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
Assistant 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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José Buscaglia
Associate Professor
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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David Castillo
Associate Professor
David Castillo 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
Visiting 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
Assistant 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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Mária Elena Gutiérrez
Associate Professor
Mária Elena Gutiérrez holds the PhD degree and has teaching and research interests in Italian theatre, film, contemporary Italian literature, and feminism.
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Maureen Jameson
Associate Professor
Maureen Jameson, Chair of the Department, 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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Emanuele Licastro
Professor emeritus
Emanuele Licastro earned the Ph.D. degree at the University of Wisconsin. His interests are in modern Italian literature, theater, Pirandello, and Italian cinema.
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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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Alberto Moreiras
Regular Visiting Professor
The Sixth-century Professor of Hispanic Studies and Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen has research interests in Latin American literature and thought.
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Justin Read
Assistant 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 will be offering courses this year 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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Ramón Soto-Crespo
Assistant Professor
Ramón Soto-Crespo holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Purdue University in 1996. His areas of interest include Latina/o and Caribbean literature, Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer studies.
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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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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
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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