Faculty

Ramona Naddaff

Associate Professor
Rhetoric

Ramona Naddaff is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric and director, The Art of Writing, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. She is currently researching a book on censorship and the novel in 19th and 20th-century France, England and the United States. Her forthcoming study, "Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato's Republic" (University of Chicago, Fall 2002) examines the relation, forged through the mechanism of censorship, between philosophy and literature. Drawing on this work, she is examining Western philosophical and literary...

Alva Noë

Professor; Chair, Department of Philosophy
Philosophy

Alva Noë is a philosopher of mind whose research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015), Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark...

Maura Nolan

Associate Professor
English

Nolan works on late medieval English literature, with a special focus on the 14th and 15th centuries, and the vexed relationship between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance.” She is especially interested in defining and articulating the role of the aesthetic in late medieval vernacular literature, particularly in relation to variable cultural understandings of sensation and cognition. She is currently working on two projects. The first focuses on the place of contingency and sensation in the work of John Gower, while the second addresses notions of the beautiful and the sublime in medieval...

Fumi Okiji

Assistant Professor
Rhetoric

Okiji arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene in which I took an active part as a vocalist and improvisor. She works across Black study, critical theory and sound and music studies. Her research and teaching look to Black expression for ways to understand modern and contemporary life, which is to say, she explores works and practices for what they can provide by way of social theory. For instance, her book Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford University Press, 2018) is a sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno’s idea concerning the...

Stefania Pandolfo

Professor; Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Anthropology

Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, investigating narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness. Her current project is a study of emergent forms...

Diego Pirillo

Associate Professor
Italian Studies

Pirillo (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore) is an associate professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently serving as the director of REMS, the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and he is affiliated faculty in the Center for the Study of Religion, the Institute of European Studies and the Program in Critical Theory.

His work focuses on early modern Italy, Europe, and the Atlantic world, with a strong interest in intellectual history, the history of books and reading, religious and migration studies and the history of...

Djordje Popović

Assistant Professor
Slavic Languages & Literatures

Popović is an assistant professor of South Slavic Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures. His research and teaching interests include 20th- and 21st-century South Slavic literature, Yugoslav modernism and state socialism, critical theory (Frankfurt School) and intellectual history. His book project, “The Concept of Statelessness in Second-World Literature,” is a comparative study of the mutually constitutive relationship between homelessness as a cultural standpoint and statelessness as a political condition. His essays on the appropriation of the dialectical...

James Porter

Distinguished Professor; Irving Stone Chair in Literature
Rhetoric

Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Rhetoric. His teaching and research have followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (both Stanford University Press, 2000). Another is a study of models of aesthetic sensation, perception and experience in ancient Greece and Rome, which he explored in ...

Harsha Ram

Associate Professor
Slavic Languages & Literatures
Comparative Literature

Ram's first book, The Imperial Sublime (2003), addresses the relationship between poetic genre, aesthetic theory, territorial space and political power in 18th- and early 19th-century Russian literature. His recent publications chiefly concern Russian-Georgian, Russian-French and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of theories of world literature and comparative modernisms. His forthcoming book, The Geopoetics of Sovereignty. Literatures of the Russian-Georgian Encounter, seeks to provide a historical account of cultural...

Henry Ravenhall

Assistant Professor
French
Ravenhall works on medieval French literature, premodern material and visual culture, and critical theory. He has taught classes on medieval culture, French literature and film, ecocriticism, and theories of the haptic. His first book project brings the concept of anachrony to bear on medieval manuscript culture, while his second book project rethinks the medieval (and modern) reading experience through the figure of touch. A new project is in its initial stages on what he calls the “medieval commune form,” which will reread the major formal shifts of thirteenth-century European culture...