Category: Alumni Award

Elena Prokhorova: Associate Professor of Russian, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, Film & Cultural Studies Program

Research:

• Soviet and post-Soviet television
• Visual representations of national identity
• Genre theory
• Gender Theory

Teaching Experience:

• Russian language
• Russian literature and media (in Russian)
• 19th and 20th-century Rusn lit.
• Russian cinema
• The Eastern Front
• Dostoevsky
• Media and Communism
• Intro to film studies
• World cinema
• Vampires and popular culture
• Contemporary Russian television

Areas of Specialization

Root’s research interests include the material and environmental culture of the Americas. She is the editor of The Latin American Fashion Reader (Berg Publishers 2005), which takes a broad look at the influence of Latin American culture on global fashion trends. The volume was awarded the 2006 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize, shortlisted for the 2006 Costume Society of America Millia L. Davenport Award, and chosen as Elle’s book of the month in June 2005 (Argentine edition) and lead title in Berg’s new online library. Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina, which began as an archival project conducted under the auspices of a Fulbright research grant, was published in 2010 as part of the University of Minnesota Press’s Cultural Studies of the Americas series. In recent years, Root has served as consulting editor of Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia (Routledge 2008), guest editor of Fashion Theory, and as a reviewer or consultant to various agencies, museums, NGOs and publishers. She currently serves on the research council of Raíz Diseño, a transnational network of Latin American designers; as President Ad Honorem of Ixel Moda; and as Past President of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies.

Background

Originally trained as a journalist, Regina Root went on to complete her Master’s in Spanish at the University of Iowa and Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley (1997). She teaches courses at all levels, including Words of the Earth, Cultural Constructions of the Environment, and Fashioning the Nation. She is also a core faculty member of the Environmental Science and Policy, Latin American Studies, and the Sharpe community scholars program. Her work with students in the field of environmental culture, new media and creative agency are featured in a university documentary on innovations in teaching with technology (scroll to 6:28): http://swem.blip.tv/file/167857/

For the past two years, she has taught a two-semester service-learning course on Ethical Fashion for the Sharpe Community Scholars Program, inspired by work conducted in the field of fashion studies currently. She is also interviewed regularly by the international fashion press, with Canal 23 of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, having dedicated a half hour television show to her research.

Rob Leventhal an Associate Professor of German Studies at the College of William and Mary, where I teach German language, literature, thought and culture from the 18th century to the present.

1975-1982 Stanford University, Ph.D. in German Thought and Literature (1982)1976 Stanford University, M.A. in German Literature, with Distinction (September, 1976)
1979-1980 Institut für deutsche Philologie, Ludwig-Maximillian-Universität, Munich, West Germany. DAAD Research Fellow
1975-1976 Fellowship of the Foreign Academic Office (Akademisches Auslandsamt), Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, Bonn, West Germany
1971-1975 Grinnell College. B.A. in German and Philosophy, with Honors. Phi Beta Kappa, Grinnell College
1973-1974 Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany
1973 Goethe Institut, Freiburg, Germany

ACADEMIC POSITIONS
2012 Section Head, German Studies
2009-Present Associate Professor of German Studies, The College of William and Mary
2004-2009 Assistant Professor of German Studies, The College of William and Mary
1988-95 Assistant Professor of German, University of Virginia
1986-88 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies, University of Virginia
1982-86 Assistant Professor of German, Washington University in St. Louis
1984 Director, Summer Language Institute of Washington University at the Goethe Institute, Göttingen
1982 Instructor in German, San Francisco State University
1981 Lecturer in German, University of California at Santa Cruz

Alexander Prokhorov is Associate Professor of Russian and Film Studies at College of William and Mary. His research interests include Russian visual culture, genre theory, and film history.

He is the author of Inherited Discourse: Paradigms of Stalinist Culture in Literature and Cinema of the Thaw (Akademicheskii proekt, 2007) and the editor of Springtime for Soviet Cinema: Re/viewing the 1960s (Pittsburgh Film Symposium, 2001). His articles and reviews have been published in Kinokultura, Russian Review, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Art of Cinema (Iskusstvo kino), and Wiener Slawistische Almanach.

Jennifer Taylor received her Ph.D. in German Studies from Cornell University and is an Associate Professor of German Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the College of William and Mary. Her research areas include German Film, Holocaust Studies and Women’s Studies. During her career she has given numerous scholarly talks and presentations at national and international German and Film Studies conferences, and she has published articles about the works of German Jewish Holocaust survivor authors Edgar Hilsenrath, Ruth Klueger and Jurek Becker. She has also published on German and Austrian film, including a chapter on the contemporary German filmmaker, Doris Doerrie, ”American Influences on Doris Doerrie’s Screenplays,” in Straight Through the Heart: Doris Dörrie, German Filmmaker and Author (2004). Professor Taylor has also taken part in nationally competitive faculty development seminars on German cinema and on Holocaust Studies. Her forthcoming edited volume, National Responses to the Holocaust, is being published by the University of Delaware Press.

Francie Cate-Arries completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and joined the faculty of the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at the College of William & Mary in 1986. She is a professor of contemporary Spanish cultural and literary studies, and teaches courses at all levels of the curriculum, including Fundamentals of Literary Criticism; The Art & Literature of the Spanish Civil War; Film under Franco; Literary Landscapes of Spain, 1800-2012; Phantasms of Francoism: History, Literature, Memory; and language courses at all levels.

Prof. Cate-Arries regularly serves as a faculty adviser for W&M’s Semester in Sevilla program (est. 2007), which includes an innovative “International Service-Learning Internship” opportunity for qualified students. She also frequently directs the W&M Summer in Cádiz, Spain program, celebrating its 10 year anniversary in 2013. She supervises on-site undergraduate research projects about contemporary topics in today´s Spain related to, for example, women´s issues, cinema, immigration, historical memory, music, commemorative cultures, and youth cultures.

She is a 2007 recipient of the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia´s Outstanding Faculty Award, and received the Plumeri Award for faculty excellence in 2010.