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Comparative Literature Faculty

Western University offers opportunities for comparative study in a broad range of languages and literatures. Students and faculty work in European literatures, comparative Canadian literature, Latin-American studies, post-colonial studies, and world literatures.

Outstanding Faculty

Comparative Literature is housed in the Department of Languages and Cultures. Our core faculty includes professors from the Departments of English and Writing Studies, Women's Studies, French Studies, Classical Studies, and the Faculty of Media and Information Studies. The research interests of faculty members include: Medieval and Renaissance Literature; Baroque, Enlightenment and Romantic Literature; Twentieth-century Literature and Culture; Critical Theory; Postcolonial Theory; Philosophy and Intellectual History; Gender studies and Queer Theory; Visual Arts and Film Studies; Central and Eastern European Studies; and Transatlantic Studies. Core faculty have been initiators in a number of national and international scholarly organizations that reflect interdisciplinary interests, including The Canadian Comparative Literature Association, The Canadian Society of Mediaevalists/Société Canadienne des Mediévalistes (SCM), and The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR).

  Melitta Adamson (Ph.D. Toronto) Medieval German Literature; European Medical and Culinary Literature; Parody. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Nandi Bhatia (Ph.D. Panjab / Ph.D. Texas at Austin) Postcolonial Literatures and Theory; British Imperial Literature; Theatre Studies. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Tim Blackmore The ways that culture and cultural products revolve around each other. Popular, mass, and folk culture (comix, art, film, bande dessinee, fiction). Industrial culture, heavy industry, and the emotional costs of full throttle capitalism.

Janelle Blankenship (Ph.D. Duke) 19th-20th Century German Literature; European Film and the Avant-Garde; Modernism; Media Theory; Critical Theory; Early Cinema. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Angela Borchert (Ph.D. Princeton) 18th-Century Cultural Studies; Visual Art and Cultural Theory; Germanic Literatures 1700 to 1900. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Jonathan Boulter (Ph.D. Western Ontario) Contemporary Narrative; Beckett; Popular Culture; Theory. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Henri Boyi (MA Cornell) Post Colonial Theory; Francophone and Anglophone African Literature; Post Colonial Theory; Intercultural Competence; Ubuntu Pedagogy; innovative approaches to second language teaching; Experiential Learning.

Constanza Burucúa (Ph.D. Warwick UK) Latin American and Argentine cinemas; Film history; historical representations; film and historiography; Women's cinema and questions of gender representation; Documentary cinema- theoretical and critical approaches; Documentary filmmaking- researcher and producer

Roberta Cauchi-Santoro (Ph.D. Western University) Italian women writers; Italian and Anglo-Italian literary relations 

Cristina Caracchini (Ph.D. U. Montréal) 19th & 20th century European Poetry; Historical Avant-gardes; Practical Feminism; Italian Literature; Ethnic Literature (Italian-Canadian). Doctoral level supervisory privileges

Thomas Carmichael (Ph.D. Toronto) Literary Theory, Cultural Theory, Postmodernism, American Studies. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Laurence de Looze (Ph.D. Toronto) European Medieval Literatures; French; Spanish; Narrative Theory; Film Studies. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Julia Emberley (Ph.D. York) Indigenous storytelling practices, testimonial discourses, cultural and feminist postcolonial studies and decolonial theory and literatures.

Alain Goldschläger (Ph.D. Toronto) 20th-Century French Literature; Semiotics; Discourse Analysis. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Christopher Keep (Ph.D. Queen's) 19th-Century Literature and Culture; Contemporary Theory; Technologies of Writing; Hypertext; History of Virtuality. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

M.J. Kidnie (Ph.D. Birmingham) Renaissance Literature, especially drama; Performance Studies; Textual Studies and Editorial Theory. Doctoral level supervisory privileges

Laté Bégnon Lawson-Hellu (Ph.D. Ottowa) Francophone Literature and Novel; Identity and Representation in Literature; Ideology and Social Discourse in Literature; Colonialism and Post-coloniality in Literature; Multilingualism in Literature; Resistance in Literature; Discourse on Earth, Discourse on Land and Tenure; Indigenous Voices and Epistemology

Guoyuan (Kevin) Liu (Ph.D. Western Ontario) Comparative Literature; Chinese Theatre (16th century - 18th century); Chinese fiction and film, Cultural Studies.  Doctoral level supervisory privileges

Mario Longtin (Ph.D. Edinburgh) Littérature médiévale, histoire du théâtre, histoire de la langue, édition critique, transmission des textes dramatiques (manuscrits et imprimés), histoire des pratiques théâtrales et mise en scène.

Mary Helen McMurran (Ph.D. New York) 18th-Century British and French Literature and Culture; The Novel; Transnationalism. Doctoral level supervisory privileges

Jia Mia (Ph.D. Nanjing University) Culture and Cultural Studies, Asian/Pacific Studies, Christian culture & Christianity in China, Chinese-North American Diasporic Lit, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies

Tobias Nagl (Ph.D. Hamburg) Critical race studies, postcolonial studies, film theory and history, popular German cinema, silent film.

Vidya Natarajan (Ph.D) Effects of British and Indian texts of the early 20th century on South Indian classical dance; Interplay of gender politics, struggles for cultural power and aesthetic theories in the writings of this period

Allan Pero (Ph.D. Toronto) Modern British, Irish and American Literature, Drama, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory.

Jan Plug (Ph.D. SUNY, Buffalo) 18th and 19th-Century German, French, English, Philosophy and Literature; Critical Theory. Doctoral level supervisory privileges 

Luca Pocci (Ph.D. Toronto) Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, Literary Theory, Thematic Criticism; History and Fiction. Doctoral level supervisory privileges 
Theses supervised

Randall Pogorzelski (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara) Roman literature, especially Augustan and early imperial poetry; classical reception; literary geography; politics in literature; nationalism and imperialism. Publications include articles on Lucan, Virgil, and James Joyce.

Felipe Quintanilla (Ph.D. Western University) Salvadoran Post Civil memory and oral history; gender and sexuality in contemporary Latin American cinema and literature; U.S. Latin@ representation in popular media; and Spanish-English translation

Michael Raine (Ph.D. Iowa) Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Asian Studies.  World Cinema especially Japanese cinema; the transition to sound, wartime image culture, and the Japanese new wave.

Tillottama Rajan (Ph.D. Toronto) Romanticism; Critical Theory (Phenomenology, Deconstruction, Aesthetic Theory). Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Joshua Schuster (Ph.D. Pennsylvania) Poetics, Theory, American literature, and Environmental Ideas

Chris Roulston (Ph.D. Toronto) Queer theory, feminist theory, history of sexuality, eighteenth-century french and english novel, marriage and women's friendship in the eighteenth century. Doctoral level supervisory privileges.

Aara Suksi (Ph.D. Toronto) Classical Greek literature; Greek myth; Athenian politics. Doctoral level supervisory privileges

Jane Toswell (D.Phil. Oxford) Study of psalter manuscripts, field of medievalism, modern reception of Middle Ages
Recent Publications

Vladimir Tumanov (Ph.D. Alberta) Bible and Literature; 20th-Century German, French and Russian Literature; Children's Literature. Doctoral level supervisory privileges
Theses supervised

Daniel Vaillancourt (Ph.D. UQAM) Theories of reading, mystical writings, travel narratives, birth of urbanism and urbanity in 17^th-century France, philosophy and aesthetics of Deleuze, semiotics. Doctoral level supervisory privileges

Servanne Woodward (Ph.D. Wisconsin-Madison) Eighteenth-century literature; French-speaking literature (Africa; West Indies)

 

 

For further information about any aspect of the program, please contact:
The Graduate Chair, Comparative Literature
Department of Languages and Cultures
Phone: (519) 661-2111, ext. 85828/Fax: (519) 661-4093