literary analysis – Faculty

Cristina Morales Segura

Cristina Morales Segura — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 09:05:51 +0000

Cristina Morales Segura has a Law Degree by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a Masters in Company Law by the IE Business School in Madrid. She got her PhD in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2019. Her professional career has been both in Corporate Law in Spain, and more recently as a professor of Spanish Languages and Cultures in the United States. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in �ֲ��ý College, and she is also teaching an interdisciplinary seminar (Themes of Justice in Spanish Literature and Film) at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Cristina has published 13 articles and book chapters on the interactions between Law and Literature. Her PhD Dissertation is a study that analyzes the historical, political and legal contexts of Mateo Alemán’s 1593 report on the working conditions in the mercury mines of Almadén (Spain) and his picaresque novel El Guzmán de Alfarache. This interdisciplinary study has been recently published as a book in Spain:�� Galeotes de Mercurio (2020). His current research keeps dealing with the many aspects of the relationship of Law and Literature and transatlantic relationships between America and Spain.

Claudia Aburto Guzmán

caburtog — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:47:11 +0000

Associate Professor Aburto Guzmán received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.�� In addition to language, she teaches courses on Latin American literatures and cultures from 19th century to the present, as well as translation courses. Since 2006 she has focused on human rights discourses and actions in and around the México – U.S. border.�� She is a summer-time volunteer with the Tucson-based human rights group the Samaritans.

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Kirk D. Read

kread — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:25:13 +0000

Kirk Read, Ph.D Princeton University

Kirk Read, Professor of French and department chair, is a specialist in Early Modern French literature. He has secondary pedagogical and scholarly interests in Francophone North Africa. His book, Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction (Ashgate 2011), investigates sex and gender across various literary genres, including lyric poetry, midwives’ manuals, medical and proto-anthropological discourse from explorers, and the debates from the querelle des femmes. He created and maintains the Oxford Online Bibliography for the Renaissance poet Louise Labé.

In collaboration with colleagues and students over his 32-year career at �ֲ��ý, Professor Read has developed a course in oral French that follows the adventures of a fictional North African heroine, Marie Malika d’Alger–an endeavor that combines his interests in language, culture and theatre. In 2019, he engaged a small group of students in an intense short-term redesign course and converted the text into an Open Educational Resource available to �ֲ��ý students and soon to the general public. Professor Read has led both semester-long and short-term study trips to Nantes, France. From 2013-2016, he served as Associate Dean of the Faculty; previously he had served as Chair of the �ֲ��ý Arts Collaborative, Chair of the Department of French and Francophone Studies, and Chair of the Division of Humanities. He has served on numerous search committees for senior staff and has a long-standing affiliation with Writing at �ֲ��ý.

Professor Read has enjoyed an active alliance with the Department of Theater and Dance as an actor in a number of roles directed by both faculty and students including Angels in America (Roy Cohn), Stupid Fucking Bird (Sorn), Grand Concourse (Frog) and Luck of the Irish (Mr. Donovan). He enjoys teaching a course on French Drama in Performance and regularly deploys theatrical exercises and assignments in language courses. Professor Read enjoys teaching at all levels in the department, most especially his intermediate oral French class, his mid-level literature course on childhood in North Africa and a seminar, “Rereading Tintin” wherein students confront the author/artist’s colonialist renderings while at the same time exploring his appeal as an artist, storyteller and cultural influencer for nearly 100 years. Recent senior theses include authors’ use of childrens’ narrative voice, campaign rhetoric in the French presidential election, and the politics and pedagogies of ��ï��é in France.

Teaching (course selection)

Fre240E “Le Maghreb: Vue de l’Enfance”
Fre371 “Literary Identity in Early French Literature”
Fre372 “Woman Writer/Women Written” (in 17th century France)
Fre377 “Colon/Colonisé: Récits de l’Experience Nord-Africaine”
FreS33: “France, Day by Day” (taught in Nantes, France)
FreS39 “Rereading Tintin”
FYS203 “Family Stories” (First-Year Seminar)

Theses mentored (selection)

“Emily in Paris:�� Quel Paris est vendu?” (2023)
“La question de l’immigration Maghrébine en France, sujet polémique dans le discours politique de l’extrême droite” (2022)
“Towards an Embodied Understanding: Stage performance, gender narrative, and binary transcendence in Ivan Coyote & Rae Spoon’s Gender Failure and Sean Dorsey’s Lost/Found” (2018)
��“Tintin au Congo: un rêve révisé” (2018)
“Lire Tintin: un héros en contexte” (2016)
“La Folie Francophone au Féminin: Une Analyse des Textes de Trois Femmes” (2012)
“A la Recherche des Pères: Questions d’Identité dans le Cinéma Franco-Maghrébin” (2012)
“Les Citoyennes (Im)possibles: La Négociation de l’Identité des Jeunes Musulmanes dans la République” (2011)
“Alors, on danse: Le Rôle de la Danse dans la Récupération du Génocide Rwandais” (2011)
“Identité Nationale Française: une Collectivité Exclusive” (Honors, 2011)
“Harmonies du Soir:�� Baudelaire et Debussy” (2009) (Honors, with Music)

Publications (selection)

��

Marie Malika d’Alger: a Theatre-based Course in Oral French [OER: Open Education Resource, official launch Fall 2024]
Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France: Stories of Gender and Reproduction (Ashgate, 2011)
“Touching and Telling: Gendered Variations on a Gynecological Theme” in Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture (Ashgate, 2010)
“Staging the Competent Midwife:�� Louise Boursier as Response to François Rabelais’s gargantuan birth,” in Esprit généreux, esprit pantagruélicque Eds., Reiner Leushuis and Zahi Zalloua ,Cahiers du seizième siècle (Droz, 2008)
“What’s a Mother to Do?”: Maternal Advice from a Wise Woman,” Cahiers du 17ième siècle,Vol. VIII, no. 2 (2003) 65-76.
“Mother’s Milk from Father’s Breast:�� Maternity Without Women in French Renaissance Lyric” in High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, Ed. Kathleen Perry Long.�� (Truman State UP, 2002) 71-92.

Eden K. Osucha

Eden Osucha — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:25:08 +0000

Prof. Osucha’s areas of research expertise include Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture, African American Studies, Legal Studies, Critical Race Studies, Visual Culture, Queer Studies, and Feminist Theory. Her book manuscript, The Post-Racial Past: Race, Privacy and Identity Before the Obama Era, examines historical productions of the discourse commonly called “the post-racial”�� prior to the twenty-first century, at the intersections of law, literature, and media culture. The Post-Racial Past argues that contemporary post-racialism originates in the legal history of “privacy,” which Prof. Osucha traces beyond the formal recognition of a right to privacy in constitutional law to antebellum slave law that regarded the sovereignty of slave masters as a natural right�� rooted in the master-slave relation’s “private” nature. Through linked analyses of literary works and legal writing–including Supreme Court opinions, statutory laws, and legal scholarship–and visual texts from cinema and television to nineteenth-century commercial media, The Post-Racial Past argues that the legal right to privacy’s development via racialized technologies of publicity, surveillance, and sexuality made broader discourses of race, privacy, and identity increasingly enmeshed and conceptually interdependent. Exploring the acute racialization of a rights claim overtly linked, throughout its history, to gendered and sexuality-based identity claim, the book demonstrates how legal privacy anticipated, rehearsed, and consolidated post-racialism prior to its becoming, at the start of the Obama Era, a dominant ideology still pervasive within the political and cultural contradictions of American racism in the present.

Prof. Osucha has served on the faculty steering committees of the Programs in American Cultural Studies and African American Studies and has also served as a member of the Program Committee for Gender and Sexuality Studies and was a founding member of the college’s Arts Collaborative. Recent public humanities work includes serving as lead project scholar to develop the program which examines legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment for the nation’s literary history, for the Maine Humanities Council’s public libraries’ reading groups project, and co-curator of featuring short documentary and experimental films created as artistic responses to 9/11, which Prof. Osucha developed for Portland, Maine’s SPACE Gallery.

Recent publications:

Carol Batker, Eden Osucha, and Augusta Rohrbach, “Introduction: Critical Pedagogies for a Changing World.” American Literature 1 June 2017; 89 (2): 213–223.

Awards

Prof. Osucha’s awards and honors include the Mrs. Giles Whiting Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, administered by the �ֲ��ý College Office of the Dean of Faculty, the Nancy L. Buc Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowships Program, administered by the National Research Council of the National Academies.

Literary Arts Live

A published poet and creative writing teacher, Prof. Osucha is one of the curators of the English Department’s Literary Arts Live reading series, which brings poets, novelists, and creative non-fiction writers to campus to give public readings and serve as guest instructors in the department’s creative writing program. Visiting writers whose visits Professor Osucha has personally arranged include: Emily Barton,��C.A. Conrad, Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Gabriel Gudding, James Hannaham, Courtney Eldridge, Samantha Hunt, Caroline Knox, Dorothea Lasky, Sarah Manguso, Ander Monson,��Tessa Joseph-Nicholas, Paul LaFarge, Dinaw��Mengestu, Brian Kim Stefans,��Christopher Vitiello, Colson Whitehead, Dara Wier, and Magdalena Zurawski.

Recent courses:

Eng 105. “Narrating 9/11 in Literature and Film”
Eng 142. “Early American Literature”
Eng143. “Nineteenth-Century American Literature”
Eng 241. “U.S. Fiction”
Eng 292. “Poetry Writing”
GSS 248. “Queer Studies”
ACEN 395b. “Privacy, Intimacy, and Identity: American Selfhood from the Puritan ‘Soul’ to Facebook”
ACEN 395c. “Frontier and Border in U.S. Literature and Culture: Chican@ and Native American��Literatures and Cultural Theory.”