Elizabeth Benninger received her B.A. in Spanish and Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. Her research at NYU has focused primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures in Arabic and Spanish. She received her M.A. in 2015 for a thesis on uneven temporalities and the blurring of generic distinctions in Benito Pérez Galdós’s La desheredada. Her dissertation, National Literatures, Internationlist Comparatism: Writing the Contemporary in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt and Spain proposes an “internationalist” method of literary comparison which seeks to reckon with the importance of the “national” aspects of literary production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries across four different national contexts (Egypt, Spain, Peru, and Ottoman Syria). Using “genre” and “historical representation” as vectors of comparison, the dissertation offers new grounds for comparative work and trajectories of comparison that do not rely upon imperial narratives or the triangulation of “peripheries” with a cultural “center.”
Elizabeth co-organized the Feminist Reading Group for graduate students and faculty at NYU and neighboring institutions since 2015. Further information can be found at https://frgnyu.wordpress.com/.
Alumni
Elizabeth Benninger
Tuhin Bhattacharjee
Bringing together ancient Greek and Sanskrit texts – as well as their reception in (post)colonial Bengali culture, 20th-21st century feminist philosophy, and the German-English socialist tradition – Bhattacharjee's dissertation investigates figurations of desiring mothers in antiquity. His dissertation, Maternal Origins: Comparative Approaches to Ritual, Cosmogony, and Sexuality in Ancient Greece and India, uses the figure of the mother as its focal point, his project explores how the Greek “classics” interface with the study of Sanskrit texts, what interferences one creates in the other, and how the intellectual tendencies of each can work to both unsettle and reanimate the forces on the other side of the equation. He engages in close readings of key ancient texts – from Plato to Greek tragedy, from the Vedas to the Mahabharata – to examine the frequent invocation of the desiring mother. Deploying the variegated tools of philology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, phenomenology, postcolonial criticism, and feminist/queer theory, the dissertation asks how maternal bodies, desires, and pleasures are articulated in these texts in formulations that complicate modern theorizations of nature, gender, and sexuality.
Bhattacharjee's approach to ancient texts thus poses urgent questions for 21st-century thought – questions that require serious rethinking today when issues such as abortion and parenting rights are fiercely debated, assisted reproductive technologies remain points of contention in several countries, and queer kinships and non-normative parenting are increasingly gaining ground. Against the anti-natal turn in queer theory, which often sees radical negativity as the only model for queer political engagement, this dissertation theorizes a queerness that does not exclude life and the opaque processes of coming-to-be, of the proliferation of desires and bodies beyond conscious or predictable pathways. Going back to the maternal figure in ancient texts, and tracing its genealogies across unexpected geo-literary terrains such as 19th-century European socialism and an early-20th-century psychoanalyst from Bengal, allows Bhattacharjee to interrogate these foundational moments and interpret them in ways that warrant a radical remapping of our histories, traditions, and philosophical inheritances.
Daniella Gitlin
Daniella's dissertation, Documents of Urgency: Postwar Responses to Grave Injustice, revolves around documentary writing and film that responds to grave injustice in mid-20th-century Argentina, the United States, and Palestine/Israel, and effects in its reading and viewing publics a sense of urgency about how unjust conditions might be improved, how a better world may be possible. Daniella is also pursuing a Certificate in Media and Culture at NYU, through which she is at work on a documentary film. Her English translation of Argentine author Rodolfo Walsh's 1957 book-length work of investigative journalism, Operation Massacre [Operación Masacre], was published by Seven Stories Press in 2013. Daniella's writing and translations have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Huffington Post, CineAction, and Asymptote Journal, among other publications, and she is currently at work on a book about Israel. Daniella sits on the board of and helps run Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria, a nonprofit, bilingual community bookshop in Washington Heights staffed predominantly by volunteers.
Shirin Nadira Sulaiman
Zach Rivers
Zach Rivers received a BA in English Literature from Georgia State University in 2009 and an MA in Gender Studies from Central University in 2012 with a thesis entitled “Subjectivity Without Return” before coming to NYU in 2013. His dissertation at NYU studies iterations of weaving in Ancient Greek literature and philosophy – mostly of the 4th and 5th Century BCE – as indissociable from sexual difference in order to approach such divergent topics of embodiment, the materiality of language, cultural inheritance, and cultural obliteration. Weaving gathers a poikilotic array of significations that shuttles the spectrum from denigrated feminine activity to valorized masculine metaphor. By reading for embodied feminine weavers that exceed patriarchy’s dream of autopoesis, this dissertation attempts to unravel disavowed yet existing threads of material subjects and objects made unintelligible by the discursive frameworks that structure and allocate social and material positioning. Indeed, the woven veils, shrouds, words, and robes that populate philosophy’s most renowned metaphors helped to murder husbands, form social bonds, give voice to the tongueless, and keep menacing suitors at bay. His dissertation, Weaving Gender and Race in Classical Athens and its Modern Receptions, enacts an embodied, situated knowledge approach and affirms deconstructive feminisms as always already imbricated with intransigent yet volatile Ancient inheritances.
Honey Watson
Honey Watson
Research interests: Contemporary Chinese Literature, Chinese Science Fiction, Science Fictions, Translation, Gothic Literature, Soviet Film, Gothic Marxist Materialism.
Smaran Dayal
Research Interests: Science Fiction Studies, African American and Global Anglophone Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Queer Theory.
Smaran Dayal is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Stevens Institute of Technology. A scholar of Global Anglophone and American literature, Dayal has previously held fellowships funded by the Mellon Foundation, the European Council, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He is the co-editor, with Univ. Prof. Ulrich Baer, of an anthology of American literature, Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts (2020), and maintains an active translation practice. His scholarly work has appeared in the journals American Studies, Citizenship Studies, and Social Text, among other venues.
Email: sdayal@stevens.edu
Lauren K. Wolfe
Lauren K. Wolfe is Associate Faculty and Program Coordinator at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, a non-profit teaching and research institute offering critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences for working adults. Her teaching and research interests include 20th and 21st century Austrian and German literature and cultural and political history and the theory and practice of translation. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU with a dissertation on translation ethics and methods, an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in German Studies from Grinnell College. She is a founding editor of Barricade—A Journal of Antifascism and Translation. Her translations, which include drama, poetry, prose literature, and philosophical writings, have been published with Dalkey Archive Press, MIT Press, the University of Minnesota Press, and elsewhere.
Email: lkw268@nyu.edu
Ziad Dallal
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
Michael Krimper
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
Research Interests: Turkish-German Studies, Twentieth- and twenty-first century German literature and cinema, German media theory, minority literatures, surrealism, history of philosophy, theories of modernism and the avant-garde, postdramatic and postmigrant theater, Turkish literature and cinema
Mert Bahadir Reisoglu completed his BA in Philosophy at Yale University, wrote his Master's thesis on Georges Bataille under the supervision of Denis Hollier, and completed his dissertation, "Circulations and Archives: Turkish German Literature and Cinema in the Age of Technological Media" 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 is currently an Assistant Professor in English Language and Comparative Literature at Koç Üniversitesi, and has published numerous articles, touching on Turkish-German memory, the condition of the exile, and perspectives on the refugee crisis.
Siarhei Biareishyk
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
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.
Qin Wang
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
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.
Lucy Ives
Languages: German, French and Japanese
Research Interests: Intermedial modernism, Folk art in America
Kevin Goldstein
Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian
Research Interests: Comparative Literature of the Americas; disability studies
Erag Ramizi
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.
Nienke Boer
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.
Sonia Werner
Languages: German, French, Spanish
Research interests: Realisms, inventions of a useable present
Ozen Nergis Dolcerocca
Languages: French, Turkish, German, Spanish
Research interests: Comparative modernisms; 19th- and 20th-century Turkish and French literatures; philosophy of time; translation studies; critical theory
Sage Anderson
Research Interests: Translation practice and theory, modern French and German literature, short literary forms
Manuel Gonzalez
Languages: Spanish, French, Specialization in Performance Studies
Research interests: Narratives in resentment
Cecilia Moss
Languages: German, French, Specialization in Media Studies
Research interests: Expanded Internet art
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
My work centers on African and Latin American literatures, with a focus on the intersection of large-scale frameworks—including World Literature, the Global Anglophone, and in particular the Global South—with local and regional specificities. I am completing a book on novels about dictators in the post-independence literatures of Latin America and Africa, and beginning another on the African novel in the 21st century. I have also published essays on topics such as women’s writing in nineteenth-century Argentina, the function of the fetish in representations of the African dictator, Africa and science fiction, and magical realism in the South Atlantic.
In addition to these research projects, I am co-director of the digital platform Global South Studies, have served as guest editor for an issue of The Global South ("Dislocations," 7.2; 2013), and am a founding member of the executive committee for the forum on the Global South (CLCS; G152) at the Modern Language Association; I will chair this committee in 2018-2019.
Before joining Penn State in 2015, I was an Early Career Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center (2014-2015) and Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Mississippi, where I taught courses on World Literature and postcolonial studies (2012-2015).