gennifer Dorgan received her BA in German Area Studies from Kenyon College and her MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut. She specializes in high medieval German, English, and Latin literatures with a particular focus on gender, rhetoric, and intertextuality in texts emerging from communities of pious women. Her additional areas of interest include the global history of the book and the ways that medieval texts shape contemporary discussions about identity. Her work has appeared in Early Middle English, American Notes and Queries, and the Harvard Library Bulletin. She has taught German and Latin at Assumption University and is a student of Koine Greek and Ge'ez. Currently, she is studying Hildegard of Bingen's Liber Vitae Meritorium and working on an English translation of the St. Trudperter Hohelied.

maryamfatima@umass.edu

Maryam Fatima’s dissertation, Partitions and Palimpsests: Transgressions of Form and Territory in Postcolonial Urdu and Arabic Writing, advances a transnational framework for the study of “partition literature” in Urdu through a comparative study of Urdu and Arabic literature in the wake of the South Asian partitions in 1947 and 1971 and of Palestine/Israel in 1948. Her project has been supported by a Mellon-Sawyer dissertation fellowship, two diversity grants from the university, and the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute. Her other areas of research include the connected histories of Urdu and Arabic literary modernities and Afro-Asian literatures of decolonization. Her work is forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies and Critical Global Studies. She is also editing a special issue on Late Persianate literatures with Mehtap Ozdemir and Alexander Jabbari.

rfreire@umass.edu

Rafael Freire, Brazilian, has a BA in Comparative Literature (Hamilton College) and an MA in Translation Studies (University of São Paulo). For his Master's thesis he analysed and rendered into Portuguese a section of the travelogue EIMI by E. E. Cummings. The process of translating this work also spurred a reflection on the phenomenon of translation in general; he guided such discussion on the thought of the French intellectual Henri Meschonnic. With a background in modernism, Rafael's current research interests include translation, Judaism and feminism. He has worked as a visiting professor at the University of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil).

phartland@umass.edu

Before earning an MFA from the University of Notre Dame's Creative Writing program this May, Patricia Hartland earned an MFA in Comparative Literature at the Iowa Translation Workshop, where she served as the Outreach & Engagement Fellow and was an editor of the Exchanges Literary Journal. Her interests traipse into the realms of postcoloniality, monstrosity, fragmentation, and utterances of the void. She also enjoys teaching creative writing courses with an emphasis on collaborative and cross-media explorations. Her translations, poetry, video-poems, interviews and reviews can be found in a variety of journals, and a co-translation of Raphaël Confiant's Stephanie St. Clair, Queen of Harlem with Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernerg is imminently forthcoming with Dialogos Books. 

ljackmauh@umass.edu

Luke Jackmauh is trained as a Slav[ic]ist, but hopes to draw from diverse languages and adjacent disciplines, especially linguistics and philosophy of language, in his scholarship. He enjoys reflecting on contemporary literature's engagement with language ideologies, on the role of grammar in aesthetic expression, as well as exploring the bounds and contours of language's ability to represent mental and spiritual states. He has good command of Russian, French, and German, and is currently refining his Polish, Turkish, and Persian. Luke earned his BA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard College in 2019, after which he received a year-long travel fellowship for creative pursuits in Hungary. 

mkowalchuk@umass.edu

Michael Kowalchuk is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature after studying architecture and working as an architectural designer for six years. He is especially interested in the political culture of the Left and its aesthetic and literary ramifications. Michael's primary research topic centers on the ideological cross-pollination that occurred between French and Latin American Marxists during the 1960s and 1970s — particularly those who studied under Louis Althusser. Michael primarily employs feminist, queer, and Marxist methodologies in his work. Leveraging his academic/professional background in architecture, he understands the interrelationship between visual culture, aesthetics, space, and political power. He is a native English speaker and fluent in French, with a conversational knowledge of Spanish and Italian.

xuli@umass.edu

Xu Li received his MAs in English from Miami University and the University of Macau. He has worked as a journalist and educational counselor in China. His academic interests include comparative poetics, ecocriticism, continental philosophy, Chinese intellectual history and material culture, as well as Asian American literature. He is currently doing research on ecological crises, global trade and English subjectivity from 1644 to 1840.

aishwaryasal@umass.edu

Born in England and of Indian origin, Aishwarya received a BA in French, a BFA in Creative Writing, and a certificate in World Language Pedagogy from Portland State University. At UMass, she is pursuing a dual MA in Comp Lit. and French. Her other working languages include Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu. She is interested in the intersections of identity and language, namely how they have influenced postcolonial, diasporic literature in Francophone and Anglophone nations. Apart from her active fiction and dramatic writing practice, in 2022, she completed a Visharad in Kathak dance.

mmujumdar@umass.edu

Vika Mujumdar received her BA in English and History from the University of Illinois Springfield. Her interests include Asian diaspora literature, cross-genre and hybrid work, and transit in immigrant literature. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Liminal Transit Review.

mparadelamac@umass.edu

Manuel Antonio Paradela Maceiras has a BA in German Language and Literature (University of Santiago de Compostela) and, through the Erasmus Mundus Crossways programme, three MAs in Comparative Literature (University Santiago de Compostela, University of Guelph and University of Perpignan). His main topic of research has been Central European fantastic literature, an approach which geographical scope he is interested in expanding to Western Europe, Latin America, North America and Japan, with an eye to the role of the fantastic in peripheral literatures such as those of Italy, Galicia, Argentina and Catalonia. His interests also include World Literature, post-Continental Philosophy, Latin American Studies, Iberian Studies and Comparative Modernities. He can either read or speak English, Spanish, Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Swedish.

eurbina@umass.edu

Born in Mexico City, Enrique graduated from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a BA in Latin American Literature. His research interests are ecocriticism, transmedia and weird literature. He is also a fiction and poetry writer, mountaineer, and holds a 4th dan degree in kendo. He sometimes does not know how he finds the time to practice (and enjoy) all of the above.
 

uvoinich@umass.edu

Uladzislau Voinich received his BA from Whitman College (Walla Walla, WA) in English and French. His research interests include theory, psychoanalysis, anticolonial literature and the Palestinian struggle. Uladzislau speaks English, French, Italian, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian and Turkish. He has worked as a research assistant for Professor Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College) on Universal Politics (authors Zahi Zalloua and Ilan Kapoor, Oxford University Press, 2021) and Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause. Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2023). 

yanwu@umass.edu

Yan Wu received her BA in English and MA in Applied Linguistics from Anhui University and an MA in Conference Interpreting and Translation Studies from the University of Leeds. She is currently a graduate teaching assistant in Comparative Literature with research interests in the sociology/philosophy of translation, transnational literature and paratextual studies.