Officers 2012-2013

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.

First-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.

Second-Vice President

Heidi Schlipphacke, Old Dominion University

Heidi Schlipphacke is Associate Professor of German and Director of the B.A. in International Studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She has been a member of PAMLA since 1998.  She received her Ph.D. in German Literature from the University of Washington, and she has enjoyed retaining strong ties to colleagues in the Western United States ever since. Her research focuses on gender, kinship and aesthetics in the European Enlightenment and in post-fascist German and Austrian literature and film. She also enjoys writing about queer popular culture.  She is the recipient of research fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service. She teaches courses in German and Austrian Studies, in Gender and Queer Studies, in Film Studies, in Jewish Studies, and in International Studies.  Her published academic work on authors and filmmakers including Ernst Marischka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Tom Tykwer, and Goethe has appeared in journals such as Modern Austrian Literature, Screen, Camera Obscura, The German Quarterly, and Journal of English and German Philology, among others. Her book, Nostalgia After Nazism: History, Home and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film, appeared with Bucknell University Press in 2010.

Pacific Coast Philology Co-Editors

Roswitha Burwick, Scripps College

Roswitha Burwick is Professor Emerita at Scripps College where she has been teaching 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 works 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. She is presently working on the second volume of Arnim's scientific writings that contains his manucripts. In collaboration with Olaf Breidbach, University of Jena, she has published a collection of essays on Physics Around 1800: Art, Science or Philosophy? in German and English (2012/2013). She also directed a student-faculty project with the title Merry Sorrows. (Un)Happy Endings. Fairy Tales For Our Time. (2010).

Although retired, Dr. Burwick continues to teach "Once Upon a Time. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Fairy Tale," a course in the Scripps Interdisciplinary Core 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 University of Denver

Craig Svonkin is a dedicated PAMLA member, a lover of academic conferences, and an Assistant Professor of English at Metropolitan State University 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 has had the pleasure of serving as PAMLA's Executive Director since March of 2009.

Craig’s publications include "From Disneyland to Modesto: George Lucas and Walt Disney" (in Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology, 2012), “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering” (College Literature 37.4, Fall 2010), “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room” (in Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark West’s edited collection, Disneyland and Culture, from McFarland & Company, 2011), “Muggles and Giants and House-elves, Oh My: Harry Potter, Liberalism, and the Problem of Evil” (Research Digest: A Quarterly Journal of Higher Education, 2011), “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 site 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.” Please feel free to email Craig with any questions or suggestions about PAMLA: svonkin@netzero.net

Executive Committee

Terms Expire 2013

Damian Bacich, San Jose State University

Damian Bacich is Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair of 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.

Terms Expire 2015

John D. Schwetman, University of Minnesota, Duluth

John D. Schwetman is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth where he has taught for 12 years. HIs specialty is 20-century American literature. In Fall 2011, his article “The Superhero and the Prospective Geography: Tropes of the Cityscape in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth” came out in an issue of the International Journal of Comic Arts. His articles “Urban Rail Maps and the Organizational Sublime” and “’Balefires on the Distant Ridges’: Dismantling the Apocalyptic Zombie Trope in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” are both currently under consideration. He is currently working on a book on the American cosmopolitan.

Sonia Barrios Tinoco, Seattle University

Sonia Barrios Tinoco is an Assistant Professor in the Modern Languages and Cultures Department at Seattle University. She teaches Spanish language and Latin American Literature and Film. Her primary research areas range from cultural products on (il)legal immigration to the study of bandits in Latin American literature and film representations of said figures. She recently published an article about the construction of identity through violence taking as a point of reference the famous Mexican corrido in honor of Joaquín Murrieta. She obtained her doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and she joined Seattle University in 2009. She was part of the organizing committee for the PAMLA 2012 conference held at her institution.

Graduate Student Representative, Term Expires 2014

Melanie Hernandez, University of Washington 

Melanie Hernandez is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she is a Simpson Center Fellow in Public Scholarship, with a focus on service-learning-based pedagogy. Melanie’s current dissertation research on nineteenth and early-twentieth century “passing” narratives takes a comparative ethnic studies approach, tracking Mexican-American racial formations across time against the black-white color line, and using an African-American critical framework to critique exclusionary Chicano identity politics discourses. In addition to her research and teaching at the University of Washington, Melanie is a volunteer instructor for University Beyond Bars, and currently teaches Composition at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, WA.

Nominating Committee for 2012

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

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.

Staff

Webmaster

Heather Wozniak, University of Washington

Heather Wozniak is currently a web developer in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington, where she builds and manages a framework to support department websites.  She received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 2008, with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. 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 mermaids, Disneyland, and her two adorable little girls. She has been managing PAMLA's website and electronic communications since 2007.