Robert Alter (Ph.D., Harvard University) teaches courses on the 19th-century European and American novel, on modernism, and on literary aspects of the Bible, and he also teaches and writes on modern Hebrew literature. His publications range from critical biography (Stendhal) to literary theory (The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age) to two recent volumes of Bible translation accompanied by literary commentary —The Book of Psalms, and The Wisdom Books. His two most recent books are Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton,...
Office: 246 Barrows Office Hours: Tuesdays 2:30-4 or by appointment
Professor Kronfeld teaches Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature with a special emphasis on modern poetry.
Professor Kronfeld is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics which won the MLA Scaglione Prize in 1996 for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies. Her co-translation (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open won the PEN Translation Prize. She is the recipient (with Chana Bloch) of the top 2005-6 National Endowment for the Arts award for...
Prof Emerita Spanish/Portuguese & Comparative Literature
Spanish/Portuguese
Comparative Literature
Languages: Spanish, Italian Periods: 19th to 21 st centuries Academic Area: Latin American literature Francine Masiello is Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor Emerita in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese. Her teaching and research arc covers Latin American literatures of the 19th through 21st centuries and comparative North/South cultures. She has focused on the relationship between politics and literature, culture under dictatorship and the transition to democracy, and, more recently, the global south as a problem for literature and philosophy. The...
James Monroe works in the areas of lyric poetry, the Middle Ages, and East-West relations with particular interest in the importance of the Arab contribution to Spanish civilization. He has published numerous books and articles in the field of Arabic literature with special emphasis on its Hispano-Arabic component, including Ten Hispano-Arabic Strophic Songs in the Modern Oral Tradition: Music and Texts, with Benjamin M. Liu, and The Art of Badi az-Zaman al-Hamadhani as Picaresque Narrative. (Ph.D., Harvard University).
Barbara Spackman, Ph.D. Yale University, is Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, and holder of the Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair in Italian Literature. She works on nineteenth and twentieth century Italian literature and culture, with special interests in decadence, the cultural production of the fascist period, feminist theory, travel writing and Italian...
