Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

President

Thierry Boucquey, Scripps College

Born and raised in Antwerp, Belgium, Thierry Boucquey received his B.A. in Romance Philology from the University of Louvain, Belgium, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in French from the University of California, Irvine. He is currently Associate Dean of Faculty and Professor of French and Humanities at Scripps College in the Claremont University Consortium. He has published Mirages de la farce (1991), Six Medieval French Farces (1999), and 100 Games and Activities for the Introductory Foreign language Classroom (2007), edited two volumes of the Encyclopedia of World Writers (2005), contributed chapters to books, and published numerous articles in scholarly journals. He is multilingual, volunteers as an advanced soccer referee, and competes as a sprinter on the world level in Master's track and field.

First Vice-President

Sabine Wilke, University of Washington

Sabine Wilke is Professor of German at the University of Washington. She is also associated with and teaches in the European Studies Program, and the graduate Program in Critical Theory. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, and cultural studies. She has written books and articles on body constructions in modern German literature and culture, German unification, the hisory of German film and theater, contemporary German authors and filmmakers including Christa Wolf, Heiner Muller, Botho Strauss, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Monika Treut, and others. Most recently, Dr. Wilke was involved in a larger project about German colonialism and postcoloniality, and the question of comparative colonialisms, especially how Germany related differently to Africa and the South Pacific. She has also begun a new project on environmental criticism, the German tradition of philosophy of nature, and overlapping concerns of postcolonialism and ecocriticism.

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Second Vice-President

Ana María Rodríguez-Vivaldi, Washington State University

Ana María Rodríguez-Vivaldi received her B.A. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Latin American Contemporary Literature and Culture from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with secondary specializations in Colonial Latin American and Spanish (Peninsular) 20th century literatures. She joined the Foreign Languages and Cultures Department at Washington State University in 1990, where she is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Film Studies. She coordinated the Spanish Undergraduate and Graduate Studies for eleven years before joining the College of Liberal Arts as Associate Dean for Student Affairs & Global Education in August 2009. She continues to coordinate Film Studies for the College of Liberal Arts. She teaches for the Honors College and was selected Outstanding Teacher in 2008. Her research interests are postmodern/ hybrid cultures and genres, particularly as expressed in the intersection between film and literature, and she has published and presented nationally and internationally on related subjects. She lives in Pullman with her husband, Dr. Gustavo V. Barbosa Cánovas (Biological Systems Engineering), their three children: Juan Manuel (WSU 2009), Gabriela (a junior in the Civil Engineering program), and Jorge (entering 8th grade); and a cat named after Brazilian soccer star, Romario.

Click here for more information about Dr. Rodríguez-Vivaldi

Pacific Coast Philology Co-Editors

Pauline Beard, Pacific University

Pauline Beard, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Pacific University, is actively involved in teaching, has coordinated the First Year Seminar (FYS), and directed the Writing Resource Center and the Honors Program.  She has published tests for GRE and MCAT, an essay on Lawrence Durrell in Lawrence Durrell and The Greek World, and articles on Durrell and Italo Calvino.  She has also presented papers on Austen, Durrell, Joyce, Clara Reeves and Aphra Behn, and Barbara Kingsolver. Her latest published essay on Austen may be found at www.jasna.org (follow the Persuasions On-Line link for January 2007). Dr. Beard's book, A Riddling Thing: Time in Five Modern Novels, reflects her fascination with time. She is the co-coordinator of the local chapter of JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) and is busy organizing the 2010 Annual General Meeting to be held at the Portland Hilton, when 500-plus Janeites will descend on Portland to explore the area and the early novel Northanger Abbey. Dr. Beard and Lorely French co-edit Pacific Coast Philology.

Lorely French, Pacific University

Lorely French is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of German at Pacific University in Oregon, where she teaches German language, culture, literature, and film.  She is the author of the book German Women Letter Writers 1750 to 1850.   She has published numerous book chapters and journal articles on German women writers, including Bettine von Arnim, Rahel Varnhagen, Dorothea Mendelssohn-Veit-Schlegel, Sophie Mereau-Brentano, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Marlene Streeruwitz, and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as Austrian Roma writers and Afro-German poets. In 2009 she co-organized, with Michaela Grobbel at Sonoma State University, a traveling exhibit in the United States of the artworks of Ceija Stojka.  She is presently working on a book manuscript examining gender and ethnicity in writings by Roma in the German-speaking countries. She is also working with Michaela Grobbel on publishing a book on Ceija Stojka's art, life, and writings.   Her research has been supported by grants from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst/German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Commission.  In 2003 she was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair of Gender Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria.  She is presently co-editor of Pacific Coast Philology: The Journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association.

Executive Director

Craig Svonkin, Metropolitan State College of Denver

Craig Svonkin is a dedicated PAMLA member, a lover of academic conferences, and an Assistant Professor of English at Metropolitan State College of Denver specializing in American literature, Children’s literature, American poetry, and American film and visual culture. Craig received his B.A. in English from USC, his M.A. in English from California State University, Los Angeles, and his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. He holds the distinction of having served oh-so-briefly on PAMLA’s Executive Committee, from November 2008-March 2009, when he somehow borrowed a page from Shepherd Mead’s 1952 best-seller How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying to vault himself into PAMLA’s Executive Director’s seat.

Craig’s publications include “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering” (forthcoming in College Literature), “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room” (forthcoming in Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark West’s Disneyland and Its Global Impact, from McFarland & Company Publishers), “Muggles and Giants and House-elves, Oh My: Harry Potter, Liberalism, and the Problem of Evil” (forthcoming in Research Digest: A Quarterly Journal of Higher Education), “From Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart: Becoming the Other; Suiciding the White Male ‘Self’” (in Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 43, 2008), “Melville and the Bible: Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, Multivocalism, & Plurality” (in Letterature D’America, Anno XXI, n. 88-89, 2001), and, co-authored with Emory Elliott, New Directions in American Literary Scholarship: 1980-2002. Craig grew up in Southern California, where he squandered his youth wandering the streets of Los Angeles and the faux-streets of Disneyland. He is a dedicated fan of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson’s meta-museum—a sight of wonder and confusion examined in Craig’s essay “If Only L.A. Had a Soul: Spirituality and Wonder at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.” Despite the lightly flippant tone of this bio, please know that Craig is extremely excited and honored to have been appointed to work on PAMLA’s behalf. For those concerned, please also know that Craig does not habitually speak about himself in the third person. Please feel free to email Craig with any questions or suggestions about PAMLA: svonkin@netzero.com

Executive Committee

Terms Expire 2010

Catherine Montfort, Santa Clara University

Catherine R. Montfort is Professor of French and Women's and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University. She was born in Marseille, France and received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. At SCU she teaches a variety of language, culture and literature classes. She is the author of three books (among them Les Fortunes de Mme de Sévigné au XVIIème et XVIIIème siècles), and about forty articles and chapters on Agrippa d’Aubigné, Mme de Sévigné, Charlotte Corday, Mme de Staël, Mme Campan, Vigée Lebrun, Simone de Beauvoir and Annnie Ernaux published in such venues as Albineana, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, French Studies, French Forum, Nottingham French Studies, The French Review, Dalhousie French Studies, Pacific Coast Philology and WIF Studies. She has edited a volume entitled Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 (1994), and a Special Section of WIF Studies on “Feminine Friendship” (1999). She has co-edited three WIF volumes, French and Francophone Women, 16th-21st Centuries: Essays on Literature, Culture and Society with Biographical and Media Resources (2002), French/Francophone Culture and Literature Through Film (2006)and Eclectic Expressions: Women’s Triumphs, Past and Present (2008). From January 2005 to January 2009, she was also the Executive Editor of Women in French Studies and published a volume a year. She is now the General Editor. She was President of the Women in French Association from 2000 to 2003, and President of PAMLA (Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association) from 2003 to 2004. She is interested in the epistolary genre, women writers and artists, the critical reception of works from the past, and cinema.

Stanley Orr, University of Hawaii, West Oahu

Terms Expire 2011

Sophie Delahaye, Washburn University

Sophie Delahaye received her D.E.A. in French Literature and Civilization from the Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France, and a Ph.D. in French from the University of Kansas. Since 2008, she teaches French Language, Literature and Culture at Washburn University. Her areas of research are the French Enlightenment (Marquis de Sade, 18th-century novel, poetry, and literary theory), 20th-century criticism on the Enlightenment, and interdisciplinary studies (literature, art, and architecture).

Jeremiah B. C. Axelrod, Occidental College

Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod received his Ph.D. in American History (with graduate certificates in Critical Theory, Feminist Studies, and Film Studies) from the University of California, Irvine, in 2001 after having graduated from Williams College with a B.A. in 1992. After teaching for several years in the Film Studies and History Departments at UC Irvine and serving as Kevin Starr Fellow in California Studies at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Dr. Axelrod has worked since 2005 at Occidental College, where he is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in the History and American Studies Departments and in the interdisciplinary Cultural Studies Program. In addition, he is the founding partner in two Internet-based technology start-ups, Music For Dozens and Grabbit, LLC, based in Portland, Oregon. Founded respectively in 2001 and 2007, both companies focus on the distribution of independent popular music to consumers, seeking to construct communities of interaction between artists and fans which are capable of sustaining rich cultural relationships. He is also a founding board member of Enigma Icon, Inc., a Nevada-based corporation that develops imaginative games built upon collaborative storytelling.

Professor Axelrod is the author of Inventing Autopia: Envisioning the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles, published by the University of California Press in 2009, as well as several articles. His research generally probes the connections between visuality, urban topography, memory, gender, race, and transportation in twentieth-century Southern California. A strong believer in both collegiate pedagogy and interdisciplinary academic collaboration, Dr. Axelrod is currently co-authoring a textbook, A Theory Toolkit (under contract from W.W. Norton), that helps college-level undergraduates construct argumentative essays using key concepts from contemporary critical theory. He regularly presents academic papers at the PAMLA annual conference and at others around the world. Born in Hollywood, Jeremiah Axelrod grew up primarily in Riverside, California, and has lived for the past several years in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles.

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Terms Expire 2012

Roswitha Burwick, Scripps College

Roswitha Burwick holds the Distinguished Chair in Modern Languages and has been teaching at Scripps College since 1971. She has published several books and numerous articles on German Romanticism, specifically on Achim von Arnim and science, and on women in Romanticism. She is one of the main editors of the Weimarer Arnim-Ausgabe, a historical critical edition of the complete worls of the German Romantic poet Achim von Arnim. In 2007 she published a two volume edition on Ludwig Achim von Arnim. Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften 1 which contains his publications on natural science. In collaboration with Olaf Breidbach, University of Jena, she is presently working on a collection of essays on Physics Around 1800: Art, Science or Philosophy? to be published in German and English. She is also directing a student-faculty project to be titled Merry Sorrows. (Un)Happy Endings. Fairy Tales For Our Time. (2010).

Dr. Burwick teaches German language classes and advanced courses in 19th and 20th century German literature and culture. She also teaches regularly in the Scripps Core Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities and recently served as the Director of that program. She is a member of many professional organizations and the Vice-President of the Internationale Arnim-Gesellschaft.

Jeffrey Gray, Seton Hall University

Jeffrey Gray is a professor of English at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, where he teaches courses in postwar American poetry, postcolonial literature, and literary theory. Related areas of his research are travel writing and Caribbean poetry. He is author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2005) and editor of the five-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry (Greenwood, 2005). His articles on poetry and American culture have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Callaloo, Profession, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other journals, and his poetry in the Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Midamerican Review, and other journals. He is or has been an NEH fellow, MacDowell fellow, Geraldine R. Dodge fellow, and two-time Fulbright fellow. He was born in Seattle, Washington, and was educated at the University of Washington and the University of California, Riverside. He lived and taught for many years in Central America, the South Pacific, Asia, and Europe.

Graduate Student Representative, Term Expires 2010

Lorenzo Giachetti, Stanford University

Lorenzo is a Ph.D. candidate in the French department at Stanford University. He grew up between Florence, Italy and Portland, Oregon, where he also earned his B.A. in French literature from Reed College. While his background is mostly in 19th century poetry, his interest and research in urban mythologies has extended across genres and into the 20th century avant-garde. Lorenzo became a member of PAMLA in 2007, and has since gained invaluable academic and professional experience chairing a panel on Children's literature and presenting his own work in different areas of French and Francophone literature.

Nominating Committee for 2010

Beverly Voloshin, San Francisco State University (Chair)

Imke Meyer, Bryn Mawr College

Kathleen Lundeen, Western Washington University

Kathleen Lundeen is Professor of English at Western Washington University. A specialist in British Romantic literature, she has published on Blake, Keats, Hemans, Wordsworth, and Austen, as well as on literature and science, biblical literature, intermedial art, and film. She is the author of Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology.