Faculty Profiles
Bárbara Ávila-Shah
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Bárbara Ávila-Shah holds the Masters and the Ph.D. degrees in Spanish linguistics from Cornell University. Her specialties are sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.
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Galen Brokaw
Associate Professor
Galen Brokaw holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University. His primary area of specialization is colonial Latin America with emphases in historiography, indigenous writing, and Nahuatl language and culture. He is also interested in Andean studies and indigenismo and neo-indigenismo in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Erik Bullot
Visiting Scholar
Erik Bullot is a filmmaker and scholar of modern French cinema. He has made more than a dozen experimental films which have been shown in museums and festivals throughout Europe. He locates them somewhere in between the documentary and the art film. He teaches film at the Ecole nationale supérieure d'art de Bourges (in France).
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David Castillo
Professor
David Castillo, Chair of the Department, joined the UB faculty from the University of Oregon, where he had received the Ersted Award for Excellence in Teaching. His research focuses on Golden Age Spain and the works of Cervantes.
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Laura Chiesa
Assistant Professor
Laura Chiesa joins the Department from Yale University. Her area of specialization is modern and contemporary Italian literature.
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Colleen Culleton
Assistant Professor
Colleen Culleton earned graduate degrees from Middlebury College and Cornell University after completing an undergraduate triple major in Spanish, geography, and political science. Her research focuses on 20th-century peninsular literature in both Spanish and Catalán.
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Rosemary G. Feal
Professor
Rosemary G. Feal holds the M.A. and Ph.D. degree from the University at Buffalo. Her research and teaching interests include Latin American literature, Afro-Hispanic studies, and feminist theory.
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Christian Flaugh
Assistant Professor
Christian Flaugh earned his Ph.D. in French from the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A specialist in Francophone studies, Flaugh is an assistant professor whose research interests are in bodies and normality.
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Amy Graves
Associate Professor
Amy Graves earned the Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. She specializes in 16th century French literature, history of the book and material culture, propaganda and polemics, wars of religion (Protestant and Catholic Reformations) and Historiography.
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Jorge Guitart
Professor
Jorge Guitart, professor of Spanish, received Masters and Ph.D. degrees from Georgetown University, where he specialized in theoretical and applied linguistics. His teaching and research are focused on Caribbean Spanish and on bilingualism.
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Maureen Jameson
Associate Professor
Maureen Jameson holds the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. Her teaching and research interests are in 19th- and 20th-century French narrative, particularly the writings of Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She has developed an interest in contemporary electronic media and is working on instructional technologies.
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Eva Juarros-Daussà
Assistant Professor
Eva Juarros-Daussà holds the Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She specializes in romance linguistics, morphology, syntax, evolution of language, argument structure and psycholinguistics.
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Jeannette Ludwig
Associate Professor
Jeannette Ludwig, associate professor of French, received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where she studied second-language acquisition. Her current research interests include gender differences in human communication.
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Justin Read
Associate Professor
Justin Read received the PhD degree from University of Michigan in 2002. His research interests include transamerican poetics with emphasis in Spanish-American vanguardismo, Brazilian modernismo, and U.S. modernism. He offers courses in Portuguese and Spanish American Literature.
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Elizabeth Scarlett
Associate Professor
Elizabeth Scarlett completed her graduate training at Harvard University. She specializes in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century Spanish peninsular literature, feminism, and film.
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Jean-Jacques Thomas
Professor
Jean-Jacques Thomas is the Melodia E. Jones Professor of French. His research interests focus on modern French poetry, linguistics, and Francophone literatures of the New World.
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Mary Lorene Thomas
Visiting Professor
Mary Lorene Thomas is a specialist in dramatic texts of the Spanish Golden Age.
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Paola Ugolini
Visiting Assistant Professor
Paola Ugolini specializes in early modern Italian literature and culture as well as gender studies and the history of sexuality.
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Margarita Vargas
Associate Professor
Margarita Vargas holds graduate degrees from the University of Kansas. Her research interests include Spanish-American theatre, Mexican Literature, and contemporary theory.
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Affiliated Faculty Profiles
José Buscaglia
Associate Professor (American Studies)
José F. Buscaglia is Associate Professor and Director of Cuban and Caribbean Programs. He hold a BA in History and Latin American Studies from Princeton, a Masters of Architecture, Masters in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University at Buffalo. His research interests include Caribbean history and culture, and the aesthetics of what he calls "mulataje."
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François Paré
Adjunct Professor
François Paré is Professor and Chair of French Studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He has a longstanding relationship with UB, first as a student and then as teacher. Recently, he was named a Trillium Book Award winner for La distance habitée, Le Nordir, 2003.
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Rodolphe Gasché
Professor (Comparative Literature)
Rodolphe Gasché holds a M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, critical theory, and its relation to continental philosophy since early romanticism.
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Shaun Irlam
Associate Professor (Comparative Literature)
Shaun Irlam holds an M.A. in English literature from the University of Cape Town and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from John Hopkins University. His research interests include 18th-century cultural studies and aesthetics in England and France, current critical theory with an emphasis on deconstruction, and postcolonial literature and theory with emphasis on Caribbean and African literatures.
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David E. Johnson
Associate Professor (Comparative Literature)
David Johnson holds a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo. His research interests include the relations between anthropology, literature, and philosophy with particular interest in modern philosophy and 20th-century Latin American literary and cultural discourse.
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Jean-Pierre Koenig
Professor
JP Koenig's research interests span semantics, the inferface between syntax and semantics, the organization and processing of lexical and syntactic knowledge, Gricean pragmatics, and natural language processing
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Carine Mardorossian
Associate Professor (English)
Carine Mardorossian's research interests include Postcolonial studies; Caribbean literature; Victorian studies; and feminist criticism.
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Sasha David Pack
Assistant Professor (History)
Sasha Pack's research interests include the history of southern Europe and the Mediterranean region as well as Fascism and authoritarianism. His book Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe's Peaceful Invasion of Franco's Spain (Palgrave, 2006) won the "Best First Book" Prize for the 2004-2006 cycle from the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies.
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Deborah Reed-Danahay
Professor (Anthropology)
Deborah Reed-Danahay works on transnationalism and citizenship, and has published extensively on Pierre Bourdieu. She writes on Europe (including the European Union), France, Vietnamese diaspora communities in the U.S. and France.
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Krzysztof Ziarek
Professor (Comparative Literature)
Krzysztof Ziarek teaches 20th-century comparative literature, especially contemporary poetry and poetics, aesthetics, philosophy and literature, and literary theory. He has published numerous essays, including works on Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and his latest book, The Force of Art, was published by Stanford University Press.
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