Undergraduate Research
The Department of Romance Studies offers a gateway for research in the Humanities, including the various fields that make up Romance Studies. Research activities include the Honors Thesis, summer research fellowships, or engaging in mentoring projects with professors which lead to opportunities to present papers at conferences or for publication in the University’s undergraduate research journal.
Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Romance Studies
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Department of Romance Studies
- Write an Honor’s Thesis with one of our Faculty Advisors
- Submit an abstract to the Carolina Conference for Romance Studies: http://ccrs.unc.edu
- Talk to individual faculty about research internships and collaborative projects; e.g. Lucia Binotti’s Digital Humanities projects: lbinotti@email.com and Rosa Perelmuter’s MURAP program: murap@unc.edu
SURF (Summer UG Research Fellowship)
- Students work with ROMS faculty mentor during summer – 9 weeks for 20 hrs per week, sponsored by the Office for UG Research
- Typical award: $3,000
- Application deadline in February
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Celebration of UG Research
- A pan-university UG research conference sponsored by the Office the UG Research
- Students can present at poster and panel sessions
- Takes place in April
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JOURney UNC Journal of UG Research
- Students submit articles for publication in peer-reviewed UG journal, sponsored by the Office for UG Research
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Undergraduate Opportunities and Resources for Research & Academic Enhancement include:
- The Frances L. Phillips Travel Scholarship
- The Burch Fellows Program
- Grants for Honors Thesis Research
- The Office for Undergraduate Research
Talk to your professors today about their research activities and your research interests!
Current Research in ROMS
Diana Torres Silva
Graduate Student
I research the intersections between history, literature, and visual arts in order to understand the concept of “desaparecido” as represented in Latin American cultural artifacts from the seventies and the present-day. The project involves analyzing the transformation of the concept under changing political circumstances and in different social contexts.
Jennifer Mackenzie
Assistant Professor of Italian
I’m taking a break from my book project this semester to work on an article-length project about the horses that appear as human companions and as characters in their own right in Renaissance epic poetry, starting from the most famous Renaissance epic, the Orlando furioso. more...
Martin Sueldo
Teaching Associate Professor of Spanish
I am working in a project about female artists/authors from Latin America: Catalina Bu, Power Paola, Sole Otero, and María Luque. The first stage is to establish the difference between comics, comics-books and graphic novels. The latter display specific features in this century, one of them is to foster a feminist perspective over Storytelling. This new artistic expression is global, and can be traced to authors like Marjane Satrapi (Iran) or Rutu Modan (Israel).
Bruno Estigarribia
Associate Professor of Spanish
I am beginning to work on creating a bilingual Italian-English digital environment to document and revitalize Rusitène, an indigenous language from Southern Italy, classified as vulnerable by UNESCO. This digital environment will consist of (1) language data in the form of a Rusitène glossary and collection of culturally-relevant texts (including dialectal poetry, jokes, anecdotes, recipes, etc.) linked with audio and video recordings, as well as more...
Ellen Welch
Professor of French, Department Chair
The French word bruit (noise) is a common a metaphor indicating rumor, “buzz,” “the news of the time”—what people are talking about in society. In my current book project, I explore how writers in the 17th and 18th centuries used this and other sonic metaphors to reflect about public discourse. From Corneille to Diderot, creative writers evoked an acoustic vocabulary to imagine how ideas and feelings spread through a population as if at the speed of sound, more...
Rosa Perelmuter
Professor of Spanish
La recepción literaria de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Un siglo de apreciaciones críticas (1910-2010). Edición e Introducción de Rosa Perelmuter. Recopilación bibliográfica de Luis M. Villar. Instituto de Estudios Auriseculares (IDEA), Colección «Batihoja». Serie Proyecto Estudios Indianos (PEI). Forthcoming, New York: IDEA, 2020more...
This study of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s literary reception in the twentieth century is the product of years’-long collaboration between national and international specialists on the works on the renowned seventeenth century Mexican writer. The editor, who also wrote the introductory essay detailing the trajectory of Sor Juana criticism, brought together twelve sorjuanistas who studied the scholarly production on the writer during each of the ten decades and wrote critical essays evaluating the prevailing opinions and summarizing their findings. Each chapter is accompanied by an exhaustive bibliography of the decade prepared by Dartmouth and University of Wisconsin’s Bibliographer emeritus Luis M. Villar
Sean Matharoo
Postdoctoral Fellow of French
As a part of the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity, I am updating my doctoral thesis into a book in the Department of Romance Studies. As indicated in its abstract, my thesis is about speculative aesthetics and philosophy. To speculate is to think an absolute, which is a nonrelative property of something. more...
Sarah Booker
PhD Candidate in Spanish
Over the last two years I have been translating Cristina Rivera Garza’s Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country and it was just published with The Feminist Press. This hybrid collection of essays, crónicas, and poems examines systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and the United States, what could be considered the “Visceraless State,” and proposes a poetics of writing and collective grieving as a powerful mode of resistance.
Maury Bruhn
PhD Candidate in French
One of my current projects is for a journal special issue on reading Proust at home during the coronavirus crisis. My article takes as its inspiration a scene from A la recherche du temps perdu’s third volume where the narrator inadvertently delays a dinner party because he is so fascinated by his hosts’ collection of works by the novel’s fictional painter Elstir. This scene describes these invented paintings in great detail and references a number of real artists as well. more...
Cristina Carrasco
Teaching Associate Professor of Spanish
Dr.Carrasco’s research focuses on contemporary Spanish and Transatlantic studies. Building on her doctoral work on the autobiographical metafictions of Miguel de Unamuno, Rosa Montero, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Juan José Millás, she examines the ways in which contemporary hybrid genres continue to reconfigure Spanish and Latin American literature in an age of globalization and new cultural mestizajes. more...
Alicia Rivero
Associate Professor of Spanish
Prof. Rivero is working on a book project titled “Nature in Contemporary Latin(a) American Literature: Ecology, Gender, and Race,” which shows how all of these concepts are interrelated and studies them in selected literary works. Besides publishing articles on ecocritical and other topics, her research also includes digital humanities, digital texts and theory. An example of the latter is a recent paper titled “Chiappe’s Hypertext Novel, more...
Christina Rudosky
Teaching Associate Professor of French
Objects surround us in our everyday lives. We make them, we use them, we accumulate them, and sometimes we obsess over them. Yet, we often pay little attention to how they shape our interactions with the world. My research focuses on Surrealism and how objects are used, created and collected in this multifaceted avant-garde movement. more...
Dorothea Heitsch
Teaching Professor of French
At the crossroads of translation, cultural exchange, humanistic rhetoric, the medical schools of Italy and France, printing, and transnational conversations, Opera Mesuae represents a paradigm of Renaissance medical anthropology. more...
Francisco Chen-Lopez
PhD Candidate in Spanish
My research revolves around the representation of Asian communities in Latin American cultural productions such as literature and films. Currently, I am working on two projects. The first one is an article-length project that deals with the semi-authentic film portrayals of the Chinese community in a China-Japan-Brazil multi-national production. more...