GRADUATE STUDENTS—SPANISH AND FRENCH

Hispanic Studies ADB's | Hispanic Studies Ph.D. Students | Hispanic Studies M.A. Students | Hispanic Studies--Recently Graduated PhD's | French Studies M.A. Students

Hispanic Studies Ph.D. Candidates (ABD) 

Literary and Cultural Studies

Steve Buttes
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
20th-century and contemporary Latin American literature and culture, especially the Southern Cone and Mexico; comparative literature (U.S.-Latin America); studies of modernity and postmodernity; literary theory and philosophy; nationalism and representations of poverty, labor relations, and occupational culture.

Susana Domingo Amestoy
Advisor: Margarita Saona
Late twentieth-century Latin American novel and peninsular cinema; the liminal friction between marginalized and the globalized identities within and beyond the nation-state; the theoretical limits of transculturation and its application within a contemporary context; European immigration policy and the construction of supra-national subjectivities; Paris and other European cities as dystopic objects of Latin American desire within literature and film.

Eugenio Di Stefano
Advisor: Margarita Saona.
Dissertation title: Cultural representations of torture in the Southern Cone.
Comparative literature and theory. Early 20th-century American literature and contemporary Latin American literature, specifically Uruguayan and Chilean testimonios. Transhemispheric literary and cultural studies; representations of torture, disability, and race.

Diana González-Cameron
Advisor: Margarita Saona
Dissertation topic (working title): Hysteria: A Mechanism for Self-expression and Survival in the Works of Contemporary Caribbean and Latino-Caribbean Women Authors.  Historically, hysteria has been seen as a disease with a flair for dramatics affecting mostly women. Today, however, as Mark Micale states, hysteria is being reexamined as “an alternative physical, verbal, and gestural language, an iconic social communication narrative,” which poses fundamental questions about gender, culture, language, narrative and representation. This thesis will examine the presence of hysteria in the works of selected contemporary Puerto Rican and Latino-Caribbean writers. Questions of class, race, culture, and politics, and how these intersect with hysteria will be explored in conjunction with a psychoanalytical theoretical framework. The analysis of hysteria in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Cixous, and other theorists such as Elaine Showalter, Diane Hunter and others will provide the underlying support in understanding why hysteria appears in these authors and their works, and what is its function.

Javier García Montes
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
Dissertation Topic (Working title):  Herencia cultural, silencio e identidad en la narrativa contemporánea española.  By positing values embodied in shared histories and traditions, historical-cultural heritage plays an important role in constructing collective and individual identities.  However, this identification by means of heritage may equally imply an act of socio-political silence which threatens the sense of inner stability of a modern subject conceived in ethical terms. This dissertation compares different responses to this paradox in recent contemporary Spanish narratives which refer to transitional and transnational (European) scenarios in order to denounce the logic of simulation and exclusion operating in silence. Authors studied include Miguel Sánchez-Ostiz, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Juan Goytisolo, or Mauricio Wiesenthal.

Clara E. Herrera
Advisor: Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro
Dissertation title: Estudio de la escritura femenina autobiográfica en el Nuevo Reino de Granada basado en la autobiografía espiritual de la Madre Josefa del Castillo y la Madre Jerónima Nava y Saavedra.  The purpose of this dissertation is to study the autobiographical writings of the Colombian colonial nuns, Madre Josefa del Castillo y Madre Jerónima Nava, in relation to the models of mystic and autobiographical writing they imitated, and with specific reference to the socio-historical context of Nueva Granada. The dissertation will contemplate the development of the conventual’s milieu in Nueva Granada, the lives and writings of the two nuns from a socio-historical perspective, as well as the innovations and particularities of their works. 

Jelena Sánchez
Advisor: Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro
Secondary advisor: Anne Cruz (University of Miami)
Dissertation title: Las tramoyeras: A New Age of Women in the Spanish Seventeenth-Century comedia de capa y espada plays. Women as subject in early 17th-century comedia de capa y espada plays. The search for cultural nuances of female subjectivity in the commercial popular theater of Madrid. My aim is to forge a new classification of the female protagonist in comedia de capa y espada plays. Works analyzed include plays by Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca, and María de Zayas.

Montserrat Pérez-Toribio
Advisor: Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro
Dissertation title: Profession, Occupation, Vocation or Duty: Economic Discourses of Woman’s Work in Golden Age Spanish Literature. My dissertation examines how women and their relationship to labor are depicted in early modern Spanish cultural products. I analyze how female characters are portrayed as perceiving and performing their functions and roles as workers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The analysis centers upon the way in which working female characters act according to a new way of understanding economic and social relationships, which drives them to promote new modes of labor and remuneration.

Linguistics

Jill Jegerski
Advisor: Bill VanPatten (Texas Tech University).
Dissertation title: Testing the Limits of Adult Second Language Acquisition:
A Psycholinguistic Study of Near-native Syntactic Processing
The issue of whether adults can ever completely acquire a second language is of fundamental importance to the field of second language acquisition (SLA). This dissertation draws on previous investigation from two distinct disciplines, examining this critical SLA issue of native-like attainment from a psycholinguistic sentence processing perspective. The performance of near-native speakers of Spanish will be compared to that of monolingual native speakers in a self-paced reading experiment measuring five different types of syntactic processing, the selection of which is motivated by both SLA and processing research. Reading time results will be reported and analyzed statistically for individual near-native participants as well as for the group. Crucially, the testing of several processing behaviors within one experiment will provide a broad profile of near-native processing and of grammatical processing in general, so the results will be widely generalizable.  Research Interests: Second language grammatical processing and parsing, native language and bilingual processing, eye-tracking, heritage language development.

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Hispanic Studies Ph.D. Students

Literary and Cultural Studies

Andrea Castelluccio
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
Latinoamerican literature and film with special focus on Argentina.

Luz Bibiana Fuentes
Advisor: Gabriel Riera
Latinoamerican literatures and literary theory.

Lillian Gorman
Advisor: Frances Aparicio
US Latino and Latinoamerican literature. Heritage language maintenance.

Raúl D. Gutiérrez
Advisor: Frances Aparicio
Border literature and music created amid the México-U.S. borderlands; the role that abject poverty, identity, gender, political, and economical structures play in the creation of a border in literary texts and music, both in the United States and México; the representation of “el mestizo” and the hybridism in contemporary Latin American literature, especially Mexican literature; the uses of indigenous knowledge and traditions in both contemporary Mexican-American and Mexican art and literature.

Melissa Huerta
Advisor: Frances Aparicio
US Latino and Latinoamerican literature.

Caroline Kopel
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
Interests: post-dictatorship female identity in the Cono Sur; relationship between public (nation-imposed) and private female identity, 20th and 21st-century Latin American visual arts, especially representations of the nation; the erotic in female writing; Latin American short story; the micro-cuento; 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Spanish cinema; feminist theory; post-colonial novels of the Caribbean; female political initiatives in Latin America; immigration movements between, to, and from Latin American and Spain; pop culture; female identity possibilities and story formulas in Latin American telenovelas.

Carolina López-Lozano

Advisor: Steve Marsh

Peninsular contemporary novel and cinema.  Explore the connections between

these fields focusing on authors like Antonio Muñoz Molina, Enrique

Vila-Matas, Javier Marías, Felipe Benítez Reyes, Juan José Millás, Juan

Bonilla, Julio Medem and Pedro Almodóvar among others.  Main research project is to trace how these authors construct their identity within those 'post-modern cities' that represent their novels. Map out what is the role of high and low culture in their writing:

how fiction, cinema, music and plastic arts help to configure the imaginary

of that urban space.

Idoia Martínez-del-Mozo
Advisor: Steve Marsh
Women writers of the 20th-21st centuries. In particular, Latin American women writers who, at some stage of their lives, underwent a migration experience. The area of interest is not reduced to how this experience influenced their writing, but considers as well the reception of their works in the United States. 

Martín Ponti
Advisor: Frances Aparicio
The construction of a political voice-discourse in women’s melodramatic folletín of the early 20th century and its influence on Argentinean political speeches of the period.

Maxi Sánchez

Advisor: Gabriel Riera

Main interest in the relationship between post-structuralist Philosophy and some Latin-American writers such as Alejandra Pizarnik, Ricardo Piglia, Antonio Di Benedetto and Felisberto Hernàndez. At this moment I am trying to develop a notion of "Narrative Machine", based on a re-reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and the Lacanian readings of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Linguistics

Zuriñe Alonso
Advisor: Rafael Nunez-Cedeno
Formal approaches to second language acquisition.

Tim Anderson
Advisor: Luis López
Theoretical and descriptive linguistics, in particular semantics of natural language; analytic philosophy of language, in particular the work of John Searle; history of the Spanish language.

Clara Azevedo
Advisor: Kara Morgan-Short
Second language acquisition

Laura Bartlett
Advisor: Kay Gonzalez
Using code-switching to elucidate details of how language works, with a particular focus on the issue of case.  Also, neurolinguistic aspects of bilingualism and of second language learners.

Shane Ebert
Advisor: Kay González

Codeswitching between oral languages and sign languages using a theoretical/formal approach, in particular codeswitching between Spanish and sign languages of Latin American and between English and American Sign Language.

Brad Hoot

Advisor:  Luis López-Carretero

Research Interests:  Information structure, especially experimental and quantitative methods of studying IS and optimality theoretical approaches to the syntax/prosody interface. Heritage speakers and Spanish in the US, specifically the syntax and information structure of heritage Spanish. Code-switching, with a focus on the formal features and properties governing code-switched utterances.

Janine Matts
Advisor: Richard Cameron
Spanish-English bilingualism, more specifically code-switching. The social and pragmatic motivations for inter- and intrasentential switches. Comparing and contrasting code-switching patterns in Mexican and Puerto Rican communities in Chicago. Following the work of Poplack, Myers-Scotten, Wei, and Auer.

Jason Steve Sarkozi

Advisor: Richard Cameron

Variationist sociolinguistics; Spanish in contact with other languages,

especially Galician and European Portuguese; quantitative approaches to

the study of sexuality as a social variable within bi- and multi-lingual speech communities.

Hispanic Studies M.A. Students

Literary and Cultural Studies

Elsa Camargo
Advisor: Cristian Roa
Latinoamerican literature with focus on the Colonial period.

Chris Coleman
Advisor: Gabriel Riera
Latinoamerican literature and contermporary philosophy

Xabier Granja 

Advisor: Rosilie Hernandez

Peninsular literature, especially from the 19th and 20th centuries;

focusing on Spanish and also Latin American writers, and how Empiricism,

Rationalism, and Logical Positivism influenced their works.

Mayte Harbison

Advisor: Margarita Saona

Late XX and XXI century Latinoamerican literature with a focus on Cuban literature.  Would like to use cultural, literary and artistic theories as a study framework to explore the different phenomena of the Cuban literary diaspora.

Stephanie Navarro
Advisor: Rosilie Hernandez
Peninsular Literature

Octavian Stinga
Advisor: Gabriel Riera
Contemporary literature and literary theory.

Linguistics

Junice Acosta
Advisor: Rafael Nunez
Caribbean linguistics with focus on phonology. 

Sarah Downey-Giménez
Advisor: Kay Gonzalez
Theoretical linguistics. 

Mandy Faretta
Advisor:  Kara Morgan-Short
Second Language Acquisition and the cognitive processing of language.

Jeanne Heil
Advisor: Luis Lopez
Theoretical linguistics

Mirta Lee

Advisor: Luis López-Carretero

Code-Switching and Theoretical Linguistics

Lesley Summers
Advisor: Kim Potowski
Sociolinguistics of heritage language maintenance 

Hispanic Studies--Recently Graduated PhD's

Clara Burgo
Advisor: Richard Cameron
Dissertation title: Tense and Aspect Grammaticalization in Bilbao Spanish.
This is a variationist study of the grammaticalization of the present perfect in Bilbao Spanish in hodiernal and prehodiernal contexts across three social variables: age, social class, and gender. A curvilinear pattern would point to a change in progress, which would support previous research conducted in other Spanish cities.

Jennifer Domino Rudolph
Advisor: Frances Aparicio
Dissertation title: Los hombres nunca se rajan: Racialization, Redemption and Latino Masculinities This dissertation explores the diverse notions of masculinity in U.S. Latino cultures as they intersect with race and racialization. If Latino men have been constructed as foreign, violent, and without redemption by US dominant society, the cultural texts (fiction, music and film) that I analyze shed light on self-constructions of manhood from within the community, thus enhancing our understanding of the intersection of racialization and redemption in Latinos’ formation of their own identities.

M.A. Candidates French

Erin Bond

Advisor:  Margaret Miner

Second language acquisition for French, focus on literature and conversation.