Stacey Battis
Graduate Student

Joachim du Bellay, Francois Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Helisenne de Crenne, Jean Lemaire de Belges, narrative theory, the appearance (and often transformation) of Classical literature in French literature, 17th century tragedy, the literary representation of hysteria, second language acquisition.

Victoria Bergstrom
Graduate Student

Sonja Bertucci
Graduate Student

Maia Beyler-Noily
Graduate Student

Political, social and philosophical dimensions of literature in 20th century writers; Leiris, Satre, Guyotat, Quignard, Michon.

Problems of Interdisciplinarity; Literature in Cinema, Cinema in Literature, Literature versus Cinema; Resnais, Godard, Bergman.

Vanessa Brutsche
Graduate Student

Modernism (French and American); film studies

Zane Burris
Graduate Student

Orlaith Creedon
Graduate Student

Early Modern French literature; Enlightenment thought and culture; Moralist literature; the sociology of literature; ethnographic writing; panoramic literature (text/image field relations); La Bruyere, Marivaux, Diderot, L.-S. Mercier; literature and the city.

Pamela Diaz
Graduate Student

Medieval literature and oral traditions.

David Divita
Graduate Student, Romance Languages and Literatures

Sociolinguistics, Style, Multilingualism, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Second Language Acquisition.

Aubrey Gabel
Graduate Student

Aubrey Gabel is a first-year PhD student who is currently focusing on the role of le fantastique in 19th century French realism literature; she hopes to further understand the parallel relationship between a genre transgression and other boundary crossings, be it a question of sexual, social, moral, or other narrative transgressions.

Her other interests include:

The question of Commitment in 20th century Resistance works, in particular, in Resistance theater

Le conte de fée and it's derivations--the translation and transcription of Fairy Tales and the influence of the Fairy Tale on 19th century literature and culture.

The Grotesque in literature, especially in the Southern United States 

Graduate Student Instructor of French 1 

Jennifer Gipson
Graduate Student

Nineteenth-century literature. The development of the short story. Orality and the figure of the storyteller. Intersections of folklore and literature in French and Francophone literature.

Website for Berkeley Language Center Fellowship project on folklore and the foreign language classroom:
http://dcrf-dev3.berkeley.edu/jennifer/?page_id=28.

Anaïs Goudmand
Exchange Student (Ecole Normale Supérieure)

Jonathan Haddad
Graduate Student

William Heidedenfeldt
Graduate Student, Romance Languages and Literatures

Student in RLL with an emphasis in French. My current academic interests include language acquisition and pedagogy, technology and language instruction, and language and pop culture.

Daniel Hoffmann
Graduate Student

19th-century poetics (Mallarmé, Valéry), questions of literarity, poetry and the visual arts (Courbet, Baudelaire, Rodin)

Neil Landers
Graduate Student

Kathryn Levine
Graduate Student

Lowry Martin
Graduate Student

19th and 20th Century literature; Gender, Sexuality, Feminist Theory; Legal Studies; I am particularly interested in Zola, Colette, Proust and the discursive production of gender, sexuality and race in the late 19th and early 20th Century novel. Of special interest to me is the influence of law, race, and space in the emergence of sexual ontologies as imagined and represented in literary works

Margo Meyer
Graduate Student

16th and 17th century France, Wars of Religion, literature and politics, women\'s writing, historiography, memoir, historical fiction, the novel.

Blanca Missé
Graduate Student

Darlene Pursley
Graduate Student

20th Century literature and poetry, philosophy, aesthetics, film studies, the representation of memory in literature and film.

Christine Quinan
Graduate Student

20th century literature, philosophy, theory; gender studies; feminist theory.

David Alain Rafoni
Graduate Student

Principal field of research is on the 18th French literature in regards to the libertine movement & the question of confinement (prison, convent, or inside oneself) as both could be seen in the works of Crébillon, the Marquis de Sade, & Restif de la Bretonne;


Enlightment philosophy (Jean-Jacques Rousseau); political and religious history;

Lévi-Strauss; Bourdieu; Foucault.

Jonathon Repinecz
Graduate Student

Postcolonial studies; constructions of tradition and modernity; African literary history; Wolof language; Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Ousmane Sembène.

Vera Shapirshteyn
Graduate Student

Jessica Singer
Graduate Student

Pria Sinha
Graduate Student

Anna Skrzypczynska
Graduate Student

Nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry, questions of genre, temporality, theory/practice and aesthetics/politics

Matthew Smith
Graduate Student

20th and 21st century literature, literary translation.

Maya Smith
Graduate Student, Romance Languages and Literatures

studying RLL with a focus in linguistics, i get the opportunity to explore the depths of the university and all its departments. academically, i have many interests including sociolinguistics. my dissertation topic, which I will start in the fall, will look at how identity influences second language learning for senegalese immigrants in france and italy. outside of the academic sphere i mainly focus on my artwork and hope to establish myself in the bay area as well as continue my work in new york and paris.

at the moment i am taking the semester off to travel around southeast asia and eastern/southern africa. you can keep up with my travels at www.bigbang2009.blogspot.com. you can also read about my former adventures at www.mayainbrazil.com, www.mayainsenegal.com, and www.mayainmexico.com.

Olga Sylvia
Graduate Student

Renaissance

Historiography, political philosophy, literature and history, religion and politics, ethics;
Humanism and Reformation;
Philippe de Commynes, Erasmus, Rabelais, Bodin, Montaigne, Luther, Machiavelli

Catherine Talley
Graduate Student

19th and 20th century fiction, time and form in the novel, writing in the first person, the ethics and politics of reading.

Kristenn Templeman
Graduate Student

Performance studies with an emphasis on contemporary French dramatic writing. Theatrical representation of traumatic experiences.

Performances in French directed at UC Berkeley: "Scenes ouvertes" in 2003 and "Roberto Zucco" in 2004.

Maria Vendetti
Graduate Student

Interests include: Francophone - especially Algerian - literature; 20th and 21st century poetry; violence and counter violence in writing; the OULIPO; horizons, itineraries, paths of desire; food - the eating, making and writing of it.

Marie-Charlotte Vetter
Exchange Student (Paris VII)

comparative linguistics

French and English passive and causative constructions

get, the French pronominal and reflexivity

Margot Wagner
Graduate Student

Travis Wilds
Graduate Student

Interests include materialisms, philosophy of science, music history, Enlightenment, Diderot, Deleuze.

Livi Yoshioka
Graduate Student

Interests: travel narratives; history of race and racism; fairs, museums and expositions; pop culture; language acquisition; queer readings; gender studies

Gina Zupsich
Graduate Student

Her teaching and research interests are 19th and 20th century French literature and culture, gender theory, feminist history, questions of identity, nation and republicanism, bohemian narratives, ‘pataphysics, connections between literature and science, social history of the working-class, questions of race, gender and colonialism in West African and Caribbean literature.