Placement and Dissertations

Spanish

Pedro Aguilera-Mellado
Dissertation Title: Archisms in Liberal and Neoliberal Spain: On Death, Dictatorship, and Democracy
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Assistant Professor at The University of Notre Dame du Lac

Lucía Naser
Dissertation Title: De la politización de la danza a la dancificación de la política
Dissertation Director: Gareth Williams
Placement: Communications and Development Coordinator of the Faculty of Physical Education at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay

Shannon Dowd
Dissertation Title: Stasis: Border Wars in 20th and 21st Century Latin American Literature and Film
Dissertation Director: Gareth Williams
Placement: Postdoctoral fellow, University of Michigan

Juanita Bernal
Dissertation Title: The Secret History of Paramilitarism: Capitalist Insurrections in Colombia's 20th and 21st Centuries
Dissertation Director: Gareth Williams
Placement: Postdoctoral fellow, University of Michigan

Laura Herbert
Dissertation Title: Silver Screen Sovereignty:  Mexican Film and the Intersections of Reproductive Labor and Biopolitics
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams

French

Benjamin Ireland
Dissertation Title: The East Asian Métis in Francophone Literatures of the South Pacific, Indian Ocean, and North America
Dissertation Director: Jarrod Hayes
Placement: Assistant Professor, Texas Christian University, Forth Worth

Spanish

Elizabeth Barrios
Dissertation Title: Invisible Geographies: Oil, Time, and Ecology in Venezuelan Cultural Production
Dissertation Chair: Kate Jenckes
Placement: Assistant Professor, Albion College

Karen Frazier
Dissertation Title: Neoliberal Noir: Bearing Witness to Systemic and Subjective Violence in Mexico
Dissertation Chair: Kate Jenckes
Placement: Senior Researcher, American Institutes for Research

Anna Mester
Dissertation Title: Iberian Atlantic Imperial Carcerality: Narratives and Vestiges of Disciplinary Violence in Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, and Mozambique from Colonialism and Beyond
Dissertation Chair: Fernando Arenas & Juli Highfill
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Martin Vega
Dissertation Title: Mothers and Daughters at Imperial Crossroads: Expressions of Status, Economy and Motherhood in 16th Century Mexico
Dissertation Chair: Gustavo Verdesio
Placement: Assistant Professor, Bucknell University (declined); College Fellow, Harvard University

Italian

Mattia Beghelli
Dissertation Title: As Seen on TV: Programming Cinema and Entertainment in Italy during the Long 1980s
Dissertation Chair: Giorgio Bertellini
Placement: Academic Advisor, University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts

Pierluigi Ergaggio
Dissertation Title: Writing Mussolini: Il Duce’s American Biographies on Paper and on Screen, 1922-36
Dissertation Chair: Giorgio Bertellini
Placement: Visiting Assistant Professor, Kenyon College (declined); Administrative Assistant for the Italian Consulate in Detroit

Francesca Minonne
Dissertation Title: Between Italy and Argentina: Circular Accents in Contemporary Migration Literature
Dissertation Chair: Giorgio Bertellini

Roberto Vezzani
Dissertation title: Reframing Italianness: Circulation of Italian Fiction Films in the United States During the 1930s
Dissertation Chair: Giogio Bertellini
Placement: World Language Faculty, North High School, Grosse Pointe MI

French

Matthieu Dupas
Dissertation Title: The Postsexual Transition: Sex and Love After Sexuality in the Contemporary French Novel
Dissertation Chairs: David Caron & David Halperin
Placement: Assistant Professor, Northwestern University

Spanish

Erika Almenara
Dissertation Title: The Language of Travestism and the Political Limits of the National-Popular in 20th and 21st Century Latin American Cultural Production
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas

Matias Beverinotti
Dissertation Title: What Happened in History since the End of History?: Populism and New Historical Discourse in Argentina
Placement: Assistant Professor, San Diego State University

David Collinge
Dissertation Title: The Turning Wheel of Hostility: The E.T.A. in Literature and Film in Spain since the 1970s
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Visiting Assistant Professor, Union College

Rodrigo Toromoreno
Dissertation Title: One World is Not Enough: The Colonial Amazon and the Shaping of the New World
Dissertation Chair: Gustavo Verdesio
Placement: Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Michigan

Brian Whitener
Dissertation Title: The Rise of Finance: Cultural Production and Politics in Mexico and Brazil After 1982
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of South Alabama

French

Maria Canal
Dissertation Title: Récits de consolation et Consolations du récit dans la littérature française de la fin du Moyen Âge
Dissertation Chair: Peggy McCracken
Placement: Public Project Liaison, Mayor’s Office, Geneva

Spanish

Diogenes Costa Curras
Dissertation Title: Redeeming Realism: Alternate Historicities in Spanish Film and Literature
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Visiting Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Mara Pastor 
Dissertation Title: La Dimension Inexacta: Two Case Studies on War, Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Production in Puerto Rico in the 1970's.
Dissertation Chair: Kate Jenckes
Placement: Assistant Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico, Ponce

Rachel TenHaaf
Dissertation Title: Visualizing an Aesthetics of Resistance: The Role of Sight in 19th and 20th Century (Neo)Realism on the Iberian Peninsula
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kalamazoo College

Federico Pous
Dissertation Title: Beyond Incarceration: Prison Literature and Political Subjectivation in Cold War Latin America
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor, Elon University

Gabriel Horowitz 
Dissertation Title: Fantasies of Independence and their Latin American Legacies
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor of Spanish, Arkansas State University

French

Mamadou Moustapha Ly 
Dissertation Title: Edouard Glissant in Theory and Practice: A Diasporic Poetics of Politics 
Dissertation Chair: Jarrod Hayes
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Denver

Tanya Camela Logan  
Dissertation Title: Sartorial Second Skins: Black Men, Masculinity, and Agency in Dress in Paris and Brussels from 1976 to Present  
Dissertation Chair: Frieda Ekotto

French

Marie Stoll
Dissertation Title: "Masculin, Féminin" et l’écriture littéraire et cinématographique burkinabè : Double émergence, double affirmation
Dissertation Chair: Jarrod Hayes
Placement: Visiting Assistant Professor, Humbolt State University

Italian

Juliet Guzzetta
Dissertation Title: Stages of History: Performing 1970s Italy with Narrative Theater
Dissertation Chair: Vincenzo Binetti
Placement: Assistant Professor, Michigan State University

Spanish

Aaron Boalick
Dissertation Title: Revitalizing Youth in the Body Politics of Contemporary Spanish Culture
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Adjunct, Columbia University for Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Michigan

French

Maxime Foerster
Dissertation Title: French Romanticism and the Reinvention of Love
Dissertation Chair: Michèle Hannoosh
Placement: Assistant Professor, Southern Methodist University in Dallas

Spanish

Talía Dajes
Dissertation Title: Staging Terror:  Violence and the Aesthetics of Civil War in Contemporary Peru
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Visiting Assistant Professor, Westminster College

Christian Kroll
Dissertation Title: Writing Beyond Reason:  Literature, Insurgency, Counterinsurgency and Sovereignty in Contemporary Latin America
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor, Reed College

Marcelino Viera
Dissertation Title: In the Shadow of Liberalism: The Culture and Literature of Anarchism in the Río de la Plata (1880-1930) 
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor, Michigan Technological University

Sandra Watts
Dissertation Title: Genre in the Works of Benjamín Jarnés:  "el género intermedio"
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Senior Lecturer, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

French

Jennifer Solheim
Dissertation Title: Sounding the Text: Listening to Gender in Mediterranean Culture in French
Dissertation Chair: David Caron and Jarrod Hayes
Placement: Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago

Spanish

Alejandro Quin
Dissertation Title: Taming the Chaos:  Nature, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Writing in Modern Latin America
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Utah

Jessica Piney
Dissertation Title: A Trans-Atlantic Encounter: Special Period Migration and La Nueva España: Geographies and Cultural Production of the Cuban Velvet Exile in Contemporary Spain
Dissertation Chair: Larry LaFountain-Stokes
Placement: Lecturer, Pennsylvania State University

ErieMariam Colón Pizarro 
Dissertation Title: Poetic Pragmatism: The Puerto Rican Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO) and the Politics of Cultural Production, 1949-1968
Dissertation Chair: Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez

Robert Wells
Dissertation Title: Humanism and Deshumanización:  Fiction and Philosophy of a Transatlantic Avant-Garde
Dissertation Chair: Juli Highfill and Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Sarah Cyganiak
Dissertation Title: The Method of Maria Zambrano: An Analysis and Translated Selection of Essays Centered on the Concepts of the Word, the Person, Compassion and Love
Dissertation Chair: Juli Highfill
Placement: Assistant Professor, Carthage College

Javier Entrambasaguas
Dissertation Title: The Social Movements in Contemporary Spanish Culture
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Lecturer, University of Michigan

French

Elena Dalla Torre
Dissertation Title: French and Italian Feminist Exchanges in the 1970s: Queer Embraces in Queer Time
Dissertation Chair: Jarrod Hayes and Peggy McCracken
Placement: Lecturer, University of Michigan

Julie Human
Dissertation Title: Looking Back: Medieval French Romance and the Dynamics of Seeing
Dissertation Chair: Peggy McCracken
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Kentucky

Rebecca Wines
Dissertation Title: Sporting Frenchness: Nationality, Race, and Gender at Play
Dissertation Chair: Jarrod Hayes
Placement: Assistant Professor, Cornell College

Italian

Federica Colleoni
Dissertation Title: Violenza politica e identita nazionale: Trauma, Spettralita e allegoria nella letteratura e nel cinema
Dissertation Chair: Vincenzo Binetti
Placement: Instructor, University of South Florida

Spanish

Daniel Arroyo-Rodríguez 
Dissertation Title: Guerrilla Narratives in Spanish Contemporary Culture
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Assistant Professor at Colorado College

Andrea Dewees
Dissertation Title: The Trembling Foundations of the Guatemalan National Novel: The Case of Miguel Angel Asturias
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Alaska Southeast

Annie Hesp
Dissertation Title: Writing the Camino: First-Person Narratives of the Camino de Santiago, 1985-2009
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Lecturer, Virginia Tech

Andreea Marinescu
Dissertation Title: Dialoguing Across Catastrophies: Chilean Post-Coup and Post-Dictatorship Cultural Production
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Associate Professor, Colorado College

Roberto Robles-Valencia
Dissertation Title: Melancholic Nation:  The Affective Culture of Spanish Nationalism
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of South Alabama

Ofelia Ros
Dissertation Title: The Uncanny Laughs Once Again: Subjectivity and Structures of Ideological Domination in Late Twenty-Century Argentinean Cultural Production
Dissertation Chair: Kate Jenckes
Placement: Professor and Researcher, Instituto Caro y Cuervo and Graduate Professor in the Universidad Santo Tomás, Bogotá, Colombia

French

Julie Robert
Dissertation Title: A Nation's Ills: Medico-National Allegory in Quebec 
Dissertation Chair: Jarrod Hayes
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Technology, Sydney

Italian

Silvia Marchetti
Dissertation Title: Promoting the "Minor": A Figural Practice in Italian Literature and Film
Dissertation Chair: Vincenzo Binetti
Placement: Diplomat, State of San Marino

Spanish

Manuel Chinchilla
Dissertation Title: In the Wake of '68:  Literature and the Cultural Politics of Democracy in Contemporary Mexico
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Associate Professor, Senawee: The University of the South

Noelia Sol Cirnigliaro
Dissertation Title: Through the Cellar and From the Window: Urban Domesticity and Literary Creation in Early Modern Spain (1583-1663)
Dissertation Chair: Enrique García Santo-Tomás
Placement: Associate Professor, Dartmouth College

Sebastián Díaz
Dissertation Title: Against Paraguay: Visual and Literary Culture in the War Against Paraguay (1864-1870)
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College

Eduardo Matos Martín
Dissertation Title: Thinking Biopolitics: Reflections on Franco’s Dictatorship through Contemporary Fiction
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Faculty Fellow, New York University

Cristina Miguez
Dissertation Title: Changing Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in Latin American Crime Cinema and Narrative
Dissertation Chair: Daniel Noemi Voionmaa
Placement: Assistant Professor, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Colorado

Pedro Porben
Dissertation Title: The Desired Revolution and the New Man: Assembling and Negotiating Cultural and Intellectual Practices in Revolutionary Cuba (1959-2007)
Dissertation Chair: Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola
Placement: Associate Professor, Bowling Green State University

Radost Rangelova
Dissertation Title: House, Factory, Beauty Salon, Brothel: Space, Gender and Sexuality in Puerto Rican Literature and Film
Dissertation Chair: Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Placement: Associate Professor, Gettysburg College

Alana Reid
Dissertation Title: The Pirated Body: Mapping Gender and Nationality in Contemporary Hispanic Fiction
Dissertation Chair: Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Central Arkansas

Raquel Vega Duran
Dissertation Title: The Migrant’s Journey: Border-Crossing, Otherness, and the Politics of Place in Spanish Culture
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras Menor
Placement: Assistant Professor, Claremont McKenna College

Sergio Escobar
Dissertation Title: Manuela, by Eugenio Diaz Castro, the Novel about the Colombian Foundational Impasse
Dissertation Chair: Javier Sanjines
Placement: Associate Professor, Truman State University

French

Michelle Miller
Dissertation Title: Material Friendship: Service and Amity in Early Modern French Literature
Dissertation Chair: George Hoffmann
Placement: Marketing, Google Inc.

Sharon Marquart
Dissertation Title: Witnessing Communities and an Ethics of Reading
Dissertation Co-chairs: David Caron & Juli Highfill
Placement: Assistant Professor, Wilfred Laurier University 

Spanish

Andrea Fanta
Dissertation Title: Narratives of Abandonment: Colombia's Cultural Production from 1990 to 2007
Dissertation Chair: Daniel Noemi
Placement: Assistant Professor, Florida International University

Fernando Velásquez
Dissertation Title: The Political Constitution of the Literary: Impossible Nationhood and Alternative Commonality in Modern Peru
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Associate Professor, St. Joseph's College

Ana Ros
Dissertation Title: Inheritance: Living Memory, Leaving Countries. Uruguayan and Argentinean Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium
Dissertation Chair: Daniel Noemi
Placement: Assistant Professor, SUNY Binghamton

Anne McGee
Dissertation Title: From Tomochic to Las Jornadas Villistas:  History, Memory, and Regional Identity in Chihuahua and Durango
Dissertation Chair: Gareth Williams
Placement: Visiting Assistant Professor, Indiana University

Leslie Marsh
Dissertation Title: Embodying Citizenship in Brazilian Women’s Film, Video and Literature, 1971 to 1988
Dissertation Co-chairs: Catherine Benamou and Larry LaFountain-Stokes
Placement: Associate Professor, Georgia State University

Patricia Keller
Dissertation Title: Reading the Ghost:  Towards a Theory of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture 
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor 
Placement: Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Jonathan Snyder
Dissertation Title: Reading Culture at the Threshold:  Time and Transition in Modern Spain (1800 – 1990)
Dissertation Chair:  Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Graduate Program Coordinator (M.A.), New York University

French

Dominica Chang
Dissertation Title: Textually Transmitted Revolutions: Revolutionary Mimicry and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century France
Dissertation Chair: William Paulson
Placement: Associate Professor, Lawrence University

Olivier Delers
Dissertation Title: The Other Rise of the Novel: Alternative Economies in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
Dissertation Chair: William Paulson
Placement: Associate Professor, University of Richmond

Spanish

Wilfredo Valentin Marquez
Dissertation Title: Doing being boricua: Perceptions of national identity and the sociolinguistic distribution ofliquid variables in Puerto Rican Spanish
Dissertation Chair: Lesley Milroy and Teresa Satterfield
Placement: Assistant Professor, Millersville University

Megan Saltzman
Dissertation Title: The Deteriorating Histories in the Public Everyday Space of Post-Francoist Barcelona
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Assistant Professor, West Chester University

French

Honorine Abessolo
Dissertation Title: Postcolonial African Literature and Art: A Father's Death as Allegory of Dislocated Culture
Dissertation Chair: George Hoffmann

Benedicte Boisseron
Dissertation Title: Taking the Postcolonial Lead: Decentering the Metropole Through Martinican Literature
Dissertation Chair: Frieda Ekotto and Jarrod Hayes
Placement: Associate Professor, University of Montana

Patrick Dodd
Dissertation Title: Le Mythe Negre: ideologie de la race, de la sexualite et de l'immobilite chez Dany Laferriere
Dissertation Chair: Frieda Ekotto
Placement: Freelance Artist, New York City

Joanna Gill
Dissertation Title: Between Rejection and Redemption: Representations of the Father in Sartre, Beauvoir, Genet and Camus, 1939-1949
Dissertation Chair: David Caron and Frieda Ekotto

Spanish

Silvia Ximena Soruco-Sologuren
Dissertation Title: The City of the Cholos. Bolivia in Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Dissertation Chair: Javier Sanjines
Placement: Researcher, Graduate University for Strategic Research in Bolivia

Constanza Svidler
Dissertation Title: Narratives of Failure and Impossibility: Dismantling Silenced Trauma in Postdictatorial Argentina
Dissertation Chair: Jossianna Arroyo and Santiago Colás
Placement: Interim Manager, Kaiser Permanente

French

Megan Moore
Dissertation Title: Translating Byzantium: Cross-Cultural Marriage and Gender in Medieval French Romance
Dissertation Chair: Peggy McCracken
Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Missouri

Spanish

Orlando Bentancor
Dissertation Title: The Life of Metals in Potosi: Colonial Mining in the XVI, XVII, and XX Centuries
Dissertation Chair: Gustavo Verdesio
Placement: Assistant Professor, Barnard College

Susana Draper
Dissertation Title: Transmutants in the Poslettered City: Intellectuals, Culture, and Politics in Uruguay at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Century
Dissertation Chair: Santiago Colás and Gareth Williams
Placement: Associate Professor, Princeton University

Emma Garcia
Dissertation Title: Reading Latinas: A Cultural Analysis of Beauty, Gender and Empowering Models For and By Latinas
Dissertation Chair: Francis Aparicio and Jossianna Arroyo
Placement: Assistant Professor, Colby College

Luis Martin-Cabrera
Dissertation Title: El No-lugar: Novela Policial y Justicia en las Postdictaduras de España del Cono Sur
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Placement: Associate Professor, University of California at San Diego

Monika Szumilak
Dissertation Title: Reconfiguring Spanish Subjects: Trans/Nationality and Technology in Spanish Narrative and Film after 1992
Dissertation Chair: Cristina Moreiras- Menor and William Paulson
Placement: Owner, Freedom Therapy