Professor van de Stadt teaches in the Russian Department, as well as Comparative Literature. She is currently interested in Franco-Russian literary relationships, such as those between Guy de Maupassant and Isaak Babel, or Charles Baudelaire and Valerii Briusov. She also works on literature and the human body (with a special focus on narratives of disease), and the role of music as a structural device in literature. Her publications include an article on "Narrative, Music, and Performance: Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata and the Example of Beethoven" and another article on "Seeing 'Amiss' or Misreading 'A Miss'" Imperfect Vision in Maupassant's Les Tombales." In addition to Russian and French, Professor van de Stadt also speaks and has taught Dutch, Spanish, and Italian.

 

 

Janneke van de Stadt

Assistant Professor

Julie A. Cassiday

Professor

 

 

 A member of the Russian Department, Professor Cassiday teaches a number of different courses in Comparative Literature, including the Nature of Narrative, Adultery and the Fallen Woman, and seminars on the Russian writers Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in translation. She has published a book on drama and legality in Russia titled The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen, as well as several articles devoted to drama and theatricality in Russia and the Soviet Union. Her interests in Comparative Literature lie primarily in the influences of English, French, and German drama on Russian literature and theater.

Professor Goldstein, who teaches in the Russian Department and Comparative Literature, is an authority on poetry, the visual arts, and food studies. She teaches a wide variety of courses at Williams, including the History of Russian Art, The Cultures of Poetry, and Feasting and Fasting in Russian History. She has written a book on the Russian poet Nikolai Zabolotsky titled Nikolai Zabolotsky: Play for Mortal Stakes, as well as several award-winning cookbooks. Her current research interests lie primarily in food studies: she is writing a book on the cultural history of food in Russia and is the editor of a new journal titled Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture.

 

 

Darra Goldstein

Professor

Soledad Fox

Assistant Professor

 

 

Soledad Fox teaches Spanish and Comparative Literature. She was trained as a comparative scholar and her doctoral dissertation examined the relationship between Cervantes's Don Quixote and the work of Gustave Flaubert. She has presented papers on Cervantes and Flaubert and has published articles on the Galician poet Rosalia de Castro. Her fields of specialization include the history of prose fiction, Modern Peninsular Spanish literature and culture, translation, and film. She has done research in Spanish, French, Italian, Latin and Gallego. She has taught at MIT and Sarah Lawrence College.

 

Professor Newman teaches in the German Department, as well as in Comparative Literature. She developed the course Literature and Psychoanalysis, which reflects her primary research interest in psychoanalytic approaches to literature. She has written a book on the German Romantic writer Novalis and the British psychoanalyst Winnicott titled Locating the Romantic Subject: Novalis with Winnicott. She has also published articles on the German writers Heinrich von Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann. In addition to teaching German and Comparative Literature, Professor Newman directs the Summer Humanities and Social Sciences Program and the Multicultural Center on campus.

Gail Newman

Professor

 

 

 

 

Helga Druxes

Professor

Professor Druxes teaches both German and Comparative Literature. The courses she teaches at Williams include Modern Women Writers and the City, which reflects her research interests in women's writing and feminist theory, a winter study course on colonialist fiction, and a course on travel and tourism from the late eighteenth century to the present. She has written two books: The Feminization of Dr. Faustus: Female Identity Quests from Stendahl to Morgner and Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction. She is currently completing a book on literary reactions to German unification from the perspective of German-Rumanian and East German dissidents. Her other interests include holocaust literature, autobiography, and postcolonial writers. In addition to speaking, teaching, and researching in German, Professor Druxes works on literature in English and French.

A member of the French department, Professor Pieprzak teaches Francophone and Comparative Literature. Through an analysis of French and Arabic sources, her doctoral dissertation "Which Way to the Modern Art Museum? Cultural Discourse on Art and Modernity in Post-Colonial Morocco" examined the tensions between aesthetic modernity and socioeconomic modernization in the post-colonial Islamic and African world. Reflecting her interests in the politics and poetics of representation in North Africa, she has published articles on the narratives of citizenship in the display of Moroccan contemporary art, museum politics in the developing world, and the search for identity in the work of Leila Sebbar. Other research and teaching interests include the narration of trauma in African literatures, French imperialism, colonial photography and art, and Caribbean literature.

 

 

Katarzyna Pieprzak

Assistant Professor

Bruce Kieffer

Professor

 

 

A member of the German Department, Professor Kieffer specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature and European intellectual history. He has taught a number of different courses at Williams that treat the relationship between philosophy and literature. He has also published a book titled The Storm and Stress of Language: Linguistic Catastrophe in the Early Works of Goethe, Lenz, Klinger, and Schiller.

Professor Rouhi teaches a number of different courses in the Spanish Department and Comparative Literature, including The Nature of Narrative, The Cultures of Poetry, and Cervantes' Don Quixote. Her research interests focus on medieval literature and cross-cultural influences in peninsular Spanish literature. She has written a book on literature devoted to the art of love titled Mediation and Love: A Study of the Medieval Go-Between in Key Romance and Near Eastern Texts, as well as several articles on medieval Spanish literature. Professor Rouhi regularly teaches in Spanish and English, but she also conducts research in Arabic, Farsi, French, and Latin.

 

 

Leyla Rouhi

Professor

Jennifer French

Assistant Professor

 

 

 Professor French's current research project examines the terrible Paraguayan War of 1864-1870 in Latin American literature from the time of the war to the pre-sent. She studies writings by 19th century Argentine writers Lucio V. Mansilla, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Domingo F. Sarmiento, and his son “Dominguito” that often reveal an intimate connection between the Para-guayan genocide and the consolidation and stabilization of Argentina as a modern nation-state. Her readings of twentieth-century Paraguayan authors ranging from the militant nationalist Juan E. O’Leary to the leftist novelist Augusto Roa Bastos, on the other hand, explore the equivocal nature of collective memory and the implica-tions of assimilating massive, collective violence into narratives of national identity. When complete, the Para-guayan portion of the project will form a book tenta-tively titled, The Paraguayan War: Trauma, Testimony and Transfiguration.

In addition to her research on the Paraguayan War, she has an ongoing engagement with issues of violence, aesthetics, and the political; questions of economic and environmental justice; and the literary and historical relations of Britain and Latin America.

Professor Vargas teaches Arabic and Comparative Literature. He is primarily interested in issues of globalization, transnationalism, and the ties between Latin America and the Middle East. His research focuses on immigrant identities and the place of immigrants in the nation. His dissertation, entitled "Migration, Literature and the Nation: Mahjar Literature in Brazil," is on the Arab community in Brazil. Professor Vargas hopes to promote constructive dialogues across cultural and linguistic barriers. He has lived and studied in Mexico, Brazil and five different countries in the Middle East.

 

 

Armando Vargas

Assistant Professor