Graduate Students

Graduate Students

Amrita De

  • Bio: Sixth year doctoral candidate
  • Research Interest: Masculinity Studies, global south studies, affect studies, south Asian literature.

Connor Grogan

  • Bio: Connor has a B.A. in poetry from Hampshire College. His present research is interested in varieties of literary & aesthetic techniques for capturing/expressing/generating thought & experience. Specifically, he looks to the cross-section of literature & philosophy where experimental modes of expression & argumentation are employed to seek out new articulations which might in turn open onto new modes of thinking & experiencing the world. He’s particularly interested in evocatively playful/speculative ways of conducting philosophy through fictive or lyric conceit. Otherwise, he finds himself preoccupied by queer theory, (sado-masochistic) erotics, libidinal economics, process philosophies, contemporary poetry, lyric essay, speculative & fabulist fictions, & anything else that might suffice to provide moments of Bewilderment/aesthetic rapture/Dickinsonian Decapitation. His work has been published in diagram (thediagram.com) & is forthcoming from SPECTRA (spectrajournal.org).
  • Research Interest: French & German Theory, Aesthetics, Queer Theory, Eroticism, Theories of Play.

Daimys García

  • Bio: Daimys Ester García is a writer, artist, and educator from Miami and a PhD candidate in the comparative literature department at SUNY Binghamton. Her essays have appeared in Convivial Thinking and The Mantle; her poetry has appeared in The Maynard. She is currently a proofreader and editor’s assistant for the journal Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas and the podcast host for Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal for Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. She is the Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Fellow at Kenyon college for the 2022-2023 academic year.
  • Research Interest: Major research interests: Latinx literature, with special focus on Cuban American literature; Native American/Indigenous studies; women of color feminisms; decolonial praxis Minor research interests: POC speculative fiction; theories of memory; theories of the archive; conceptions of the prosthetic.

Guelden Olgun

  • Bio: Gülden Olgun is currently working on her thesis titled Identity & Homelands in Contemporary Turkish-Kurdish-German Cinema: “Heimatfilms without Heimat”, which deals with issues of home, homeland, longing, displacement, and statelessness. Her research interests include cinemas of displacement and exile, transnational cinema and literature, particularly Turkish-German cinema and literature, Kurdish Cinema in Germany and women’s representation in films. She received an MA in German as a Foreign and Second Language at University of Kassel in Germany and has twelve years of experience teaching German. From August 2014 to May 2015, she worked as a DAAD (The German Academic Exchange Service) lecturer in the German Department at Binghamton University.
  • Research Interest: Transnational Cinema, World Cinema, Cinema of Exil, Cinema of Displacement.

Hannah Leonard

  • Bio: Hannah Leonard is a PhD graduate student in Comparative Literature. She holds a graduate certificate in translation research and instruction and a Master of Arts degree in comparative literature from SUNY Binghamton; she received her undergraduate degrees from the University of Iowa, where she was trained in Classics, English literature and creative writing, and Medieval Studies. 
  • Research Interest: Women Latin Writers; Materiality; Digital Humanities; Translation Theories; Adaptation Theories; Graphic Novel; Monstrosity and Abjection; Feminisms and Queer Theories.

Jan Hohenstein

  • Bio: Jan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. His research revolves around European literature and philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specifically the legacy of the Enlightenment in Austrian Literature. He is currently finishing a dissertation with the working title, Man has Limits”: Adalbert Stifter and the End of Enlightenment.
  • Research Interest: German literature (especially in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries), literature & philosophy of the Enlightenment, German as a foreign language (Deutsch als Fremdsprache), aesthetics of reception.

John Piccarella

  • Bio: I am a retired school district administrator, former public school teacher and music journalist, currently ABD in comparative literature. I am married, have four adult children, and live in Trumansburg, NY.
  • Research Interest: Disruptive textual practices in experimental literature Poststructuralist conceptions of language and subjectivity.

Julia Eggleston

  • Bio: Julia received her MA in Political Theory from Virginia Tech, where she focused on the geopolitics of knowledge as well as the intellectual history of new materialism. Her previous work also includes critiques of neocolonial rhetoric in internet freedom reporting as well as explorations of decolonial onto-epistemologies. This work informs her current interests in the politics of translation and post-representationalist reading methods. Julia is also highly enthusiastic about teaching, and pursues pedagogical practices that reflect the political stakes of her research.
  • Research Interest: Decolonial thought and the geopolitics of knowledge; transmaterialities; multispecies studies; politics of translation; global political economy.

Kodai Abe

  • Bio: Kodai Abe received his BA and MA at the University of Tokyo, Japan. After three years as the JSPS research fellow, he moved to the US as a Fulbright grantee. He's working on two book projects: "Transpacific Exceptionalism" and "Afro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Cold War." He has published articles in Discourse, the Journal of Asian American Studies, among others.
  • Research Interest: American studies, Asian studies, Asian American studies, transpacific studies.

Lisa Timmermann

  • Bio: Lisa is a TA and a PhD student in the Comparative Literature department. A German national, she worked as a language teacher for several years and produces a podcast for German learners. She holds a BA (Hons) in Film Studies with Modern Writing, an MA in Film Studies, and an MA in Creative Writing from universities in England and Canada. 
  • Research Interest: Female friendship and solidarity in world literature and popular culture.

Maria del Carmen Rodriguez Galindo

  • Bio: I hold a BA in English Studies and an MA in Hispanic Studies, I am currently pursuing my PhD. My dissertation focuses on Romani Literature in terms of literacy and orality. 
  • Research Interest: Romani Studies, Indigenous Studies, Spanish Literature, Decolonization, Media Studies.

Min-Chi Chen

  • Bio: Min-Chi Chen's research interests center on the relationship between the fictional (serial) killers and their cultural representations. She is writing a dissertation on criminal profiling techniques and their social influence on American crime novels, films, and television series.
  • Research Interest: Media studies; cultural studies; American studies; psychoanalysis; crime fiction; popular culture.

Mushtaq Bilal

  • Bio: Mushtaq Bilal is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. Currently, he is finishing his dissertation titled, "Novel Community: Urdu Novel and 'Muslim' Community in Nineteenth-Century India." His work has appeared in academic journals including the Journal of World Literature and the International Journal of Middle East Studies as well as in popular publications like the Washington Post, the LA Times, Dawn (Pakistan), and Scroll (India). Mushtaq has taught Pakistani literature to undergraduates, general members of the community, and officers of the American Foreign Service. In 2016, he published a collection of interviews with ten Pakistani novelists titled, Writing Pakistan: Conversations on Identity, Nationhood and Fiction. Currently, he is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 
  • Research Interest: World literature, anglophone literature, South Asian literature, Urdu novel, Pakistani literature.

Rabie Zouaghi

  • Bio: Is a second year PhD student in the Comparative Literature department. Also, he is pursuing a certificate in the Translation, Research, and Instruction program at Binghamton University. He is broadly interested in the problems of perception, interpretation, or translation of the Maghrebian literature. His current research focuses on the afterlife of the Algerian literature in translation and adaptation. 
  • Research Interest: Postcolonial Studies, Maghrebian Literature , Arabic Literature and Translation Studies.

Rebecca Forney

  • Bio: Rebecca Forney is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY). In her dissertation, she examines the embodied feminism articulated in Algerian author Assia Djebar’s work in conversation with Julia Kristeva’s concept of the chora as an embodying mechanism.
  • Research Interest: 20th century francophone literature, North African literature, postcolonial studies, comparative feminist theories, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and literatures of exile and migration.

Rebecca Warshofsky

  • Bio: My in-progress dissertation attempts to theorize the genre of transgressive fiction through the lens of various moralities and moral philosophies. To do this, I analyze texts containing representations of transgressions, subversions, and rejections of various laws, morals, customs, and conventions. This study serves to highlight the boundaries constituted by social structures in order to better understand their implications regarding the functioning of society; this study also seeks to interrogate how overcoming such structures can lead to the creation of new meanings and identities.
  • Research Interest: Moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophies and theories of transgression, transgressive fiction, philosophical fiction, weird, bizarre, absurd fiction, science fiction & speculative fiction.

Ruiyun Liao

  • Bio: PhD candidate
  • Research Interest: Cinema Studies, Literary theory, Eco-cinema, Comedy.

Samantha Sharp

  • Bio: Sam is a PhD student interested primarily in philosophy and theory. Her main fields of research are Peircean semiotics, Russian-formalist poetics, and ecological thought.
  • Research Interest: Ecotheory, Posthumanisms, Peircean, Semiotics, Poetics, Russian Avant-Garde.

Xiu Lin

  • Bio: 
  • Research Interest:

Yujun Mei

  • Bio: Create classic Chinese poetry and keep making some translations 
  • Research Interest: Translation

Zach Wagner

  • Bio: My research sits mostly in the realm of philosophy and critical theory. My work involves understanding the shift towards information theory and cybernetics in the wake of World War 2 and how such theories function in both a material and metaphysical sense, the former as methods of control and Imperialism, and the latter in how such theories render certain metaphysics obsolete.
  • Research Interest: Information Theory, Critical Theory, History and Makeup of Metaphysics, Deleuzian Thought, Post and Decolonial Theory, US Imperialism, Arabic Language Political Theory.

Ziyana Lategan

  • Bio: I am a 4th year PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature (specializing in Philosophy, Literature, and Criticism) and Fulbright scholar from Cape Town, South Africa.
  • Research Interest: Social and Political Theory, Dialectics/Dialectical Materialism, Black Critical Thought, Third World Marxisms.