Current M.A. & Ph.D. Students
Sandeep Banerjee Mark Barber Sarah Barkin Amy Burnette Mark Celeste Rinku Chatterjee Steven Doles CJ Dosch Lindsey Frank Adrienne Garcia Jules Gibbs Soumitree Gupta Joseph Hughes Peter Johnsmeyer Joseph Kappes Peter Katz Theresa Keicher Jackson Petsche Kicia Sears Jillian Sherwin Ruma Sinha Staci Stutsman TJ West Thomas Witholt
Name / Email
Research & Teaching Interests
Sandeep entered the PhD program in 2007. His dissertation examines landscapes as sites of contestation between the British and Indians during the late 19th and early 20th C; its role in the spatial production of India. His intellectual interests include Long 19th C British literature and culture; Literature and Culture of Colonial India; Marxism(s); Theories of Michel Foucault; Postcolonial Theory; Materialist approaches to space, culture and globalization.
Mark entered the MA program in 2010. His research and teaching interests include Marxist approaches to pop culture; film, ideology and reception; avant-garde music and aesthetics, particularly noise music and sound art; 20th and 21st century American literature; and the politics of critical theory.
Sarah began the PhD program in 2009. (M.A., English, Syracuse University; M.A., History, SFSU). Her research and teaching interests involve visual culture, focusing on the ways in which documentaries, graphic narratives, and photography engage with the interplay of history, memory, geography, and trauma in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. In addition she is interested in Jewish and Arab diasporas, gender, social problem films, and pop culture.
Amy Burnette entered the PhD program in the fall of 2010. Her research interests include early modern literature, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and critical animal studies. She is currently working on a study of the relationship between humans and animals in the works of Shakespeare.
Mark began the MA program in 2010. His research focuses on instances of the supernatural and occult in Early Modern drama and Victorian speculative fiction; he is also interested in book history and graphic novels.
Rinku began the PhD program in 2006. Her research and teaching interests center around Early Modern literature and culture, especially drama; theories of history, Cultural Materialism, and post colonial theory. Her project is titled: "The Witch, the Magus and the Mountebank on the Early Modern Stage". She is also interested in translation studies and Indian writing in English, and has designed and taught courses on ethnicity, gender, and class.
Steven began the PhD program in 2007. His research interests include non-fiction film, including the essay film, the social problem film, and popular culture; he is especially interested in the ways in which films become relevant to their audiences in larger social and political contexts, and attempts to understand the spectator in active rather than passive terms.
C.J. entered the PhD program in 2007. His research interests include American realism, Native American studies, the American West, and American imperialism. His dissertation focuses on Native American intellectuals of the Assimilation era and their manipulation of Euro-American cultural and literary tropes to paradoxically self-determine modern pan-Indian identities through their written texts.
Lindsey began the Ph.D. program in 2010. Her research interests are in film and popular culture, particularly vampires, zombies, monster theory, genre hybridity in the horror-comedy, and feminist issues surrounding representations of embodiment and maternity.
Adrienne is entering the M.A. program in 2011. Her interests include modern political literature and the anti-colonial mode of thought. She hopes to research and define the modern Chicano/a experience in the United States.
Jules Gibbs entered the MA program in 2010 with an MFA in poetry. She is interested in teaching poetics and creative writing.
Soumitree's research and teaching interests include transnational feminism and sexuality studies; postcolonial/anti-colonial literatures and cinemas; globalization, diaspora, and nationalism; transnational cultural studies; temporality; and cultural memory and archive.
Joseph M. Hughes (BA Loyola University New Orleans; MFA University of Notre Dame; entered PhD program 2008). Primary field: early modern and long-eighteenth-century British literature, with a focus on depictions of slavery in the West Indies and the reification of whiteness and blackness as racial/racist categories. Secondary Fields of Interest: anti- and post-colonial theory, critical race theory, race in contemporary film and popular culture, contemporary Caribbean writers.
Peter's current research focuses on the apocalyptic representation of America in the works of Cormac McCarthy and, more broadly, in contemporary American fiction and visual media. His interests also include representations of music in literature, depictions of social crises, modern and postmodern literature, experimental novels, satire, popular culture, graphic narratives, and genre fiction.
Joseph began the PhD program in 2011. His research interests include the utility of literature and the intersection of science, philosophy and literature. Especially, he is interested in the connection between evolutionary biology, existential freedom(s), and late 20th century American short fiction.
Peter entered the Ph.D. program in 2010. His theoretical interests center around Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Baudrillard, Barthes, postmodernisms' intersections and conflicts with Marxism, and the question of historicism. He traces these theories largely on the surface of Victorian Studies, specifically liberal reform, sartorial studies, violence and violent sport, and the production of novel reading, readers, and writers.
Cultural studies, education, and (neo-) colonialism' s impact on human relations.
Esei Murakishi
Esei's interests include: Milton, the seventeenth-century lyric, Wittgenstein, and contemporary American poetry.
Jackson entered the PhD program in 2010. His research interests include Marxist theory, critical animal studies, Victorian literature and culture, aesthetics, and critical/cultural theory.
Kicia entered the MA program in 2011. Her research interests include postcolonial and national studies, gender theory, and film. Other intellectual interests are semiotics, Marxism, and cultural studies.
Jillian began the PhD program in 2008. Her research interests include the Long Nineteenth Century British Novel, with a focus on Jane Austen and the publication history of her novels, and the History of the Book. She is also interested in Jane Austen Fan Fiction, and other types of current popular nineteenth century novel reworkings. She has been a teaching assistant for Interpretation of Film and Popular Culture, and has taught Gender and Literary Texts and British Literature since 1789.
My research and teaching interests include Postcolonial studies, African-American studies, and Caribbean Literature. In particular, I am interested in the autobiographical works by African-American women writers, Indian Literature in English and Translation, diasporic literature, subaltern narratives, gender studies, and minority discourse.
Staci began the PhD program in 2011. Her research and teaching interests involve visual culture. She is especially interested in new media studies and blogs (focusing on how blogs and other new media affect the history of the book, authorship, and postfeminism). Her other interests include gender and queer theory, popular culture, and film studies.
T.J. began the Ph.D. Program in 2011. He is interested in the ways in which film, television, and other aspects of popular culture undertake the process of creating and reproducing a normative gender and sexuality. Specifically, he is interested in the ways in which historical films and television series (especially those representing the Greek/Roman and Medieval/Renaissance pasts) make either explicit or implicit arguments about the gender/sexuality of the period being depicted, and what that says both about that time period and about our own. He is also interested in the body, and how representations of it have changed and evolved over time, as well as in how popular culture differentiates (or fails to do so), between human and animal bodies. He is very interested in the series The Golden Girls and its power as a feminist text. He also studies feminist, gender, and queer theory more generally, masculinity studies, and various aspects of body studies.
Thomas began the PhD program in 2009 and researches film and popular culture, especially graphic narratives, focusing on gender and genre, with many tangential interests including adaptations and issues of time (time travel, intentional anachronisms, and apocalypse). He teaches introductory courses in film and popular culture.