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Name Year Areas of Interest
Elina Bloch Elina Bloch 6th Elina Bloch is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature also working towards a qualification in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She joined the department in 2006, after graduating the same year from CUNY with a B.A. in English Language and Literature and a minor in marketing. Her research interests include the modern European novel, with an emphasis on Proust; the relationship between art and politics across the national boundaries of Western and Eastern Europe; the intersection between literature, music, and the visual arts; and the nineteenth century novel, particularly English, French, and Russian. She is currently working on her dissertation, titled "Unconfessed Confessions: Strategies of (Not)Telling in Nineteenth Century Narratives". In addition to her research, she has been a co-fiction editor of the Palimpsest, Yale's Arts and Literary magazine, and the organizer of the WGSS Graduate Colloquium. Outside the academy, she is a musical school graduate, and enjoys playing the piano and ballroom dancing.
Michael Cramer Michael Cramer 7th Michael Cramer is a PhD candidate in the combined program in Film Studies and Comparative Literature.  His research interests include European film and film theory of the sixties and seventies (especially French and Italian auteurs such as Godard, Rossellini, and Pasolini), Leftist art, and the politics of aesthetics (and aesthetics of politics) more broadly. His dissertation examines European 'pedagogical art films' of the sixties and seventies, in which filmmakers attempted to unite pedagogical and aesthetic imperatives in order to create a new social role for art and the artist in the age of mass media.  He contributed an article, 'Television and the auteur in the late Fifties, to the collection Opening Bazin, edited by Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin and published in 2011 by Oxford University
Rossen Djagalov Rossen Djagalov Rossen Djagalov's education began in his native Bulgaria, then took him to England and New England (Williams College, BA 2002), and after two memorable years as a non-degree student in Moscow, to New Haven, CT. His spatial movements have largely shaped his scholarly interests: the former Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, Germany, and nowadays, the USA. Morally born in the nineteenth century, he has also spent much time studying the twentieth, publishing articles on imperial ideologies, GULAG narratives, Soviet-Third World exchanges, peripheral literary cultures (Siberian and Central Asian) and genres (guitar poetry, documentary film). These days he is trying to understand the anti-populism of late/ post-socialist Eastern European intelligentsia, a group that once defined itself through its love of “the people.” In addition to the Comparative Literature department, he has found an intellectual home at Yale's Working Group on Globalization and Culture (hence, his predilection for transnational cultural studies) and a few other scholarly communities, both within and outside the university. After a year spent breathing archival dust in Moscow, Berlin, Warsaw, and Philadelphia (2008-09), he has returned to New Haven to finish his dissertation on Imagining Socialist Internationalism. His efforts to keep word and deed together have led him to become an organizer for GESO (Graduate Employees and Students Organization).
Soren Forsberg Soren Forsberg 5th Soren Forsberg's research interests include the contemporary novel, Scandinavian cinema, media studies, and the future of the print publishing. He is writing a dissertation about American literature after 1970 which is so far titled "The Content Farm: Freelance Labor and Literary Form." Soren grew up in Denmark and graduated with an MA in English from the University of Virginia in 2006.
Noam Gal 4th Noam Gal joined the department in 2008 after receiving his BA in Graphic Design from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (Major: Typography and Print), and an MA in Cultural Studies from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His MA thesis "Character Rights: Ethical Questions in J.M. Coetzee" focused on notions of nature, freedom and speech as they construct the relations between literary characters and the author in his novels and non-fiction. Before moving to New Haven, he was a performance artist and a lecturer of critical theory in the Social-Economic Academy in Jerusalem. His main research interests are the intersections of literature and performance-art since 1960's, human-animal divide in post-1945 German, English and Hebrew Literatures, and the critiques on humanitarian discourse in the 20th century. In 2008, his article "A Note on the Use of Animals for Remapping Victimhood in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace" appeared in African Identities 6, and another article (in Hebrew): "On the Political Action of the Metaphoroid" appeared in Teoria VeBikoret 33.
Lucian Ghita Lucian Ghita 7th Born and raised in Romania, Lucian Ghita came to Yale in 2005 after completing two Master'sdegrees in American Studies (Bucharest) and Culture of the European Renaissance (Warwick).His research focuses on Renaissance literature and drama, European avant-garde theatre(especially French), performance studies, critical theory, theater theory and history. Lucian iscurrently completing his dissertation, which examines the performance and reception ofShakespeare and his contemporaries in the French theatrical avant-garde from the late 19th to themid-20th century. By unearthing the history of this literary and theatrical reception, he argues thatElizabethan and Jacobean drama shaped the cultural and political imaginary of the avant-garde inprofound ways that continue to reverberate in contemporary plays and performances. He haspublished articles in Shakespeare Yearbook, Prose Studies, CLCWeb: Comparative Literatureand Culture, Literature Compass, and The Journal of the Kafka Society of America. His essay onJulie Taymor's Titus appeared in a collection of essays titled Shakespeare in Asia, Hollywood,and Cyberspace (Purdue UP, 2009). He is a co-organizer of the Balkan Film Series and a formercoordinator of the Open Forum series. For more information about his research and teaching, please visit the site listed above.
Kevin Holden Kevin Holden 3rd Kevin Holden is from New England. Before coming to Yale, he attended Harvard (AB), Cambridge (MPhil), and Iowa (MFA), where he was then a visiting assistant professor. His MPhil dissertation at Cambridge was on Beckett's late prose and paintings by Robert Ryman. He works on the philosophy of poetry, music, and meaning, especially in Adorno, Celan, and Zukofsky. He has a keen interest in queer theory. He is also a poet and is the author of two books, Alpine and Identity, and his poems have appeared in many magazines and journals. He translates poetry from Russian and French.
Suzanne Hopcroft Suzanne Hopcroft 4th Suzanne Marie Hopcroft joined the department in 2008. She did her undergraduate work at Columbia University and comes to Yale by way of Stanford University, where she first began work on a Ph.D. Suzanne works mainly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative, and her areas of focus have included comparative contemporary Caribbean literature and European fiction in the long nineteenth century. Her current locus of inspiration is the search for fruitful, fresh points of intersection between these two fields, which has led her to explore transatlantic studies and rewritings, dialogue and tensions between Western feminist and postcolonial ideologies in the novel, and cultural essentialist literary production in Europe outside the colonial context. A lover of writing, Suzanne reviews books and films in her spare time and also copy-edits academic writing for ESL writers.
Christopher Hurshman 4th Christopher Hurshman joined Yale's Department of Comparative Literature in 2008. He spent much of his childhood and youth in Europe, and after earning a B.A. in Russian and history from Williams College in 2001, he taught English at a small, Connecticut boarding school for seven years. At Yale, he spends most of his time and effort studying the nineteenth-century novel in English, Russian, and French. Areas of particular interest include utopias and dystopias, philosophical and religious imaginations, literary avant-gardes, and intersections of politics and literature.
Jeanne-Marie Jackson Jeanne-Marie Jackson 5th Jeanne-Marie Jackson came to Yale in 2006, and joined the Comparative Literature Department in 2007. A native of the New Haven area, she received her B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Drew University. Her dissertation, "Close To Home: Forms of Isolation in the Postcolonial Province," charts the afterlives of nineteenth-century Russian narratologic innovations in late- and post-apartheid South African fiction. Jeanne-Marie has been an Open Forum coordinator, co-coordinator of the Slavic and Comparative Theory Colloquium, Articles Editor for the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and is currently co-chair of a new African Language and Literature series at Yale. She received Honorable Mention for the graduate student essay prize of the 2011 International Conference on Narrative, and has an article on singularity and the Afrikaans novelist Marlene van Niekerk forthcoming in Studies in the Novel.
Eugenia Kelbert Eugenia Kelbert 4th Eugenia Kelbert joined the department in 2008, following a BA in Medieval and Modern Languages (French & German) at The Queen’s College, Oxford. After graduating in 2007, she worked in Moscow as a freelance translator and interpreter in English, French and Russian. Born in Russia, she grew up in the UK and studied in a khâgne class in Paris (Lycée Louis-le-Grand, 2005-2006), earning an ‘équivalence’ of a BA in Philosophy from the Sorbonne. Her current interests include bilingualism in literature, with a focus on authors writing in a second language, translation theory, cabaret in the 1920s, and — somewhat incompatibly — the uses of paradox and of cognitive and mathematical approaches in the Humanities.
Heather Klemann Heather Klemann 6th Heather Morr Klemann is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature, having earned an A.B. in Comparative Literature and a Certificate in Finance from Princeton University and an M.A. and M.Phil. in Comparative Literature from Yale. Her dissertation, "Developing Fictions: Childhood, Children’s Books, and the Rise of the Novel," traces a dialogic history of children’s books and novels in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her research interests include British Long Eighteenth-Century Literature and Intellectual History (Restoration to Romanticism), the Novel from Cervantes to the present, Children’s Literature, and the Digital Humanities. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in Romanticism, and The Johnsonian News Letter. For information on her work in the digital humanities, please visit: http://digitalhumanities.yale.edu/pdp.
Maleti Viggiano Margherita Maleti Viggiano 5th Margherita Maleti Viggiano, M.A., M.Phil. Doctoral Thesis: Shakespeare and Dante: Demonic Agency as Literary Theory. Fields: Christian Catholic Theology; Christian Demonology; History of freemasonry, demonic magic and secret societies; Satanism in the media; Pasolini’s Salò and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed; the Impossibility of Religious Freedom – from an anthropological perspective; the Bible and the Western canon; the Great Books of the Western tradition; History of literary theory; the Death of the Humanities: Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Barthes, De Man, Foucault, Derrida, Bloom, Bhabha, Butler. My syllabi and excerpts from my dissertation will be published on my professional website this Fall 2011. Work philosophy: the ethical duty of instructors and scholars is always to say the truth, never to compromise with academic corruption, and work for the benefit the students entrusted to their care: for - on that - God will test us at the end of our life. Parati estis?
Anne-Marie McManus 4th  Anne-Marie McManus graduated from Northwestern University in 2004 with a B.A. in American Studies and Critical Theory. She spent three years following graduation teaching English literature in France and Morocco. Her research at Yale centers on modern Middle Eastern and North African literature in Arabic and French. 
Sinsky Carolyn Sinsky 4th Carolyn Sinsky joined Yale's Department of Comparative Literature in 2007. Carolyn Sinsky received her B.A. from Stanford and her M.A. from Harvard, both in Russian literature. Her dissertation traces Russian influences in the English novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is also at work on a novel.
Stević Aleksandar Stević 4th Aleksandar Stević came to Yale in 2007, after receiving his BA and MA in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Belgrade in Serbia, where he also taught between 2004 and 2007. Sasha's interests are mostly divided between literary theory per se and the nineteenth and early twentieth century European novel. Much of his work revolves around the relationship of genre and ideology, and he is particularly interested in rethinking the ways in which realist and modernist novels interact with legal, intellectual, and social history. His dissertation explores the links between social change and the formal evolution of the Bildungsroman from Dickens to Joyce and from Stendhal to Proust. Sasha's other scholarly preoccupations include Greek tragedy and its contemporary appropriations, Holocaust representation (mainly in Central and Eastern European literatures), post-1945 British cinema and culture. Sasha has published on topics which include Joyce and poststructuralism, modernism and the Bildungsroman, theory and history in Bakhtin, historicism, and narratology. He has also translated numerous critical texts from English and French to Serbo-Croatian, including the work of Stephen Greenblatt, J. Hillis Miller, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler, among others. Personal website.
Meg Weisberg Meg Weisberg 5th Meg Furniss Weisberg joined the department in 2003, and works on 20th-century literature from North and West Africa, Latin America, and France. She combines aspects of postcolonial theory with a close attention to literary texture and form. She is interested in the jungle and the desert as representations of utopian or dystopian alternative sociocultural models in twentieth-century novels and travel journals by European and African authors, as well as in African film. Her dissertation is titled, Poetics of Jungle and Desert in European and African Fiction. She is very glad to have lived and worked for two years in Paris and two years in Rabat, Morocco before starting graduate school. Meg also enjoys photography, literary translation, singing in the Yale Camerata, and spending time with her husband and daughter.
Grant Wiedenfeld Grant Wiedenfeld 5th Grant Wiedenfeld joined the departments of Comparative Literature and Film Studies in 2007. His dissertation explores the relationship between time and paratextuality in Franco-American modernisms from the 1880's to 1920's. He earned an MFA in Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and studied previously at La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) & the University of Colorado at Boulder. A native of Des Moines, Iowa, he adores being in the out of doors.
Spencer Wolff Spencer Wolff 4th Spencer Wolff is a Fourth-Year student in the Department of Comparative Literature. His dissertation addresses legal and literary narratives of state legitimacy in post-war Germany and post-Apartheid South African. A graduate of Harvard College, with law degrees from Columbia Law School and Paris I Pantheon la Sorbonne, he will be a visiting Fox Scholar at the University of Cape Town this coming year.
Younger Neil Younger 2nd Neil Younger a native of Glasgow, joined the Comparative Literature department in 2010 after receiving his BA and M.St. in Modern Languages from Jesus College, Oxford. His masters dissertation examined scientific popularization during the eighteenth century, and reflects his broader interest in the European Enlightenment as experienced in western Europe - in particular France, Germany and Britain. He has carried out research on several aspects of the eighteenth century, including the interplay between novels and the theatre, libertinage and the theatre, and the cultural history of ventriloquism. He is also interested in the music and cultural impact of Richard Wagner, and in the literature of early modernism.