About the Graduate Students

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 began work on a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Film Studies at Yale in Fall 2005. He graduated from Columbia University with a BA in English in 2004, and spent the subsequent year teaching English in Lille, France.  His main research interests are the films and writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini, French and Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, politically-engaged cinema, and film theory.  He is also a musician and a songwriter.

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: former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, USA, and nowadays, Germany. Morally born in the nineteenth century, he has also spent much time studying the twentieth, writing his Yale papers on subjects like empire and nationalism, human rights in literature and film, GULAG narratives, and peripheral genres in the Soviet bloc (jokes, guitar poetry, sots-art). In addition to the wonderful Comparative Literature department, he has found an intellectual home at Yale's Working Group on Globalization and Culture (hence, his predilection for 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 Literary Imaginings of Socialist Internationalism. His efforts to keep word and deed together, difficult as it sometimes can be, have led him to become an organizer for GESO (Graduate Employees and Students Organization).

Stefan Esposito came to Yale in 2006 after completing his B.A. and M.A. in Literature at the University of California-Santa Cruz.  His masters thesis concerned the political work performed by Baudelaire's translations of Edgar Allen Poe during Second Empire France. His work at Yale has focused primarily on the intersections of Literature and Philosophy (particularly in 19th century Europe), Literary Theory, Intellectual History, Romanticism, Symbolism, and Contemporary Continental Philosophy-Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière, Agamben etc.  Stefan is co-founder of the “Deleuze and Culture” working group funded through the Whitney Humanities Center.

Victor Fan is a composer, sound editor and director for film and theatrical pieces.  He was the Artistic Director of the experimental theater group, Post [ET]2! in Hong Kong (1991-1997).  The Gao Brothers—Cruel Story of Desire (1996), an adaptation of Bajin’s Jiliu (Rapid), received wide critical attention.  His film, The Well, was premiered at the Anthology Film Archives in 2000, presented by Sony Music at the Japan Society in 2001, and screened at the Oshima Retrospect at George Eastman House in 2002.  His most recent project is a feature about Pier Paolo Pasolini.  At Yale, he is primarily working on film theory, Chinese and Japanese cinema, and 20th century Chinese literature.  He is also doing theoretical and historical research on the exchange of English (football) and opium between England and China.  His essay, “English Football and Its Hong Kong Television Audience” is going to be published in Comparative Literature and Culture in March 2006. Weblink: http://www.victorfan.com

Daniel Feldman came to Yale in 2002 after earning a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Columbia.  He also studied in Krakow, Berlin, and Israel. His dissertation explores how art and remembrance merge in the art of atrocity, and especially Jewish, German, and Polish postwar fiction. Other interests include literary representations of memory and amnesia, eastern European modernisms, trauma theory, the absurd, and biblical poetics. A founder of the Artemis Project for Truth Commission Documentation at Yale, he leads an archival project in tribute to colleague Artemis Christodulou to secure testimony and other materials produced in the wake of human rights abuses. His activities in transitional justice stem from an interest in testimony as a literary genre.

Catherine Flynn joined the department in 2002. She is interested in modernism, German and French theory and philosophy, Irish and Anglo-Irish literature, and film. Her dissertation, entitled City Fragments and Collections: Strategies of Recuperation in Joyce, Benjamin, Dickens and the Surrealists, uses Walter Benjamin’s notions of the collection, the dream image, the commodity and myth to explore modernist, proto-modernist, and avant-garde works. Catherine leads the Finnegans Wake Reading Group with Barry McCrea. She also coordinates the Comparative Literature Open Forum lecture and workshop series, a venue for faculty and student research and discussion. Before taking her degree in English and philosophy in University College Cork, Ireland, she qualified as an architect at University College Dublin and practiced in Cork and in Vienna, Austria.

Soren Forsberg, a native of Denmark, joined the department in 2006 after completing an MA in English at the University of Virginia. Soren mostly works on American literature and contemporary critical theory but is also interested in the idea of Scandinavian literature as “world literature.” Favorite research topics include the afterlives of Romanticism, debates over the End of History, and the theorizing of uneven development, as well as the history of the print public sphere, the future of the book, and the googlization of literacy.

Born and raised in Romania, Lucian Ghita studied and pursued research in English and Comparative Literature at several universities in Romania, England, and the US. He came to Yale in 2005 after completing two Master's degrees in American Studies (Bucharest) and Culture of the European Renaissance (Warwick). His research focuses on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, French avant-garde theatre, critical theory and performance, early modern cross-cultural encounters, and Shakespeare on stage and screen. He has published articles in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Literature Compass, Prose Studies, and the Shakespeare Yearbook (forthcoming). His essay on Julie Taymor's Titus is forthcoming in a collection of essays entitled Shakespeare in Asia, Hollywood and Cyberspace (Purdue UP, 2009). He is also a co-organizer of the Balkan Film Series.

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 joined the Comparative Literature Department in 2007, after spending her first year of graduate school in Yale's Slavic Department. A native of the New Haven area, she graduated from Drew University in 2006 with a degree in Russian Language and Literature with a minor in European History. While an undergraduate, she also studied in Kiev, Ukraine, where she worked as a research and policy assistant in the HIV/AIDS field. A serial intern, she spent her summers working in language and humanities textbook publishing and as an English instructor in Izhevsk, Russia, and worked for a New York- based Russian children's aid organization during the year. Her academic interests at Yale include the nineteenth and twentieth century Russian realist novel, comparative modernism, the Anglophone postcolonial novel, ethical criticism and intersections of literary and legal theory. In addition to singing in an all-women's graduate a cappella group, Jeanne-Marie is co-organizer of the Slavic and Comparative Theory Colloquium, and an articles editor for the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities.

Seung-hoon Jeong earned an MA in French Literature and worked as a film critic in South Korea, before joining Film Studies and Comparative Literature in 2005. His literary interests center on critical theories including continental philosophy and systems theory, literature on other arts/media, and (post)modern fiction/culture. In cinema, he loves just many, from film theory in general to various fields such as experimental film and contemporary Hollywood. A winner of the 2007 Domitor essay award on early cinema, Seung-hoon has also explored cinematic ontology in relation to the animal, the ghost, the body, etc., presenting and/or publishing on Herzog/Bazin, Deleuze/Rancière, Mallarmé/Fassbinder, Greenaway/Bill Morrison, Henry James/Apichatpong, Haneke/suture, Rossellini/body, Freud/interface, Korean modernism, Korean horror, etc. Along with these subjects, his emerging interests in digital indexicality and the cinema of catastrophe are more or less related to his dissertation "Cinematic Interfaces: Retheorizing Apparatus, Image, Subjectivity," a reconfiguration of film theories through a variety of films with onscreen interfaces and partly via new media studies.

Rebecca Johnson joined the department in 2004 after receiving a joint B.A. in Islamic and Near Eastern Studies and Creative Studies from U.C. Santa Barbara and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from N.Y.U.  She has studied in Cairo, Egypt, where she also pursued research as a Fulbright Scholar on Arabic popular novels and serialized fiction from the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Her research interests include the development of the Arabic and English novels, pre-modern Arabic prose genres, globalism, print culture, and the public sphere.  Her article, "Lineages of the Novel: The Arabian Nights and Arab-European Literary Influence,” co-authored with Katie Trumpener and Richard Maxwell, will appear in Modern Language Quarterly in June 2007.  She is also deeply interested in the poetics and politics of translation, as well as its practice.  Her translations of contemporary Arabic poetry have appeared in Banipal Magazine and www.wordswithoutborders.com, and her translation of Sinan Antoon's novel, I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, is available from City Lights Press. 

Heather Morr Klemann is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, having earned an AB in Comparative Literature and a Certificate in Finance from Princeton University and an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Yale. Her dissertation, "Literary Souvenirs: Didactic Materialism in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction," examines the influence of didactic children's fiction and the contiguous material culture of education (primers, maps, puzzles, and toys sold with books) on the novel. Her research interests include material culture studies and the history of the book, literature and economics, and the rise of the novel. Website: http://heatherklemann.wordpress.com/

Alice Lovejoy (joint degree with Film Studies) graduated in 2001 from Brown University with an independent major in Documentary Studies and Social Issues. She spent the academic year 2003-2004 as a Fulbright student at FAMU, the Prague film academy, where she researched the work of documentarian Karel Vachek. She has also worked as managing editor of Film Comment magazine, a freelance film critic and programmer, and a filmmaker. Her academic interests center on nonfiction film, aesthetics and politics, official and unofficial cultures in communist Central and Eastern Europe, the interwar Czechoslovak avant-garde, and borders. She is planning a dissertation project on the productions of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior and Army Film units.

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.

Alexandra Parfitt studied Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.  While at the U of C, she translated essays by Henryk Broder for a collection of his essays, A Jew in the New German, edited by Sander Gilman and Lillian Friedberg, published in 2004. After a year of teaching special education, she came to Yale in 2003. Her dissertation re-reads the French and German Bildungsroman in the context of the educational discourse and methods in the early nineteenth century.  Her article “Spells, Potions and the Status Quo: Witchcraft and Reactionary Politics in Corneille, De Visé and Ravenscroft” was published in the 2006 issue of the Revue Frontenac. Other research interests include the sociology of readership, popular depictions of French history, contemporary American fiction, Marxism and psychoanalysis. If she’s not in the library, you’ll probably find her practicing yoga, lifting weights or running.

Originally from Rome, Rocco Rubini moved to New York as a teenager to pursue an International Baccalaureate (IB) degree. He then received a B.A from NYU in Comparative Literature (2002). Before entering graduate school (2003), Rocco lived and worked for a year in the Southern Indian city of Pondicherry. He is now the first Yale student to pursue a Ph.D. in the joint programs in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies. His academic interests are centered around the concept of Humanism in its Renaissance, Romantic (Goethezeit), and contemporary (Dritte Humanismus) manifestations. Rocco is particularly interested in the Methodenstreit between humanistic thought and philosophy proper during the Renaissance and Early-Modern periods. His theoretical tools are Hermeneutics, Russian Formalism and German Historicism. His first academic publication includes four entries (Valla, Salviati, Bracciolini, Biondo) for the Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies (Routledge), while his dissertation attempts to define Humanism according to this movement’s animadversion against Philosophy. Chapters will include discussions on Petrarch, Montaigne, Vico, Rousseau, and W. Dilthey. He spent the 2005-2006 academic year studying in Heidelberg (Germany) on a Connecticut/BadenWurtenberg exchange fellowship.

Carolyn Sinsky joined Yale's Department of Comparative Literature in 2007. She graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and from Harvard with an M.A. in the same. Her research interests include the novels of sensibility and romanticism and the intersections of literature and dance.

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 ideology, intellectual, and social history. Even more specifically, he seeks to explore the links between social change and the formal evolution of the Bildungsroman from Eliot to Lawrence and from Stendhal to Proust. Sasha's other scholarly preoccupations include Greek tragedy and its political contexts, Holocaust representation (mainly in Central and Eastern European literatures), as well as the rhetoric and philosophical foundations of different theoretical discourses, especially those which emerged throughout the 20th century. Sasha has published scholarly articles on topics which include Joyce and poststructuralism, modernism and the Bildungsroman, theory and history in Bakhtin, forms of historicism in literary studies, and narratology. A member of the editorial team of txt, a journal of literature and theory published in Belgrade, he has 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: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~as989

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 joined the departments of Comparative Literature and Film Studies in 2007. He earned an MFA in Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and BA's from La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) & the University of Colorado at Boulder. He studies early modernist art from France and the US, alongside inquiries into aesthetics and hermeneutics. He co-curates the Avant-garde Film Series, and continues to work as an artist. A native of Des Moines, Iowa, he adores being in the out of doors.

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