Nehama Aschkenasy earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University in 1977. She also holds degrees in Judaic Studies and English literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She teaches courses in Israeli and Middle Eastern literature, Bible, Women's Studies, and English Literature at the Stamford campus and graduate courses in literature and politics and literature and religion at the Storrs campus. In 1981 she founded the Center for Judaic and Middle Eastern Studies at UConn, Stamford.

Dr. Aschkenasy has published four books: Eve's Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition, a Choice selection and winner of the Present Tense / AJC Literary Award; Woman at the Window: Biblical Tales of Oppression and Escape; Biblical Patterns in Modern Literature; and the dedicated volume, The Bible's Presence in Contemporary Hebrew Literature and Culture (which she edited for the AJS Review, 28:1, 2004, Cambridge UP), with invited articles from senior scholars, to which she contributed a methodological Introduction and an article.

Aschkenasy has contributed numerous chapters to scholarly books and published essays in Judaic Studies, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature in publications such as Comparative Drama, Modern Language Studies (where she served as an Advisory Editor for over a decade), SYMPOSIUM, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (where she currently serves as an Advisory Editor), Prooftexts, Journal of Biblical Literature, the AJS Review (where she served as Associate Editor for sixteen years), The Cambridge Dicitonary of Judaism and Jewish Culture, the Melton Journal, Hebrew Higher Education, Judaism, Midstream, Lilith, Tradition, and Hadassah Magazine. She was also invited as guest scholar and distinguished lecturer to many academic institutions and community study retreats in the US, Canada, and Europe. She has also frequently given commentary on Middle Eastern politics and culture in the Stamford, CT area television station and published Op-Ed pieces in and local papers.

Philip Balma is Assistant Professor of Italian Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, where he also serves as the Coordinator of the Italian language program. He teaches modern Italian literature and cinema, as well as courses on the Italian-American experience. His research interests include the Jewish experience in contemporary Italophone literature and film, artistic representations of World War II, the theory and practice of literary translation, Italian literature in dialect, the influence of English on the Italian language, and the postcolonial question in Italy. He was previously a member of the Italian faculty at Indiana University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Georgia. His work has been published in Italica, Forum Italicum, Italian Quarterly, Italian Poetry Review, Translation Review, Saggi di 'Lettere Italiane', and Italianistica Ultraiectina. He is the co-author of Streetwise Italian: the User Friendly Guide to Italian Slang and Idioms published by McGraw-Hill in 2005. He was awarded the Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship in 2009, by the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. In the summer of 2011 Prof. Balma was awarded a Visiting Scholarship for the Study of Italian Jewry by the CDEC (Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea) in Milan, Italy.

Recent publications:

Big Business, Big Brother, and 'Big Father'": Proto-Feminist Marxism in Giovanna by Pontecorvo. ITALICA 89.3 (2012): 499-509.

L’Italia letteraria e cinematografica dal secondo Novecento ai giorni nostri. Cuneo: Nerosubianco, 2012.

“Nostalgia del neorealismo: il rigore storico in Viva l’Italia di Roberto Rossellini.” Cinema e Risorgimento: visioni e revisioni. Ed. Fulvio Orsitto. Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2012. 109-128.

“Death of an Archbishop: The Assassination of Oscar Romero Seen Through the Eyes of Gillo Pontecorvo, John Duigan and Oliver Stone.” Luci e ombre: rivista bimestrale di informazione cinematografica e culturale 1 (novembre-dicembre 2012): 120-143.

"L'Olocausto nel cinema di Carlo Lizzani: il caso controverso di Hotel Meina." L'Italia letteraria e cinematografica dal secondo Novecento ai giorni nostri. Cuneo: Nerosubianco, 2012. 123-132.

The Necessary Foreign: Translating Dialects. Spec. iss. of Translation Studies Journal 3 (2011)

"Quando non tradurre vuol dire censurare: appunti su un racconto di Edith Bruck." Italian Quarterly 177-178 (2008): 31-42. [Volume published in 2011]

"From Can to Dawg: Rendering Calzavara’s Dialectal Poetry for Italophone and Anglophone Readers." Forum Italicum 44.1 (Spring 2010): 119-135.

“Intervista a Edith Bruck.” Italian Quarterly 171-172 (2007): 75-87. [Volume published in 2009] 

Ed Benson earned a Ph.D from Brown University in 1971, then taught at high schools in Providence, at Central Missouri State University and at the Universities of Rhode Island and New Mexico, before coming to UConn in 1998. He wrote Money and Magic in Montaigne in 1995, and many articles on sixteenth-century literature as well as French cinema; his most recent article was “The Screen of History in Clément’s Forbidden Games.” He is currently an assistant editor for literature of the French Review, and the chair of the Executive Committee on the Teaching of Language of the Modern Language Association.

An “agrégée des lettres” and a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Anne Berthelot is now professor of French and Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut. Following her dissertation for the French “Doctorat d’Etat” on the writer in 13th century French literature, she has written numerous books and articles on Medieval literature, focusing especially on the Arthurian legend with a comparatist approach. She is part of the team who is making the so-called Lancelot-Grail Cycle accessible to a large audience in the prestigious series of “La Pléiade” (Gallimard). Her most recent book is a synthetic presentation of the Arthurian legend for the Editions du Chêne, La Légende du roi Arthur (Fall 2004), which has now been translated into German. She is working on a book-length study of the enunciation problems in the Roman de Perceforest, and at the same time is preparing an edition of a little-known Arthurian romance that may be considered as the source for the Perceforest, the Roman des fils du roi Constant.

Norma Bouchard (PhD, 1996, Comparative Literature, Indiana University) is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies.  She teaches courses in 19th and 20th century Italian Culture and Literature, from the Risorgimento to Migrant and Postcolonial Writers, Italian American Studies, Film, Critical Theory, and Mediterranean Studies.  Among her publications are The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation: Umberto Eco's Alternative (Lang, 1998), Celine, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writers of the 1930s (Florida UP, 2000), Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the 19th century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2005), Reading and Writing the Mediterranean: Essays by Consolo (Toronto UP, 2006), Italian Cultural Studies: Negotiating Regional, National and Global Identities, Annali d'Italianistica 24 (2006), Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean (Fordham UP, 2011, Race and Ethnic Studies series) as well as critical essays and translations. She has recently edited a journal issue on the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification, Italy @ 150: National Discourse at the Sesquicentennial 1861-2011 (2012) and is completing two monographs, Writing, Screening, and Sounding Beyond the Nation: Italy and the Mediterranean after the Cold War into the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming 2013) and Cultural Interventions: Umberto Eco's Historic Imaginary (FUP, forthcoming 2014).  Her current project, entitled From Otium and Occupatio to Work and Labor (forthcoming in 2014), is an edited collection of essays that examine the spatial and temporal articulations of work and labor in Italian culture, from the pre-industrial era to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. She is Vice-President elect of the American Association of Italian Studies and has served as Associate Editor of Italica. She is currently Book Review Editor for Italian Culture and Associate Editor of Annali d'Italianistica.   

Renaissance Poetry; Golden Age; Early Modern Literature and Culture; Grammatical Theory in Colonial Latin America; and Cervantes. She is the editor of Fray Francisco Ximénez, Arte de las tres lenguas cakchiquel, quiché y tzutuhil (1993), and La obra del Padre Manuel Mariano de Iturriaga S. J. en la Nueva España y el Reino de Goathemala (2006). Her publications also include a number of articles in  Caliope, Renaissance and Reformation, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Revista Iberoamericana and other journals. Article topics include Cervantes, Juan del Encina, Garcilaso de la Vega, Nebrija and Juana de Austria, as well as other topics related to literary history (Golden Age, Patronage in the Early Renaissance, Early Modern Spectacle; the Influence of Rome on Spanish Humanism). She has been the recipient of a Newberry Library Fellowship and an NEH Seminar Fellowship.

This past summer marked the conclusion of a nineteen-year career as professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, OH, and a transition to the Dept. of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where I will be teaching a variety of topics in medieval Jewish literature and culture. My research specialty is late medieval Jewish writing in Europe (especially France, Provence and Iberia), generally with a comparative emphasis – between literary and historical or scientific genres, secular and sacred genres, Hebrew and vernacular writing. Specifically, I am interested in writing and martyrdom, persecution and exile; the scientific and belles letters writing of physicians; liturgical poetry; questions of late medieval “identity” and affinity; and medieval manuscripts and translation. Although predominantly a literary scholar, I have a great love for history and situating my texts in the context of historical and historiographical concerns.

I serve on the editorial boards of Jewish History and Prooftexts, and maintain memberships in the Association for Jewish Studies, the American Historical Association, the Hagiography Society and other organizations. For over eight years, I have also served on the board of the Solidarity Refusal Network, the U.S. umbrella organization supporting the activity and outreach of conscientious objectors in Israel.

 

Professor of Spanish. Author of La realidad y el valor estético: configuraciones del poder en el ensayo hispanoamericano (Universidad Simón Bolívar, 2010); Los géneros literarios en Hispanoamérica: teoría e historia (Universidad de Navarra, 1999); Horas de crítica: ensayos y estudios (Santo Oficio, 2002); Poéticas del ensayo venezolano del siglo XX (2nd ed., Universidad del Zulia, 2007), and several other volumes. He also edited, among other books, Estética hispanoamericana del siglo XIX (Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2003), Estética del modernismo hispanoamericano (Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2003), La vasta brevedad: antología del cuento venezolano del siglo XX (co-edited, 2 vols., Alfaguara, 2010). He has published many articles on modern Latin American poetry, essay, and fiction.

Margaret R. Higonnet, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,  has taught at George Washington University and the Universities of Munich and Santiago de Compostela (Spain). A past President of the American Conference on Romanticism and the American Comparative Literature Association, she cochairs the Study Group on Gender, Society, and Politics at Harvard’s Center for European Studies. Her theoretical interests have ranged from the romantic roots of modern literary theories (Bachelard and Benjamin) to the intersection of feminist theory and comparative literature, as in the volumes Borderwork (1995), Gender in Literary History, CCS 6.2 (2009), and Comparatively Queer (2010). Her work on gender issues in the nineteenth century is represented by British Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1996) and The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (1992), as well as several editions of Thomas Hardy. She edited Children’s Literature for seven years. Much of her recent scholarship has been devoted to the literature of World War I, in articles and in Behind the Lines (1987), Lines of Fire (1999), Nurses at the Front (2001), and Margaret Hall’s Letters and Photographs from the Battle Country,1918 - 1919 (forthcoming). She has taught courses on “Word and Image,” the literature of World War I, folklore and fairy tales, suicide, Victorian literature, and children’s literature. 

Oliver Hiob is an Assistant Professor in Residence of German Studies and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. He received his PhD last May from the University of Connecticut and was a recipient of the highly competitive “Humanities Institute Tenth Anniversary Graduate Fellowship”. In his dissertation, "Guilt is Always Beyond Doubt: Punishment and Poetic Justice in the Works of German-Jewish Writers in the Early 20th Century," Hiob investigates manifestations of punishment in literary works prior to 1934. He explores the conceptualization and representation of punishment in works by Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Gertrud Kolmar, and Joseph Roth and pay’s special attention to the intersection of literature and law, philosophy, and theology. While Hiob is particularly interested in issues related to punishment and guilt, other research and teaching interests include European fairy tales, war literature, Jewish and Christian religious issues in 20th-century literature, as well as film studies.

After a B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy, Patrick Hogan did his Ph.D. in English, concentrating on literary theory. His areas of research and teaching include the history of literary theory; cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to literature, emotion, and narrative; the literature and culture of India; and postcolonial Anglophone literature. He is the author of twelve books and over one hundred scholarly articles, as well as several dozen shorter pieces; he has also edited five special issues of journals and four books, including the forthcoming Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. He is also on the faculty of the India Studies Program and the Program in Cognitive Science. 

Guillermo Irizarry is Associate Professor of Spanish and Puerto Rican/Latina/o Studies at UConn, Storrs. He has held faculty appointments at Bucknell, Brown (Visiting), Massachusetts at Amherst, and Yale. His book, José Luis González: el intelectual nómada (2006), was awarded Puerto Rico’s highest honor for a humanities scholar: “Best Research and Criticism Book” by the Academy of Literature of Puerto Rico. He has published on Latina/o and Latin American cultural production in late modernity, “Post-national Discursive Technologies in Exquisito Cadáver” (Centro), “Cadavers Encountered" (Latino Studies), and “Standing in Cultural Representation" (in The Politics of Performing Latin American Theatre), among other essays.

Jacqueline Loss (PhD, 2000, Comparative Literature, University of Texas-Austin) teaches Latin American and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. Her book Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place was published by Palgrave in 2005. She is the co-editor of New Short Fiction from Cuba (Northwestern University Press, 2007) and an advisor to Literature from the Axis of Evil: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations (New Press, 2006). Among the writers she has translated into English are Cubans Víctor Fowler Calzada. Ernesto René Rodríguez, Jorge Miralles, and Armando Suárez Cobián. Her critical essays have appeared in Nepantla:Views from South, Miradas (Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños), Chasqui, Latino and Latina Writers, Mandorla, and New Centennial Review, among other publications. Her manuscript, Dreaming in Russian, and her co-edited volume Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the post-Soviet Experience are forthcoming.

Lucy Stone McNeece served as co-Chair of the Program in Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies from 1996-2010 and as Head of the Mideast Studies Center at UConn from 2003-2010. She received her PhD from Harvard in 1985 in Romance Literatures. She teaches courses in French and English on the literatures of the Caribbean, Africa, the Maghreb and the Middle East, as well courses in Theater, Film, Film theory and Postcolonial theory. She received and American Institute of Maghreb Studies grant, the Provost�s Large Grant and a Fulbright Research Grant for research in North Africa. She has published on Caribbean, African and North African writers as well as writers of the Near East. Her current research concerns the differing relation between signs and images across cultural boundaries and the impact of ancient traditions upon contemporary authors of the Mediterranean and Arabo-muslim world.

Stuart S. Miller is Professor of Hebrew, History, and Judaic Studies and a member of the Classics and Mediterranean Studies section of the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life and is responsible for the direction of academic offerings in Judaic Studies at UConn. Professor Miller is a specialist in the history and literature of the Jews of Roman and Late Antique Palestine and has worked closely with archaeologists, having served for many years on the staff of the Sepphoris Regional Project. His publications include, Studies in the History and Traditions of Sepphoris (E. J. Brill, 1984) and Sages and Commoners in Late Antique ’Erez Israel: A Philological Inquiry into Local Traditions in Talmud Yerushalmi (Mohr-Siebeck, 2006) and many articles that have appeared in the Association for Jewish Studies Review, Harvard Theological Review, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period, Journal of Jewish Studies, Historia, and in numerous edited volumes. His most recent book, At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity among the Jews of Roman Galilee, will appear in the Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplement Series (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) in early 2013. Professor Miller is a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gustavo Nanclares teaches Spanish Peninsular literature and culture. Some of his research interests include the Spanish historical avant-garde, the narrative of the 1920s and 30s and their relationship to international film, and the literature and culture of the Spanish-Moroccan War, the II Republic, and the Civil War. He is also interested in peripheral nationalisms in Spain, and has published several works on Basque literature and culture. He is the author of several articles on literature and film in the 1920s and on the literary and intellectual works of Jon Juaristi, Ram�n de Basterra, Jorge de Oteiza, Benjam�n Jarn�s, Ernesto Gim�nez Caballero, Ernestina de Champourcin, Jos� Bergam�n, Gilberto Owen, Mario Verdaguer, Miguel M�ndez, and others. His book entitled La C�mara y el C�lamo: Ansiedades Cinematogr�ficas en la Narrativa Hisp�nica de Vanguardia was published in 2010 by Iberoamericana/Vervuert. His next book-length project examines the relationship between film and war from the Spanish-American War (1898) through the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its impact in the emergence of Modernity in Spain.

Twentieth Century Latin American and Caribbean Literature, postmodernism, globalization, film, drama, women and cultural studies. A Fulbright scholar and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Grants (2000, 2003), professor Seda is the editor of the book Teatro contra el olvido (2012) and the theatre anthology La nueva dramaturgia puertorriqueña (2003, 2007). She is co-editor of  Travesías trifrontes: Teatro de vanguardia en el Perú, Trans/Acting: Latin American and Latino Performing Arts and Teatro de frontera11/12. She was the guest editor for a Special Issue on Caribbean Theatre for Latin American Theatre Review (Spring 2004). Professor Seda is member of the editorial board for LATT Books, Latin American Theatre Review, Revista Teatro XXI, Desde el Sur and Boletín del Archivo Nacional de Teatro y Cine del Ateneo Puertorriqueño. She has also published numerous essays on contemporary Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Argentine, Peruvian and Chilean theatre in edited collections and in journals such a s Hispanic Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Gestos, Conjunto, and Revista Teatro XXI. In 2006 she received the Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award from the Puerto Rican/Latin American Cultural Center.  In 2005 she directed and organized the VI Conference/Festival Latin American Theatre Today:Translation, Trangender and Transnationalism. And in the same year she created the Premio de Teatro Latinoamericano George Woodyard. Professor Seda is currently working on a book tentatively titled: Cruzando puentes: La dramaturgia latinoamericana ante la globalización.

Milton and the Rabbis:  Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (Columbia UP, 2001), which was awarded the American Academy of Jewish Research's Salon Baron Prize.

Hebraica Veritas?  Christian Hebraists, Jews, and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, with Allison P. Coudert (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Fictions of Conversion:  Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England  (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

Roger Travis is an Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages of the University of Connecticut. He is also the Director of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative at UConn, an interdisciplinary online nexus for scholarly activities like monthly symposia and “playversations.” He received his Bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley before arriving at UConn in 1997. He has published on Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Greek historiography, the 19th C. British novel, HALO, and the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game He has been President of the Classical Association of New England and of the Classical Association of Connecticut. He writes the blog Living Epic about the fundamental connection between ancient epic and the narrative video game, and is a founder and contributor of the collaborative blog Play the Past. Roger also works on developing and studying a form of game-based learning, practomimetic learning, in which learners play the curriculum as an RPG wrapped in an ARG.

My research fields include multimodality, applications of cognitive linguistics to film, advertising and art, and humor in the media and in the Foreign language classroom. My main publications are Puro Teatro: Metafora y espacio en el cine de Pedro Almodovar (Editorial Libertarias, Madrid, 2010), a co-edited volume with Prof. Ch. Forceville Multimodal Metaphor (Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2009), and Ejercicios de pragmatica, with G. Reyes and E. Baena, (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2000). I have also published articles in humor, Greek comedy and literature, and poetry in Spanish.

Manuela Wagner holds an M.A in English studies and Marketing and a Ph.D. in English studies with a specialization in linguistics from Graz University, Austria. During her graduate studies she spent 2 years in the baby lab of Psychophysics in the department of Neurophysiology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and 3 years in the Department of Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include pragmatic development in first and second language acquisition, world language teaching methodology, intercultural communication, communicative development in special circumstances, and humor in the world language classroom. As director of the Critical Languages Program Manuela also engages in research in less commonly taught languages. She teaches courses in world language teaching theory and pedagogy, pragmatics, introduction to linguistics, as well as German language and culture.

Sarah Winter is the author of The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens (Fordham UP, 2011) and Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge (Stanford UP, 1999). In Spring semester 2012, she held the UConn Human Rights Institute Faculty Fellowship to work on a book project titled "A Judgment on Behalf of Humanity: Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, and the Novel.” This project examines personifications of the political prisoner and the fugitive slave in Anglo-American habeas corpus jurisprudence, abolitionist writings, and the novel, in order to trace the formulation of modern legal conceptions of human rights in the long nineteenth century. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Cultural Critique, and Comparative Literature Studies, and she won the North American Victorian Studies Association’s Donald Gray Prize for the best article in Victorian studies from 2009 for “Darwin’s Saussure: Biosemiotics and Race in Expression,” published in Representations. Her recent teaching includes courses in Victorian literature, classical rhetoric, the modern novel, and literature and human rights. Recent lectures include invited talks at the University of Zürich and the University of Cologne, and panel presentations at conferences organized by the Society for Novel Studies, the North American Victorian Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also Co-Director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and organizer of the faculty study group on Refugees, Narratives, and Media for the Research Program on Humanitarianism at the UConn Human Rights Institute.

Sebastian Wogenstein's research and teaching focuses on 20th-century German literature with emphasis on German-Jewish literature, theater, and the intersection of literature and human rights. He is the author of a monograph, Horizonte der Moderne: Tragoedie und Judentum von Cohen bis Levinas (Horizons of Modernity: Tragedy and Judaism from Cohen to Levinas, 2011), and co-editor of the book An Grenzen: Literarische Erkundungen (On Borders: Literary Explorations, 2007), a volume focusing on borders, acts of border crossings, and the de/construction of borders. He edited a special issue of Germanic Review, titled "Zionism and Its Discontents," and published articles in Germanic Review, Monatshefte, Gegenwartsliteratur, Naharaim, and Telos. Sebastian Wogenstein is a faculty associate of the Human Rights Institute and currently a fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. He studied German Literature, American Studies, and Political Science at the University of Tuebingen, received an M.A. in European Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, and studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he also worked for the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Tuebingen in 2005.