Current Graduate Students

  • Pre-modern Arabic and Persian Philosophy, Mysticism, and Poetics, especially works of Ibn ʿArabi and Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī; Islamic Intellectual History; Continental philosophy.
  • 20th century French literature and art—esp. Surrealism; 20th century Japanese literature and art—esp. avant-garde; gender studies; women’s studies.
  • 20th and 21st century French and Latin American literary and visual cultures; Latinx cultural productions in the U.S.; queer theory; continental philosophy; Latin American philosophy; Critical Theory; semiotics; performance studies; autotheory.
  • Postmodernism and Postcolonialism; Nationalism, Feminism, Refugee Studies, Memory and Postmemory; the Vietnamese Diaspora, the Vietnam War; The dialectics between literature and national culture/history.
  • World literature and civilization, science fiction literature and film, China-Latin America cultural studies, history of science, culture industry and creative writing
  • Designated Emphasis in Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science

Lupina Farhana finished medical school before seeing the light and transitioning into the Humanities, where she earned two graduate degrees in literature and composition. In her Ph.D., she focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century American, French, and German literatures, by developing a theoretical framework from the artistic motif of the arabesque

  • foreign language pedagogy; cultural linguistics; dialogic learning and teaching; modernism in French and Italian literature; sociopolitical contexts of 20th century European literature.

Kate Huang, originally from Taipei, earned BA in English Literature, MA in Applied Linguistics (California State University, Fullerton), with Certificate in Basic and Advanced Core Early Childhood Education, and is currently working on her doctorate program at UC Riverside. Kate’s research interests focus on Samuel Beckett’s works, Contemporary Marxist school, Media and Cultural Studies, and Psycholinguistics. Her hobbies include listening to Baroque Music and visiting DTLA’s museums in her leisure time.

  • science fiction studies; posthumanism; philosophy of science and technology; premodern and modern Chinese science fiction.

Kenneth Ken-Wah Lee

  • modern and contemporary Chinese and Japanese literature; Asian American literature; cultural anthropology in relation to transpacific studies; Sino-Japanese studies.
  • Asian American literature, diaspora studies, Sinophone literature, transnational film and media studies.

Misaki Matsuda

Charles McCallister

  • 19th Century British Literature, German Philosophy – esp. Nietzsche and Heidegger; biopolitics; existentialism; morality; posthumanism.
  • Francophone West African Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies
  • Children’s literature in English, Finnish, and Japanese; horror studies; fairy- and folktales and their English translations and adaptations; video game and internet studies.
  • modern Korean fiction; postcolonial studies; critical race theory.
  • French literature, Farsi literature, Gender Studies, feminism and women studies.
  • Early Chinese and early Greek philosophy, rituals and religious studies, Chinese fiction, Asian horror cinematography, supernatural folklore, cultural history of ghosts, otherness. Link to Vlad’s academia.edu page

Benjamin E. Tilson

Yixin Xu‘s areas of research include classical Chinese literature, modern Chinese literature, and Taiwan cinema. She currently focuses on feminist studies, translation studies, and emotion studies. With both intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches, Xu’s works aims to address the discursivity of Chinese literature and culture.