Graduate Students | Department of Comparative & World Literature

Ann Xiaoxu Pei

English, Mandarin, German

Ann works at the intersection of environmental humanities and memory studies, water and land, animals and humans. She holds a B.A. in English from Northeast Normal University and an M.A. in English from Nanjing University. In her M.A. thesis, she investigates the rich visual paratexts of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and analyzes how Spiegelman rebels against the antisemitic imagination of Jewishness.

Email: xiaoxup2@illinois.edu

Carolina de Paula Cardoso

English, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin

A Brazilian native, Carolina received her B.A. in Comparative Literature, French, and Psychology from Cornell University (2021), where she graduated magna cum laude with a thesis on the poetry and poetics of "Hypo-Romanticism," a concept she formulated to investigate the romantic period in connection with the contemporary lyric. Focused on the value of Romanticism still today, Carolina is mostly interested in the interplay and dialogue between the philosophy of German tragedy, poetic language, and present-day culture analysis. Moreover, while at UIUC, she plans on further thinking and writing about the contemporary subject, not only about our physio-psychological constitution, but also about human nature in face of the modern-contemporary malaise. She is also fascinated about the phenomenological and spiritual implications, as well as the transmogrifications of time and space, associated with such "Hypo-Romantic" malaise.

Mary Casey

English, Spanish, Portuguese, Modern Greek

Research interests: Latin-American Literature; Classical Reception in the Americas; Liberalism and Neoliberalism; Postcolonialism; Gender Studies

Minor concentrations: Cinema and Media Studies; Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies

Ragini Chakraborty

Postcolonial Studies, Diaspora Studies, South Asian-Canadian Literature.

Matthew Fam

English, German, Mandarin, Indonesian

From Singapore, Matthew attended Goethe University Frankfurt and is working on his thesis on theatrical remediations of WWII in British Malaya, for an MA in Anglophone Literatures, Cultures, and Media. His current research interests include the environmental humanities, maritime Southeast Asia, literatures of the former East Indies, historiography, theatre, and memory studies. He also holds a BA (Hons) in Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. Prior to his MA, he worked in Theatre, Arts Education, and Advertising.

Sambhabi Ghosh

English, Bengali, Hindi, German, Japanese

Postcolonialism, Shakespeare in Asia, Performance Studies, Translation and Adaptation studies, Cinema and Media Studies

Asiya Ikhsanova

English, French, German, Russian

European modernism; biopolitical discourse and film; detective fiction

Elif Isik

Turkish, English, Japanese, French, Italian

Born and raised in Turkey, Elif Isik received her first MA degree in Comparative Literature and Criticism from Goldsmiths, University of London. She recently received her second MA degree from Bilkent University in Turkish Literature. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University. Her research interests include kinship, hybridity and canon formation in comparative literary studies mainly focusing on the circulation and translation of genre writing, most specifically of romance novels in the 20th century.

Amartya Karmarkar

Bengali, English, Hindi

Amartya holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English Literature and Languages from India. His main research interests include Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Masculinity Studies, and Film Theory. He intends to explore the female writing of the domestic space as a problematized masculine sphere where the competing fantasies of male domination/androcentric desire compete with the female desire for autonomy. His research examines whether inhabited space is inherently phallocentric and how female protagonists generate alternative spaces of existence inside a dominant patriarchal setup.

Outside the domain of academia, he takes an avid interest in creative writing, filmmaking, user-experience research, and visual design. His recent collaboration on the script of Starfruits has been presented at the Film Bazaar (2021) [National Film Development Corporation of India] and the La Fabrique Cinéma [Cannes Film Festival 2022].

At UIUC, he aspires to further develop his ideas on the concept of domestic space and its intricate interrelations with the subject and aims to work on varied aspects of narrative structures in filmmaking as a visual art form that offers the possibility to dissect and reform the social, the political, and the contemporary world.

Email: amartya6@illinois.edu

Eva Kuras

English, French, Italian, Persian

Medieval French, Italian and English literature. Classical Persian literature. Development of the narrative romance genre. "East-West" cultural transmission in the Middle Ages.

Chang-Yen Lo

English, French, German, Chinese

Born and raised in Taiwan, Chang-Yen Lo holds an M.A. with distinction in European Culture and Thought from University College London and a B.B.A. in International Business from National Taiwan University. His research interests include psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Julia Kristeva, René Major, and Élisabeth Roudinesco), deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Affect theory, 20th-century continental philosophy, modernism, 20th-century French, English, German, and Chinese literature.

Sasha McDowell

English, French, Russian, Spanish

20th and 21st century European and North/South American literature, translation & adaptation studies, structuralism/poststructuralism, theatre, surrealism & avant-garde

Zahra Meshkani

Persian, English, Arabic

Zahra Meshkani comes from Iran, where she recently finished her MA with a focus on the sociology of literature in post-revolution reflections of literature. Interested in philosophy and theory as well, she finds literary pieces most interesting in how they are intertwined with one's perspective — whether residing in the center or the periphery. Her research interests are translation theories, canon formation, nation-state, and the East-West dichotomy.

Elizabeth Mostowski

English, Polish, French, Yiddish

Lizy Mostowski is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative & World Literature in conjunction with the Program in Jewish Culture and Society’s Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative with a Graduate Minor in Museum Studies. She is working on a dissertation examining spectral themes in Polish-Jewish literature in Polish and Yiddish after the Holocaust. Her research interests include Polish-Jewish studies, trauma & memory theory, Holocaust literature, Polish literature, Yiddish literature, and the anti-Semitic campaign of March of 1968.

Nobuto Sato

Twentieth-century American, Japanese, and Yiddish literatures; multilingualism; critical theory; memory studies; avant-garde; modernism/postmodernism

Stephanie Stoeckl

English, German, French

Modernism, Fin-de-Siècle, Religion and Literature, Continental Philosophy; particular interest in dialogue between critical theory and the Catholic intellectual tradition.

My current research explores representations of redemptive suffering in French and German novels of the late 19^th- and early 20^th-century Catholic Revival movement.

Modje Taavon

Persian, Arabic, English

Greco-Arabic Translation movement, the reception of Classical philosophy in the medieval Islamicate world and its role in the development of "western" intellectual traditions, especially in medieval and early modern Europe.

Megi Tedoradze

Georgian, English, Russian, Japanese

Coming from Georgia, Megi received her B.A. in Social Sciences at Free University of Tbilisi, with minor in Japanese Language. Her B.A. thesis concerned Butlerian forms of gender performativity and sexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Her upcoming research will focus on the forms of nationality, orientalism, gender, sexuality and materiality in the post-Soviet literature and the role they played in the formation of a new political subjecthood. Her general research interests include Feminist and Queer Studies, Nationalism, Materiality studies, and Cognitive Sciences.

Samantha Ting

English, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, German

Research interests include: cinema and media studies; Holocaust representations; memory studies; twentieth-century German and Japanese literatures; identity and nationhood; speculative fiction.