Italian lecturer

Stefania Amodeo, Instructor of Italian, holds a laurea from the University of Genoa, Italy, in Lettere e Filosofia with a thesis in medieval history. She did graduate work in Belgium at the University of Louvain and at Harvard University from which she received an M.A. in Italian Literature. She has taught at Wellesley College and at Harvard University as a teaching fellow. Her main research interest is in language pedagogy and the use of computer technology in teaching foreign languages. She recently developed an Italian language course centered on the history and cultural importance of food in Italy.

Assistant Professor of French

Sarah Benharrech, assistant professor, specializes in eighteenth-century French literature. She received a Ph.D in French literature from Princeton University in 2002 and has published articles in MLN, Eighteenth Century fiction and in various proceedings. Her research interest deals with the esthetic, epistemological and anthropological concepts underlying the elaboration of fictional characters in theater, novels and moralistic works. Sarah is currently working on a book about early Enlightenment moralistic genre, focusing on Marivaux’s plays and novels. She participated to the critical edition of Crébillon fils’s Oeuvres complètes as editor of the correspondence (Classiques Garnier, 2002). Presently she collaborates to the critical edition of the eighteenth-century periodical Les Mémoires Secrets de Bachaumont (Champion, forthcoming publication). Before coming to Maryland, she has taught at The University of Chicago, Tulane University, and the University of Toronto (Mississauga).

Chair of French and Italian, Professor, French and Italian

Joseph Brami, Professor of French, received his Ph. D in French Literature from New York University. Before joining the University of Maryland, he taught at New York University, Barnard College and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has also taught various summer courses at Columbia University centers in New York and in Paris, and at the Institute of American Universities in Avignon. His general field of research is modern French literature, with a specialty in 19th and 20th-century French literature. His main teaching areas are the novel, poetry and essays from the 17th to the 20th centuries.  His publications include Les Troubles de l'invention: Essai sur le doute poétique de José Bousquet (Summa, 1987); Théophile Gautier: Mademoiselle de Maupin (Editions Nathan,1993); co-prefaced and co-annotated edition of 2 volumes of Marguerite Yourcenar's correspondence 
1) Lettres à  ses amis et quelques autres (Gallimard, 1995),  
2)  Une volonté sans fléchissement (Gallimard, 2007). 
He is currently editing a third volume of these letters as well as a two-volume series of critical work on Proust: Lecteurs de Proust au XXeme siècle, to be published by Éditions Minard in 2008 and 2009.

Assistant Professor of Italian

Silvia Carlorosi received a Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere from the University of Urbino, Italy, an M.A. in Mass Communications at Miami University of Ohio (May 2001), and a Ph.D. in Italian at the University of Pennsylvania (August 2006). In 2006-2007 she worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Middlebury College, where she taught courses in language, literature and culture. Her interests include 20th century Italian literature and film, cultural studies, literary theory and philosophy, and teaching pedagogy. She has published articles on Italian cinema, including:  “Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La ricotta:  The Power of Cinepoiesis” (Italica 86:2, 2009; 254-271), “Politicizzazione dell'Estetica o Estetizzazione della Politica? 1860 di Alessandro Blasetti” (Italian Culture, Vol. 18, 2, 2000. 87-104); and  “Neo-Romanticismo in risposta al Postmodernismo?  L’influenza leopardiana nella poetica cinematografica felliniana di La voce della luna”  (Film e Letterature: Paesaggi Gedit Ed: Bologna, 2007).  She is currently working on her manuscript: A Grammar of Cinepoiesis:  Poetic Cameras of Italian Cinema, which analyzes the interaction between cinema and poetry. Departing from an analysis of Pasolini's idea of "cinema of poetry," her work considers how this poetic form differs from a cinema of prose, and evaluates the modes of a poetic camera, in theory and in the practice of various Italian filmmakers.

Acting Associate Director for Academic Affairs, SLLC

Lauretta Clough earned an MA in Linguistics and a PhD in French from the University of Maryland, with a specialization in translation theory. Her published translations include Pierre's Bourdieu's The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Stanford, 1997). She has spoken and published on teaching, translating, literature, and the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and has completed a manuscript about values and culture in a French village provisionally entitled A Thousand Years Beyond Provence: Village Lessons from the French. Currently SLLC Acting Associate Director for Academic Affairs, she has taught French at UMD since 1990.

Italian Lecturer

Federica Brunori Deigan holds a laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Rome, a professional diploma from the School for Interpreters of Rome, and a Ph. D. in Italian studies from the Johns Hopkins University. She has taught Italian language, literature, and culture at Hopkins and at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent grants and awards include a stipend for seminar work in Italian history from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Flaiano prize for Italian Studies for her book Alessandro Manzoni’s The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2004).

Associate Professor, French

Caroline Eades specializes in Film Studies and Contemporary French Culture. She received her PhD in Film Studies from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III and has taught at the University of Grenoble, France, the University of Southern California, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her main fields of research are European Cinema, Post-Colonial Studies, Film Feminist Theory, Film and Myth. Her book “Le Cnéma post-colonial français” appeared in 2006 (Paris: Collections 7eArt, Editions du Cerf). She is currently working on a book on Classical Reception in Film for Editions du Cerf. She has published numerous book-chapters and articles on French cinema, culture, and literature in American, Canadian, French, Greek, Brazilian, Swiss, Belgian, and Italian scholarly series and journals, including The French Review, Revue de Littérature Comparée, and CinémAction.

Italian Undergraduate Advisor, Romance Languages Advisor, Associate Professor, French and Italian

Giuseppe Falvo is Associate Professor of Italian. He received his Ph.D. in Italian from the Johns Hopkins University in 1986 with a specialization in the Italian Renaissance. He has published numerous articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Della Casa and a book on Baldesar Castiglione entitled The Economy of Human Relations. Castiglione's "Libro del Cortegiano" (Peter Lang, 1992). He recently contributed to the six volume Encyclopedia of the Renaissance published by Charles Scribner's Sons in association with the Renaissance Society of America. He is currently working on a volume on Stefano Guazzo and La Civil Conversazione and on a project dealing with the study of ceremony and ritual in Boccaccio's Decameron. He has been a participant at many conferences and colloquia, delivering papers on various aspects of Italian literature and culture, including the Italian cinema. He is recipient of several honors, including an award from the Folger Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Italian Lecturer.

Associate Professor of French

A specialist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Andrea Frisch received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley with a dissertation on early modern travel literature and the novel. She subsequently did research in law and literature for The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (University of North Carolina P, 2004). Her work has appeared in Representations, Romanic Review, Discourse, Esprit créateur and Modern Language Quarterly. Andrea has received fellowships from the Newberry Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities and, most recently, from the National Humanities Center, where she was a fellow in 2004-2005. She is currently writing a book about the impact of the civil wars of the sixteenth century on the literature and aesthetics of the seventeenth century in France.

Associate Professor of French

Jacqueline Letzter, Associate Professor of French, was awarded a Ph.D. in French from Harvard University in 1995. She specializes in the literature and culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution, and is particularly interested in the literature of women; including novels, memoirs, essays, political tracts, theatre, and opera. In her book, Intellectual Tacking: Questions of Education in the Works of Isabelle de Charrière (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). Letzter examines Isabelle de Charrière's contribution to the debate over education. With musicologist Robert Adelson, Letzter has written Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy in the Age of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), a book which examines the unprecedented success of women opera composers and librettists during the French revolutionary period. She has published articles in numerous journals, including Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge Opera Journal, Feminist Studies, Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre, Lettre de Zuylen, Nineteenth-Century French Studies , and Eighteenth-Century Women. She is currently working on a project about women and early modern cultural identity in Belgium.

Professor of French, Director of the Graduate Program

Carol Mossman, Professor of French, received a Ph.D. from Rice University in French Literature; before coming to this university she taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Her general field of research and teaching is 19th-century French literature. Within that framework she has a special interest in gender studies. She particularly enjoys teaching an interdisciplinary course which encompasses opera, cinema and narrative with respect to the figure of the femme fatale and the performance of violence. Currently her research bears on rereading and deconstructing the concept of "boheme." She has published two books: The Narrative Matrix: A Study of Stendhal's "Le Rouge e le Noir" ( French Forum Publishers, 1984) and Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Valérie Orlando is Associate Professor of French & Francophone Literature. She received her PhD in French Studies in 1996 from Brown University. She is the author of three books: Francophone Voices of the ‘New Morocco’ in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2009), Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women's Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2003), and Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb, (Ohio University Press, 1999) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Francophone literature from the African diaspora, African Cinema, and French literature and culture. She has taught at Illinois Wesleyan University (1999-2006), Purdue University (1997-1999) and Eastern Mediterranean University in the Northern Turkish Republic of Cyprus (1996-1997). For additional information click here

Teaching Assistant Supervisor, Associate Professor French and Italian

Mary Ellen Scullen received a joint Ph.D. in French and Theoretical Linguistics from Indiana University in 1993 and holds a Maîtrise de français langue étrangère from l'Université François Rabelais in Tours, France. Before joining the University of Maryland, she taught at the University of Louisville and at Chancellor College, University of Malawi in Southern Africa. Her research interests include French linguistics, second language acquisition and pedagogy, and theoretical phonology. She is currently working on a book, The Art and Practice of Circumlocution in Foreign and Second Language Acquisition with Sarah Jourdain of SUNY, Stony Brook, as well as a textbook, Chez Nous: Branché sur le monde francophone, 2nd edition, with Cathy Pons, Albert Valdman, and Sarah Jourdain. She is the author of French Prosodic Morphology: A Unified Account (IULC Publications, 1997) and a number of book chapters and articles, including "New Insights into French Reduplication" in Romance Phonology and Variation (2001), "Les dictionnaires français: un lieu privilégié du sexisme" in Cahiers de lexicologie (2001), "The Effect of Explicit Training on Successful Circumlocution" (co-authored with Sarah Jourdain) in Meaning and Form: Multiple Perspectives (2000), and "French Syllable Structure: Reconsidering the Onset" in Grammatical Theory and Romance Languages (1996).

Professor, French and Italian

Pierre Verdaguer holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia as well as a French Agrégation. Before coming to the University of Maryland he taught at Georgetown University. He specializes in twentieth-century fiction, French cultural studies, and the history of ideas. He is the author of L'univers de la cruauté, une lecture de Céline (Droz, 1988) and La séduction policière: Signes de croissance d'un genre réputé mineur (Summa, 1999). He is also the co-editor of Regards sur la France des années 80: Le roman (Anma Libri 1994) and the co-author of an introduction to literary analysis, Transition: Le plaisir des textes (Prentice Hall,1990 and 1995). He has published articles on novelists and thinkers (Henri Bosco, Céline, Denis de Rougemont); popular heroes (Astérix, Superman); stereotypes; and detective fiction. In 1999 he received the Millstone Prize for his article "Manipulating the Past: The Role of History in Recent French Detective Fiction" published in Proceedings of the Western Society for French History. His recent research has focused on French and Anglo-American popular fiction and film.