Working Papers - A graduate student publication of the UPenn Department of Romance Languages

Arcana Albright is a fourth-year graduate student in French Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA in French and Economics at UC Berkeley and an EdM from Harvard University. Her primary areas of interest are 20th and 21st century French fiction and film. Other interests include 19th century French fiction and Francophone literature.

Marcelline Block received her BA in History and Literature (magna cum laude) from Harvard. She is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton, where she was a Jacob Javits Fellow for four years. In 2005, she was the recipient of a University Prize from Princeton. Marcelline's dissertation explores photographic representations of women in post-World War II French literature. Her other interests include French cinema, Swedish literature and cinema, as well as crime/detective fiction.

Hugh Cagle is a graduate student in History at Rutgers University specializing in Latin America and the Lusophone world. His areas of interest include the late medieval Mediterranean and the early modern Indian Ocean regions and he is particularly interested in issues of race and ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. His current research is comparative and traces the genealogy of social categories in these regions—chiefly through the prism of the plantation complex. This work emphasizes, first, the ways in which religion frames understanding and, second, the ever-improvised character of social hierarchies.

Martin Oliver Carrion is a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins University.  His areas of interests are Colonial Latin America, Pre-Colombian and Colonial Art and Architecture and Colonial Baroque Music. He is currently the Managing Editorial Assistant to the The Blackwell Companion to Latin American Culture and Literature.

Jaclyn Cohen is a doctoral candidate in Spanish at the Johns Hopkins University. Her main area of interest is early modern Spain.

Antonio Francisco PedrÓs-GascÓn is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Studies at Ohio State University. His interests include reception and interaction in Spain of the Latin-American Boom; popular literature and culture in Spain and Latin America; literature and revolution; gender studies; Francoism; literary theory and criticism; queer studies; semiotics and porn representations in film; myth criticism.

Tania Gentic-Valencia is a doctoral candidate in the Hispanic Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. Tania specializes in twentieth-century Latin American literature but is dedicated to a Transatlantic approach that also includes Peninsular (specifically Catalan) literature. She is currently completing her dissertation, entitled Affected Readers: The Interpellative Chronicle in Twentieth-Century Spain and Latin America. The work studies the aesthetic, ideological, and ethical modes of interpellative address in the crónica and their relationship to the reading subject.

MÓnica GonzÁlez is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. She has taught Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley and Latin American Literature at Saint Mary’s College of California. During 2005-2006, she was the Editor-in-Chief of Lucero, the academic journal of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Currently, she is writing her dissertation on the role of colonialism and imperialism in the articulation of local and global discourses and narrations regarding the War of 1898.

Bob Hudson is a third-year Ph.D. student in French and Francophone Studies at UCLA.  Originally from Kentucky, he received his BA and MA from Brigham Young University, writing a master’s thesis treating the anthropological notion of the Sacred and the anti-modern aspect of Baudelaire’s work.  He specializes in 19th-century French literature; 1848 and the late Romantics (especially Baudelaire, Nerval and Gautier); anthropological approaches to poetry and the French lyrical tradition.

Gayle Jones, originally from Temple, Texas, is a 2nd year Ph.D. candidate in French literature at the University of Virginia.   She graduated from Davidson College in 2003 with a degree in Economics and French, and in 2005 she earned an MA in French from  Middlebury College.  Her primary academic interests include North African film and literature and 20th century French literature.   

Enric Mallorqui-Ruscalleda received a BA in Philology and an MA in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literatures before going to Princeton University to pursue a Ph.D. in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literatures.  His research focuses on Medieval Iberian Literature and Culture, Mediterranean Studies, and Early Modern Hispanic Literatures from a Transatlantic and interdisciplinary perspective. Mallorqui-Ruscalleda has delivered papers in professional conferences and congresses and has published articles on a variety of topics in professional journals in the USA, Europe, and Latin America.

Amanda Minervini is a doctoral student in the Italian Studies Department at Brown University.  She has a Laurea in Lettere from Universitá di Bari, Italy (2002),  and an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst (expected 2006). Her academic curiosity is currently directed towards contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema.

Namrata Poddar is a fourth-year graduate student in French at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include Francophone, 19th and 20th century literatures, otherness, and Proust.

Yann Robert is a doctoral student in the French Department at Princeton University. Professional publications include works on Elizabethan theatre, Rabelais and the “claque” in nineteenth-century French theatre. Current work includes study of the interaction between philosophy, politics and theatre in France, from 1750 to 1850.

Michelle Slater is a Ph.D. candidate in the Romance Languages Department at Johns Hopkins University. She is currently concluding her dissertation on émigré authors in France at the turn of the twentieth to twenty-first century, with a focus on Eastern European immigrant literature. Her interests include contemporary literature, the intersection between philosophy and literature, and ordinary language philosophy.

Sarah Smith is a second-year graduate student in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests are contemporary Latin American literature, particularly the issues of gender and the representation of other identities, as well as violence and globalization.  She explores these issues in the works of the Achy Objeja, Fernando Vallejo and Jorge Franco Ramos.

Samuel Steinberg is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is currently writing his doctoral thesis on visual culture and politics in Mexico.

David K. Vassar is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia, where he is currently writing his dissertation, “Writing the Rites: Exploring Ritual in Contemporary Spanish American Autobiographical Fiction.”  A resident of Houston, Texas, David has interest in Southern Cone fiction, Cuban culture and literature, as well as Latino writing and thought.

Rebecca Wolpin received her undergraduate degree in music. She's a fifth year graduate student in Spanish literature at Princeton University and is working on her dissertation about memories and experiences of ex militants in 1970s Argentina.

Benedetta Gennaro received her Laurea in Communication Studies from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (1999) with a thesis on the peculiarities of the American public broadcasting system.  She went on to earn her MA in Media Studies from Miami University (2003).  She then moved to Portland, OR where she worked as operations coordinator for the Portland International Film festival, and taught Italian and Italian film history at Portland State University. She is now a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University; her research interests include Italian women’s history, film culture, Italian intellectual history, and modern Italian history. 

Crystal Hall is a fourth-year graduate student in Italian at the University of Pennsylvania. Her primary interests are 17th century literature and science, and the 20th-century novel. She is working on a dissertation entitled “The Romanzo in the Galilean Library.”

Maria Moreno is a doctoral candidate in French at Brown University. Her research interests include 20th century Francophone and Latin American literatures.

Dylon Robbins is a doctoral candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. He is currently working on a comparative study of Brazil and Cuba and the role that twentieth-century musicological discourse plays in configuring citizenship.

Joan PÉrez-Rodriguez is a second-year graduate student in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ellen R. Welch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in early modern French literature and culture. Her dissertation is entitled “Cosmopolitan Fictions in 17th-Century France.”

Dorian Bell is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ben Huberman is a doctoral student in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies 18th century French literature and philosophy, and is interested in particular in Franco-German cultural interaction, epistolary genres, and translation studies.