Recent Faculty & Graduate Student Publications

Explore our latest publications in French and Francophone literature, Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies, and Romance linguistics. Recent books were featured at our 2025 Book Launch, celebrating the scholarship and creative works of faculty and graduate students. Together, these publications exemplify the breadth and depth of our engagement with the worlds of French-, Italian-, Portuguese-, and Spanish-speaking communities.

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January 2026

"Information structure, subject positions, and the cartography of the preverbal field in Cibaeño Dominican Spanish," authored by Dr. Timothy Gupton, Professor of Spanish Linguistics, appeared in the most recent volume of the journal Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics. Congratulations to Dr. Gupton! 

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December 2025

Elisa Bedê Braga, a second year PhD student in Romance Languages at the University of Georgia, published the article “Configurações do espaço queer e a (re)escrita da história em vila mathusa (2022)" in Mester, a graduate student journal from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. The article was published in the volume n. 54, with a focus on Tensions in Latin American Cities. Elisa analyzes the spatial configurations present in the novel vila mathusa (2022), by Zênite Astra, from the perspective of trans subjects. To this end, they consider space in two aspects: the external space, which is the one we inhabit in society, and the internal space, composed of the body and its metamorphoses. Then, they explore how Brazilian literature represents the trans subject, and how this representation shifts in contemporaneity, with the queer space as the main focus of analysis. The article originated from a paper written in the course PORT 8010 - Trajectories of Displacement in Brazilian Literature, taught by Dr. Cecília Paiva Ximenes Rodrigues at the University of Georgia in 2024.

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Assistant Professor Priscila Calatayud-Fernández's article, The Temporality of Debt during the Great Recession in the Novel On the Edge (En la orilla, 2013) by Rafael Chirbes, was published in Periphērica. This essay offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Rafael Chirbes’ novel En la orilla (2013), recognized as the paradigmatic work of the Great Recession of 2008 in Spain. The article examines how the Valencian writer denaturalizes the forms of violence adjacent to the credit-driven economy fostered during the real estate bubble cycle in southeastern Spain. In line with the arguments of David Graeber, Walter Benjamin, and Maurizio Lazzarato on the history and philosophy of debt, En la orilla [On the Edge] portrays the intimacy of social malaise in contemporary neoliberal capitalism, unveiling the violence that has historically accompanied debt and credit in their interrelation with the moral sphere of guilt and sin. The literary analysis shows how the novel depicts the discursive mechanisms of subjectivity production in indebted individuals, resulting from a theological-sacrificial temporal experience. Specifically, three literary devices that render visible the constrained temporality of the indebted–predetermined by a delimited future–are identified: a non-theological composition, the heterogeneity of narrative voices, and a narrative tone described as obscene. This interpretation of En la orilla also draws on Corinne Maier’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on alterity and mortality to examine the forms of violence that emerge when workers, bound by the temporality of debt, are alienated from the possibility of experiencing their social and finite condition. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that the novel’s value is not only literary but also political, as it offers an aesthetic experience of resistance to the theological temporality imposed by debt.

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Diana Trindade Drumond, a second-year PhD student in Romance languages at the University of Georgia, published a chapter in the book Deslocamentos, heterotopias, identidades: reflexões sobre literatura, arte e diversidade (in English, Displacements, heterotopias, identities: reflections on literature, art and diversity), published by Pedro & João Editores (Brazil), as a result of the presentations given by the members of the Research Group Poetics of Diversity (UERJ, State University of Rio de Janeiro) in its VI seminar. As stated in the book’s introduction, which was edited and organized by Dr. Shirley de Souza Gomes Carreira (UERJ), diversity is the guiding concept that permeates all chapters of the book, whether through the discussion of human displacement and the identity issues inherent to migrant subjects, through forms of resistance or affirmations of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity expressed in media-based cultural products, or through the transposition between genres. The book opens with a chapter written by Dr. Eduardo F. Coutinho, the esteemed literary Brazilian scholar whose work directly contributes to the field of comparative literature, followed by chapters written by Dr. Carreira and other members of the Reasach Group Poetics of Diversity. Diana Drumond authored Chapter 3, titled “’Traçando rotas em terreno dominado’: uma análise da arte tática na busca por mobilidade(s) dos personagens de Passageiro do fim do dia” (in English, “‘Mapping out routes through controlled territory’: an analysis of the tactical art in the search for mobilities of the characters in Passageiro do Fim do Dia”). In this chapter, she examines how the subaltern characters in Passageiro do Fim do Dia, by Rubens Figueiredo, face severe constraints on their geographic, social, and economic mobility within a context of inequalities sustained by capitalist society. She also explores how these subaltern subjects employ tactical strategies to resist and survive in environments dominated by hegemonic forces. The chapter developed from a paper that Diana wrote for the course PORT 8010 - Trajectories of Displacement in Brazilian Literature, taught by Dr. Cecília Paiva Ximenes Rodrigues at the University of Georgia in 2024.

The e-book is available for download on the publisher's website

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July 2025

"Chrétien’s Reign: Reception, Authority, and Truth in Erec et Enide," authored by Assistant Professor Lukas Ovrom, appeared in the most recent issue of the journal Romania (July 2025). This article examines the reception of Erec et Enide (c.1170), Chrétien de Troyes’ first Arthurian romance, from the Middle Ages to the present and Chrétien’s role in defining the nascent field of vernacular (French) literature in the late twelfth century.

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June 2025

"A bolsa amarela, by Lygia Bojunga Nunes: A Queer Allegory," authored by Portuguese PhD student, Elisa Braga, appeared in the most recent volume of the journal Revista de Literatura, História e Memória. Congratulations to Elisa! 

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May 2025

Tale of Black Histories: A Translation and Critical Edition

Translated and edited by Emily Sahakian, Associate Professor of French and Theatre, and Andrew Daily

Édouard Glissant has emerged as a major figure of 20th-century postcolonial literature, yet little is known about his cultural and educational activism. Intellectually rich, formally innovative, yet long-neglected, this first English-language translation of Histoire de Nègre offers a privileged window into Glissant’s intellectual and aesthetic development and an early model of Caribbean popular, consciousness-raising theatre.

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April 2024

"O fruto estranho de Bernardo Kucinski" [Bernardo Kucinski's Strange Fruit], authored by Portuguese PhD student, Fábio Mariano, appeared in the most recent volume of the journal Revista de Estudos Literários da UEMS. Congratulations to Fábio! 

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March 2024

"Processing dissociations between raising and control in Brazilian Portuguese" recently appeared in the First View portion of the Journal of Linguistics. This article was co-published by UGA Department of Linguistics alumnus Douglas Merchant (PhD, 2019) and Professor Timothy Gupton. This project started before the Covid-19 pandemic, and is the first manuscript resulting from this collaboration. 

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February 2024

In The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges, editors Daniel Balderston and Nora Benedict, along with a team of international scholars, contextualize Jorge Luis Borges's work for a new generation of twenty-first-century readers and critics. This volume shifts the emphasis to Borges's working life, his writing processes, his collaborations and networks, and the political and cultural background of his production. The Handbook also evaluates his impact on a variety of other fields ranging from political science and philosophy to media studies and mathematics.. 

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