Alumni Profiles

My research focuses on Arabic Intellectual History in the late 19th and early 20th century. I trace, using a method of comparative philology, the cognitive networks that map the history of the Levant and Egypt in the 19th century. Philology allows me to read these intellectual networks and their histories in close fidelity to their moments of tension and slippage, thus revealing the role of contingency inherent in philological practice. The project is nuances, and thus complicates, the intellectual landscape of the 19th century Arab intelligentsia within the problem-spaces of capitalist modernity. What we find is a critical revaluation of the Nahdah as a massively heterogeneous landscape, yet to be understood on its own terms within the 19th century. 

I have also written and presented on contemporary Arabic theater, specifically the works of Sulayman al-Bassam, and contemporary music in Lebanon, specifically the booming of hip-hop.

Email: zkd205@nyu.edu     

Research Interests: 19-21st century French, English, and comparative modernisms, literature and philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, poetics, environmental humanities

Michael Krimper earned his BA in French and Philosophy at UC Berkeley, and his PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University in May 2018. He specializes in 19th-21st century French and English literature, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in transatlantic modernisms. His other research and teaching interests include narrative and the novel, critical theory, diaspora and exile studies, and translation. He is currently preparing his dissertation, "Beyond Work: The Ethics and Politics of Inoperative Literature (Blanchot, Bataille, Melville, Beckett)," for publication as a book manuscript. He has published on Blanchot, Levinas, and Heidegger, and has other articles forthcoming on Beckett.

Mert Bahadir Reisoglu completed his BA in Philosophy at Yale University and wrote his Master's thesis on Georges Bataille under the supervision of Denis Hollier. He is currently writing his dissertation on the role of transportation and communication technologies in the works of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Güney Dal, Thomas Arslan, Aysun Bademsoy and others under the supervision of Avital Ronell. He thereby situates Turkish German works within the context of German and Turkish avant-garde movements in literature, cinema and theater. He published articles on Özdamar, Kittler and Gezi protests, as well as on Levinas, Blanchot

Research Interests: Literary Theory, Continental Philosophy, Russian Formalism, German Romanticism, Soviet and Western Marxisms

Siarhei Biareishyk’s research concerns the encounters between literary theory and political philosophy; aesthetics and Marxism; and literature and science. Working in the materialist tradition of Spinoza and Marx, his dissertation investigates latent transpositions and explicit misappropriations of Spinoza’s thought at the turn of the 19th century in Germany in view of its persistent effects in contemporary debates. His broader project also investigates the political dimensions in literature and literary theory through the mediated relations among Spinoza, German Romanticism (Schelling, Novalis, Kleist), and Soviet Marxism (Arvatov, Ilyenkov) and Formalism (Tynyanov, Shklovsky). 

At NYU, Siarhei completed a certificate in The Poetics and Theory Program, where he co-organized reading groups and numerous events, including the conference "Standpoint of Reproduction: Questions for Contemporary Materialist Thought." 

Juan Carlos Aguirre is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the College Core Curriculum at New York University, where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. His research focuses on Latin American testimonial and nonfiction literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, through which lens he examines the persistence of colonial cartographies, as well as the intersections between popular culture, migration, illicit economies, and globalization. His work recently appeared in the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal The Global South.

Research Interests: Critical Theory, Modern Chinese Literature, Political Philosophy, Studies in Subculture

Qin Wang received his B.A. and M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature from East China Normal University. He is the winner of Global Writing Fellowship at NYU-Shanghai and the Dissertation Fellowship of NYU Center for Humanities (declined) for the 2016-17 academic year. His research interests include critical theory, modern Chinese literature, political philosophy, and studies in subculture. His dissertation focuses on the configuration of the individual in modern Chinese literature, discussing the way in which literary individuality is distinguished from the notion of individuality determined in socio-political theories. The undergraduate courses he taught at NYU include “Texts and Ideas: Animal Human” (as TA), “Cultures and Contexts: China” (as TA), and “Contemporary Japanese Subculture and the End of Narrative.” He is the translator of the Chinese edition of Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (forthcoming); Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil; Jacques Lezra, Wild Materialism; and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. He is currently performing postdoctoral research at Peking University.

Dafne Duchesne-Sotomayor received her B.A. in Comparative Literature and French from the University of Puerto Rico and entered the Ph.D program at NYU in 2010. Her undergraduate thesis, published in the Argentinian journal Confines, focuses on the voice and gaze as the paradoxical positions that mark the displacements of the poetic subject between the interior and exterior of the poem, in Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Extracción de la piedra de la locura”. Her interests include: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, 20th century Latin American literature, Baroque discourse, Francophone literature, and testimony.

Duchesne-Sotomayor is currently a full time one-year instructor at the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University.

Languages: German, French and Japanese

Research Interests: Intermedial modernism, Folk art in America

Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

Research Interests: Comparative Literature of the Americas; disability studies

Languages: Albanian, Spanish, French

Research Interests: Time and temporality, anachronism, realism, theories of the novel, genre criticism, history and historiography, peasant studies, urban studies, theories of revolt and revolution, aesthetics and politics, Balkan literature and cinema. He is currently working on a book project, tentatively entitled Reading the Peasant Question, which looks at literary contributions to agrarian debates across Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Languages: Afrikaans, German, French

Research interests: Her dissertation, "Indian Ocean Passages: Time in Narratives of Indenture and Internment," focuses on the narratives produced by and in the wake of the mass movement of people between South Asia and South Africa at the turn of the last century, looking specifically at two groups: Indian indentured laborers who arrived in South Africa between 1860 and 1909, and South African Prisoners-of-War who were held in South African POW campus during the second South African War (1822-1902). Her work has been published in MLN, and she is the recipient of the 2015-16 Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities at New York University.

Languages: German, French, Spanish

Research interests: Realisms, inventions of a useable present

Languages: French, Turkish, German, Spanish

Research interests: Comparative modernisms; 19th- and 20th-century Turkish and French literatures; philosophy of time; translation studies; critical theory

Languages: German, French, Spanish

Research interests: Chamfort, Benjamin

Languages: Spanish, French, Specialization in Performance Studies

Research interests: Narratives in resentment

Languages: German, French, Specialization in Media Studies

Research interests: Expanded Internet art