CLS Graduate Students, Comparative Literary Studies Program, Northwestern University

Amanda Allan

Home Department: Slavic

amila.allan@gmail.com

Genevieve Amaral

Genevieve is a PhD student in French and Comparative Literature. She 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 on the engagement with Heidegger's conception of being-toward-death in Maurice Blanchot's work of narrative prose, Death Sentence. She spent last year in Lille, France, teaching English as a language assistant, and she has also studied at the Universite de Laval, in Quebec City. 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. She also speaks Portuguese, and is interested in the work of Fernando Pessoa.

Stanley Bill

Home Department: Slavic

s-bill@northwestern.edu
Areas of Interest: Polish poetry, Comparative Romanticism, Bruno Schulz, Galicia, French Existentialism, Joseph Conrad

Virgil Brower

Home Department: Philosophy

v-brower@northwestern.edu

Virgil Brower received a football scholarship to small fundamentalist university at which he earned a B.A. in Biochemistry & his M.A. in Religious Studies; research projects published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in London; graduate work at the University of Glasgow, the University of Chicago, Boston College, Harvard, & the University of California at Irvine; first poem picked up by small journal in North Carolina; travels with friends down the Mississippi river in homemade raft; enters seminary; at which he is alleged to nail a copy of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization to the front door; takes first collegiate level job teaching Ethics at the Chicago Police Academy; lectures in Philosophy at various schools, notably Morton College & Chicago State University; currently in a Dual-Ph.D. program between The Chicago Theological Seminary( http://www.ctschicago.edu/ ) & Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern where he co-directs the Paul of Tarsus Reading Group; recent projects include the political theologies of masochism, the populism of rhyme, an eschatology of jazz, an amphibiology, and an erotic phenomenology of taste.

Jennifer Cazenave
Home Department: French and Italian
j-cazenave@northwestern.edu

Jennifer Cazenave is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literary Studies and French. She completed a B.A. in Languages and Literature at Bard College. Her research primarily focuses on visual and textual representations of the Holocaust, with a particular focus on survivor testimony. Her larger interests include twentieth century French and German literature, autobiography, cinema, and photography. A former Teaching Fellow at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, Jennifer is also a fellow of the Twelfth Annual Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Studies. A recipient of a 2008 Mellon Writing Grant from the Alice B. Kaplan Center for the Humanities Center, Jennifer will also be a research fellow (2008) at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., where she will conduct archival research for her dissertation.

Kelsey Craven

Home Department: French and Italian

k-craven@northwestern.edu

Kelsey Craven is a Ph.D. student in French and Comparative Literary Studies. She holds a B.A. with High Honors from U.C. Berkeley. Her research interests include: Contemporary French Literature and Visual Art; Contemporary American Literature and Visual Art; 20th Century Avant-Garde Movements; Psychoanalysis; Poststructuralism; Continental Philosophy; Sexuality Studies.

Jennifer Lee Croft

Home Department: Slavic
jennifer-croft@northwestern.edu

Jennifer Croft completed an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. She is currently in Berlin working on twentieth-century European and Latin American fiction, focusing in particular on Witold Gombrowicz and Jorge Luis Borges.

Leah Culligan

Home Department: English

leahculligan2009@u.northwestern.edu

Denis Dapo

Home Department: German

nwu-dda384@northwestern.edu

Denis is a PhD student in German and Comparative Literature. Prior to Northwestern, he studied at Arizona State University, and graduated in 2005, earning degrees in German and English Literature. Before arriving to the United States in 1998, Denis lived in Germany for five years, whereto he emigrated following the collapse of Yugoslavia, the country of his birth.
Denis' interests are wide-ranging, but if hard-pressed to enumerate the ones he is presently most preoccupied with, those would be, in no particular order: topics dealing with identity and identity formation, globalization, nationalism, avant-garde, literature/philosophy dialectic, aesthetic theory, inter- and multiculturalism, problems of translation, philosophy, literature/culture dynamics, exile literatures, all within the wide context of late 19th to 21st century literatures in German, English, and Slavic languages.

Casey Drosehn

Home Department: Slavic

Casey Drosehn is interested in 20th century Russian humor genres and particularly the literature of the Leningrad Underground in the late 70s and early 80s. She got her B.A. in 2007 from Williams College, where she majored in Comparative Literature and played rugby; these days her sport of choice is distance running. She is originally from North Carolina, but she has lived in Delaware since she was ten. She spent this past year on a Watson Fellowship interviewing grandmothers in Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Morocco.

Katie Hartsock

Home Departmenr: Classics

kehartsock@gmail.com

Katie Hartsock 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 CLS home department is Classics, and her interests include intersections between contemporary and classical
poetry. She has deferred beginning the program for a year to work as the media assistant at the Poetry Foundation in downtown Chicago.

Ena Jung

Home Department: German
e-jung@northwestern.edu

Ena Jung is a graduate student in Comparative Literary Studies and German. After receiving an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt/Main and a B.A. in English from Williams College, she 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. Interests condensed: lyric poetry, diacritical marks, detective fiction, early German cinema (especially Fritz Lang), experimental film and theater, and French theory.

Ela Kotkowska

Home Department: French and Italian
ela@northwestern.edu

Ela Kotkowska is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies and French, working on her dissertation entitled Alterity and Singularity in the Poetry of René Char. Her poems have been anthologized in a recent collection The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century from Cracked Slab Books.

Elena Krell

Home Departmenr: Classics

Elena Krell received her bachelors of arts in Ancient Greek and Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance from Oberlin College in 2003. Her home department in CLS is Classics, and she is also interested in contemporary and classical German and Italian literature and language, continental philosophy, and gender studies within all of the above.

Bishupal Limbu
Home Department: French and Italian
bishupal@northwestern.edu

Bishupal Limbu is writing a dissertation on how 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

Yelena ("Helen") Lorman holds a BA in Philosophy and a BA in Literature with Honors from Claremont McKenna College, where she completed a Senior Thesis on Russian translations of Shakespeare. She spent a few years after college working as a Montessori teacher, but she is now looking forward to focusing again on her academic interests: 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

Sarah hails from Philadelphia, where she taught theory in various modalities at Rosemont College for several years. She 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. A revised version of the dissertation is available online, at <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/sociology/papers>http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/sociology/papers.

In her first year at Northwestern, Sarah’s preliminary interests are poststructuralism 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, which you can visit here: <http://sarahssoundscripts.blogspot.com>http://sarahssoundscripts.blogspot.com.

Sarah has written about topics as diverse as performance in Benjamin’s Arcades Project, epistemological desire and suffering in Turing, Deleuze and Foucault, the Platonic and Kristevan chora in Nancy Drew, and Foucauldian technologies of the self in Vito Acconci. She is thrilled to be a student again, and created a guide for application to doctoral programs based on her own harrowing yet rewarding process of application. For anyone needing guidance, the blog is available here: <http://humanitiesphd.blogspot.com>http://humanitiesphd.blogspot.com.

Joel Morris
Home Department: German
j-morris5@northwestern.edu

Joel Morris is in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literary Studies and German. Joel received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Colorado College and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, and has also studied at University College Dublin, Universität Lüneburg, and Universität Regensburg. His interests include German literature and critical thought; art history/photography and issues concerning image and narrative; "modernism" in the 20th century novel and film; and 20th century Irish literature.

Rachel Ney

Home Department: French and Italian
r-ney@northwestern.edu

Rachel E. Ney is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in French and Comparative Literature Studies. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she earned a Licence in English, a Maîtrise and D.E.A. in contemporary Anglo-American Literature at the University of Nancy II, France. Her areas of research are contemporary transnational French literature dealing with the American Southwest and Mexico (Antonin Artaud,Yves Berger, Le Clezio, Frédéric Temple), contemporary Anglo-American fiction from the Border (Cormac McCarthy) as well as problems of literary translations in multilingual and transnational sites. Her dissertation explores how death crystallizes transnational relations in terms of Hegelian dialectics and through the geographical mapping of the Unhappy Consciousness. She has published several essays in both French and English and has contributed to the first French critical volume on Cormac McCarthy.

Julian Ng

Home Department: German
j-ng@northwestern.edu

Julia Ng is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies and German, with an emphasis on Critical Theory. She received her B.A. and M.A. in German and Comparative Literature from UCLA, and studied at the Humboldt and Freie Universities in Berlin before arriving at Northwestern. She has also studied at the University of Vienna and the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and worked as editor for a literary publisher and as freelance journalist in her hometown of Hong Kong. Her research interests include literary theory, continental philosophy, architectural and urban theory, the "sacred" in poetry and the ornament in literature and architecture. She is currently working on a dissertation project on the triangulation of architecture, literature, applied mathematics and the formation of political communities in early modern Northern Europe and early 19th century Germany. She is an awardee of a DAAD scholarship for doctoral studies, and has published on contemporary architectural theory as well as translations.

Daniel Nolan

Home Department: German
dan@northwestern.edu

Daniel Nolan is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies and German. He 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 training in Minsk and St. Petersburg he came to Northwestern where he is now working on a dissertation on Evgenii Abramovich Baratynskii and Heinrich von Kleist. The dissertation follows these authors' engagement with the jouralistic press in the first half of the nineteenth century. Baratynksii and Kleist serve as exemplary cases for study of the emerging literary public. Dan's areas of specialization include Romanticism, German idealism, phenomenology, literary publicity, and critical theory. He recently spent a year studying French literary criticism in Paris. He spent last year teaching courses on Kleist and literary theory at the University of Mannheim while also conducting research on the dissertation in Heidelberg.

Saein Park
Home Department: German

Robert Ryder

Home Department: German
r-ryder@northwestern.edu

Rob Ryder entered the program in 2001 as a student of Comparative Literature and German. He 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 will focus on acoustics and the uncanny in early twentieth-century German literature and film.

Brenna Joelle Stuart
brenna@northwestern.edu

Home Department: English

Caroline Vial

Home Department: French and Italian

Caroline Vial received her B.A. in 2006 from Middlebury College, where she majored in Philosophy and Italian, and her M.A. in Comparative Literature in 2007 from the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III. She has also studied at the Universitˆ degli studi in Ferrara, Italy, and the Universidad de la Rioja in Logro–o, Spain, in addition to being a participant in the Paris Program in Critical Theory (2006; 2007). Her M.A. thesis focused on the phenomenology of time in Gertrude Stein's poetry and the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Her research interests include literary theory, continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, postmodernity, 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, which appeared in a special issue of the journal _SubStance_ (March, 2008) entitled "Cultural Theory after 9/11."

Mordecai Walfish

Home Department: German

m-walfish@northwestern.edu

Mordecai Walfish is a graduate student in Comparative Literary Studies and German.

In May 2007 he received his B.A. in Contemporary Studies and German from the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His research focuses on the intersection of continental philosophy and German literature. He is particularly interested in Heidegger and French post-Heideggerian thought. Other interests include the history of German Jewry, the ethics and politics of memory, and modern Yiddish literature.

Mordecai has also studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin on a DAAD scholarship and is a past delegate of the German Foreign Office’s Bridge of Understanding program.

Holly Zindulis
Home Department: English

h-zindulis@northwestern.edu

Holly Zindulis is a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literary Studies and 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.



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		CLS Graduate Students Amanda Allan Home Department: Slavic amila.allan@gmail.com Genevieve Amaral Home Department: French and Italian Genevieve is a PhD student in French and Comparative Literature. She 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 on the engagement with Heidegger's conception of being-toward-death in Maurice Blanchot's work of narrative prose, Death Sentence. She spent last year in Lille, France, teaching English as a language assistant, and she has also studied at the Universite de Laval, in Quebec City. 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. She also speaks Portuguese, and is interested in the work of Fernando Pessoa. Stanley Bill Home Department: Slavic s-bill@northwestern.edu Areas of Interest: Polish poetry, Comparative Romanticism, Bruno Schulz, Galicia, French Existentialism, Joseph Conrad Virgil Brower Home Department: Philosophy v-brower@northwestern.edu Virgil Brower received a football scholarship to small fundamentalist university at which he earned a B.A. in Biochemistry & his M.A. in Religious Studies; research projects published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in London; graduate work at the University of Glasgow, the University of Chicago, Boston College, Harvard, & the University of California at Irvine; first poem picked up by small journal in North Carolina; travels with friends down the Mississippi river in homemade raft; enters seminary; at which he is alleged to nail a copy of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization to the front door; takes first collegiate level job teaching Ethics at the Chicago Police Academy; lectures in Philosophy at various schools, notably Morton College & Chicago State University; currently in a Dual-Ph.D. program between The Chicago Theological Seminary( http://www.ctschicago.edu/ ) & Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern where he co-directs the Paul of Tarsus Reading Group; recent projects include the political theologies of masochism, the populism of rhyme, an eschatology of jazz, an amphibiology, and an erotic phenomenology of taste. Jennifer Cazenave Home Department: French and Italian j-cazenave@northwestern.edu Jennifer Cazenave is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literary Studies and French. She completed a B.A. in Languages and Literature at Bard College. Her research primarily focuses on visual and textual representations of the Holocaust, with a particular focus on survivor testimony. Her larger interests include twentieth century French and German literature, autobiography, cinema, and photography. A former Teaching Fellow at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, Jennifer is also a fellow of the Twelfth Annual Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Studies. A recipient of a 2008 Mellon Writing Grant from the Alice B. Kaplan Center for the Humanities Center, Jennifer will also be a research fellow (2008) at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., where she will conduct archival research for her dissertation. Kelsey Craven Home Department: French and Italian k-craven@northwestern.edu Kelsey Craven is a Ph.D. student in French and Comparative Literary Studies. She holds a B.A. with High Honors from U.C. Berkeley. Her research interests include: Contemporary French Literature and Visual Art; Contemporary American Literature and Visual Art; 20th Century Avant-Garde Movements; Psychoanalysis; Poststructuralism; Continental Philosophy; Sexuality Studies. Jennifer Lee Croft Home Department: Slavic jennifer-croft@northwestern.edu Jennifer Croft completed an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. She is currently in Berlin working on twentieth-century European and Latin American fiction, focusing in particular on Witold Gombrowicz and Jorge Luis Borges. Leah Culligan Home Department: English leahculligan2009@u.northwestern.edu Denis Dapo Home Department: German nwu-dda384@northwestern.edu Denis is a PhD student in German and Comparative Literature. Prior to Northwestern, he studied at Arizona State University, and graduated in 2005, earning degrees in German and English Literature. Before arriving to the United States in 1998, Denis lived in Germany for five years, whereto he emigrated following the collapse of Yugoslavia, the country of his birth. Denis' interests are wide-ranging, but if hard-pressed to enumerate the ones he is presently most preoccupied with, those would be, in no particular order: topics dealing with identity and identity formation, globalization, nationalism, avant-garde, literature/philosophy dialectic, aesthetic theory, inter- and multiculturalism, problems of translation, philosophy, literature/culture dynamics, exile literatures, all within the wide context of late 19th to 21st century literatures in German, English, and Slavic languages. Casey Drosehn Home Department: Slavic Casey Drosehn is interested in 20th century Russian humor genres and particularly the literature of the Leningrad Underground in the late 70s and early 80s. She got her B.A. in 2007 from Williams College, where she majored in Comparative Literature and played rugby; these days her sport of choice is distance running. She is originally from North Carolina, but she has lived in Delaware since she was ten. She spent this past year on a Watson Fellowship interviewing grandmothers in Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Morocco. Katie Hartsock Home Departmenr: Classics kehartsock@gmail.com Katie Hartsock 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 CLS home department is Classics, and her interests include intersections between contemporary and classical poetry. She has deferred beginning the program for a year to work as the media assistant at the Poetry Foundation in downtown Chicago. Ena Jung Home Department: German e-jung@northwestern.edu Ena Jung is a graduate student in Comparative Literary Studies and German. After receiving an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt/Main and a B.A. in English from Williams College, she 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. Interests condensed: lyric poetry, diacritical marks, detective fiction, early German cinema (especially Fritz Lang), experimental film and theater, and French theory. Ela Kotkowska Home Department: French and Italian ela@northwestern.edu Ela Kotkowska is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies and French, working on her dissertation entitled Alterity and Singularity in the Poetry of René Char. Her poems have been anthologized in a recent collection The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century from Cracked Slab Books. Elena Krell Home Departmenr: Classics Elena Krell received her bachelors of arts in Ancient Greek and Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance from Oberlin College in 2003. Her home department in CLS is Classics, and she is also interested in contemporary and classical German and Italian literature and language, continental philosophy, and gender studies within all of the above. Bishupal Limbu Home Department: French and Italian bishupal@northwestern.edu Bishupal Limbu is writing a dissertation on how 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 Yelena ("Helen") Lorman holds a BA in Philosophy and a BA in Literature with Honors from Claremont McKenna College, where she completed a Senior Thesis on Russian translations of Shakespeare. She spent a few years after college working as a Montessori teacher, but she is now looking forward to focusing again on her academic interests: 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 Sarah hails from Philadelphia, where she taught theory in various modalities at Rosemont College for several years. She 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. A revised version of the dissertation is available online, at <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/sociology/papers>http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/sociology/papers. In her first year at Northwestern, Sarah’s preliminary interests are poststructuralism 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, which you can visit here: <http://sarahssoundscripts.blogspot.com>http://sarahssoundscripts.blogspot.com. Sarah has written about topics as diverse as performance in Benjamin’s Arcades Project, epistemological desire and suffering in Turing, Deleuze and Foucault, the Platonic and Kristevan chora in Nancy Drew, and Foucauldian technologies of the self in Vito Acconci. She is thrilled to be a student again, and created a guide for application to doctoral programs based on her own harrowing yet rewarding process of application. For anyone needing guidance, the blog is available here: <http://humanitiesphd.blogspot.com>http://humanitiesphd.blogspot.com. Joel Morris Home Department: German j-morris5@northwestern.edu Joel Morris is in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literary Studies and German. Joel received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Colorado College and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, and has also studied at University College Dublin, Universität Lüneburg, and Universität Regensburg. His interests include German literature and critical thought; art history/photography and issues concerning image and narrative; "modernism" in the 20th century novel and film; and 20th century Irish literature. Rachel Ney Home Department: French and Italian r-ney@northwestern.edu Rachel E. Ney is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in French and Comparative Literature Studies. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she earned a Licence in English, a Maîtrise and D.E.A. in contemporary Anglo-American Literature at the University of Nancy II, France. Her areas of research are contemporary transnational French literature dealing with the American Southwest and Mexico (Antonin Artaud,Yves Berger, Le Clezio, Frédéric Temple), contemporary Anglo-American fiction from the Border (Cormac McCarthy) as well as problems of literary translations in multilingual and transnational sites. Her dissertation explores how death crystallizes transnational relations in terms of Hegelian dialectics and through the geographical mapping of the Unhappy Consciousness. She has published several essays in both French and English and has contributed to the first French critical volume on Cormac McCarthy. Julian Ng Home Department: German j-ng@northwestern.edu Julia Ng is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies and German, with an emphasis on Critical Theory. She received her B.A. and M.A. in German and Comparative Literature from UCLA, and studied at the Humboldt and Freie Universities in Berlin before arriving at Northwestern. She has also studied at the University of Vienna and the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and worked as editor for a literary publisher and as freelance journalist in her hometown of Hong Kong. Her research interests include literary theory, continental philosophy, architectural and urban theory, the "sacred" in poetry and the ornament in literature and architecture. She is currently working on a dissertation project on the triangulation of architecture, literature, applied mathematics and the formation of political communities in early modern Northern Europe and early 19th century Germany. She is an awardee of a DAAD scholarship for doctoral studies, and has published on contemporary architectural theory as well as translations. Daniel Nolan Home Department: German dan@northwestern.edu Daniel Nolan is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies and German. He 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 training in Minsk and St. Petersburg he came to Northwestern where he is now working on a dissertation on Evgenii Abramovich Baratynskii and Heinrich von Kleist. The dissertation follows these authors' engagement with the jouralistic press in the first half of the nineteenth century. Baratynksii and Kleist serve as exemplary cases for study of the emerging literary public. Dan's areas of specialization include Romanticism, German idealism, phenomenology, literary publicity, and critical theory. He recently spent a year studying French literary criticism in Paris. He spent last year teaching courses on Kleist and literary theory at the University of Mannheim while also conducting research on the dissertation in Heidelberg. Saein Park Home Department: German Robert Ryder Home Department: German r-ryder@northwestern.edu Rob Ryder entered the program in 2001 as a student of Comparative Literature and German. He 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 will focus on acoustics and the uncanny in early twentieth-century German literature and film. Brenna Joelle Stuart brenna@northwestern.edu Home Department: English Caroline Vial Home Department: French and Italian Caroline Vial received her B.A. in 2006 from Middlebury College, where she majored in Philosophy and Italian, and her M.A. in Comparative Literature in 2007 from the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III. She has also studied at the Universitˆ degli studi in Ferrara, Italy, and the Universidad de la Rioja in Logro–o, Spain, in addition to being a participant in the Paris Program in Critical Theory (2006; 2007). Her M.A. thesis focused on the phenomenology of time in Gertrude Stein's poetry and the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Her research interests include literary theory, continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, postmodernity, 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, which appeared in a special issue of the journal _SubStance_ (March, 2008) entitled "Cultural Theory after 9/11." Mordecai Walfish Home Department: German m-walfish@northwestern.edu Mordecai Walfish is a graduate student in Comparative Literary Studies and German. In May 2007 he received his B.A. in Contemporary Studies and German from the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His research focuses on the intersection of continental philosophy and German literature. He is particularly interested in Heidegger and French post-Heideggerian thought. Other interests include the history of German Jewry, the ethics and politics of memory, and modern Yiddish literature. Mordecai has also studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin on a DAAD scholarship and is a past delegate of the German Foreign Office’s Bridge of Understanding program. Holly Zindulis Home Department: English h-zindulis@northwestern.edu Holly Zindulis is a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literary Studies and 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.