People

Joanne Bernardi
Associate Professor of Japanese
Lattimore 409 | 585-275-4268
joanne.bernardi@rochester.edu

Ph.D. Columbia University, 1992. Research and teaching draw on a background in photography, film and media and East Asian studies: Japanese popular culture; Japanese and Asian Cinema; animation; visual culture and media of the past; early, silent, orphan and “lost” film; nuclear history and the visual image; film history, culture, and historiography; film and media archiving and preservation. Publications include Writing in Light: the Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Wayne State, 2001)

Maria Cordoba Gomez
Lecturer in Spanish
Lattimore 209 | 585-275-7112
mcordoba@mail.rochester.edu

Jennifer Creech (Website)
Assistant Professor of German
Lattimore 428 | 585-275-4273
jennifer.creech@rochester.edu

Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 2006. Research and teaching interests: late 20th-century German literature, film and culture; cinema studies; Marxist and feminist theories. Recent courses: Cinema & Revolution, Hollywood Behind the Wall, 20th-century Gender & Sexuality, Marx & Marxism. Professor Creech's current research explores the critical impulses in East German women's films, and the revolutionary and reactionary aspects of post-unification representations of the East.

Thomas DiPiero (Website 1) (Website 2)
Professor of French, Senior Associate Dean of Humanities
Lattimore 427 | 585-275-5524
thomas.dipiero@rochester.edu

Thomas DiPiero is the author of Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569-1791 and White Men Aren't, and co-editor of Illicit Sex: Identity Politics in Early Modern Europe. He has also authored a number of articles on psychoanalytic theory and gender studies. His research focuses on early modern fiction, the French Enlightenment, and on contemporary psychoanalysis. He teaches courses on 17th- and 18th-century literature and culture and contemporary theory.

Robert Doran (Website)
Assistant Professor of French
Lattimore 414 | 585-275-7894
rdoran@mail.rochester.edu

Ph.D., Stanford University, 2004; Ph.D., Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, 2004. His areas of research & teaching interest include nineteenth-century French and comparative literature, literary theory, music and literature, aesthetics, intellectual history, visual culture, film, and the relations between Islam and the West.

Andree Douchin
Senior Lecturer in French
Lattimore 209A | 585-275-5382
andree.douchin@rochester.edu

Ph.D., University of Rochester. Areas of interest: Surrealist literature, French poetry. North-African novels. Publications on Georges Bataille and Julien Gracq.

Shino Fumino
Senior Lecturer in Japanese
Lattimore 213 | 585-275-9247
fsmn@mail.rochester.edu

A native speaker of Japanese, she has been teaching at the University of Rochester since 1988. Privately, she is an Urasenke Cha no Yu, Way of Tea, instructor.

John Givens
Associate Professor of Russian
Lattimore 423 | 585-275-4272
john.givens@rochester.edu

Ph.D., University of Washington, 1993. Professor Givens teaches courses on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and twentieth-century Russian literature and film. He is the author of Prodigal Son: Vasilii Shukshin in Soviet Russian Culture (Northwestern UP, 2000), the co-translator of Vasilii Shukshin, Stories from a Siberian Village (Northern Illinois UP, 1996) and editor (since 1999) of the quarterly translation journal Russian Studies in Literature. He is currently writing a book on the image of Jesus Christ in Russian literature.

Laura Givens
Senior Lecturer in Russian
Lattimore 426 | 585-275-4261
laura.givens@rochester.edu

M.A., University of Washington, 1993. Laura Givens teaches elementary through advanced Russian language courses. She is also the translator (with John Givens) of Vasilii Shukshin, Stories from a Siberian Village (Northern Illinois UP, 1996). From 1997-2000 she was the translator for Russian Studies in Literature, a quarterly journal of translations from the Russian literary press.

Susan E. Gustafson
Professor of German
Karl F. and Bertha A. Fuchs Professor of German Studies
Lattimore 425 | 585-275-4849
susan.gustafson@rochester.edu

Ph.D. Stanford University, 1987; teaches courses on 18-20th century German literature and culture, comparative literature, and women's studies, such as Poe and Hoffmann, Sexuality and Gender, and Monsters, Ghosts, and Aliens. She has published numerous articles on Lessing, Goethe, Kleist, Hoffmann, Kafka, and Dickens. She received a GSA book award in 2004 for her second book, Men Desiring Men and a Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching in 2006.

June Hwang
Assistant Professor of German
Lattimore 429 | 585-275-4197
june.hwang@rochester.edu

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2007. Research and teaching interests: early twentieth-century literature, film and culture; German Jewish topics; urban spaces; questions of modernity; film theory; critical theory. Recent courses: The Urban Imagination, Strangers in a Strange Land: German Jews, On the Move: Travelers, Wanderers and Explorers. Her current work explores how discourses of wandering, urban alienation, and the stranger intersect in the figure of the German Jewish intellectual.

Beth E. Jörgensen (Website)
Associate Professor of Spanish
Lattimore 422 | 585-275-4265
beth.jorgensen@rochester.edu

Ph.D. Wisconsin-Madison. Teaches 20th century Spanish-American literature & culture, focusing on women writers, literary nonfiction, narrative fiction, theater & poetry. Her primary research area is Mexican literature. She is the author of The Writing of Elena Poniatowska (Texas, 1994), co-editor of The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle (SUNY, 2002), collaborator on a revised translation of Azuela's Los de abajo (Modern Library, 2002), co-editor of the summer 2006 issue of Letras Femeninas, and author of numerous articles.

Cilas Kemedjio
Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Lattimore 407A | 585-275-3946
cilas.kemedjio@rochester.edu

Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 1995. Primary field of research includes Francophone African and Caribbean literatures. Book: De la Négritude à la Créolité. Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé et la malédiction de la théorie. Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 1999). Kemedjio has guest-edited a special issue of Présence francophone (No. 62, 2004) on Postocolonial Mythologies. Kemedjio is now completing a book on Mongo Beti: The Alien Condition.

Paola M. Kersch
Assistant Professor of Spanish (Visiting)
Lattimore 432A | 585-275-4251
pkersch@mail.rochester.edu

Ph.D. Spanish, SUNY at Buffalo. Teaching and research interests: 20th century theater, film, and culture of Spain, Latin America, and Italy, gender studies, comparative literature, and psychoanalysis. Recent research argues the symbolic value of the child figure in plays and films set in periods surrounding the Spanish Civil War. Currently she is exploring East/West tensions in the contemporary plays of Spanish female writers.

Berthe Kouroublakis
Senior Lecturer in Spanish
Lattimore 213A | 585-275-3054
berthe.kouroublakis@rochester.edu

BA/BS Degree: West Liberty State, West Liberty, West Virginia. French Masters: NYU-Paris, France, French Culture/Civilization. Doctorate, ABD: Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y., Teaching Languages/Culture. Focus: A) Teaching Languages and Culture. B) Master's Thesis focus: Portrayal of the peasantry in French painting. C) Doctorate, ABD: French, Spanish, German, Methodology and the theme of peasantry in literature.

Maria Manni
Adjunct in Spanish
Lattimore 403 | 585-275-4251
mariamanni@yahoo.com

Anna Maslennikova
Senior Lecturer in Russian
Lattimore 426 | 585-274-4261
anna.maslennikova@rochester.edu

Anna Maslennikova teaches courses on Russian Art, Russian Literature in the Original, and Advanced level Russian language. She is the author of The Linguistic Interpretation of Implied Meanings (St. Petersburg University Press 1999). She is full professor, Department of English Philology, St. Petersburg State University, Russia; Co-Director of New York Summer Institute of Cognitive and Cultural Studies.

Teresa Murano
Adjunct in Italian
Lattimore 403 | 585-275-4251
tmurano@rochester.rr.com

Michelle O'Brien
Department Secretary
Lattimore 403 | 585-275-4251
mobrie10@mail.rochester.edu

Luisa O'Keefe
Senior Lecturer in Italian
Lattimore 209A | 585-275-5382
luisa.okeefe@rochester.edu

Michelle Palermo-Biggs
Adjunct in CLT
Lattimore 403 | 585-275-4251
mbiggs@rochester.rr.com

Julie Papaioannou
Assistant Professor of French (Visiting)
Lattimore 432A | 585-275-4251
ppapaioa@mail.rochester.edu

Ph.D., University of Rochester, 2002. Her research and teaching interests include French literature, culture, and film, Francophone film, French criticism, literary and postcolonial theory, and film theories. Currently working on women filmmakers, and the representation of women in most recent film production in Francophone Africa. Her most recent research interest includes the production of literature by the African diaspora in France. Her published and forthcoming articles focus on issues of authenticity and orality in Francophone African cinema.

Lil Paraka
Department Manager
Lattimore 408 | 585-275-4253
lil.paraka@rochester.edu

Kathleen Parthé
Professor of Russian, Director of the Russian Studies Program
Lattimore 424 | 585-275-4176
kathleen.parthe@rochester.edu

Kathleen Parthé (Ph.D., Cornell) is the author of Russian Village Prose (Princeton), and Russia's Dangerous Texts (Yale), both of which were published in Russian. She has taught at St. Petersburg University and given talks in Russia, Europe, and Australia. With Librarian of Congress Dr. James Billington, she co-authored The Search for a New Russian Identity, which can be downloaded here.

Jason Peck
Adjunct in German
Lattimore 403 | 585-275-4251
jasonmichaelpeck@mac.com

Ph.D. University of Minnestoa, 2006. Research & teaching interests: German-Jewish literature and philosophy from the 18th-century to the present; the history of German aesthetics; poetics. He is co-editing a volume on key terms in German aesthetics from Baumgarten to Adorno. His current work focuses on the tension between Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy and Jewish identity in the late 18th century.

Ping Pian
Adjunct in Chinese
Lattimore 403 | 585-275-4251
phpxia@hotmail.com

Ryan Prendergast
Associate Professor of Spanish
Lattimore 430 | 585.275.4113
ryan.prendergast@rochester.edu

Ph.D. Emory University, 2003. Research and teaching interests include: the literary and cultural production of both 16th- and 17th-century Spain and Colonial Latin America; Inquisition studies; Don Quijote; the Picareseque novel; medieval Spanish literature. Prof. Prendergast recently completed a book-length study entitled Specters of Control: Reading and Writing in Inquisitorial Spain in which he explores the ways Golden Age writers incorporated and confronted the Spanish Inquisition's practices of control and exclusion.

David Pollack (Website)
Professor of Japanese
Lattimore 412 | 585-275-0424
david.pollack@rochester.edu

Extensive teaching and publication in classical and modern Chinese and Japanese literature, religion and art. Recent areas of interest include the material culture and artistic expression of Japan's newly urbanized society during the 17th-19th centuries. more >>

Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández
Associate Professor of Spanish
Lattimore 420 | 585-275-4257
raul.rodriguez-hernandez@rochester.edu

Ph.D., Cornell University, 1997. He has published extensively on Hispanic literatures and cultures, including postmodern fiction, cinema, alterity and art, and European philosophical traditions in Latin American texts. The aesthetic representation of the "past"—how writers and artists incorporate the cultural remains of the past millennium—are central to his research. His book Mexico's Ruins: Juan García Ponce and the Writing of Mexican Modernity was published in 2007. He is currently writing a book on Latin American architecture.

Claudia Schaefer
Professor of Spanish, Department Chair
Rush Rhees Professor
Lattimore 408A | 585-275-4253
claudia.schaefer@rochester.edu

Ph.D., Washington University, 1979. Her research and teaching interests encompass all aspects of cultural production in Latin America and Spain of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has published five books and numerous articles in these areas. Her latest book is a biography of Frida Kahlo (Greenwood Press, 2008). She is currently writing on the Mexican film director Arturo Ripstein, and is completing a volume on anarchism and utopian thought.

Friederike Seligman
Assistant Professor of Russian
Lattimore 426 | 585-275-4261
fseligman@admin.rochester.edu

Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1979. Research and teaching interests: Chekhov and the Modern Short Story, early 20th century Russian prose and poetry, Russian dystopian fiction, contemporary Russian women writers.

Yasuko Spence
Adjunct in Japanese
Lattimore 403 | 585-275-4251
yasuko_spence@msn.com

Born in Manchuria of Japanese parents, Yasuko is a Japanese-American who holds Japanese teacher certificates in Ikebana, Calligraphy and Japanese language instruction. She is treasurer of the Rochester chapter of Ikebana International. She was honored in 2006 as one of Monroe County's Asian artists. Yasuko paints in several mediums, teaches Japanese language, calligraphy, flower arranging and painting. She emigrated to the US in 1979 and lives in Victor, NY, with her husband and two Akita dogs.

Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio
Associate Professor of Italian
Academic director, University of Rochester Program in Italian Studies in Arezzo, Italy
Lattimore 405 | 585-275-5723
donatella.stocchi-perucchio@rochester.edu

Academic Degrees: Doctorate in Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Florence, Italy. Masters and Ph.D. in Italian, Cornell University. Teaching: Italian literature, language, history, and culture. Areas of expertise: Medieval Studies and Modern Italian Culture. Publications: on Dante, Cavalcanti, Pirandello, and Leopardi. Current Research: Dante's political thinking and the theory of government of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Digital project on Dante's Divine Comedy.

Mariko Tamate
Senior Lecturer in Japanese
Lattimore 213 | 585-275-9247
mariko.tamate@rochester.edu

MBA in Marketing, Temple University. BA in Literature with Concentration on Theatrical Arts, Meiji University. Certificate in Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language, Cornell University. Mariko Tamate has been teaching Japanese at the University since 1988. Prior to coming to the U.S., she was a so called "OL" (office lady) for three years.

Jodie Vasquez
Adjunct in Spanish
Lattimore 403 | 585-275-4251
jvasquez@mail.rochester.edu

Roseanne Waterstraat
Undergraduate/Graduate Secretary

Lattimore 406 | 585-275-4252
roseanne.waterstraat@rochester.edu

Shifang Yu
Senior Lecturer in Chinese
Lattimore 208A | 585-275-2456
shifang.yu@rochester.edu

Came to the U.S. in 1980. Has been teaching Chinese in the Rochester area since 1988. Taught at St. John Fisher College, Nazareth College, and is now an Instructor at RIT, as well as a senior lecturer in the Modern Languages and Cultures Department.

Nils Beese
Exchange Student from Cologne, Germany
Lattimore 207 | 585-275-2627
nils.beese@me.com

Wibke Buys
Exchange Student from Cologne, Germany
Lattimore 207 | 585-275-2627
wibke@ish.de

Kevin Le Blevec
Exchange Student from Rennes, France

Lattimore 207 | 585-275-2627
kevin.le.blevec@hotmail.fr

Elisa Fabbrini
Arezzo Visitor
Italian-Spring Semester
Lattimore 209 | 585-275-4251
mlc@mail.rochester.edu