GRADUATE STUDENTS
Malcolm Thaine Bare studies the representation of industrial and domestic architectural spaces in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel and their relationship with genre. His most recent work focuses on Charlotte Brontë’s and Charles Dickens’s impact on the restoration debate, portrayal of educational spaces, and incorporation of contemporary essayists’ politics into their novels’ spaces.
Kurt Cavender is a 4th year PhD candidate in English at Brandeis University, where he works on contemporary fiction, film and new media, and literary theory. His dissertation is called “Restless Ontologies: Historical Fiction, Cinéma Vérité, and the Media-Event Novel,” and looks at the formal contradictions that emerge when documentary film and the historical novel attempt to represent a past moment as an historical “turning point.” The philosophical problem of the event pushes representational forms to their conceptual limits, and this project examines how film and narrative prose, as elements in a larger media-ecology, reflect upon each other’s approaches to this difficulty.
Andrew Sanggyu Lee, an MA student in Film Studies at Columbia University School of the Arts, also holds an MA in Journalism and Mass Communication from Korea University and a BA in Communication with a minor in History from Trinity University. He is keenly interested in cultural and critical media theories, particularly as related to race and representation in journalism, television, and film. As a 1.5 generation Korean American, he was exposed to different cultures at a young age, which influenced his interest in the cross-cultural aspects of life. He also engages in various media production practices, which includes documentary filmmaking, 2D animation, web design, and (electronic) sound and music composition.
Sonia Lupher is a PhD student in the Film Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to attending Pitt, she obtained a Master's degree from Columbia University, where she completed a thesis on anthology horror films. At Pitt, she works on the horror genre and women filmmakers.
David Pass is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at Brandeis University focusing on twentieth century American fiction. He earned a B.A. in English Literature from West Chester University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. His primary interests lie in exploring the function of gender, sexuality and race in American novels and films of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly canonical and non-canonical authors’ representations of masculinity and whiteness what is often called the “post-liberationist” period. His current work aims to excavate the ways in which recent critical analyses of “white masculinity” in cultural texts is limited by a tacit assumption that these representations reflect the sociopolitical anxieties, concerns and intentions (conscious or unconscious) of their white male authors, and instead focuses on mainly non-white and/or non-male fictional and critical authors (such as Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin) in order to attempt to resuscitate the now polemical question of authorial intention once made defunct by the New Critics. His previous work includes a masculinity-studies reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as well as an analysis of the gendered performance of American football spectatorship.
Jenny Sternling is an actor, director, producer, theatre arts instructor and independent scholar based in Boise, Idaho. The focus of her interdisciplinary graduate research and 2012 Master’s thesis was a virtually forgotten theatrical genre, 19th-century dog dramas. In her ongoing research, Sternling continues her unprecedented work recovering evidence of thousands of dog drama performances and chronicling dog drama history. In 2014 she wrote Taking the Seize: a Dog Drama (working title), a stage play based on the lives of the genre’s most famous human and canine actors.
Matthew Schratz is a graduate student at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He studies twentieth and twentieth century American fiction.
Brendan Trombly is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in Brandeis University's English Department. He plans to focus his research on British poetry and literary and cultural criticism of the latter half of the nineteenth century
FACULTY
Ulka Anjaria is Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English, forthcoming this year from Cambridge University Press. She is the recipient of an ACLS/Charles A. Ryskamp fellowship in 2014 for her current book project on realism and new political subjectivities in contemporary Indian literature, film, and television.
Faith Smith is Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University. She received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin and her Ph.D. from Duke University. Her research interests include the intellectual history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean; the intellectual and cultural histories of the African Diaspora; and gender, sexuality, and national sovereignty in the late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century novel and popular culture. Her recent publications can be found in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, and Small Axe. She is also the editor of Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (Charlottesville: UVA Press, 2011), the author of Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (U of Virginia Press, 2002), and her current book project is called, "Whose Modern? Caribbean Cultural and Intellectual Formation, 1880-1915."