Graduate Group Mission Statement
The newly formed Graduate Group in French, Italian and Germanic Studies (FIGS) is united by shared commitments about the relevance of literary and cultural studies for contemporary issues, in particular: migration and refugees; climate change and the environment; inclusiveness with respect to race, gender and sexuality; multilinguality; multiliteracy and new forms of media. Our primary mission is to provide linguistically and culturally informed learning and research in the traditions and practices of knowledge, cultural production, and critique in French, Italian, and Germanic languages. These are all global languages with millions of speakers worldwide and interwoven cultural and historical legacies.
We are defined by our commitment to foreign language and humanistic approaches to culture as necessary skills for serious and broadly informed research across the humanities. This commitment is as essential for utilizing foreign language resources unique to Penn—such as the holdings of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books & Manuscripts—as they are pertinent to understanding current societal phenomena on a global scale. As we move inevitably into a world shaped by the climate emergency, strained or failing democratic institutions, radically increased numbers of displaced people, excessive wealth inequality, persistent racism, post-literate culture and new visual media, we find that a longer historical view provides us and our students with more apt comparisons and concepts for understanding current developments. The research and teaching of the standing faculty in FIGS underscore the relevance of cultural-historical knowledge for confronting the pressing issues of the twenty-first century.
Click here to read about the expectations of FIGS graduate advisors and advisees.
FIGS Faculty
French and Francophone
Andrea Goulet, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Graduate, Chair of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies (FIGS)
Scott Francis, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Undergraduate Chair
Corine Labridy, Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Philippe C. Met, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Gerald J. Prince, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Italian
Eva Del Soldato, Associate Professor of Italian Studies, Graduate Chair, FIGS.
Francesco Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies
Germanic
Vance Byrd, Presidential Associate Professor of German, with a secondary appointment in History of Art
Christina Frei, Executive Director of Language Instruction for the School of Arts & Sciences
Kathryn Hellerstein, Professor of Germanic Languages
Simon Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor of German
Javier Samper Vendrell, Assistant Professor of German
Liliane Weissberg, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts & Sciences
Bethany Wiggin, Professor of German
Faculty with Secondary Appointments in FIGS
Mauro Calcagno, Associate Professor of Music, Graduate Group in Italian Studies
Opera studies; early modern music; critical theory and digital humanities
Ian Fleishman, Associate Professor of Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies, Chair of Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS)
André Dombrowski, Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th Century Art
19th-c. France and Germany, Empires, arts and material cultures
Ann Moyer, Professor of History; Director of the Center for Italian Studies
Renaissance Italy; European intellectual and cultural history
FIGS Graduate Group Affiliated Faculty
Rita Barnard, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Postcolonial studies; African and South African literature; globalization; contemporary women writers
David Barnes, Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science
Urban history, 19th-c. France/Europe, history of infectious diseases
Anne Berg, Assistant Professor, History
Modern Germany and Europe; Ecologies; waste management and genocide
Warren Breckman, Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History
Late and Early Modern European Intellectual History; Young Hegelians; contemporary theory
Sabina Bremmer, Asistant Professor of Philosophy
Kant, 19th-20th century European philosophy, philosophy of race and gender, aesthetics
Shira Brisman, Assistant Professor, History of Art
Early Modern Art, Reformation; German law and political theory 15th-18th c.
Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English
Psychoanalytic Studies, African American and American Poetry, Cinema, French Theory
Roger Chartier, Annenberg Visiting Professor and Professor, Collège de France
Material Book History, Early Modern Europe, the Annales School
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Associate Professor, English; Comparative Literature
Jack Kerouac, Franco- and Anglo-Canadian; speculative fictions
Loren Goldman, Associate Professor of Political Science
German Idealism, Hegelianism, Western Marxism and American Pragmatism
Jeffrey Kallberg, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Music
19th & 20th century music; Chopin; European, Scandinavian studies
David Young Kim, Associate Professor of History of Art
Southern Renaissance art, transcultural exchange; French and Italian
Daniele Lorenzini, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Foucault, Post-Kantian European philosophy and social & political philosophy
Benjamin Nathans, Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Associate Professor, History
Habermas, 18th-century France, Russian-Jewish historiography, modern Jewish history
Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Art; Beckett, Derrida; Theory
Karen Redrobe, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Endowed Professor in Film Studies
African Film and Media; Comparative Literature; LGBT; War and Film
Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History
European and American History since 1650; Age of Revolutions (esp. France); History of Democracy
Elly Truitt, Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science
Circulation of scientific objects western Eurasia and north Africa, antiquity to early modern period.
Adelheid Voskuhl, Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science
Early Modern and European Enlightenment, technocracy, philosophy, technology
David Wallace, Judith Rodin Professor of English
Medieval, early modern European literature, German and Dutch Mediterranean Studies, Dante