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Graduate Student and Graduate Alumni News

Fall 2023

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.

 

Spring 2023

Alex Ponomareff (Ph.D Comparative Literatue, Class of 2020) has accepted a tenure-track position in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida. 

Shastri Akella (Ph.D Comparative Literatue, Class of 2020) has accepted a tenure-track position in Creative Writing and Film in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Shastri will also be having a book launch of his first novel The Sea Elephants (Flatiron Books) in New York in July 2023 and another at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on July 24.

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki and Jeffrey Diteman were nominated for a Distinguished Teaching Award. 

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki and Kate Edwards co-chaired a three-panel two-day seminar at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) titled “Policing Spatial Imaginaries and the Body Politic."  

Fall 2022

Comp Lit Graduate student Noor Habib and her co-translator Zara Khadeeja Majoka’s are awarded a PEN/HEIM 2023 Translation Grant Award for their translation from the Urdu of Oblivion and Eternity Within Me by Miraji.

Following her year as Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender and Women's Studies at Hollins University, Sandra Russell with return to Amherst for a two-year Visiting Lecturer position in Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Sandra will be defending her dissertation in late summer of 2022.

Spring 2022

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki and Kate Edwards co-chaired an ACLA seminar at its annual conference in June 2022 titled "Ruin and Reenactment: Staging Memory in Literature and Film."

Dr. Krzyśtof Rowiński’s will join the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies as Thomas Brown Assistant Professor in Polish Studies at Trinity College Dublin in Fall 2022. Krzyś received his PhD in Comparative Literature in 2020.

Dr. Nahir Otaño Gracia is awarded the Medieval Academy of America Article Prize in Critical Race Studies for her groundbreaking work on the Global North Atlantic and Icelandic sagas in “Towards a decentered Global North Atlantic: Blackness in Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd,” Literature Compass 2019; 16. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12545

Dr. Manuela Borzone will join the Department of Modern Languages at Nebraska Wesleyan University as Assistant Professor of Spanish in Fall 2022, where she will teach Spanish language and Latin American literature. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Center College (Danville, KY). Manuela received the PhD in Comparative Literature with an interdisciplinary certificate in Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies in 2020.

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki worked as co-curator of the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival in Spring 2022.

Fall/Spring 2021

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki and Kate Edwards co-chaired an ACLA seminar at its annual conference in June 2021 titled "Obscene Dissidence: Aging, Abjection, and Sexuality in Film and Literature."

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki organized a graduate and undergraduate conference titled "80 Years of Xanadu: The Legacies of Citizen Kane" in December of 2021 with Film Studies, in conjunction with Comparative Literature. She was assistant curator of the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival in Spring 2021.

October 2020

Maryam Zehtabi was appointed Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia.

May 2020

Hyongrae Kim will be joining the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Auburn University in Alabama as Visiting Assistant Professor of Korean Language and Literature.

Noor Habib has been appointed Teaching Fellow at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.

Shastri Akella has been appointed full time permanent faculty at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Department of English and Creative Writing.

April 2020

Sandra Russell Joy was awarded the Joyce A. Berkman Award for Outstanding Graduate Feminist Scholarship for her essay "Toward a Ukrainian Feminist Poetics: The Last Soviet Poetry of Iryna Zhylenko, Natalka Bilotser."

Siobhan Meï was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellow in Womens' Studies. The Fellowship is the only national program to support doctoral work on women's and gendered issues. Each 2020 Fellow receives a $5,000 award to help cover expenses incurred while completing their dissertations.

March 2020

Hyongrae Kim and Siobhan Meï publish the translation Flower Swallows Sing. A North Korean Memoir in Verse, introducing Imu Baek's poetry to a new audience. Currently a member of the North Korea Writers in Exile PEN Center, during her childhood Imu Baek was a six-time first prize winner of the national student youth writing contest and was considered a writing prodigy by the North Korean government. After her parents died of starvation, she lived as a gotjebi - which they translate in this collection as wandering swallow - before defecting to China in 2001.

November 2019

Comparative Literature alumna Lara Curtis publishes Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender: Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion, the first comparative study of the works of these three courageous women who were ceaselessly committed to a noble cause during the Holocaust and World War II. With skillful recourse to a remarkable variety of genres, they offer compelling autobiographical reflections, vivid chronicles of wartime atrocities, eyewitness accounts of victims, and acute perspectives on the political implications of major events. See https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030312411

October, 2019

Elena Igartuburu participates in a roundtable, “Staging Spanish Theater in Translation,” featuring José Manuel Mora, playwright and director of the Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático of Castilla y León, Spain at the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard, 2 Arrow St. 4th floor. Cambridge, MA. October 30, 5:30-7:00pm Elena translated Mora’s work for the stage, Los nadadores nocturnos.

September 2019

Sara Ceroni has accepted a position as Schools Coordinator for Italy with Cambridge Assessment International Education, a department of Cambridge University. Congratulations Sara!

September 2018

Shastri Akella wins 1st prize in fiction at the Slice Literary Writers' Conference, Brooklyn, NY on September 8-9, for his story, "Odd Weather Boyfriend."

August 2018

Sandra Russell wins The Theodosius and Irene Senkowsky Prize for Achievement in Ukrainian Studies from the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute.

May 2018

Manuela Borzone wins the 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award for her ability to communicate, motivate and inspire undergraduate students in her classes.


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Comparative Literature Dissertations Collection

Comparative Literature Masters Theses Collection


Madalina Meirosu
2017
Ph.D.

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.

Ekim Akyıldız

Ph.D.

eakyildiz@umass.edu

Ekim Akyıldız received their MA in Translation Studies at Istanbul University, and their BA in German Translation and Interpreting at Ege University. Ekim has worked as a subtitle translator, lecturer, and Turkish instructor for foreigners. Their research interests are queer thought in the translation studies field and the translation of Ottoman literature. Ekim is a certified Turkish Sign Language Interpreter, who also speaks Turkish, English, and German.

Mohammad Alanazi

Ph.D.

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.

Sarah Aldawood

Ph.D.

saldawood@umass.edu

Sarah Aldawood received her MA in the Theory and Practice of Translation from SOAS, University of London, and her BA in English Translation from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. She has worked as lecturer at the College of Languages and Translation in King Saud University where she taught translation and language courses. Her current research interests include the sociology of translation, intersemiotic translation, translation technologies and modern Arabic literature. 

Adile Aslan

Ph.D.

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. 

Selma Asotic

Ph.D.

sasotic@umass.edu

A Bosnian-born, bilingual writer, Selma earned dual BA degrees in English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Sarajevo, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She’s interested in poetry and revolution. She’s taught writing to undergraduates at BU and NYU, and ESL to adult learners at community-based organizations in Sarajevo and New York. She’s also worked as a translator and interpreter. Her first book of poetry was published in both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 2022 and awarded a regional prize for best poetry collection the following fall. Her mood is usually entirely dependent on the results of Liverpool FC.

Emily Barber Emily Barber

Ph.D.

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.

Jessica Beasley

MA

jbeasley@umass.edu

Jessica Beasley received her BA from Florida State University in Italian Studies and Creative Writing (2018). In collaboration with Dr. Silvia Valisa, she is translating the “novel in verses” La sorella dell’Ave by Ludovica Ripa di Meana. Jessica’s research interests include translation studies, poetry, travel literature, identity studies, female writers of the 20th century, and the Portuguese and Italian diasporas.

Juan Carlos Cabrera Pons

Ph.D.

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.

Isabella Deloach Isabella Deloach

MA

ideloach@umass.edu

Originally from Los Angeles, California, Isabella moved to New York City where she received her BA in Classical Studies from Hunter College. She currently works with English, Latin, and German, and is fascinated by human conceptions of Beauty and the Numinous in Late Antique and Early Medieval Literature.  Isabella lives with her cat Louis and collects antiques.

Jeff Diteman

Ph.D.

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.

José do Ó José do Ó

Ph.D.

José earned his BA in History from the New University of Lisbon (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and his MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory from King’s College London. His doctoral research will examine the prevalence of allegorical forms of expression across literature, film and theory, with an emphasis on the representational impossibilities that underpin the recourse to allegorical figuration. He is also interested in genre studies, intermediality (particularly the 'cross-contamination' between film and literature) and in other issues related to matters of representation. Before coming to Amherst, he worked as an educator in his hometown of Lisbon, Portugal.

Gennifer Dorgan

Ph.D.

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.

 

Kate Edwards

Ph.D.

kredwards@umass.edu

Kate Edwards graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2018 with an AB in Russian and in Classical Languages. She joins the MA/PhD program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with interests in the effect of societal and natural disasters upon later, non-participatory generations and in the spiritual versus the corporeal grotesque.

Maryam Fatima Maryam Fatima

Ph.D.

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.

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki

Ph.D.

nforni@umass.edu

 

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a Graduate Certificate in Film Studies. She received an Associate's Degree (University of ORT, Uruguay) and a BA in Audiovisual Communication (University of Vic, Spain) with a focus on film and gender studies. She began an MA in Women, Gender, and Citizenship Studies (Interuniversitary, Spain). Her main interests are migration studies and representations of gender and sexuality, the effects of film on society, and the interaction between literature and film.

 

Rafael Freire

Ph.D.

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).

Noor Habib

Ph.D.

nhabib@umass.edu

Noor Habib completed her B.A in the Humanities at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. She has worked as a teaching assistant and taught courses in language, literature, and history. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, modern Urdu fiction, poetry of resistance across the Muslim world and translation studies. She is hoping to work with Persian and Arabic literatures as well.

Patricia Hartland

Ph.D.

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. 

Hsin-Pei Hsu

MA, Translation

hsinpeihsu@umass.edu

Hsin-Pei Hsu received her BA in Chinese and English from the University of Chengchi University in Taiwan. Her current research interests include translation studies, modern Chinese prose, and 19th-century English novels. She hopes to build a Chinese-English literary translation theory that can help translators systematically determine word connotations and offer guidelines on the practice of literary translation. 

Luke Jackmauh

Ph.D.

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. 

Abby Klug Abby Klug

Ph.D.

aklug@umass.edu

Originally from northeastern Iowa, Abby received her MA in Museum Studies from Western Illinois University, Quad Cities and her BA in English and History from Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. She has worked in various roles in the museum field before joining the program, including those in collections, curation, education, administration, and exhibit. Her current research interests (very) broadly include feminist theory, mythological figures, monstrosity and “otherness,” historiography, and narratives within museums. In her downtime, Abby can be found attempting to paint or be active, but is probably just snuggling her kitten, Pearl.

Michael Kowalchuk

Ph.D.

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.

Chamini Kulathunga

Ph.D.

cabesiriward@umass.edu

Chamini Kulathunga is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. She completed her BA in English (Hons) at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and her MFA at the University of Iowa. She was a summer visiting fellow at Cornell University’s South Asia Program in 2019. Before starting her doctoral studies at UMass-Amherst, she worked as an editor at Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, The Song Bridge Project, and as Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Sri Lanka. She has also worked as a visiting lecturer at several Sri Lankan universities. Chamini’s primary research interests extend across ecocriticism, climate change, Buddhism and ecology, and environmental literature in South Asia along with a continuing interest in world literature and literary translation.

Xu Li

Ph.D.

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.

Robert Louis

Ph.D.

rnlouis@umass.edu

Rob Louis earned his BA degree at Vassar College. His doctoral research primarily aims to explore adaptation of early English and related literary work into modern languages and media. He also intends to expand on his earlier work as a translator of Russian by working with translation theory, with a particular eye towards adaptation of Soviet literature.

Aishwarya Marathe Aishwarya Marathe

MA

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.

Toni McElrath

Ph.D.

amcelrath@umass.edu

Toni McElrath received a BA from University of Minnesota in English Language, Culture, Context and a BFA in Applied Dance with focus on choreographic experimentation, while studying oboe performance and visual art. He received his MA in Literature and Publishing from Depaul University and was awarded the Graduate Distinction Award and June Vermillion English Graduate Award. He has worked in education and has worked on visual arts and movement therapy with children as a part of various learning exchanges. His main interest is in affect theory/emotions as they relate to representation, interpellation, and identification within the performance and portrayals of visual and movement arts in literature.

Vika Mujumdar

MA

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.

Meenakshi Nair

Ph.D.

meenakshinai@umass.edu

Meenakshi Nair received her BA in English Literature from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women (LSR), University of Delhi along with a Diploma in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding. She earned her MA in Comparative Literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is interested in southern urbanisms, the digital humanities, and English literature pedagogy in postcolonial India. She is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer and some of her poetry has been published in VAYAVYA, nether Quarterly and elsewhere. 

Manuel Antonio Paradela Maceiras

Ph.D.

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.

Mehvish Siddiqui

Ph.D.

mehvishsiddi@umass.edu

Mehvish received her MSt degree in English & American Studies from the University of Oxford, and her MA degree in English from the University of Delhi. She has worked as a management consultant for three years in the UK and India. Her current research interests include poetics, aesthetics, affect studies, and phenomenology. Mehvish devotes her free time to horse-riding, learning Turkish, and translating poems from her two first languages (Hindi and Urdu) into her other first language (English). She has a working knowledge of French, and a rudimentary knowledge of Italian — both of which she hopes to improve at some point.

Enrique Urbina Enrique Urbina

MA

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.
 

Eric Vazquez Sanchez

Ph.D.

evazquezsanc@umass.edu

Eric Vázquez Sánchez is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. He received his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies with a Concentration in Translation and MA in Translation from the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. His current research focuses on oil fiction and film. 

 

Uladzislau Voinich

Ph.D.

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). 

Samantha Whittle

MA

swhittle@umass.edu

Samantha Whittle began her Master's in Comparative Literature at UMass in Fall 2021. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Clark University in June of 2021, with minors in History and Holocaust & Genocide Studies. In her final year of studies, she completed an honors thesis on the topic of so-called “Holocaust comedies,” and was awarded highest honors for her work. While at Clark University, Samantha was a member of Variant Dance Troupe for all four years, becoming Treasurer in her senior year, and choreographing every year. She also participated as a Peer Editor on the Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal. Her research interests lie primarily in applying trauma theory to postcolonial and post-genocidal literature, exploring the way that literary form and style reflect the authors’ traumatic landscapes, specifically in Francophone and eastern central European nations.

Yan Wu

Ph.D.

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.

Xiaobo Zhang

MA, Translation

xiaobozhang@umass.edu

Xiaobo Zhang received her Master’s degree in Translation and Interpreting from Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is a certified translator/interpreter in China. She has published two books in translation with one on children’s literature and one on art history. Her current research interests include the sociology of translation and Chinese literature in translation.