Graduate Students

  • Noushin Ahdoot

    Noushin Ahdoot

    Research Interests:  Philosophy of literature, ancient Greek philosophy (especially Plato and Aristotle), tragedy, the modern novel

  • Mengqi An

    Mengqi An

    Research Interests:  Russian literature of 19th and 20th centuries; Russian formalism; émigré literature; East-West comparison; comparative modernisms; philosophical aesthetics; gender; literature and intellectual history

  • Emilee Brecht

    Emilee Brecht

    Research Interests:  20th-century European literature; intersections of literature and philosophy; ethics, violence, and spirituality (Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Kierkegaard); environmental humanities; theories of knowledge; the relationship between the humanities and the sciences (esp. in the work of Michel Serres).

  • Ezgi Ince

    Ezgi Ince

    Research Interests:  Intersectional themes across text, image, and music; jazz; sociology of art and music; aesthetics; modernism and avant-garde; poetry and the visual arts in the 20th and 21st centuries; American popular culture; intellectual property and copyright law

  • Nathan McCabe

    Nathan McCabe

    Research Interests:  Modernism and the avant garde in American poetry, photography, and film of the early 20th century; media theory (particularly in reference to photographies and phonographies); philosophical discussions of intentionality and aesthetic autonomy; ordinary language philosophy.

  • Michael McCreary

    Michael McCreary

    Research Interests:  Educational theory and philosophy, critical pedagogy, the intellectual history of literacy studies and learning to read, American higher education and the public role of the humanities, the pedagogy of philosophical methods, ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell, Diamond) and its relation to literature (Dostoevsky, Coetzee, et al.) and literary studies, Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of imagination, "postcritique," contemporary popular culture and new media (cinema, television, internet/social media)

  • Marshall Meyer

    Marshall Meyer

    Research Interests:  German idealism; psychoanalysis, especially the Ljubljana Lacanian School and transcendental materialism; art and politics under the Anthropocene; new formalism

  • Barthélémy Morin

    Barthélémy Morin

    Research Interests:  19th and 20th century European literatures, WWI literature, reader-response theories, ethical criticism (F. Leichter-Flack), aesthetics (Rancière), theory and history of the novel (Pavel), narratology (Genette)

  • Harel Newman

    Research Interests:  Love and sexuality, the body, alterity, religiosity, and identity; queer, Jewish, and disabled figures within the Western canon(s) of the long 20th century; queer, Jewish, and disabled studies generally; aesthetics; existentialism; postmodern theology; Classical Greek; and philosophies of language and science, particular Greek and existential

  • Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein

    Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein

    Research Interests:  intersections of literature and philosophy (aesthetics, phenomenology, idealism, pragmatism); lyric theory, poetics; 20th- and 21st-century poetry; avant-gardes, history of experimental literature; critical theory; film; questions of method

  • Christopher Taylor

    Christopher Taylor

    Research Interests:  Media theory and history; animation and new media; Japanese cinema and literature; comparative film theory; philosophies of technology; history, philosophy, and aesthetics of artificial life

  • Eleni Theodoropoulos

    Eleni Theodoropoulos

    Research Interests:  Eleni Theodoropoulos is a third-year PhD student in Comparative Thought and Literature. She studies the essay genre and comparative modernisms. She is especially interested in the affordances of the essay as a marginal form and how it has affected the novel by giving rise to, for example, the style of “essayistic fiction.” She works in English, French, and Modern Greek, the latter of which she also translates from, in addition to tutoring for the Writing Center where she helps undergraduate and graduate students develop and eloquently present their ideas.

  • Maddie Wells

    Maddie Wells

    Research Interests:  Twentieth-century American art and poetry; contemporary art; Marxist-feminist theory; history of work (domestic, clerical, sex work); experimental cinema; Marx and ecology; process philosophy; affect theory

  • Siyu Xie

    Siyu Xie

    Research Interests:  Pre-modern Chinese thought; intersection of philosophy and literature, the literary nature of theoretical texts vs. normativity of the fictional; semantic history, layers of meanings of words in different texts and their intertextual relations; history of music notation forms; aesthetics; intellectual history.