Officers 2011-2012

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

First-Vice President

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.

Second-Vice President

Cheryl Edelson, Chaminade University of Honolulu

Cheryl Edelson is Associate Professor of English and English Discipline Coordinator at Chaminade University of Honolulu. Cheryl holds a B.S. in Anthropology from the University of California, Riverside, an M.A. in English from the University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. Her research and teaching interests include American Literature, the Literary Gothic, Film and Television Studies, and Popular Culture. Cheryl’s most recent publication is “Reclaiming Plots: Albert Wendt’s ‘Prospecting’ and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Ola Na Iwi as Postcolonial Gothic” (forthcoming in Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Re-imagined Nineteenth Century on Rodopi Press). Since 2007, Cheryl has served as the co-organizer for the Oceanic Popular Culture Association Conference— a meeting that convenes annually in Honolulu and one that attracts scholars from around the world. Cheryl received a 2010 President’s Award for contributions to the field of popular culture studies from the national Popular Culture/American Culture Associations. Born in Los Angeles, Cheryl spent most of her life in California’s Inland Empire before relocating to Hawai’i in 2004.

Pacific Coast Philology Co-Editors

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.

Friederike von Schwerin-High, Pomona College

Friederike received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and her B. A. from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. With research areas in late eighteenth-century and late twentieth-century German literature, she has published articles on Thomas Mann, Doris Dörrie, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Forthcoming articles relate to the use of blank verse in Goethe and Schiller’s classical dramas, and to Judith Herman and Heinrich von Kleist’s poetics. Her book, Shakespeare, reception and translation: Germany and Japan, appeared in 2004 with Continuum Press. Her current book project is a comparative examination of narrative techniques and the rendition of alterity in fictional biographies by Thomas Mann, Christa Wolf, Orhan Pamuk, Natsume Soseki, and Philip Roth.

Friederike has been an Assistant Professor of German at Pomona College since 2005. From 1998 to 2004 she was a visiting assistant professor of German at St. Olaf College and an instructor in German at CSU Long Beach in 2004. Her courses at Pomona College have included Multicultural and Transnational Germany, German Drama, Introduction to Culture, and German Intellectual History.

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 2012

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.

Shirin Khanmohamadi, San Francisco State University

Shirin A. Khanmohamadi (B.A. Brown, 1991; Ph.D. Columbia, 2005) is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative and World Literature department at San Francisco State University, where she specializes in comparative medieval European literature, premodern travel and ethnographic writing, cross-cultural and confessional representation within medieval literature, and literary cross-fertilization between the medieval European and Islamic worlds. She has recently published or forthcoming work in New Medieval Literatures, Exemplaria, and Arthuriana. She is currently completing a book-length study of premodern ethnographic poetics, In Light of Another´s Word: writing ethnography before the gaze.

Terms Expire 2013

Damian Bacich, San Jose State University

Damian Bacich is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at San José State University. He is co-translator with Rossella Pescatori of Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love (U Toronto, 2009), nominated for the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Translation. He currently teaches courses in Colonial Spanish American Literature, Translation, and Spanish Language. His research interests include the literatures of early modern Iberia and Ibero-America including California and the Southwest, translation studies, especially vernacular translation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Renaissance humanism in Iberia and Ibero-America. He is also a great admirer of Italian literature, especially Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia.

Damian is a native Californian and received a B.A. in History from the University of San Francisco and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ellen Finkelpearl, Scripps College

Ellen Finkelpearl has taught in the Classics Department at Scripps College since 1988. She received her BA from Princeton University and her MA and PhD from Harvard University. She specializes in Latin Literature and the Ancient Novel, with a particular emphasis on Apuleius and his Metamorphoses. Her book-length publications are: Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: a study of allusion in the novel (University of Michigan Press 1998), A Survey of Scholarship on Apuleius (Lustrum vol. 42, 2000), and An Apuleius Reader (forthcoming with Bolchazi-Carducci 2011). Her articles (mostly on Apuleius) have focused on the subjects of intertextuality, the exploration of Apuleius' Romano-African identity, and the confusions of animal-human distinctions in various ancient authors. Her current interests are moving toward critical animal studies and their relation to ancient discussions of the animal. She has been an active member of PAMLA for about two decades.

Terms Expire 2014

Emily Taylor Merriman, San Francisco State University

Emily Taylor Merriman served as an Assistant Professor in English at San Francisco State University, where she taught twentieth-century poetry from Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean. She has a B.A. in English and Modern Languages (French) from Oxford University, a teaching certificate from London University, and graduate degrees from Boston University. She works as an independent scholar in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her published work includes essays on Gerard M. Hopkins, William Blake, Geoffrey Hill, Alan Moore, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Adrienne Rich. She serves as co-book review editor for The Hopkins Quarterly. Her current book manuscript, Poetry's God, studies the theology in verse of Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, and Charles Wright. Emily spent her childhood in Great Britain and Australia. She is currently learning Mandarin Chinese.

Aili Zheng, Willamette University

Aili Zheng is Assistant Professor at Willamette University. She teaches German language and literature, culture and film. She also serves as a faculty member in the Film Studies Program, and as an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Asian Studies. Her research contributions are in twentieth century German and Austrian literature, culture and film, as well as in Chinese film.

Graduate Student Representative, Term Expires 2012

April Davidauskis, University of Southern California 

April Davidauskis is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English and Gender Studies departments at the University of Southern California. She received her M.A. in English from San Francisco State University and B.A. in English and Women's Studies from UC Berkeley. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American literature and culture, gender studies, and popular culture. She is currently working on her dissertation on roguish femininities in the nineteenth-century United States, exploring the connections between gender, nation, and desire. Born in the suburbs of Los Angeles, she grew up in downtown San Francisco.

Nominating Committee for 2011

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 history 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.

Click here for more information about Dr. Wilke

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.

Beverly Voloshin, San Francisco State University

Staff

Webmaster

Heather Wozniak, University of Washington

Heather Wozniak is currently the Humanities Web Specialist in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington.  She received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 2008.  She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, with particular emphasis on drama, romanticism, and gender studies. Her dissertation, Brilliant Gloom: The Contradictions of British Gothic Drama, 1768-1823, shifts gothic studies from a text-based inquiry focused largely on novels to a media-based inquiry that incorporates all elements of performance, including text, image, embodiment, and sound. Heather has a fondness for digital humanities, Disneyland, and her two adorable little girls. She has been managing PAMLA's website and electronic communications since 2007.