Faculty & Staff

Members of the graduate faculty hold advanced degrees from a number of the finest institutions in the United States. An able and productive group of scholars, the current faculty has published extensively and represents the department at conferences and professional meetings. The department’s active involvement in scholarship is equaled by its strong commitment to excellence in teaching. Six members of the faculty have won major teaching awards. Students’ classroom experience is complemented by the faculty’s readiness to offer extensive help and advice outside of class.

John T. Booker
(Ph.D. Minnesota) associate professor, specializes in 19th-century literature, first-person narrative, and the French novel in general. Co-editor, with Allan H. Pasco, of The Play of Terror in Nineteenth-Century France (1996), he has published articles on Constant, Stendhal, Sand, Balzac, Flaubert, Gide, and Mauriac, and has received a number of awards for excellence in teaching.

David A. Dinneen
(Ph.D. Harvard) emeritus professor, is a specialist in linguistics, Romance philology, and language teaching. His current research is in foreign language acquisition and pedagogy. He is co-author of three introductory and intermediate-level textbooks and is working on the first in a new series of readers.

Diane R. Fourny
(Ph.D. Stanford) associate professor, holds a joint appointment in French and Italian and Humanities and Western Civilization. Her areas of research are the French Enlightenment (18th-century novel, J.-J. Rousseau, Diderot), autobiography, and European studies. She has received the H. Bernerd Fink Distinguished Teaching Award and a Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence and holds the Distinguished Lecturer position in HWC. She also serves as director of the Center for European Studies.

E. Bruce Hayes
(Ph.D. Yale) assistant professor, specializes in Renaissance literature and culture, with interests in medieval literature and culture. His research interests include Rabelais, farce, and the interplay between popular and humanist cultures in the Renaissance.

Caroline Jewers
(Ph.D. Oregon) associate professor, specializes in comparative medieval literature, especially Old French and Occitan romance and lyric poetry, with interests in the Renaissance, theory, medievalism, and film. She has published a book titled Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel (University Press of Florida, 2000) and has published numerous articles in journals such as Speculum, Arthuriana, Exemplaria, and Philologus. She has won several teaching awards including, most recently, a 2002 Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.

J. Theodore Johnson
(Ph.D. Wisconsin) emeritus professor, specializes in 19th- and 20th-century poetry, Proust, and interrelations of literature and the visual arts. He has received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Mortar Board’s recognition as an Outstanding Educator at the University of Kansas, and in 1992, the Senior Class H.O.P.E. award to Honor an Outstanding Progressive Educator. Professor Johnson has published extensively on Proust and is preparing a book on Proust and Monet.

Van Kelly
(Ph.D. North Carolina at Chapel Hill) associate professor of French and chair of the Department of French and Italian, specializes in contemporary French literature (with a special emphasis on modern poetry, the recent novel, the essay) and in cinema. He also has interests in the classical moralists and the interrelationship of the arts. He has published articles on René Char, Glucksmann, Bruckner, Gance, Tavernier, the Papon affair, Descartes, Poussin, and Pascal. His book, Pascalian Fictions (Summa 1992), discusses polemical uses of imagination in the Pensées. He has co-edited a volume of critical essays, Epic and Epoch (Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1994); a special issue of Romance Notes on literature and its relationship to history and philosophy (1995); and a special issue of the South Central Review titled “Cinéma engagé: Activist Filmmaking in French and Francophone Contexts” (2000). He is working on a book that explores the interrelationship of history, poetic licence, and individual freedom in the works of Char.

Jan Kozma
(Ph.D. Michigan) professor of Italian, specializes in the 19th- and 20th-century Italian novel. She has published numerous articles on Vasco Pratolini, Alberto Moravia, Francesca Duranti, and Grazia Deledda. She is the author of “Carosello: A Cultural Reader,” “The Architecture of Imagery in Moravia’s Fiction,” an edition of “Il Quartiere” by Vasco Pratolini, and “Grazia Deledda’s Adult Adolescents: The Pathology of Arrested Maturation,” and she is the translator of “Ashes” by Grazia Deledda. She has recently completed her English translation of Deledda's novel, "Marianna Sirca," and has begun translating the last of the Deleddan trilogy, "Anime Oneste." She is currently working on a biographical article on Grazia Deledda for an edited volume dedicated entirely to the Nobel Prize winning author. She has received the Mortar Board Award for teaching, the Cramer Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research, and the Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.

Allan Pasco
(Ph.D. Michigan) the Hall Professor of 19th-Century Literature, is interested in prose fiction, cultural studies, and critical theory. Author of Proust and the Color-Keys to A la recherche (1976), Novel Configurations (1987, 1994), Balzacian Montage (1991), Allusion (1994, 2002), and Sick Heroes: French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age, 1750-1850 (1997), he has many related articles in journals like PMLA, New Literary History, MLN, Comparative Literature, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He has been honored as an outstanding teacher by the Center for Teaching Excellence and has received five Cramer Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Research.

Samira Sayeh
( Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University) specializes in Francophone Literature and culture, especially North Africa. Author of articles and reviews in this area. Recipient of several awards and recognitions for excellence in teaching. Research and teaching interests: the Francophone world, colonial & post colonial theory, cultural anthropology, French cultural studies.

Paul A. Scott
(Ph.D. Durham, UK) specializes in 17th-century theater with a focus in tragedy, and has additional interests in the representation of dissent and subversion in early modern literature, liturgy, hagiography, iconography, and performance-related issues. His most recent articles have appeared in Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Revue des Sciences Humaines, and Modern Language Review. He is also an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies at the University of Durham (UK).

Kimberly A. B. Swanson
( PhD Indiana University) specializes in second language acquisition, with special interest in phonology, and language pedagogy. Her current research project is on the acquisition versus suppression of phonological processes (or pronunciation rules) in second language learners of French and English. She has published articles in the area of phonological acquisition, as well as the syntax-semantics interface in second language acquisition. As director of the French Language Program and GTA training, she is also interested in how advances in second language acquisition theory can inform classroom teaching.