Research

Professor Valentine teaches courses in Japanese language and culture, with an over-arching goal to develop in her students an awareness of the cultural context of language. She is particularly interested in the ways Japanese cultural production — literature, film, visual art, music — shapes and is shaped by a sense of national identity. While her research interests range from language pedagogy to classical Japanese poetry to Japanese nationalism, she considers herself a comparatist at heart. She believes that the rigorous and creative interpretation of texts is a cornerstone of the humanities, and plays a fundamental role in our understanding of ourselves and our shared humanity.

Learn More

Professor Tobin teaches courses on gay and lesbian studies and queer theory, human rights and literature, and Freud, as well as more traditional topics such as German film and Faust. He is also usually one of the co-professors of the National Imagination course. He specializes in the culture and literature of the German-speaking world from the Age of Goethe to the present, with a special focus on gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and human rights.

Tobin directs the major in Comparative Literature and advises students who want to self-design a major in German Studies.

Learn More

Professor Rivera teaches courses on Latin American literature, language, and culture from modernism to the present day. His current book project analyzes the ways in which different types of bodies (the “fat” body, the black body, the absent one…) have been represented in contemporary Puerto Rican poetry.

Learn More

Professor Juan-Moreno teaches all levels of Spanish language as well as contemporary Hispanic literature, culture, and cinema. Her research focuses on contemporary Spanish poetry and cinema, food, and gender studies, specifically on works by women writers and filmmakers published or released after the year 2000. In her current project, she analyzes alliances between gastronomy, film, and poetry in Peninsular Spanish culture in the 21st century. A second project examines how the cultural narratives on aging are depicted in Spanish poetry and film from an interdisciplinary perspective that evaluates the connections between food, sexual desire, and gender.

Learn More

Professor Gale has taught courses that look at coming of age in the novel; contemporary francophone youth culture as portrayed in literature, film, music, and magazines; fairy tales of the world; and advanced oral expression. Her main scholarly focus is the depiction of female adolescence since the late 19th century, and explores topics such as education, the body, family dynamics, friendship, and sexuality from a socio-historical perspective.

Learn More

Professor Fox teaches courses in which texts serve as windows to the attitudes and concerns of Jews through the ages. His main scholarly focus is the rhetoric and internal coherence of the Hebrew Bible, and how they may be brought out in translation. He is also interested in how the Bible has been transformed at each stage by generations of Israelites, Jews, and Christians. He  Dr. Fox’s activities in translation have led him to some unexpected places. He was a religious consultant on the animated film Prince of Egypt, and has been collaborating with an American-Israeli artist, Schwebel, who sets the David stories against the backdrop of 1980s Jerusalem.

Learn More

Professor Fong is the French program coordinator; she works with the teaching assistants from France, does study abroad advising, and is the faculty liaison to Clark’s French Club. Her research interests include questions of wandering and straying, space and movement, transgression, the in-between, the everyday, surrealism, subjectivity, and writing. Her previous work interrogated figurations of ‘errancy’ in a selection of 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literary works.

Learn More

Professor Ferly teaches interdisciplinary courses on literatures and cultures from Francophone countries, on French popular culture, immigration in France, and on Caribbean writing from a comparative perspective. Her current research interests are Caribbean literatures and cultures from a comparative perspective, including the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanic regions, as well as contemporary women’s writing from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Her work focuses on the issues of race and gender in connection with history, language, and the Caribbean literary tradition.

Learn More

Professor Atienza teaches courses in Spanish language, as well as advanced undergraduate courses on early modern Spanish literature and history, including the history of madness and the carnivalesque, the Spanish inquisition, and the history of gender in the Hispanic world — Spain, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Her current research focuses on shame in early modern Spain; she is especially interested in the literary representations of marginal groups — the poor, the ill, the outcast — as well as the conditions in which they lived. Her other research interests include gender and women’s studies, history of theater, pedagogy, and cinema.

Learn More

Professor Acosta Cruz, a native of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, teaches all levels of Spanish language and literature. Her main research and teaching interests are Caribbean and Latino cultures. She explores issues such as the making and marketability of identities, Puerto Rican cultural history, and national and gender-based stereotypes.

Learn More