BOARD MEMBERS
Travis Landry
Travis Landry completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University with an honors degree in Comparative Literature. He spent his junior year abroad at the University of Salamanca and as a senior worked under Professors Arnold Weinstein and Geoffrey Ribbans on a thesis concerning James Joyce and Miguel de Unamuno. Following graduation, he taught Spanish for four years at a public middle school in Houston, Texas. As a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, he has completed coursework in various departments, taught numerous Spanish courses, presented at conferences, participated at the Synapsis European School for Comparative Studies, served two terms as his department’s graduate senator, and co-organized conferences. Directed by Professors Marshall Brown and Nil Santiáńez, he wrote his M.A. essay on Darwin, Dickens, and Galdós and over the last year, lived in Italy while attending the University of Bologna on a FLAS Fellowship. He is presently working on Spanish modernism, Greek philosophy, and French and is a TA for a Hispanic literary studies course.
Katy Masuga
Katy Masuga holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies and an M.A. in Comparative Literature. She has spent four years abroad as a student (three in southern Germany, one in Paris) and will spend the spring of 2005 in Paris studying under Cixous, Kristeva and other contemporary critics and the academic year 2005-2006 in Berlin researching film archives for her dissertation. She is currently in her last year of coursework for the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and the Program in Theory and Criticism. Her languages and literatures of interest include English, German and French as well as early Modern cinema. Her main focus is critical theory, and her dissertation will be directed towards early 20th Century literature and critical thought including Georges Bataille, English Modernism, the Frankfurt School and modes of representation of the turn of the century with a focus on film as a foundational new medium.
Ciara McGrath
Ciara McGrath graduated Cum Laude from Florida International University with a B.A. in both English and Women’s Studies. She received an M.Phil. in Women’s Studies from Trinity College, Dublin, where she focused on contemporary Irish women’s poetry. She is currently a second year graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington and working on her M.A.. She has served one year as a Spanish TA and is currently the RA to the Coordinator of the First Year Spanish Program. She is presently working on issues surrounding contemporary Irish and Spanish women’s poetry, and is interested in questions of identity and nationality, notions of belongingness, and post-colonial and feminist theory.
Katie Boyer
Katie Boyer is a second year MA student focusing on 20th century Russian and American fiction, especially women authors and theories of gendered writing. After graduating summa cum laude in English from Lipscomb University, Katie spent a year in Kyiv, Ukraine, teaching conversational English and grammar at the Ukrainian Education Center and composition at International Christian University. At the University of Washington, she has been a teaching assistant in comparative literature and currently teaches Writing in Comparative Literature, a sophomore-level composition course. Katie spent the summer of 2004 studying Russian language and culture at the Smolnyi Institute in St. Petersburg on a FLAS fellowship and is currently writing her MA thesis on Russian/Post-Soviet writer Ludmila Petrushevskaya. Other current research interests include religious studies, critical theory, and receptions of modernism.
Francoise Belot
Françoise Belot graduated from the Université de Nice with a D.E.A. in Anglophone Studies. She spent her senior year at the University of East Anglia (U.K.) where she studied in the department of History. Prior to coming to the University of Washington, she taught French language classes at the University of Virginia. Her main focus is nineteenth-century prose fiction in French and English, but her interests include literary and film theory as well as forms of popular fiction. She is currently working on theories of representation in the French context and teaching advanced-level French classes.
Web Design
Patrick Blaine
Patrick Blaine studied English and Spanish at the University of Iowa, receiving his B.A. in 1999. In 2000 he lived in the Sierra Nevada for four months before moving to Chile for 3 years to work at the Chilean North American Institute of Culture. While in South America, Patrick worked as an ESL teacher, a translator, and an interpreter and also worked actively in Forest Management and general environmental and development issues affecting Latin America. He has studied in Pittsburgh, Iowa, Spain and Chile, and finally landed in Seattle to study Comparative Literature, focusing on New World Literature, the NeoBaroque, and Literature and the Environment. In the past year, he has contributed to editorial projects, presented at conferences, and played an important role in the UW's Web-based Foreign Language Instruction initiative. Right now, Patrick is in the process of completing his M.A. He currently works in the Language Learning Center at the UW, providing media support and web development for the Romance Language departments.