FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor of German
A. Dana Weber is an Associate Professor of German. She also serves as the German program's study-abroad adviser and is a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Research Ambassador at FSU.
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor / French
Alejandra Gutierrez is an instructor of Spanish. She earned her PhD at the University of Virginia in 2011. She specializes in Contemporary Hispanic literature from twentieth and twenty first centuries. She also studied theater in Venezuela and is interested in translation. She is the founder and director of Tallahassee Hispanic Theater.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Associate, Human Resources
Beth Coggeshall (PhD, Stanford University) specializes in the literature and culture of medieval Italy, with a particular focus on Dante. Her research centers on the intersections of literature, ethics, and cultural identity; medievalism and popular culture; and the transmedia reception of Dante's works across contemporary global cultures. Her book On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante's Italy is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. In her book, she argues that the disputes over the nature and uses of amistà (friendship) in medieval Italian literary culture pave the way for the wholesale recuperation of friendship in its many forms among the early humanists. In addition to this research, she is also the co-editor (with Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin College) of the website Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture, a curated, crowd-sourced digital archive that showcases Dante's sustained presence in contemporary culture. She was part of the inaugural class of faculty fellows in FSU's Demos Institute for Data Humanities, 2019-2020. She was honored to receive a University Teaching Award for undergraduate teaching in 2019 and the Undergraduate Research Mentor Award in 2020. Beth currently serves as the Vice President of the Dante Society of America (2021-2023). In addition to her work on the DSA Council, she also serves on the Education and Outreach Committee and is part of the DSA's Dante Speakers Bureau.
Birgit Maier-Katkin holds a Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research centers on 20th and 21st-century German literature and culture with a special focus Exile, Transnationalism, Memory and Border Studies as well as Human Rights. She serves as Editor of the International Feuchtwanger Society, teaches German language, culture and literature courses, and advises students who minor and major in German at FSU. Maier-Katkin has been recognized with a FSU Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Curricular Committee
- Chairman of the Mentorship Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Undergraduate Program Committee
- Graduate Student Representative
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Teaching Professor of Spanish
Dr. Anel Brandl, Teaching Professor of Spanish and Linguistics has recently developed a track within the Spanish program specially designed for heritage speakers. The track debuted in 2019 and currently has four sections. Dr. Brandl sat down with us to talk to us about the new track in detail.
Job Titles:
- Associate Chair of Graduate Studies
- Associate Chair of Graduate Studies / German
Job Titles:
- Administrator
- Professor, Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies
Dr. Sunderman is a Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor of Spanish
Dr. Keith Howard is an Associate Professor of Spanish. He earned his PhD at the University of Virginia in 2008. His long-term research program explores how Renaissance and Baroque political modes of thought, particularly in the form of Machiavellian and post-Machiavellian discourses, reveal themselves in early modern Spanish and colonial Latin American texts. He teaches Medieval, Golden Age and Transatlantic cultural studies.
Job Titles:
- Department Chair
- Professor, Department Chair
Dr. Virginia Osborn (MA in French with specialization in SLA; PhD in French, Florida State University) is Teaching Faculty II and Director of the French Basic Language Program. She supervises and works closely with the French teaching assistants. She specializes in 20th century French literature, with a focus on women writers of WWII and the Holocaust. Dr. Osborn has also spent time abroad teaching English (TEFL) through the Peace Corps (Wlodawa, Poland) and with the TAPIF program (Grenoble, France). She is the faculty representative for the FSU campus club "La Table Francaise" and she is the moderator for the Florida State University chapter of the French National Honor Society, Pi Delta Phi. If you have any questions about either of these organizations, please contact her.
Dr. Zafer Lababidi is an Associate Teaching Professor of Arabic, and the Assistant Director and Advisor of the Middle Eastern Studies Program. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and specializes in Arabic phonetics/phonology and teaching Arabic as a foreign language.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor / Spanish
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
Associate Professor Franz Prichard's interdisciplinary research and teaching explore the literature, environmental thought, and visual media of contemporary Japan. In his first book, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (Columbia University Press, 2019) he explored the ways Japanese writers, artists, and critics reinvented their work in response to Japan's intensive urbanization. His current research develops transcultural and ecocritical approaches to the study of contemporary Japanese literature and visual media. Weaving together the perspectives of writers, critics, photographers, and artists, among others, this research elaborates ecocritical approaches with a rigorously planetary perspective in pursuit of collaborative ways of knowing the generative relations among humans, animals, material objects, and shared worlds.
Prichard received his PhD from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA in 2011. Prior to arriving at FSU as an Associate Professor in 2023, Prichard has taught as a lecturer at UCLA, as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and at Princeton University.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the International Program Committee
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Technology & Website Committee
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor / Italian
Jeannine Murray-Román (PhD Comparative Literature, UCLA) is Assistant Professor of French and Spanish specializing in comparative Caribbean literatures and cultures. Her work is grounded in postcolonial, transnational, and performance studies and her research interest in experimental writing includes digital humanities as well as the interface of oral and performance practices and writing in the regions of the archipelagos in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Her work has appeared in Small Axe, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and The French Review. Her current work focuses on walking, speculative poesis, and reparations movements.
Jessika Valentine holds an M.A. in Second Language Curriculum and Instruction from Florida State University and two bachelor's degrees from the Lebanese University in English Literature and Radio and Television. After working as a reporter/interpreter for Voice of Lebanon Radio and a regional reporter for Future News for six years combined, she changed careers to translation and interpretation. Upon receiving the Fulbright Teaching Assistantship, Jessika moved to the US where she has been teaching full time.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
Professor José Gomariz has published widely on Modern Spanish American Literature.
José Martí, Modernismo(s), and Cuban Studies are the main issues of a collective book of essays he has recently co-edited with Angel Esteban (U of Granada) in honor of Ivan A. Schulman. Prof. Gomariz has also edited the special annual issue Diaspora, Race and Cultural Identity in Cuba and the Caribbean for the Spanish academic journal América Sin Nombre (U of Alicante). In addition to his monograph Colonialismo e independencia cultural, Prof. Gomariz has published in major journals, including Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos, Caribbean Studies, Casa de las Américas, Cuban Studies, Literatura Mexicana, Revista de la Universidad de La Habana. He has been invited to present his research at universities and research centers in the United States, Europe, and Cuba.
Professor Gomariz directs doctoral dissertations on Hispanic and Cuban Studies.
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor / Spanish
Professor Juan Carlos Galeano received his Ph.D. from University of Kentucky in 1991. He is a poet and translator and teaches Spanish American poetry, the environmental imagination in Spanish American literature, and cultures of Amazonia.
Junko Brudenell has been teaching Japanese language courses at Florida State University since 2012, ranging from basic to advanced levels, and she currently serves as the supervisor of Japanese teaching assistants.
Katy Prantil is an instructor of Italian and the Director of the Italian Basic Language Program. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian (Romance Linguistics and Philology) from the University of Wisconsin - Madison (2017). She specializes in historical Italo-Romance linguistics and dialectology.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Member of Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar
Matthew Goldmark (PhD Hispanic Studies, University of Pennsylvania) is Assistant Professor of Spanish, specializing in colonial Latin American studies. His recent book, Forms of Relation: Composition and Kinship in Colonial Spanish America (University of Virginia Press, 2023), studies conceptions of family in early Latin America and Spain. His research has appeared in the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Colonial Latin American Review, and GLQ. In 2018, he received the award for the "Best Article in Colonial Latin American Studies by a Junior Scholar" from the Colonial Section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
Michelle Bumatay, (PhD, French and Francophone Studies, UCLA) is an Assistant Professor of French specializing in African Francophone literature and visual culture. Her current book project, Black Bandes Dessinées, describes the development of Francophone comics by cartoonists from Sub-Saharan Africa and investigates cartoonists' verbal-visual strategies in their representations of everyday life in Africa and the Diaspora. She is the 2015 recipient of the Annual Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award for her conference paper, "Notre histoire and Madame Livingstone: Travels in Time" and she has published in Contemporary French Civilization, Études francophones, European Comic Art, Alternative Francophone, Research in African Literatures, and Francosphères. She is also the organizer of the Winthrop-King Institute's Global Africas series.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Member of Committee
Job Titles:
- Pribic Family Associate Professor of Slavic
For his teaching, Prof. Romanchuk has been recognized with an FSU Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Lecture Series Committee
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Lecture Series Committee
- Graduate Student Representative
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Member of the Executive Committee
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor / Italian
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Undergraduate Program Committee
- Member of the Executive Committee
- Ex - Officio
Vincent Joos (PhD, UNC Chapel Hill) is a cultural anthropologist who researches post-disaster reconstruction and the relations between states, citizens, and international organizations in the Caribbean. His new book, Urban Dwelling, Haitian Citizenships tracks the vernacular transformation of urban space by people excluded from the aid economy in post-earthquake Haiti. Joos also writes about the history of immigration and border infrastructure in Calais, France.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Graduate Program Committee
- Member of the Executive Committee
Professor Qian (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures, with a certificate in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education, from UIUC in 2015. She specializes in psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and language program management. Prior to joining Florida State University, she held the position of Chinese Program Coordinator at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has studied Japanese at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan. Her research involves sentence processing by native speakers and second language learners of Chinese. She uses time-sensitive measures, such as EEG and eye-tracking, to investigate the moment-by-moment changes in the cognitive processes underlying language comprehension. Dr. Qian is currently working on three projects: 1) investigating classifier processing in Chinese, Japanese, and English, 2) exploring whether sentence processing by non-native speakers is shallow and good-enough, and 3) examining the potential benefits of character-typing in facilitating the second language acquisition of Chinese characters.
She is currently leading the Chinese Language Teachers Association's Chinese as a Second Language Research Special Interest Group, where over 200 researchers gather remotely to engage in forum discussions, workshops, and other events related to both Chinese language teaching and research. The primary aim of this special interest group is to promote communication and inspire collaborative ideas. Anyone interested in joining this SIG is welcome to contact zqian@fsu.edu.