Hakan Atay holds a BS in Philosophy (Middle East Technical University, Ankara), and an MA in Turkish Literature (Bilkent University, Ankara). He is a PhD student in the PLC program of the Department. His current research subjects are modern philosophy and thought, Gilles Deleuze, problems of modern literature and Fernando Pessoa.
Hivren Demir-Atay received her BS in International Relations, Middle East Technical University-Ankara, and her MA in Turkish Literature, Bilkent University-Ankara. She joined the department of Comparative Literature in 2004. Her research interests include psychoanalysis, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, narrative theory, short story, 19th and 20th c. American, European, and Turkish literature.
Raniela Barbaza. I am primarily interested in the human being, her relationship to language and what this entails about possibilities for thought interrupting an order already rendered natural and legitimate but whose impropriety is revealed by the very violence - in various forms - experienced by many of its members. I am thus drawn to exploring the functioning of stories predicated not upon the notion of the sovereign human being demonstrated as such by her capacity to see and speak - as embodied by the narrator - but upon alternative ways of sensing and of being. For my dissertation project, I am presently working on orosipon, a Filipino (specifically Bikolnon) word for story whose morphology suggests a refusal to narration and community. I am currently preparing a short paper on the orosipon to be presented in the ACLA conference in March 2009.
Natallia Beliakova. This is my second year as a doctoral student in Comparative Literature department and my fourth year at SUNY where I earned my MA in Comparative Literature and a graduate translation certificate. I entered the graduate program determined to study English modernism and continue my research on the Russian topic in Virginia Wool's essays. But the wide opportunities of the program and the variety of classes taught led my to the new field of translation theory, which is currently my major research focus. I am working with Western and Slavic translation theory and 19th /early 20th Russian literature. In my dissertation project I am trying to combine three areas of my interest: translation theory, Russian literature, and the discourse of madness. More specifically, I am exploring how the Russian modification of the madness topic in the 19th century Russian literature is reflected in various English translations and what the implications behind such (mis)translations are. I presented the results of my initial research at the 32nd Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference, 2007 in the paper "The Author, the Reader, and the Translator in a Dialogic Text: On Translating Dostoevsky's The Double" and I am working on a paper for AATSEEL 2008 conference "Translating Insanity: How Mad is Golyadkin in Translation?"
I taught several COLI introductory level literature classes, including World Literature (ancient and modern periods), Literature and Society, a Russian Literature course cross-listed with the GREAL department, and conversational Russian. I also worked as a Credit Teacher of Russian for Concordia Language Villages.
Irmak Ertuna began the Ph.D program in 2004 after completing her B.A. in Sociology from Bogazici University in Istanbul. Her dissertation investigates the relationship between technology, aesthetics and the radical politics of the early 20th century Dada and Surrealism. Her interests include Marxist theory, film studies and issues regarding intellectual property rights. She has presented papers on relationship between vanguardism and avant-gardes, commons and enclosures in the 21st century and has taught cinema and literature courses focusing on her areas of interests.
Julia Friday joined the Comparative Literature department at Binghamton University, SUNY in 2002. Her primary areas of research interest include poststructuralist theory and philosophy, visual culture analyses of documentary photography, and Eastern-European historiography. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled Practices of Memory: State and Dissident Documentary Photography During the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 under the direction of Professors Gisela Brinker-Gabler and John Tagg. Her project analyzes the processes that have framed the possibility of public discourse in the reform period of the Prague Spring. Utilizing Foucault's model of investigating history combined with the psychoanalytic approaches developed in visual culture studies, she approaches the contested field of Czechoslovak mainstream and dissident photography in order to raise broader questions concerning the role of public and private memory. The contemporary debates surrounding the concept of "national memory" serve as theoretical models for her inquiry. Her investigation of the manner in which the specific historical and socio-political context affected the distribution, duplication, banning, and manipulation of specific photographs proposes a unique way of conceiving the term 'visual documentation' within the genre of visual culture studies.
Friday was a recipient of a Binghamton University's Dissertation Fellowship award (January - May 2008). She also received a DAAD Short-Term Graduate Research Scholarship award and conducted research in Berlin, Germany (September - December 2006). Her work has been published in Afterimage: The Journal for Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and most recently, she has presented at 1968: A Global Perspective conference at University of Texas at Austin (October 2008).
Gulru Gozacan Received B.A. in English Language and Literature in 2002. Bogazici University, Istanbul; M.A. in Comparative Literature, 2005, Binghamton University. Interests are continental thought, biophilosophy, quantum physics, modern political philosophy, and Yoga. Most recent presentation is "Badiou's Reading of Deleuze and Political Ontology," for Knowledge, Violence, Discipline: (Re) Thinking Politics and the University, PIC Conference, Binghamton. Spring 2008. Dissertation topic, in very general terms, is Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Marx. Upcoming presentation is on Facism and Modernism for ACA Conference, New Orleans, Spring 2009.
Alison Heney is ABD and currently working on her dissertation which examines the role of the "Fantastic" and its operative modes (the uncanny, irony, the grotesque and the absurd) in the interrogation of modernist themes such as memory, gender, language and history in the literature of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Ingeborg Bachmann. Her area of specialization includes 20th Century Literature, Transnational Modernism, Latin American Literature, Film Theory and the Fairy Tale. Some of her most recent conference presentations include: "Apocalyptic Laughter: Contextualizing the Fantastic in Modern Literature" - MSAX in Nashville; "Because the last room is his room": Bluebeard and Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina" -- ACLA in Long Beach; "Archive and Imagination: Masked Performance and La Loa in Santa Lucía, Guatemala" -- ACLA in Puebla. She was a panel organizer for the recent Long Beach ACLA seminar on "The Ghosts of Latin America" and the SUNY Binghamton seminar "Last Living Words: Reading Ingeborg Bachmann" with Lilian Friedberg. She has been the recipient of the Tinker Foundation Award for Summer Research presented by the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the "Excellence in Teaching" Award presented by the Harpur Graduate School. Alison has also served as a member of the Comparative Literature GSO and as a managing editor for issue #9 of "Crossings: A Counter-Interdisciplinary Journal" at SUNY Binghamton and issue #23 of "genre" published by the Department of Comparative Literature and Classics at CSULB.
Tamkin Hussain is a PhD student. Her areas of interest are: trauma studies, comparative histories, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction. Degrees: MA (Comparative Literature) Binghamton University BSc. (Social Sciences) Lahore University of Management Services, Pakistan.
Jessie Kabwila Kapasula. I am a Malawian graduate student at Binghamton University, New York, married with two children. I hold a Master's of Arts degree in Literature, specializing in Contemporary African feminist theory. I am currently completing my PhD thesis on "Representations of African Feminist Agency in the Transnational Fiction of Adichie and Danticat." I have over 15 years of teaching experience in several countries including the United States of America, Botswana, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. Currently, I teach Africa and Diaspora feminist theory courses using texts of film, fiction and popular songs. I am mainly interested in exploring the woman question, specifically, issues of female agency and liberation in contemporary fiction and popular culture. I am president of the Graduate Student Organization (GSO) and graduate advisor for African Student Organization (ASO) at Binghamton University (2008-2009).
Greg Sevik received his B.A. in English and German from San Diego State University in 2004 and his M.A. in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University in fall of 2008. His primary area of scholarly interest is poetry, especially the work of such early twentieth-century poets as Rilke, Trakl, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas -- but also that of idiosyncratic figures likes Emily Dickinson, Gerald Manley Hopkins and Christine Lavant. His other research interests include: modernism, history of English and German poetry and prosody, French Symbolism, aesthetic theory, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and inter-arts studies. He recently received the Graduate School's award for "Excellence in Teaching.").
Angela Runciman is a PhD student. She completed her MA in English at SUNY Binghamton in fall 2006, and her BA in English at Bloomsburg University of PA in May 2003. Since undergraduate school, she became enamoured with British Modernism, particularly the work of Woolf and Joyce, but also developed an affection for the Romantics, such as Blake, Shelley, and Wordsworth, as well as Victorians such as Carlyle, Ruskin and George Eliot. While at Binghamton, she expanded these interests, taking German Romanticism, Proust, George Eliot, Victorian realist fiction, Victorian biographies, and Walter Benjamin. While reading Middlemarch for the course on Eliot, she happened upon passages which echoed sentiments she'd read in Novalis's poetry - and her suspicions were confirmed. This small epiphany, as well as the more recent discoveries led to her current research on George Eliot.
Among her interests are Eliot's fiction and her critical and literary interst in German thought, life, and travel; religion, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the medieval cathedral and its meaning for Eliot in terms of community. She also enjoys contemporary American drama and race and gender studies. She is currently an instructor in the English Department at Bloomsburg University of PA.
Marina Zaharopol is a Ph.D student. Her areas of interest are: Contemporary Literary Theory; Modern and Contemporary Philosophy; Twentieth Century Literature. Presentations: "Rewriting the Past: Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World' "New World Regionalism versus Old World Domination, Interdisiciplinary Conference, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, April 1992" 'Meridian' on Romania in Transition" The Seventeenth Annual Congress of the American-Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences, California State University at Northridge, Northridge, CA, June 1992" Transcedence or Transgression: Text vs. Context in Bakhtin's Theory of the Novel and the Carnivalesque" Literature and Popular Culture, Interdisciplinary Conference, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, April 1995 "Censorship and Romanian Literature" The Twenty-third Annual Congress of the American-Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, August 1998" Censorship, Community and Counter-community in Lidia Vianu's Book of Interviews: 'Censorship in Romania, 'CEU Press 1998" Identity, Ethnicity, Origins, Interdisciplinary Conference, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, March 1999.
