Editorial Board

André Nascimento is a doctoral candidate in Romance Studies. His work focuses on peace studies, Afro-diaspora, Indigenous sovereignties, Marxism, and Latin American literature and politics.

Arturo Ruiz Mautino received his BA and Licenciatura in Hispanic Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (2017), where he focused on the connections between the essays of Jorge Luis Borges and reader-response theory. He is currently working on a theoretical framework for analyzing contemporary fiction of the Southern Cone and Spain, especially dealing with the intersection of literary genres, metafiction, and the fantastic. He is also interested in drama theory, contemporary aesthetics, and distant reading.

Cary Howie is Associate Professor of Romance Studies. Raised in Danville, Illinois, and Brunswick, Georgia, Cary received his B.A. in Literature from Bard College (1997) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University (1999, 2003). He is the author of Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (Palgrave 2007) and, with Bill Burgwinkle, Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (Manchester 2010 / Palgrave 2011). He has also edited a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur on sanctity (Spring 2010).

Cary is fascinated by bodies, by questions of style, and by the ways in which sexuality and the sacred are porous to one another. His interests tend to gravitate toward French and Italian medieval literature, contemporary American lyric poetry, Christian theology, and queer studies.

Debra Castillo is Emerson Hinchliff Chair of Hispanic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature,  former director of the Latin American Studies Program (two separate terms) and incoming director of the Latino/a Studies Program (beginning in January 2016). She is past president of the international, interdisciplinary Latin American Studies Association.

Among the courses she teaches regularly are Hispanic Theater Production (Teatrotaller) http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/spanl301/, Cultures and Communities, and Bodies at the Border.   In 2016-17 she is directing the Mellon Diversity Seminar, focused on the theme: Scholars as Humans:  Enacting the Liberal Arts in Public

She is the holder of a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship, which is Cornell University’s highest teaching award, and is granted for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Perhaps the course with which she has been most identified is “Hispanic Theater Production.” http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/spanl301/She has taught this course except when on leave for over 20 years, and coordinates summer productions as well on a volunteer basis.  Graduate and undergraduate students, as well as some community members participate

Farah Bakaari is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research focuses on African literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, postcolonial studies, political theory and the novel as well as the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Her writing has appeared in Global Networks, Journal for the African Literatures Association, Representations, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry as well as popular outlets, like Africa is a Country and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She was born and raised in Somaliland.

Gavin Walker is Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He specializes in literary, social, and cultural theory in its intersections with global intellectual history, continental philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.

Walker is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016), Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux, 2022), and The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject (Verso, forthcoming), and the editor of many volumes, including The End of Area (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), The Red Years (Verso, 2020), Foucault’s Late Politics, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, no. 121-4 (Duke, 2022); editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020), alongside nearly 70 articles and chapters in the theoretical humanities, critical theory, intellectual history, literary studies, and political thought.

Working across texts in languages including English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese, he is interested in the social structures, cultural forms, politics, and discursive regimes produced by the nexus of capital, the nation, and global modernity at the juncture of philosophy, philology, criticism and historical analysis. A member of the editorial boards of the Historical Materialism Book Series (Brill/Haymarket), diacritics, and positions: asia critique (Duke), his work has been supported by institutions such as the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Japan Foundation (Canada, US, and UK), the Fonds québécois de recherche—société et culture, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, including an Insight Grant (2016-2024).

Grant Farred: PhD (Princeton University, 1997), MA (Columbia University, 1990), BA Honours, Cum laude, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, 1988). He has previously taught in the Program in Literature, Duke University, Williams College and Michigan University.  He served as General Editor of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) from 2002 to 2010.

He has published in a range of areas, including theory, postcolonial studies, race, the formation of intellectuals, sport’s theory, Cultural Studies and literary studies.

His books: Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa(Westview Press, 1999), What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),  Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and, most recently, The Burden of Over-representation: Race, Sport & Philosophy (Temple University Press, May 2018).

Imane Terhmina is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance Studies. She holds a PhD in French Literature from Yale University. Her research lies at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Areas of specialization include: Francophone African literature and culture, postcolonial theory, affect theory, political philosophy, petrofictions / eco-topias, Afropolitanism.

Professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Graduate Fields of Comparative Literature, English, and Romance Studies, Jonathan Monroe has served several terms as Comparative Literature’s Director of Graduate Studies.

Working in English, French, German, and Spanish, with a focus especially on Europe and the Americas from the Age of Revolution to the 20th and 21st centuries, aesthetics and politics, history and literary history, philosophy and critical theory, and genre and media studies, he is the author most recently of Framing Roberto Bolaño. Poetry, Fiction, Literary History, Politics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming Fall 2019), and editor of Roberto Bolaño in Context (Cambridge University Press, approved for contract). Other recent publications, from a book-length project nearing completion, include articles and chapter contributions on “Genre”; “Philosophy, Poetry, Parataxis”; and “Urgent Matter.” Author of A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre; and co-author and editor of Writing and Revising the Disciplines; Local Knowledges, Local Practices: Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell; Poetry Community, Movement; and Poetics of Avant-Garde Poetries, he has published widely on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, innovative poetries of the past two centuries, avant-garde movements and their contemporary legacies, writing and disciplinary practices, and interdisciplinary approaches in literary and cultural studies. In addition to Demosthenes’ Legacy, a book of prose poems and short fiction, he has published poetry and cross-genre writing in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Epoch, Harvard Review, /nor New Ohio Review, Verse, Volt, and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics.

A scholar of sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, Naminata’s research primarily explores African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Hispanic literatures, cultures, cinema, and new media.

Her current teaching and research interests focus on forms of gendered, sexual, and racialized agency in a variety of cultural products (oral tradition, literary fiction, filmic and social media). These explorations in Malinke, French, English, and Spanish take the trans African context as their points of departure to make broader contributions to transnational reflections on questions of agency and resistance.

Environmental and energy humanities; media theories; psychoanalysis (trauma, melancholia, mourning, anxiety, psychosis); deconstruction; critical theory; theories of modernity; science and technology studies; critiques of capital; contemporary Anglophone novel; contemporary global auteur cinema (especially Nordic, Post-Soviet and Turkish); critical animal studies; performance studies.

Patty Keller specializes in Spanish literature and visual culture. She is the author of Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture, which examines the relationship between image production, ideology, and spectrality. Weaving together close readings of three distinct media from Spain’s fascist and post-fascist periods—documentary newsreels, art films, and conceptual photography—this study explores the interpretive possibilities of visual constructions of loss in contemporary culture. She is currently working on a new project titled, Photography’s Wound: Exposing Belief in Times of Uncertainty, a study of contemporary photography, ethics, and structures of belief. Her research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of literature, photography, critical theory, political philosophy, cultural studies, cinema and media studies.

Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies as well as the Taylor Family Director of the Society for the Humanities, Paul Fleming has published monographs on Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (2009) and The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (2006) along with edited volumes on Hans Blumenberg, Siegfried Kracauer, the scholars around Stefan George, and Ulrich Peltzer. His translation of Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic appeared in 2002 and of Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River in 2010. He is currently co-translating Blumenberg’s The Saint Matthew Passion for Cornell Press as well as completing a book-length project that examines the use of the anecdote in and as theory with respect to questions of exemplarity, evidence, history, and rhetoric.

Fleming’s teaching and research interests include eighteenth and nineteenth century German and European literature, especially the novel; aesthetics and hermeneutics from 1750 to the present; Critical Theory; the relation between narration and knowledge. He is co-editor of the book series Paradigms: Literature & the Human Sciences in de Gruyter Press as well as of the series Manhattan Manuscripts in Wallstein Press. He serves on the boards of Cornell’s Signale book series, diacritics, and New German Critique.

Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of Graduate Studies. Eighteenth- twentieth-century literature and philosophy; aesthetics; systems theory; literary and media theory; lyric poetry and poetics.

Philip Lorenz received his PhD from New York University. His teaching and research focus on English and Spanish literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in relation to problems of sovereignty and political theology. Related areas of interest include International Law, Religion, Psychoanalysis, Translation and Poetics and Theory. His book, The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama (Fordham University Press 2013) examines the metaphor-logics created by the great playwrights of the early modern period – William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca – in relation to contemporary theorists on the problem of sovereignty. His current book project, “Baroque Files,” pursues the after-lives of early modern sovereignty, as its representation moves from the symbolic body of sacred kings into increasingly abstract and disembodied forms, including public administration.

Simone Pinet received her PhD from Harvard University. Her teaching and research focus on medieval and early modern Spanish literatures and cultures, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, especially in relation to spatiality, economics, poetics, and translation, with an eye, especially in her teaching, to the long-term connections between the medieval and the modern, both in contemporary Spain and Latin America. Related areas of interest include visual studies, cartography, and political economy. Her book, Archipelagoes: Insularity and Fiction from Romance to the Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) examines literature and cartography in Spain in the transition from the medieval to the early modern through the figure of the island. A second book, The Task of the Cleric (University of Toronto Press, 2016), takes the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre as a focal point for the discussion of cartography, translation, and political economy in different archives and texts. She is currently at work on a book on economic metaphors and rhetorical strategies traced through canonical works of the Iberian Peninsula from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.

Prof. Pinet was a fellow of the Society of the Humanities in 2008-2009, and a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow for 2010-2011.

Tracy McNulty, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, received her BA in French and English from U.C. Berkeley and her PhD in Comparative Literature from U.C. Irvine. Her research interests include 20th-century French literature and comparative modernism, psychoanalytic theory (especially Freud and Lacan), contemporary French philosophy, and political theory. In addition to these fields, she regularly teaches interdisciplinary courses on such questions as the origins of language, myth and symbolic thought, eroticism and perversion, and philosophical, scientific, and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and human agency. Her first book, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007. Her second, Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life (a defense of the liberating function of formal and written constraints in psychoanalysis, political theory, and aesthetics), came out with  Columbia University Press in 2014. Currently she is working on two new books. Libertine Mathematics: Perversions of the Linguistic Turn juxtaposes masterpieces of the libertine tradition by the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the Comte de Lautréamont, and Pauline Réage–each of which can be read as promoting a “language of the real” that would allow for an integral transmission of the drive—alongside contemporary theoretical works that have embraced the language of mathematical formalization—or of other non-signifying languages—either as an ultimate extension of, or as a rejection or overturning of, the so-called “linguistic turn” in twentieth century thought: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and the “speculative realists,” and in a different way Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. A fourth book project, currently in progress, explores the intersubjectivity of political acts through the lens of psychoanalysis.