Cultural Studies and Languages Faculty

Barbara Alfano brings a background in journalism, translation, and short-story writing in Italian to her study of 20th- and 21st-century Italian fiction.

A scholar of contemporary Spanish fiction, Sarah D. Harris's research and teaching interests include sequential art, twentieth and twenty-first century Peninsular film, trauma, collective memory and forgetting, migration, monstrosity, and gender and identity studies.

How do social factors shape our use of language, and how does language use in turn impact our construction and perception of society? A sociolinguist, Thomas Leddy-Cecere addresses these questions through his research in Arabic and contemporary American English.

Ginger Lin, a native of Taiwan, has 30 years of experience teaching at the cross-section of language, literature, history, and philosophy.

Jonathan Pitcher is a scholar of Latin American literature, philosophy, and history whose research interests exceed any one discipline: identity, exile, film, politics, travel, art, architectural ideology, puppetry, and the aftermath of the Boom, to name a few.

Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly teaches French language through the lenses of francophone cinema, literature, and other aspects of French cultural life.

Stephen Shapiro’s research on early-modern French literature and culture focuses on aristocratic memoirs, the history of sexuality, culinary culture, and the history of the city of Paris. He is currently looking at the development of a modern gay culture in 18th-century Paris.

Ikuko Yoshida teaches Japanese language and culture, and her research interest areas are second language acquisition, pedagogy, critical thinking in foreign language learning, technology, and Japanese aesthetics. She is a certified instructor of ikebana—traditional Japanese flower arrangement.

Alexia Fawcett is a linguist specializing in community-based language documentation with speakers of Indigenous languages of the Americas. She conducts research on linguistic structure, most recently and extensively focusing on spatial language in Wao Terero (spoken in the Amazon region of Ecuador).

A poet and a scholar of contemporary Latin American Literature and Culture, Retamoso Urbano's research includes 20th and 21st century Latin American and Spanish poetry, Transnational surrealism, 20th century Latin American narrative, intertextuality, Queer theory, Latin American Avant-Garde movements, Peruvian poetry, the Generation of ‘27, Transatlantic studies, Modern fiction and poetics, the Poetics of Eros, and Literary and Artistic connections between Latin America and the US.