Peter Connor's teaching and research interests include twentieth century French literature, literary theory, contemporary French philosophy, translation, psychoanalysis. He is the author of Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 2000) and the translator of numerous books and articles by French philosophers, including Georges Bataille's The Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1989) and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

B.A. (Trinity College, Dublin), Ph.D. (University of California at Berkeley)

Wiebke Denecke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures. She teaches and writes about the thought and literature of pre-modern China and Japan, and more generally literatures of antiquity and strategies of crosscultural comparison.

She is completing a book manuscript that recaptures the development of early Chinese “philosophy” as a history of the traditional Chinese genre of “Masters Literature” [zhuzi baijia]. Her second book project, entitled “In the Footprints of Others: Latin and Early Japanese Writers and their own Literature,” examines how early Japanese and Latin authors wrote their literature through and against Greek, respectively Chinese, precedents. She is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature (3rd edition, scheduled for 2010).

For further information and publications, click here.

B.A. (equal.) and M. A. (George August University, Göttingen, Germany), Ph.D. (Harvard University)

Erk Grimm is Associate Professor of German and Chair of both the German Department and of the Comparative Literature Program.

Queen's University, Kingston (Canada), 1989-93 Ph.D. in German, May 1993
Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany M.A.; B.A.

 

Alfred Mac Adam (AJM19-at-Columbia.edu) is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures. He is a Latinamericanist and comparatist,author of Textual Confrontations: Essays in the Comparative Study of Latin American Literature (Univ. of Chicago Press). Mac Adam has also translated works by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, and Julio Cortázar.

 

Brian O'Keeffe received his undergraduate degree in French and German from
Cambridge University, and did his graduate work at Columbia University,
the Ecole Normale Superieure, and at Oxford University (where he was a
British Academy scholar). More latterly he was a Fellow at the School of
Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Jis chief research interests centre on nineteenth and twentieth-century French literature, Continental philosophy and French Theory. At the present time, he is working on study that addresses the relation between ethical philosophy and literary theory.

 

 

Above all, I am attached to words. Whether reading Ancient epic, Medieval French chansons de geste, Camões, Aphra Behn, or Derrida, it is their words which interest me--how do the words create meaning, what echoes within and beyond a given can can be brought into dialogue--and, finally, what do we do with those words? Of late, my research focus has been on the relationship between the plastic arts (especially architecture) and epic literature in Early Modern France, part of a wider interest in both epic (Ancient and Modern, with particular affection for Virgil, Ronsard, d'Aubigné, and Joyce!) and the connections between literature and other arts. The question of connections also leads me to ask continually how writers deal with space. More generally, I enjoy to read and teach French literature of most periods, as well as literature from elsewhere, espeically win Latin and Italian. Articles have appeared in various journals and edited collections. My edition and translation of Ronsard's Franciade (1572) will be published by AMS Press (2008). Several other editions and books are also forthcoming (2009-10).

Recent Comp. Lit. courses: Epic Travel: From Text to Road Movie (Fall 2006, Spring 2008). Click here for details.

My next Comp. Lit. course will likely be in Spring 2009 and titled "Big Brother: Between Politics and Paranoia" with readings by George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, Lucan, Derek Walcott, and others, and films by Hitchcock, Terry Gilliam, Charlie Chaplin, and others. Theoretical work by Foucault, Zizek, and others. Currently in construction, more details to follow soon...

B.A. (University of London, UK), A. M. and Ph.D. (Harvard University)

 

Caroline Weber is a specialist of eighteenth-century French and comparative literature. She came to Barnard in 2005 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught for 7 years. She holds her undergraduate degree in Literature from Harvard and her PhD in French from Yale. Her interests include libertinage, bourgeois drama, Enlightenment philosophy, revolutionary politics, costume history, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Her most recent book is "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution" (Henry Holt 2006/Picador 2007), which both the New York Times and The Washington Post named a Notable Book of the Year. Her other titles include "Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France" (U of Minnesota P 2003) and "Fragments of Revolution" (Yale UP 2002). She is currently at work on a book on ideology in bourgeois drama. Her essays have appeared in a wide variety of academic and mainstream publications, and she writes regularly for The New York Times Book Review.

B.A. (Harvard University), Ph.D. (Yale).

 

Nancy Worman is an Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature. She specializes in ancient Greek rhetoric and drama, ancient literary criticism, and literary theory. She has taught in the Program in Comparative Literature since 1999, including the introductory course and "Poetics of the Mouth." Her most recent book, Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens was published this year by Cambridge University Press. She is currently at work on a new project on landscape imagery in ancient literary criticism and will offer a new comparative literature course in the spring, entitled "Literary Landscapes from Homer to H.D."