The Junior Faculty Forum was created in 2006 under the auspices of the University of Connecticut's Humanities Institute. The purpose of the Junior Faculty Forum is to provide a space for dialogue among junior faculty from various disciplines in the humanities, to support and strengthen the intellectual community on campus, to encourage cooperation among tenure-track faculty who are at a similar point in their career, and to address specific issues junior faculty may have during their first years as members of the university's community. During the academic year 2007/08, the Junior Faculty Forum met for monthly roundtable discussions and brought Louis Menand to campus for a talk on "Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety." The JFF's leaders for the academic year 2009/10 are Gustavo Nanclares and Brendan Kane.
Interests
Amanda Bailey, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Amanda Bailey has published articles on male youth culture and the early modern theater and is the author of Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England (University of Toronto Press). She is currently co-editing a collection entitled City of Vice: London 1550-1700 on manhood and commercial London and is at work on a new book project about human capital in early seventeenth-century England.
Philip Balma (Ph.D., Indiana University, 2007) is an Assistant Professor of Italian Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, where he also serves as the Coordinator of the Italian language program. He teaches modern Italian literature and cinema, as well as courses on the Italian-American experience. His research interests include contemporary Jewish authors and directors in Italy, artistic representations of World War II, the theory and practice of literary translation, Italian literature in dialect, and the influence of English on the Italian language.
He was previously a member of the Italian faculty at Indiana University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Georgia in Athens. His articles, essays, and translations have appeared in ITALICA, Lettere Italiane, Translation Review, Italianistica Ultraiectina, and are forthcoming in Italian Quarterly and Italian Poetry Review. He is the co-author of Streetwise Italian: the User Friendly Guide to Italian Slang and Idioms published by McGraw-Hill in 2005.
Pamela Bedore, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Pamela Bedore is an Assistant Professor of English and the Writing Coordinator for the Avery Point campus. Her research includes popular literature, focusing especially on gender theory, science fiction and detective fiction. Additionally, she is interested in composition and rhetoric, focusing on library-writing collaborations and the theory and practice of peer review.
Mary Burke has published articles on the Irish Revival, dramatist J.M. Synge and Darwinism in Ireland. Her exploration of the "tinker" figure in Irish, British and American literature and popular culture, Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2009. She was the 2003-04 NEH Keough-Naughton Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She directs the Irish Literature Concentration.
Ana María Díaz-Marcos, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Ana María Díaz-Marcos has written several articles and book chapters on Spanish women writers such as María Rosa Glvez, Rosario de Acua and Carmen de Burgos. Some of her research interests include 18th century theatre and popular culture and 19th century narratives about the body and its relation to issues such as class struggle, adultery and prostitution. She has published a book on representations of fashion in modern Spanish literature, La edad de seda (Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 2006) and has edited the essay La casa de muñecas by Rosario de Acuña (Sevilla: Arcibel, 2006). Prof. Díaz-Marcos is currently working on a book-length project on representations of the body in 19th Century Spain.
Serkan Gorkemli, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
and
Coordinator of Writing and Composition
Serkan Gorkemli is researching how Turkish lesbian and gay college students have been using new media, such as websites and mailing lists, to form communities on college campuses and participate in the burgeoning LGBT movements in Turkey. This research originated with his dissertation ("The Globalization of Digital Technologies and Lgbt Identities: The Turkish Collegiate Lesbigay Population's Access to the Internet and the Formation of Lesbigay Identities and Communities in Turkey"), where he traced the formation of Legato, the Turkish Collegiate Lesbian and Gay Network, and discussed how it influenced a specific instance of lesbian and gay identity formation in Turkey. This discussion was based on his interviews with individual Legato members about their digital literacy and access to both traditional and new media, and through such media, to local and global representations of LGBT identities.
Brendan Kane, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History
Brendan Kane is an assistant professor in the department of history. His research focuses on early modern Britain and Ireland. His book manuscript, The politics and culture of honour in early modern Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. His next book-length project is tentatively titled "Knowledge, power and cultural contact in 'colonial' Britain, 1500-1700." A case study for this project, "Domesticating the Counter-Reformation: bridging the bardic and Catholic traditions in Geoffrey Keating's 'The three shafts of death,'" is currently being revised for publication.
Clare Costley King’oo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Clare Costley King’oo teaches English literature at the Storrs campus. She is currently working on the seven Penitential Psalms in late-medieval and early-modern England, and is particularly interested in how theologies of penance intersected with developments in the manufacturing and marketing of books. Her monograph on this topic, Misere Mei, is under contract with Notre Dame University Press. She has also recently begun a second book project, exploring the political history of the Bible as literature.
Ellen Litman, MFA
Assistant Professor of English / Associate Director of Creative
Writing
Ellen Litman is the author of The Last Chicken in America (W.W. Norton 2007), a novel in stories about Russian immigrants. She joined English Department in the fall of 2007 as assistant professor/associate director of Creative Writing. Her research interests include Russian literature, contemporary American literature, and creative writing. She is currently at work on a novel.
Matthew McKenzie, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History and American Studies program at the UConn Avery Point Campus
Matthw McKenzie spent three years teching Maritime Studies, standing watches, working the oceanography lab, and tending the engine room aboard the Sea Education Association's research vessels, Corwith Cramer and Robert C. Seamans, where he first began linking changing human histories to changing marine ecosystems. Since 2003, he has also been an active researcher in the Census of Marine Life's History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) project. He has published work in both maritime history and marine science journals, and has presented findings in Scandinavia, Britain, Canada and the US. His current project, "Wasteland to Workspace to Wilderness" explores the human social, intellectual, cultural, and labor consequences of marine ecosystem change on Cape Cod during the 19th century. His next project will explore how southern New England's distinct marine ecosystem uniquley shaped the region's industrialization, and how changing ecosystems affected tourism in the 19th century.
Gustavo Nanclares, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Gustavo Nanclares, Assistant Professor of Spanish, teaches modern Peninsular literature and culture. Some of his research interests include the Spanish historical avant-garde, the narrative of the 1920s and 30s, and their relationship to international film. He is also interested in peripheral nationalisms in Spain, and has published several works on Basque literature and culture. He is the author of several articles on literature and film in the 1920s and on the literary and intellectual works of Jon Juaristi, Ramon de Basterra, Jorge de Oteiza, Benjamin Jarnes, Ernestina de Champourcin, Gilberto Owen, Mario Verdaguer, Miguel Mendez, and others. He is currently working on a book-length project on intermediality in Spanish and Mexican vanguard narrative.
Melina Pappademos, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History & African American Studies
Melina Pappademos is an assistant professor of history and African American studies. Professor Pappademos' research and teaching interests focus on the social and cultural history of race, social and political mobilizations, and nationalisms, particularly those articulated by people of African descent in the Caribbean and Latin America. She is revising a book manuscript on racial consciousness and political mobilization among African-descended Cubans in the republican period, titled "Negotiating Race: Black Cuban Activism and the Republican State, 1899 to 1940."
Jennifer Terni, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of French
Jennifer Terni is an Assistant Professor in the Literature and Culture of nineteenth-century France. Her background in History and Literature has shaped her interdisciplinary approach to questions surrounding the emergence of mass culture during the first half of the nineteenth-century. In a confrontation between history and theory, her current project, Elements of Mass Society: Paris 1830-1851, builds on a series of case studies that ultimately redefine some of the main categories that have organized the discourse on mass culture. She has written on topics ranging from vaudeville, the cultural history of the omnibus, emerging media systems, and fashion. She is a 2009-2010 fellow at the UCHI. Her teaching fields include nineteenth-century literature, theater, and popular culture; visual, urban and material culture as well as history and film.
Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Pragmatics, Metaphor, Discourse Analysis, Politeness Theory and Applied Linguistics. He has published with G. Reyes and E. Baena Ejercicios de pragmatica, 2 vol. (2000 Madrid: Arco Libros), and in a diversity of fields including metaphor ("Quarrelling about metaphor on love a pragmatic approach," in M. E. Placencia & R. Marquez-Reiter (Eds.), Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press 2004), Greek comedy and literature, and also in creative writing. He is currently working on multimodal metaphor in Television commercials and in cinema, and on teacher-student interaction.
Fiona Vernal is a native of Litchfield, Jamaica and grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. She earned her BA from Princeton University in 1995 and her MA and PhD from Yale. After completing her doctoral work in December 2003, she served as director of African Studies at Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Since 2005 she has taught at the University of Connecticut's Department of History where her courses focus on pre-colonial, colonial Africa, the history of South Africa and the African diaspora. She is currently completing a manuscript which explores the relationship between African Christian converts, European missionaries and the politics of land access, land alienation and the "civilizing" mission of African social and economic improvement in nineteenth century South Africa. Africa; 19th century South African history; Christianity in South Africa; slavery
Dr. Vernal consults with the Connecticut Historical Society on oral history projects, most recently on an exhibit documenting and recording the impact of 9/11 on Connecticut victims, families and first responders: September 11, 2001: Connecticut Responds and Reflects. A second exhibit documented the history of West Indian migrants to the greater Hartford's area: Finding a Place, Maintaining Ties: Greater Hartford's West Indians. She is currently engaged in a photo documentation project on Caribbean migration to greater Hartford.
Theodore van Alst, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor and the Co-Chair of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
Theo. Van Alst is an Assistant Professor and the Co-Chair of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. He teaches film and literature courses and is the faculty advisor for the Native student group. His most recent work, "Sherman Shoots Alexie: Working With and Without Reservation(s) in 'The Business of Fancydancing,' is forthcoming in Native American Art, Film, and Visuality, ed. Denise Cummings, Michigan State University Press. An earlier version of that piece was translated and published as “‘Talking Circle’: Speaking With and Without Reservation(s) in The Business of Fancydancing.” (“Círculo parlante: hablando con y sin reservas sobre The Business of Fancydancing.” Traducción: Jorge Proenza González) in Miradas—Journal of the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños, Havana, Cuba. His current book length project is Cold Warriors: Romantic Renderings and Ideological Impressments of American Indians in European Film.
Sebastian Wogenstein, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of German
Sebastian Wogenstein's research focuses on the reception of tragedy in modern German literature and cultural theories, on theater, and on German-Jewish literature. He is also interested in the intersection of literature, human rights, and politics. He is the co-editor of the book "An Grenzen. Literarische Erkundungen" and recently published articles on Hermann Cohen and Peter Szondi in the journal "Telos" (140, Fall 2007) and on Dea Loher's play "Manhattan Medea" in the journal "Monatshefte" (99.3, Fall 2007).
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