Graduate Students
Genevieve Amaral
Home Department: French and Italian
GenevieveAmaral2013@u.northwestern.edu
Genevieve received her B.A. from the University of Toronto in Literary Studies and Philosophy in 2005, and her M.A. from Dartmouth College in 2006, where she produced a master's thesis Blanchot's Death Sentence. Her interests include continental philosophy, in particular phenomenology and hermeneutics, and its intersections with 20th-century literary theory; questions relating history and narrative; German Idealism, and German, French and English literature and philosophy surrounding the French Revolution.
Stanley Bill
Home Department: Slavic
StanleyBill2011@u.northwestern.edu
Stanley graduated in 2002 from the Univeristy of Western Australia with a BA in English, European Studies, and Political Science. Before coming to Northwestern he spent five years in Poland and in 2005 he received an MA in Central and Eastern European Studies from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His main areas of interest are Polish poetry, Comparative Romanticism, Bruno Schulz, Galicia, French Existentialism, and Joseph Conrad. He is spending the current academic year at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Brett Brehm
Home Department: French and Italian
brettbrehm2012@u.northwestern.edu
Brett received his B.A. in English from Amherst College in 2003 and his M.A. in art history from the Courtauld Institute in London in 2007. Before coming to Northwestern, he spent time teaching English in France and studying music. His research interests center on critical theory, the relations between the arts, representations of the built environment in nineteenth and twentieth century French and American literature, theories of urban space, sound, and the auditory effects of the urban environment.
Virgil Brower
Home Department: Philosophy
Virgil has a B.A. in Biochemistry and an M.A. in Religious Studies and did graduate work at the University of Glasgow, the University of Chicago, Boston College, Harvard, & the University of California at Irvine. Currently he is enrolled in a Dual-Ph.D. program between The Chicago Theological Seminary and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern where he co-directs the Paul of Tarsus Reading Group. Virgil is spending the current year with the Paris Program in Critical Theory.
Jennifer Cazenave
Home Department: French and Italian
jennifercazenave2008@u.northwestern.edu
Jennifer earned a B.A. in Languages and Literature from Bard College. Her research focuses on visual and textual representations of the Holocaust, with a particular focus on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. A recipient of a 2008 Mellon Writing Grant from the Alice B. Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Jennifer served as research fellow at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. from January to June 2008. In 2009, Jennifer won Northwestern's Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award. She is currently in Paris, where she is working on her dissertation and undertaking a dual-degree at the Université de Paris VII.
Kelsey Craven
Home Department: French and Italian
Kelsey holds a B.A. with High Honors in French from U.C. Berkeley. Her research interests include: Contemporary French Literature and Visual Art, Contemporary American Literature and Visual Art, Psychoanalysis, Post structuralism, Continental Philosophy, Performance Studies, and Sexuality Studies. The working title of her dissertation is: "Cruel to be kind: Against decency," and will consider the the way in which the fetishization of atrocity and trauma, its site-specific localization as always "other" and "over there," works to permit, and indeed encourage, the repetition of the atrocities of which it claims it cannot conceive.
Jennifer Lee Croft
Home Department: Slavic
jennifercroft2010@u.northwestern.edu
Before coming to Northwestern, Jennifer completed an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. She has published translations of fiction and poetry in "World Literature Today," "Words Without Borders," "Lyric," "Absinthe," and other journals. She was awarded a prestigious translation residency for the summer of 2009 by the Polish Institute for the Book. Her research is focused on twentieth-century European and Latin-American fiction, and in particular on Witold Gombrowicz and Jorge Luis Borges. This year she is participating in Professor Samuel Weber's Paris Program in Critical Theory.
Denis Dapo
Home Department: German
denisdapo2008@u.northwestern.edu
Denis’s present research focuses on aesthetic theory, exile and immigrant literatures, modernism and avant-garde, epistemology, and the intersection of continental philosophy and literature. The period he is chiefly interested in is from the late 19th century to contemporary times in German, English, and Slavic languages and literatures. Denis spent the summer months learning Spanish and reading on aesthetic theory in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
Casey Drosehn
Home Department: Slavic
CaseyDrosehn2013@u.northwestern.edu
Casey is interested in 20th century Russian humor genres and particularly the literature of the Leningrad Underground in the late 70s and early 80s. In 2007, she received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Williams College. Before coming to Northwestern she spent a year on a Watson Fellowship doing intereviews in Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Morocco.
Richard Gabri
Home Department:
richardgabri2014@u.northwestern.edu
Richard is a self contrarian who is never amazed by his ability to be amazed. He is also interested in things that interest others, so long as they don't interest others the way that they interest him. He is currently thinking about the question of sovereignty, and its reason, as it relates to language and poetic discourse. Richard knows Armenian, Persian and a little Italian.
Katie Hartsock
Home Department: Classics
Katie received a BA in English and a minor in Classics from the University of Cincinnati, and a MFA in Creative Writing, poetry, from the University of Michigan; she has also studied at the Goethe Institut in Freiburg. Her interests include intersections between contemporary and classical poetry. Before joining the program in Comparative Literary Studies she worked as the media assistant at the Poetry Foundation in downtown Chicago.
Ena Jung
Home Department: German
After receiving a B.A. in English from Williams College and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt/Main, Ena began her graduate studies in the German Department at Princeton University. Besides finishing a project entitled "Dashing Gaps" on the dashing use of the dash in Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin trilogy, she will be writing a dissertation on the figuration of inspiration in the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan. Her interests include: lyric poetry, diacritical marks, detective fiction, early German cinema (especially Fritz Lang), experimental film and theater, and French theory.
Ozge Kocak
Home Department: Philosophy
aysekocak2008@u.northwestern.edu
Ozge received her B.A. in English Literature and M.A. in Philosophy from Bogazici University, Istanbul, where she worked on contemporary English-American fiction and the idea of death as her finishing project in English. She wrote her master's thesis on perceptual content and the concept of self in contemporary philosophy of mind along with Merleau-Ponty. Current interests include German Idealism and romanticism, especially philosophy and literature influenced by Hegelian philosophy, as well as Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology.
Ela Kotkowska
Home Department: French and Italian
Ela received her BA from Kent State University; she also studied at the Ecole de traduction et d’interprétation at the University of Geneva. Currently she is in Paris, working on her dissertation entitled “Alterity and Singularity in the Poetry of René Char.” Recently, her poems have been anthologized in the collection, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century from Cracked Slab Books.
Bishupal Limbu
Home Department: French and Italian
A native of Nepal, Bishupal received his BA from Columbia University. He spent a year in Paris with the Paris Program in Critical Theory and in 2005-06 was the recipient of a Dissertation Year Fellowship. Currently he is writing a dissertation on the ways literature and political philosophy differently articulate arguments for extending spheres of moral consideration. His interests include theories of cosmopolitanism, diaspora, and translation, ethics and human rights, and contemporary Anglophone and francophone fiction. He has published an article on Maryse Condé's revision of postcolonial cannibalism and has articles forthcoming on the figure of the refugee and on Josephine Baker and French colonial film.
Yelena Lorman
Home Department: Slavic
YelenaLorman2013@u.northwestern.edu
Yelena ("Helen") holds a dual BA in Philosophy and in Literature with Honors from Claremont McKenna College, where she completed a Senior Thesis on Russian translations of Shakespeare. After spending a few years working as a Montessori teacher, she is now focusing again on her academic interests: the intersection between English and Russian literary traditions (particularly Shakespeare's influence on Russian poets), literary translation, and adaptation of written works into visual media.
Sarah Mann-O'Donnell
Home Department: French and Italian
SarahMannODonnell2013@u.northwestern.edu
Sarah holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an MA in Gender, Culture and Modernity from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her MA thesis, titled "Becoming Alan Turing: Toward a Lived Theory of Difference," was published by Goldsmiths in 2006. For several years, Sarah taught theory in various modalities at Rosemont College. In her first year at Northwestern, Sarah’s preliminary interests are post structuralism and its roots, the relationship between philosophy and a loosely defined “literature,” and the poetics of experimental sound. She recently created a blog that chronicles spontaneous poetic compositions written while listening to live sound events.
Joel Morris
Home Department: German
joelmorris2010@u.northwestern.edu
Joel received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Colorado College
and his M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado
at Boulder with a thesis on aesthetic education in Heinrich von Kleist
and Plato. He has also studied at University College Dublin,
Universität Regensburg, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
His doctoral dissertation concentrates on the trope of "waiting" in
early 20th century German-Jewish literature and thought. Joel's
interests include literary "modernisms," early film, New German
Cinema, the German novel in the late 20th and early 21st century, and
image/photography/painting in literature.
Rachel Ney
Home Department: French and Italian
rachelney2009@u.northwestern.edu
Rachel earned a Licence, Maîtrise, and D.E.A. from the University of Nancy (France) in contemporary American literature. Her research interests include transnational literatures, phenomenology, Critical Theory (especially Deleuzian thought in relation to Marxism), and problems of translation in multilingual and transnational sites. Her dissertation, entitled “The Literary Spaces of Visions in the Transnational Fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Antonin Artaud, and Yves Berger,” explores and compares the ways in which each author develops an original vision of the transnational experience without resorting to the dialectical framework of identity and the mastery of reason over the “other.” She co-authored with Paul Breslin (English, Northwestern) a translation of Aimé Césaire’s La Tragédie du Roi Christophe, has published several essays in both French and English and has contributed to the first French critical volume on Cormac McCarthy.
Julia Ng
Home Department: German
Julia received her joint B.A. and M.A. in German and Comparative Literature from UCLA, and studied at the Humboldt and Freie Universities in Berlin, the University of Vienna and the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Currently working on a dissertation that explores the geometrical foundations of the program for a perpetual peace prefaced in Descartes and developed in Kant and Benjamin, Julia is a Fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies (Freie Universität Berlin/German Studies Association). Her research interests include literary theory, continental philosophy, architectural and urban theory, the philosophy and history of mathematics, satirical and utopian literature, text and image relations, and political theologies--for which reason she co-founded the Paul of Tarsus Reading Group at Northwestern. Before pursuing her Ph.D., she worked as editor for a literary publisher and as freelance journalist in her hometown of Hong Kong.
Daniel Nolan
Home Department: German
Daniel completed a BA in Philosophy at the University of Michigan and then spent a year learning Russian at the Humboldt University in Berlin. After more Russian language training in Minsk and St. Petersburg, he arrived at Northwestern where he is now working on a dissertation on Evgenii Abramovich Baratynskii and Heinrich von Kleist’s engagement with the journalistic press in the first half of the nineteenth century. He has taught courses on Kleist and literary theory at the University of Mannheim. Dan's areas of specialization include Romanticism, German idealism, phenomenology, literary publicity, and critical theory.
Saein Park
Home Department: German
Saein received her B. A. in Political Science and German and her M. A. in Comparative Literature from Seoul National University. She has also studied at Munich’s Ludwig Maxmilian University. Her Master's thesis was on Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project and T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land,” where she examined the reflection of social and economic conditions in modern urban literature and its immanent socio-critical capacity. She did several translations and her translation into Korean of German contemporary poetry (by Reiner Kunze) was recently published in Korea. Her research interests focus on critical theory, German idealism, deconstruction, post colonialism, gender/sexuality studies, 20th century English and German literature, German poetry, the re-shaped reception of Western literature in East Asian countries, and immigrant literature.
Ben Robinson
Home Department: German
BenjaminRobinson2014@u.northwestern.edu
Ben received his BA in Social Studies and German from Harvard where he wrote his senior thesis on the work of Giorgio Agamben and has just completed an MPhil in German at Oxford with a thesis on the significance of Wittgenstein and Benjamin in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. He is especially interested in what it means to have or to be in history and in the essentially skeptical challenges presented in the attempt to engage with history which - particularly in the wake of the Shoah - have preoccupied much post-war literature and film in German. On the more theoretical front, he has concentrated so far on the work of Benjamin, the early Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and the American philosophers Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty.
Ben Schacht
Home Department: German
benjaminschacht2014@u.northwestern.edu
Ben received his B.A. in philosophy from Trinity College in 2008. His research interests are in Continental philosophy (especially German Idealism and Critical Theory), 19th and 20th century German and English Literature, literary and philosophical representations of nature, and the historical and contemporary relationship between the natural sciences and the humanities.
Vincent Valour
Home Department: Philosophy
VincentValour2014@u.northwestern.edu
Vincent received a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Paris IV – Sorbonne, and a B.A. in History from the University of Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne. He produced a master’s thesis in History of the French Revolution dealing with the topic of the sublime in the 18th century and its use in the French revolutionary rhetoric. He produced a master’s thesis in Philosophy in 2009 about the link between phenomenology and Judaism in Levinas’s works. Current research interests include: French and German phenomenology (mainly Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida), and the link between phenomenology and literature.
Caroline Vial
Home Department: French and Italian
Caroline Vial received her B.A. from Middlebury College, where she majored in Philosophy and Italian, and her M.A. in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III. Her research interests include literary theory, continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, post modernity, deconstruction, the intersections between philosophy and literature, and visual art and literature, within the context of French, Italian and Spanish literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has co-translated two essays (by J-P Dupuy and J-J Goux), which appeared in a special issue of the journal SubStance (March, 2008) entitled "Cultural Theory after 9/11."
Holly Zindulis
Home Department: English
Holly received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her areas of interest include 20th- & 21st-century poetry, the Pound-Williams tradition, free-verse prosody, English metrical theory, aesthetics, and continental philosophy.
Recently Graduated
Leah Flack
Home Department: English
Leah graduated summa cum laude from SUNY Buffalo Honors College in 1996 and earned her MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 1997. Her dissertation, "Modernism's Odysseys", reflects her interest in comparative modernism (Anglo-Irish, American, and Russian) and literature and national identity. She was the recipient of a Mellon Fellowship for Graduate Studies from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in 1996; a Century Fellowship from the University of Chicago in 1996; and an NU Alumnae Dissertation Fellowship in 2008. In 2006, the National Honors Society named her Outstanding Teacher of the Year for her work teaching in a local high school. She is now a visiting assistant professor in English.
Robert Ryder
Home Department: German
Rob earned his B.A. with a double major in Music and Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta in Canada, and went on to receive his M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Western Ontario in 2000. He has also studied at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg. His research interests include music and literature, German critical thought and early German film. Presently he is working on the spatial and temporal ramifications of Walter Benjamin”s notion of “Schwelle,” and the extent to which it might affect or reflect theoretical problems of acoustics and sound theory from Deleuze’s “refrain” to Michel Chion’s “acousmetre.” His dissertation focused on acoustics and the uncanny in early twentieth-century German literature and film. He is now a visiting professor in CLS.
