Roxanna Curto

Roxanna Curto, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor, French and Italian
Roxanna is a specialist in 20th-century French and Francophone literature and culture; postcolonial and literary theory; Latin American theatre; and comparative Caribbean studies. Her book, Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature examines the representation of modern technologies in the works of Francophone writers from Africa and the Caribbean. She has also published articles exploring connections between Aimé Césaire and Latin American literature, and on technology in 20th-Century French poetry.
Denise Filios

Denise Filios, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Denise is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is the author of Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric, which includes poetry translated to English from Galician-Portuguese and Castilian. Her teaching and research interests include medieval Spanish literature, women in literature, performance, and North African-Spanish cultural contacts from 711 to the present. Her current book project examines stories about the conquest of Iberia in Arabic and Hispano-Latin historiography. Denise Filios coordinates the undergraduate minor in Translation for Global Literacy.
Brian Gollnick

Brian Gollnick, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Brian teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and is involved with cultural theory and Comparative Literature. His research has focused on Latin American cultural studies, particularly modern Mexico, with an emphasis on social and literary theory. He is the author of Redefining the Lacandón: Subaltern Representations in the Rain Forest of Chiapas (University of Arizona Press), a study of how indigenous populations in the jungle of southern Mexico have been depicted in a variety of media since the time of the conquest. Brian Gollnick teaches the literary translation workshop in Spanish.
Kendall Heitzman

Kendall Heitzman, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor, Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures
Kendall Heitzman translates contemporary Japanese fiction and poetry. His translation of Fujino Kaori’s Nails and Eyes (Pushkin Press, 2023) was awarded the Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He has published translations of several IWP participants including Nakagami Nori and Shibasaki Tomoka in venues such as Cha and the US-Japan Women’s Journal, and his translations of Furukawa Hideo appear in recent issues of the literary journal Monkey. He is a co-editor of the Cornell Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, forthcoming from Cornell University Press, for which he is translating work by several young Japanese poets. See his main faculty page for his academic profile and a list of publications. He teaches the Japanese-to-English translation workshop.
Waltraud Maierhofer

Waltraud Maierhofer, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Professor, German
Waltraud is professor of German and teaches courses on German literature and culture. She has authored Hexen  – Huren – Heldenweiber. Bilder des Weiblichen in Erzähltexten über den Dreißigjährigen Krieg, which examines the representation of women and femininity in a wide range of narrative texts from the seventeenth century to the present that retell the Thirty Years War. Maierhofer also coedited Women Against Napoleon: Historical and Fictional Responses. Out of her interest in the connections of literature and art, Maierhofer has completed critical editions of letters by the painter Angelica Kauffmann, a travel book on Florence by Adele Schopenhauer, as well as a bilingual edition of the opera libretto Circe with the translation by Goethe and Christian August Vulpius.
Ana Merino

Ana Merino, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Ana directs the MFA program in Spanish Creative Writing. She has published seven books of poems including Preparativos para un viaje(winner of the Adonais Prize in 1994), Juegos de niños (winner of the Fray Luis de León Prize in 2003), Compañera de celda (2006), and Curación (Accésit Jaime Gil de Biedma Prize, 2010). Her poems appeared in over twenty anthologies, and have been translated into Portuguese, English,  German, Slovenian, French, Dutch, Bulgarian, and Italian. Merino has written criticism on comics and graphic novels. including El cómichispánico, and a monograph on Chris Ware. Merino is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Cartoon Studies and has curated four comic book expositions.
Christopher Merrill

Christopher Merrill, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Director, International Writing Program
Professor
Christopher works across genres with books that include four collections of poetry; translations of the poetry of the Slovenian Aleš Debeljak; several edited volumes; and books of nonfiction, including Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. He has held a professorship at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.
Yasmine Ramadan

Yasmine Ramadan, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor, French and Italian
Yasmine received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Between 2012-2014 she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Middle Eastern Studies Program and the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her research and teaching interests include modern Arabic literature, the Arabic language, comparative literature, post colonialism, and spatial theory. Her current book project, Shifting Ground: Space in Egyptian Fiction, examines the fiction of the sixties generation in Egypt, through literary depictions of urban, rural, and exilic space. She has been published in Journal of Arabic Literature, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and Arab Studies Journal.
Ana Rodríguez-Rodriguez

Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez is an Associate Professor specializing in Early Modern Spanish Literature.  She has published articles on Christian-Muslim relations in the Mediterranean during the 16th and 17th centuries, and on Early Modern women's writing. She is also the author of Letras liberadas. Cautiverio, escritura y subjetividad en el Mediterráneo de la época imperial española. Madrid: Visor Libros, 2013, a book exploring Spanish textual manifestations of captivity during this period. She is currently writing a book on Spanish presence in the Philippines during the first centuries of Spain's colonial rule of the archipelago, and preparing a critical edition of the Libro de cassos impensados, by Alonso de Salamanca.