About the Graduate Students

Elina Bloch joined Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature in 2006. She graduated from CUNY in the summer of the same year with a B.A. in English Language and Literature and a minor in marketing. She was also educated in Ukraine and Israel. 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; nineteenth century novel, particularly the writings of Dostoevsky and Dickens; children’s literature and the representation of children in literature; women’s studies; visual culture; and the intersection between literature, music, and the visual arts. In addition to her research, she is a co-fiction editor of the Palimpsest, Yale’s Arts and Literary magazine. She is also a musical school graduate and enjoys playing the piano and ballroom dancing.

Pramit Chaudhuri. Education: B.A. Classics, Balliol College, Oxford; M.A. Art History, Courtauld Institute, London; M.A. Classics and Comparative Literature, Yale University. Research and teaching interests: epic and tragic poetry from antiquity to the renaissance, Italian renaissance art, literary theory and philosophy (in particular the ethical criticism of literature). Dissertation: Theomachy: ethical criticism and the struggle for authority in epic and tragedy, supervised by David Quint (Yale) and Susanna Morton Braund (Stanford). Activities: co-organiser of the Reception and the Classics conference at Yale (April 27th-28th, 2007); co-founder of the Classics and Theory colloquium (on the use of critical theory in the study of ancient literature).

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 started in his native Bulgaria, then took him first to England, then to New England (Williams College, BA 2002), and after two years as a non-degree student in Russia, to New Haven, CT. His spatial movements have for the most part determined the geography of his scholarly interests: former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, USA, and nowadays, Germany. He recently discovered that most of his papers written at Yale have revolved around the subjects of empire, nationalism, and transnational solidarity (or lack thereof) in the twentieth century. He studies also grim places, Auschwitz and GULAG, as well as the literature and culture that came out of them. Nowadays, however, he is contemplating a return to his moral home, the nineteenth century, and to a topic more transcendental than political (Russian and American religious culture and thought). His chief preoccupation is cultural history, but he is also interested in genre as a means of expression of that history, as exemplified by role of the joke and guitar poetry in post-Stalin Soviet culture. He is a member of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture and an organizer for GESO.

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 began the program at Yale in 2006 after studying Comparative Literature in his native Denmark and earning an MA in English at the University of Virginia.  Main interests are modern American, British, and German literature, contemporary American Studies, cultural theory as reflected by the British New Left, and the ways in which romantic ideals of community translate into conservative ideologies, radical utopian thinking, and green movements.

A native of Romania, Lucian Ghita attended his hometown university in Craiova and earned a BA in English and Romanian literature with a senior thesis focusing on “Shakespeare’s Fool.” In 2002, he received a Chevening Fellowship, which allowed him to complete a Master's degree in Renaissance Studies at the University of Warwick. He came to Yale in 2005 after doing graduate work in English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lucian’s academic interests include English and Italian Renaissance drama, theater theory and practice (Artaud, Brook, Grotowski), performance studies, the connections and interstices between early modern literature and modern critical theory, history of ideas, Shakespeare on film and Balkan cinema. He is particularly interested in cross-cultural representations and conceptualizations of violence in all its semiotic, material, ethical and political forms (discursive, ritual, structural, theatrical, symbolic), as well as in the relationships between the semiotics of performance, textuality, and reception. He has published articles in Romanian and American journals, such as Comparative Literature and Culture, Prose Studies, and Shakespeare Yearbook (forthcoming article on Taymor’s Titus with Lacan and Artaud). He is also a co-organizer of the weekly Balkan Film Series.

A Korea native, Seung-hoon Jeong received an MA in French from Seoul National University, writing on Roland Barthes. After working as a film critic mainly for Cine21 in Korea, he joined the combined program of Film Studies and Comparative Literature at Yale in 2005. In literature, his interests center on critical theory and Continental philosophy, especially modern French thought (Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, etc). Deepening these bases, he is fascinated with modernist/postmodernist fictions and their relations to systems theory as an interdisciplinary hub that connects humanities with arts and sciences. In cinema, he has a great interest in film theory in general and its (dis-)connection with historiography, enlarging foci from early cinema to contemporary Hollywood. With an ongoing concern about the ontology of any type of image, he has particularly explored the interrelation of cinema-ghost-animal-machine on the one hand, and an ontological remapping of modern/postmodern geopolitical aesthetics in Asian (Korean) cinema on the other.

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 received an A.B. in Comparative Literature with a Certificate in Finance from Princeton University in 2003. After working at Goldman, Sachs & Co. for two years, she began her Ph.D. at Yale in 2005. Her research interests include: literature and economics, Adam Smith, 18th-century British literature, the Enlightenment, and Spanish poetry. Website: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~hmm24/

Leonardo F. Lisi
Leonardo F. Lisi joined the department in 2002 and is currently completing his dissertation, advised by Profs. Pericles Lewis and Paul Fry and entitled:
"Poetics of Dependency: Early Modernism and the Struggle Against the Aesthetics of Idealism in Kierkegaard, Ibsen and Henry James." In 2006, Leonardo was awarded the Aurora Borealis Prize by the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies as well as the Ibsen Essay Prize by the National Ibsen Society of Norway and the Ibsen Society of America. While at Yale he has also been a visiting researcher at the Kierkegaard Center at the University of Copenhagen, the Edna and Howard Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, and a visiting doctoral student in the departments of Philosophy and German at the University of Heidelberg. Besides numerous translations, his recent publications have been included in "Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2007" and "Yearbook 2008," "Ibsen Studies," volume 7 and volume 8, "NB. Quaderni di studi kierkegaardiani," volume 6, and "Johan Ludvig Heiberg," ed. by Jon Stewart. He currently holds a Leylan Fellowship.

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.

Margherita Maggie Maleti.  Present Comfort Zones: Joyce; Dante; Lit. Theory; Anglo-American Lit; Ita Lit.  Future Qualifying Exams: Linguistics & Semiotics; Aesthetics; History of the Novel; C19-20 Poetry; survey of Western Epic & Theater from the origins to C20; C14-20 Ita Lit. Eternal Daimons: Joyce memorization; The Wake; apparently impossible links.  Short-term Projects: spending some months in Beijing; visiting Lhasa. where I come from “model school[girl] with [her] diploma under [her] arm”; used to sell stainless steel to Germany; BA in Translation Eng/Ger from Bologna University: spent my junior year at UC Berkeley after winning a national-based contest.  Work situations I like: intellectual freedom; respect; creativity; human capital valued more than bureaucracy.  Websites: http://www.tesionline.it/default/tesi.asp?idt=11400 and: http://www.mediazionionline.it/articoli/maleti.htm

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.

Allison Weiner was both raised and educated in the Philadelphia area, receiving an AB in English from Bryn Mawr College in 2001.  She entered the department the same year as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies. Allison’s interests lie primarily in the area of literary theory, particularly in French post-war thought (Nancy, Levinas, Blanchot) and in deconstruction and its legacies.  Her dissertation, Ethical Encounters: Refusals of Mastery in Henry James and Maurice Blanchot, brings together the figures of James and Blanchot in the first full-length study of its kind, thinking through notions of relation, community, and interchange in both authors’ theory and fiction. Allison is also the co-editor, with Simon Morgan Wortham, of Derrida's Counterparts: Contemporary Encounters with Deconstruction, a collection forthcoming from Continuum Press (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy series) which features essays from both new and well-received figures working in the deconstructive tradition, including J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Bennington, and Peggy Kamuf.  Her own essay, “The Counterpromise: Derrida on the Instant of Blanchot’s Death,” also appears in the volume.

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