Comparative Literature
Graduate Group

Moradewun Adejunmobi

530-752-5136
madejunmobi@ucdavis.edu
Professor, African Studies
B.A. French/German, University of Ife Nigeria
M.A. French, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
DEA Francophone Literature, Université de Paris-Sorbonne
Ph.D. French, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Research and Teaching Interests:

African Literature and Popular Culture, Francophone Studies, Translation, Multilingualism and Intercultural Communication in Postcolonial societies, Literacy Studies

Selected Publications:

JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar 1996.

Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa 2004.

"Major and Minor Discourses of the Vernacular: Discrepant African Histories." In Ed. Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih. Minor Transnationalism (2005).

"Translation and Postcolonial Identity: African Writing and European Languages." The Translator, Studies in Intercultural Communication. 37.4 (1998).

Marc Blanchard

530-752-1125
meblanchard@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature
Agregé de letters, University of Paris, Ph.D.

Research and Teaching Interests:

Comparative Literature

Theory, Semiotics and the Critique of Culture

Selected Publications:

La Revolution et les Mots

Description: Sign, Self, Desire: Critical Theory in the Wake of Semiotics

In Search of the City

Trois Portraits de Montaigne

JoAnn Cannon

jccannon@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Italian
B.A., Italian, Wellesley College, Summa cum laude
Ph.D., Italian, Cornell University

Research and Teaching Interests:

Contemporary Italian narrative, Italian film from neorealism to the present, detective fiction in a comparative context, Italian women writers.

Selected Publications:

Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic, 1981.

Italian Postmodernism: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Malerba, Sciascia, Eco. 1989

The Novel as Investigation, 2006.

"Lost in the Fictional Woods with Umberto Eco: La misteriosa fiamma della Regina Loana in the Context of Eco's oeuvre." Forum Italicum (Fall 2007).

"On the Path of Gianni Celati: A Reading of Narratori delle pianure." Rivista di Studi italiani, 19 (December 2001): 162-172.

"Storytelling and the Picaresque in Primo Levi's La tregua." Modern Language Studies,31, no. 2 (Fall 2001).

Xiaomei Chen

530-752-1209
Professor of East Asian Languages and Culture
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Indiana University, 1989.

Selected Publications:

Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post Mao China (Oxford UP, 1995, second edition, 2002)

Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Culture in Contemporary China (Hawaii UP, 2002)

Editor of Reading the Right Text: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Hawaii UP, 2003)

Editor of Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, intro., Xiaomei Chen (Columbia University Press, 2010)

Co-editor with Claire Sponsler of East of West: Cross-cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference (Palgrave, 2001)

Co-editor with Julia F. Andrews of "Visual Culture and Memory in Modern China: A Special Issue on Visual Culture in Twentieth-century China" for the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Ohio State University, 2001)

Margaret Ferguson

mwferguson@ucdavis.edu
Professor of English Literature
Yale University, Department of Comparative Literature, 1969-74; M.Phil. 1972; Ph.D. 1974
Attended courses at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Collège de France in Paris, 1971-72
Cornell University, 1966-69; A.B. 1969 (graduated with distinction in English and History of Art)

Research and Teaching Interests:

Renaissance literature in English, French, and Italian (some Latin, Spanish, and German interests as well)

Feminist theory

History of education

Literacy and literacy theories, early modern and modern

Selected Publications:

Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender and Empire in Early Modern England and France, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. (Winner of the Best Book Prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, 2004, and the Roland Bainton Prize for Literature, 2004)

Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, l983.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition: co-editor with Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy. New York: W. W. Norton. New York: Norton, 2005. Includes my essay on "Poetic Syntax."

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edition: co-editor. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996 (In both editions, I did selections and notes for poets from Beowulf to Blake as well as for Romantic women poets)

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, co-edited with Nancy Wright and Andrew Buck. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2004.

"Feminism in Time." A Special Issue of Modern Language Quarterly, co-edited with Marshall Brown. Vol. 65, no. 1 (March 2004). Introduction by M. Ferguson, 7-27.

Gail Finney

530-752-1125
gefinney@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and German
A.B. Princeton University, 1973, German (summa cum laude)
M.A. and Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1975, 1980, Comparative Literature

Research and Teaching Interests:

European Realism, Naturalism, Fin-de-Siecle, and Modernism

Drama and Performance

Psychoanalysis and Literature/Film, esp. trauma theory

Visual Culture

Gender Studies

Selected Publications:

The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Niemeyer, 1984).

Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Cornell Univ. Press, 1989, 2nd ed. 1991).

Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (ed.) (Gordon and Breach, 1994).

"Revolution, Resignation, Realism: 1830-1890." The Cambridge History of German Literature. Ed. Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997; in paper 2000. Pp. 272-326.

"Of Walls and Windows: What German Studies and Comparative Literature Can Offer Each Other." Comparative Literature, 49 (Summer 1997), 259-66.

Christa Wolf (Twayne/Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1999).

Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle (ed.) (Indiana Univ. Press, 2006).

"What's Happened to Feminism?" Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization: The American Comparative Literature Association 2004 Report on the Discipline. Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006. Pp. 114-26.

"How ‘Race Matters’ in the Cinematic Genealogy of Family Trauma." Conference on Literature and Film, Florida State University, February 2006

"Family Trauma as Inflected by Race: The Examples of Monster's Ball and Antwone Fisher." ACLA Convention, Princeton, March 2006

"The Onion and the Inkstain: Constructing Narrative Time in Family Trauma Cinema." ACLA Convention, Puebla, Mexico, April 2007; Graduate Film Symposium, UC Davis, May 2007

"Fin-de-siècle Gender-Bending: How Decadent Is It?" ACLA Convention, Long Beach, April 2008

"When Parents Act Like Children: Pathological Families in Contemporary American Film" MLA Convention, San Francisco, December 2008

"Little Miss Sunshine: Behind the Comic Veil." ACLA Convention, Harvard University, March 2009

Inés Hernández Ávila

530-752-4394, 530-754-5574
ighernandez@ucdavis.edu
B.A., M.A., Ph.D., English, University of Houston
Professor & Graduate Adviser, Native American Studies
Director, Chicana/Latina Research Center

Research and Teaching Interests

Native American Women's Poetry, Contemporary Indigenous literature of Mexico, Indigenous/Native Theater, Native American Religious Traditions, Native American Literature in Performance, Narratives of Indigeneity

Selected Publications

Latina Feminist Group (including Inés Hernández-Avila), eds., Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, Duke UP, 2001. (Selected as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the Gustavus Myer Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights).

Inés Hernández-Avila and Gail Tremblay, eds., Special Issue on Indigenous Women, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2002).

Inés Hernández-Avila and Domino Renee Perez, eds., Special issue of SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literature, “Indigenous Intersections: American Indians and Chicanas/os in Literature” (2003).

Inés Hernández-Avila, ed., Reading Native Women: Critical/Creative Representations, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press (June 2005)

Neil Larsen

nalarsen@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory
B.A., Philosophy, Reed College
M.A., Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota

Research and Teaching Interests:

Critical Theory and its philosophical sources

Marxism

Comparative literature

Post-colonial and Latin-American literary studies (including Brazil)

Selected publications:

Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas (London, NY: Verso Press, 2001)

Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)

Modernism and Hegemony: a Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) Theory and History of Literature Series, vol. 71

"Thoughts on Violence and Modernity in Latin America, in Light of Arno Mayer's The Furies", in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War, Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph eds, (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming)

"O 'Híbrido' como Fetiche: 'Raça', Ideologia e Narrativa em Casa-grande & senzala," Gilberto Freyre y los Estudios Latinoamericanos, Joshua Lund and Malcolm McNee, eds. (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana, forthcoming)

Kari Lokke

530-752-8401
kelokke@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature
B.A., Indiana University, French and Comparative Literature
M.A. and Ph.D., Washington University, St. Louis, Comparative Literature

Research and Teaching Interests:

British and European Romanticisms

Women Writers

The Gothic

Aesthetics, the Sublime and Grotesque

Theory of Myth

Discourses of Enthusiasm and Fanaticism

Selected Publications:

Gérard de Nerval: The Poet as Social Visionary (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1987)

"Dark Forgetfulness" and "The Intercession of Saint Monica": Charlotte Smith and Literary History," Women's Studies 27 (1998): 259-280.

Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, co-ed. with Adriana Craciun (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001)

"Children of Liberty": Idealist Historiography in Sta#235;l, Shelley, and Sand," PMLA, May 2003, Vol. 118.3, 502-20.

Tracing Women's Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence (London: Routledge, 2005) Winner of the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize awarded by the International Conference on Romanticism

Sheldon Lu

530-754-8324
shlu@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature
B.A., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1984.
Ph. D., Indiana University, Bloomington, 1990.

Research and Teaching Interests:

World cinema

Postsocialist cinema

Transnational Chinese cinemas

Modern Chinese literature and visual culture

Traditional Chinese narrative

Cultural theory

Globalization studies

East-West comparative poetics

Selected Publications:

From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford, 1994; Korean edition 2001)

China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, 2001)

Culture, Mirror-Image, Poetics (Wenhua, jingxiang, shixue, in Chinese, 2002)

Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Hawaii, 2007)

Editor of Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Hawaii, 1997). A University of Hawaii Press bestselling text.

Co-editor of Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Hawaii, 2005). Choice's award of "Outstanding Academic Title of 2005"

Co-editor of Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge (University of Hong Kong Press, 2009)

Seth L. Schein

530-752-0474
slschein@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature
A.B. (English), Columbia, 1963; M.A. (Greek), UC Berkeley, 1964; Ph.D. (Greek and Latin Languages and Literatures), Columbia, 1967; American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Summer Member 1965, Associate Member, 1967-68

Research and Teaching Interests:

Greek Literature, especially Homeric epic and Attic tragedy

Classical receptions and the history of classical studies

Greek and Roman literature, culture, and thought

Comparative epic and tragedy

Post-colonialism and classical literature

History of literary theory (esp. ancient and medieval)

Shakespeare

Gender and interpretation

The representation of history in literature

Selected publications:

2003 - Sophokles, Philoktetes: Translation with Notes, Introduction, and Interpretive Essay, Focus Classical Library (Newburyport: Focus Press/R. Pullins)

1996 - Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

1984 - The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press) translated into Serbo-Croatian (Zagreb, 1989); into Modern Greek (Thessaloniki, 2006)

1979 - The Iambic Trimeter in Aeschylus and Sophocles: A Study of Metrical Form (Leiden: E.J. Brill)

In progress: an edition with commentary of Sophokles' Philoktetes; a translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia

Juliana Schiesari

530-752-4627
jkschiesari@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian
B.A. Washington University (German)
M. A. University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

Research and Teaching Interests:

Renaissance literatures of Italy, France and England (some interest in early modern German literature)

Psychoanalysis, with a special interest in mourning and trauma

Gender studies

Feminist Theory

Posthumanist Theory with an emphasis on animals and human culture

Selected Publications:

"Bitches and Queens: Pets and perversions at the Court of France's Henri III" in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. By Erica Fudge, University of Illinois Press, 2004.

The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature, Cornell University Press, 1992

Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, co-edited with Marilyn Migiel; Cornell University Press, 1991

Beasts and Beauties: Pets, Bodies and Desire in the Renaissance, forthcoming

Brenda Deen Schildgen

530-752-9558
bdschilgen@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Indiana University
M.A., Comparative Literature, Indiana University
M.A., Religious Studies, University of San Francisco, B.A., English and French, University of Wisconsin.

Research and Teaching Interests:

European Middle Ages, particularly Southern Europe

Reception theory

The relationship between history and fiction

Biblical hermeneutics

Interpretive theory

Selected Publications:

Power and Prejudice: Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Wayne State, 1999), Choice best book award in 1999

Dante and the Orient (Illinois, 2002)

Pagans, Tartars, Jews, and Moslems in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Florida, 2001

Co-editor, The Rhetoric Canon (1997), Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (2000), Other Renaissances (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006), and Medieval Readings of Romans (Edinburgh, 2006).

Co-editor, The World of Fables

Jocelyn Sharlet

530-752-1971
jcsharlet@ucdavis.edu
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Ph.D., Near Eastern Studies: Arabic and Persian literature, Princeton University
A.B., Princeton University

Research and Teaching Interests:

Classical Literatures of the Islamic World

Literatures of the Modern Middle East

Representations of the City in Literature

Fairy Tales, Fables, and Parables

Major Works of Western Culture: The Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

Arabic (independent studies)

Persian (independent studies)

Selected Publications:

Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men, tr. Kamran Talattof and Jocelyn Sharlet (Syracuse, 1998 and The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2004)

"Voracious Men Meet Their Match" in Masculinity in Middle Eastern Literature and Film, ed. Lahoucine Ouzgane (Routledge, 2008)

"Public Displays of Affection: Male Homoerotic Desire and Sociability in Medieval Arabic Literature" in Contemporary Studies in Homosexuality amd the Muslim World, ed. Samar Habib

"Inside and Outside the Pleasure Scene in Poetry about Locations by al-Sarī al-Raffāʾ al-Mawsilī" under revision

"A Garden of Possibilities: Patronage in Manūchihrī's Spring Garden Panegyrics" under revision

"Medieval Arabic Narratives and Poetry of Gift Exchange" in progress

Olga Stuchebrukhov

oastuch@ucdavis.edu
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Russian
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UC Davis

Research and Teaching Interests:

Nationalism and Literature

19th-century Russian and English Literature

Dostoevsky

Selected Publications:

The Nation as Invisible Protagonist in Dickens and Dostoevsky: Uncovering Hidden Social Forces within the Text (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006)

"The Subaltern Syndrome and Dostoevsky's Quest for Authenticity of Being," The Dostoevsky Journal, 5 (2004).

"The 'Nation-less' State of Great Britain and the Nation-State of France in Household Words," Victorian Periodicals Review 38:4 (2006).

"The Hypothetical Nation and the Superfluous State: The Nationalist Symbolism of The Devils," The Dostoevsky Journal, 6 (2006).

"Bleak House as an Allegory of a Middle-Class Nation,"Dickens Quarterly, XXII/3, 2006: 147-168.

"Autocratic Capitalism as the 'Political Unconscious' of Dostoevsky's Devils and A Writer's Diary, The Dostoevsky's Journal, 7 (2006).

" 'Ridiculous' Dream vs. Social Contract: Dostoevkij, Rousseau, and the Problem of Ideal Society," Studies in East European Thought, 59: 1-2 (2007).

"The Concept of Integral Reason in Crime and Punishment," forthcoming in the special issue of Dostoevsky Studies (2009).

"Tolstoy's Family Happiness and Dickens' Bleak House," (in Russian), forthcoming in Leo Tolstoy Fifth International Academic Conference Proceedings (2009-2010).

Archana Venkatesan

avenkatesan@ucdavis.edu
Asst. Professor of Comparative Literature
Ph.D. South Asian Studies (Tamil), UC Berkeley
B.A. English Literature, UC Berkeley

Research and Teaching Interests:

Performance traditions in South Asia; South Indian early, medieval, and classical literature; Interface of religion, performance and visual culture in general and in South Asia in particular; Theories of Embodiment.

Michelle Yeh

530-752-4597
mmyeh@ucdavis.edu
Professor of Chinese Literature
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature

Research and Teaching Interests:

poetry and poetics (Chinese, Japanese, Anglo-American, French, German)

Chinese literature and culture (classical and modern; mainland China

Taiwan and the Chinese Diaspora)

scent culture

Selected Publications:

Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice Since 1917

Essays on Modern Chinese Poetry

Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (tr. & ed.)

Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (coed. & tr.)

Poetics of Aromatics