CULTURES - Key Persons
Deborah Nelson-Campbell is a scholar of medieval and Renaissance French literature, from the 1100s to the 1400s. An accomplished translator and editor, she published two critical editions of thirteenth-century French poets, Adam de la Halle and Andrieu Contredit d'Arras, and a translation into English of historian Franck Collard's highly acclaimed study Le Crime de Poison au Moyen Age (2003). She is also the author of an analytical bibliography of Charles d'Orléans. In addition, she has published numerous articles on authors and works in Old French and Occitan literature including Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Christine de Pizan, and Marcabru, one of the first troubadours. Her current research interests include the role of women in Old French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and the place that "courtly love" (amour Courtois, or fin'amors in Occitan) played in that literature.
Over the course of a long and distinguished career at Rice, she received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and she also acted as a consultant for National Geographic magazine. In 1987, she was named Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, one of the oldest civil honors bestowed by the French Republic, originally estabished in 1808.
Coming from Houston Methodist Hospital, Erika is thrilled to begin a new adventure with the MCLC department. She graduated from the University of St. Thomas, Houston with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in 2021. The thing she looks forward to the most is getting to the know the people in the MCLC department, as well as the students who share an interest in literature and cultures.
Job Titles:
- Resident Associate, Wiess College
Esther Fernández works on Iberian Studies, with a special interest in the history of theatre and its relationship to an emerging civil society in Spain. Her most recent book, To Embody the Marvelous (2021), explores the role of puppets and automata in early modern Spain for the development of a rationalized sense of wonder that questioned the normative authority of religious and artistic traditions. Fernández is also a founding member of the Dragoncillo Puppet Troupe, a public engagement project dedicated to bilingual storytelling with shadow puppets. She is also a regular theatre critic on both sides of the Atlantic and she has published critical editions of early modern dramatists, such as Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina, but also of contemporary Spanish authors, such as Carmen Martín Gaite. At Rice, Fernández has served as Program Advisor for Spanish and Portuguese, Divisional Advisor for the Humanities, Resident Associate at Wiess College, and Fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. She received the Sophia Meyer Farb Prize for Teaching in 2018 and the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2022. In 2018, she was a Summer Fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Job Titles:
- Frances Moody Newman Professor Emeritus - Spanish and Portuguese
Harvey Yunis is an eminent scholar of Greek rhetoric, tragedy, and political thought. His book Taming Democracy (1996) concerns theories of democratic political rhetoric that arose in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athens, which was followed by a series of widely used annotated editions of original Greek texts by Demosthenes and Plato. Together with Robin Waterfield, he also published a new standard translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric. His current research and teaching interests concern the nature of political discourse in Greco-Roman antiquity, the rise of artistic prose literature in ancient Greece, and the development of rhetoric from antiquity to the Middle Ages. He has recently completed work on the first edition of papyrus fragments of Demosthenes's On the Crown (§§271-83) from the third century BCE, now the oldest extant manuscript of Demosthenes by two centuries. Additionally, he is working on political normativity in Aristotle and the aesthetics of Athenian political speech, and together with Henriette van der Blom, he is editing a volume covering Ancient Rhetoric to 350 CE as part of the Cambridge History of Rhetoric.
Yunis received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as well as grants from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delams Foundation. From 2003 to 2007, he was editor-in-chief of Rhetorica (2003-2007) and he is now on the editorial boards of both Rhetorica and Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought. He also serves on the managing committee of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
At Rice, Yunis is part of the the program in European Studies and he also teaches in Politics, Law & Social Thought. His course on democracy and the political ideas of ancient Greece highlights the continued relevance of carefully studying the classical texts of political thought as a foundation for contemporary democratic theory.
Job Titles:
- Program Advisor, Classical Studies
Mackie is the author of two highly praised books. Graceful Errors (2003) focuses on the oral context of Pindar's odes, and on the dynamic relationship between poet and audience, while Talking Trojan (1996) is a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of the difference in political speech employed by the Greeks and the Trojans. Her current research projects concern the concept of the labyrinth in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the connections between Plato's Timaeus and Hesiod's Theogony.
Job Titles:
- Board Member of the Recovering
- Professor
José Aranda holds a dual appointment in the Department of English and the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures. He is the founding director of Rice's Program in Latin American and Latinx Studies and also serves as the coordinator for the Mellow Undergraduate Fellowships. He has written articles on nineteenth-century Mexican American literature and the Recovery Project, the future of Chicano/a Studies, and on the relationship between modernity and Mexican American writers from 1848 to 1948. Currently, he is working on a book, tentatively entitled Why I Dreamed of Jeannie But Became a Chicano Instead. This book is a critical exploration of television, popular culture, the Vietnam War, and the news media and the subsequent roles they played in shaping the political and cultural identities of the first generation of Mexican American children to be hailed by the Chicano Movement.
Aranda is a board member of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and co-founder of Avanzamos: El Taller Chicana/o, an annual workshop focused on advanced scholarship in Chicana/o Studies, sponsored by Rice University and the University of North Texas. At Rice, he won the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching three times (2019, 2012, and 2005) as well as the Presidential Mentoring Award (2017), and he also held the Allison Sarofim Chair for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities (2018-20). Aranda was magister of Brown College (2013-18) and magister of Baker College (2004-10).
Job Titles:
- Program Advisor, French Studies
At Rice, Fette is a faculty scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy's Center for the Middle East and she is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of the Program in Politics, Law & Social Thought. Fette is on the editorial boards of French Politics, Culture & Society and Contemporary French Civilization and she has given interviews with Voice of America and ABC13. Her MOOC course, "America Through Foreign Eyes," originally launched with Coursera in 2015, has more than 17,000 students.
As the department's administrator, Leticia Gonzales works closely with the chair and is responsible for all faculty needs, the undergraduate curriculum, and any department budgetary issues. Leticia has been at Rice since 1997 and with the department since 2007. At Rice, she has also worked in the Office of the Registrar and in the Department of Statistics. Prior to coming to Rice, she was at the University of Houston in the Admissions Office. She brings over 30 years of administrative experience to our department.
Job Titles:
- Mary Gibbs Jones Professor - Program Advisor, Spanish and Portuguese
M. Rafael Salaberry conducts research in a number of areas associated with the fields of applied linguistics, second language acquisition, multilingualism and bilingual education. In several publications, he has focused on tense and aspect in second language acquisition, and he has also worked o the art and science of teaching Spanish as a second language, which is closely connected to an ongoing engagement with the political dimension of multilingual education, including questions of political and social justice in language education. In a network of global collaborations that run from Japan to Sweden, Salaberry has also worked on interactional competence, and he is also interested in the effect of new media and technology on second language acquistion.
Salaberry is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices, Asia CALL Online Journal, and Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, and he also serves on the International Advisory Board of the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Españolas (ILCE) at the Universidad de Navarra in Spain.
Job Titles:
- Professor - Co - Director, Cinema and Media Studies, Program Advisor, German Studies
Martin Blumenthal-Barby studied German Literature, Philosophy, and Theory of Drama at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, at Cornell University, and at Yale University. At Rice, he also serves on the Steering Committee and is co-director of the Program in Cinema and Media Studies. Blumenthal-Barby was a Fellow at the Humanities Center, Stanford University (2011-12).
He is the author of three books. Inconceivable Effects (2013) probes the relationship between ethics and language, while Der asymmetrische Blick (2016) examines the link between surveillance and cinematic spectatorship. His most recent book, Arendt, Kant, and the Enigma of Judgment, is a nuanced extrapolation of Arendt's theory of judgment through her readings of Immanuel Kant. His current project explores the relationship between cinema and conceptions of "life."
His research and teaching interests include German literature and philosophy from the eighteenth century to the present with a particular emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and aesthetics as well as German film and media theory.
Job Titles:
- Mary Gibbs Jones Professor - Program Advisor, Spanish and Portuguese
Job Titles:
- Frances Moody Newman Professor Emeritus - Spanish and Portuguese
Nicolas Shumway's scholarship explores Latin American history and culture with an emphasis on Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Before coming to Rice, where he served for seven year as Dean of the School of Humanities from 2010 to 2017, he held positions at the University of Texas at Austin and at Yale University. At UT he was director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies.
His book, The Invention of Argentina (1991), was selected by The New York Times as "a notable book of the year" and received Honorable Mention for the Bryce Wood Book Award of the Latin American Studies Association. Shumway also has a strong interest in foreign language education.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Art History Classical Archaeology Art and Architecture of Roman and Pre - Roman Italy
Dr. Crawford-Brown has excavated at a range of archaeological sites in Cyprus and Italy, and has worked on museum projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She is the recipient of the Archaeological Institute of America's John R. Coleman Fellowship, and was a teaching fellow at the University of Tübingen's Institut für Klassische Archäologie in 2016. Dr. Crawford-Brown received the Irene Rosenzweig/Lily Auchincloss/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize for 2016-2018, and lived in Rome for three years before coming to Rice in 2020.
Job Titles:
- Program Advisor, Latin American and Latinx Studies