Members
Samaa Abdurraqib is a doctoral candidate in the English Department. Her dissertation is entitled “Home and Homelands: Women in the Diaspora.” Her project focuses on the way women from a variety of diasporic/ethnic groups write about home and the metaphor of home and nation. Her research interests include feminist theory, diaspora studies, and immigrant fictions.
Davis Brown is a Ph.D. student in the English Department. His dissertation studies the effects of travel and expatriation on national identity in post-WWII American fiction. His research and teaching focus in twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature and film, with particular interests in race, migration, travel, nationalism, globalization, and human rights.
Rasha Diab is a Ph.D. candidate and a T.A. in English. She is interested in reconciliation in general, but particularly interested in the discursive practices and material conditions that hamper sulh (Arab reconciliatory practice) processes. She is currently writing her dissertation on suhl entitled “Suhl and In(ter)vention: Sadat’s Peacemaking/Peacebuilding Rhetoric of 1977 and its Reception.” Rasha is a Fulbright scholarship recipient (1997, 2002).
Tim Glenn is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies. He is working on a project that explores the intersection of race, identity, history, and land claims in contemporary U.S. fiction. His interests range from Transcendentalism to American Indian literature to ecocriticism to postmodernisms.
Matthew Hooley is a Ph.D. student in Literary Studies. His research interests include Native American literature, oral and experimental poetics, Minority Studies, Anishinaabemowin, and Native national sovereignty. His essay "Petals Off the Bough: Gerald Vizenor, Anishinaabe Dream Song, and the Revision of Pound's Eastern Poetics" will be published this spring.
Drago Momcilovic is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English who specializes in twentieth-century British and comparative literature and film. His dissertation traces the ways writers have understood and appropriated the traumatic legacies of colonialism and the Holocaust to work through more contemporary historical traumas like South African apartheid, the AIDS crisis, and the fragmentation of former Yugoslavia.
John Riofrio is a Ph.D. candidate in English. His research and teaching include contemporary U.S. ethnic and Latin American literature, immigration, border studies, race, and social justice. His dissertation looks at Latin American immigration narratives and the construction of Latin@ identities. When not working on his dissertation, Rio can usually be found chasing his two small children and occasionally playing guitar and singing with his band, Los Surenos del Norte.
Sean Teuton is
Assistant Professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teaching and research considers the postcolonial
in literatures of North America, with interests in the novel, oral tradition, cultural memory, and imprisonment. His first book, on the philosophical
recovery of land, history, and identity in literature of the 1969-1979 Indian movement, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American
Indian Novel, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He is at work on a second book on human rights and Native diplomacy, Cities of Refuge:
American Indian Literary Internationalism, for which he was awarded the Katrin H. Lamon Resident Scholarship at the School of American Research and a
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He taught for five years in a maximum-security prison, and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
Lauren Vedal is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies. Her area of interest is twentieth-century American and Canadian literature. Her research interests include trauma and memory; experience and identity; women, minorities and social justice. Her dissertation is entitled "National Whiteness/National Witness: Narratives of Trauma by Minorities in Canada and the U.S., 1980-2000."
Elisabeth Arti Wulandari, or Arti, is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature. This semester, she is a TA in second- and fourth-semester Indonesian. Her interests include postcolonial and feminists theater, and cooking.
