Valérie K. Orlando
Director
Professor of French and Francophone Literatures
Department of French & Italian, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
www.valeriekeyorlando.org
Valérie Orlando is Director of the Honors Humanities Program and Professor of French & Francophone Literatures in the Department of French & Italian at the University of Maryland. She is the author of four books: Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb, (Ohio UP, 1999), Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2003), Francophone Voices of the ‘New Morocco’ in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) and Screening Morocco: Filmic Depictions of a Changing Society (Ohio UP, 2011). Dr. Orlando teaches courses in and has written numerous articles on Francophone women’s writing from the African diaspora, African cinema, and French literature and culture. She was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Grant to Morocco and Tunisia in spring 2007 and an American Institute of Maghrebi Studies (AIMS) grant for May-June 2009 to Morocco.
Dana Carluccio
Associate Director
Ph.D. in English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dana Carluccio is the Associate Director of Honors Humanities. Her research explores how literature can shape the history of science. She has published articles about relations between Harlem Renaissance writers and evolutionary theory in Twentieth Century Literature and about 19th-century evolutionary psychology in Signs. She is working on a book called Cognitive Fictions: Literary History and the Rhetoric of Evolutionary Psychology.
Before coming to Maryland, Dr. Carluccio spent two years in Stanford's Introductory Studies program, where she taught courses on science and popular culture, gender studies, and the rhetoric of science. This year at Maryland, she is teaching the second-year Honors Humanities seminar and a course for freshmen on speculative fiction. She also advises student research and directs admissions to the program.
Sheila Jelen
Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor of English
Sheila Jelen is an associate professor of English and Jewish Studies, and directs the program in Comparative Literature. Her books include Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance (2007) and Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (2010). Her current research focuses on the intersection between ethnographic and literary discourse in post-Holocaust culture and she is writing a book entitled Salvage Poetics: A Manifesto.
Oliver Gaycken
Faculty Fellow
Assistant Professor of English
Oliver Gaycken received his BA in English from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He previously has taught at York University (Toronto) and Temple University. His teaching interests include silent-era cinema history, the history of popular science, and the links between scientific and experimental cinema. He has published on the discovery of the ophthalmoscope, the flourishing of the popular science film in France at the turn of the 1910s, the figure of the supercriminal in Louis Feuillade's serial films, and the surrealist fascination with popular scientific images. His book project, which is under contract with Oxford University Press, is entitled Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science.
Theresa (Terri) Donofrio
Program Coordinator and Lecturer
Doctoral Fellow and Ph.D. Student in Communication (concentration in Rhetoric & Political Culture); M.A., University of Maryland; B.A., Miami University
Theresa Donofrio is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland on the Rhetoric & Political Culture track. Terri’s research concerns the rhetoric of public tragedy. She has studied genocide rhetoric, the Nuremberg trials, the Virginia Tech shootings, abortion discourse, and contestations over processes of memorialization. The majority of her research focuses on public responses to 9/11 as a nodal point for examining therapeutic rhetoric, collective memory studies, media studies, and bereavement discourse.
In 2009, Terri was named one of the Center for Teaching Excellence’s Distinguished Teaching Assistants. She has taught many courses at the University of Maryland, including COMM298L: Speak Up! People, Publics, and You, a course she co-designed and co-taught on media studies, interpersonal communication, persuasion, leadership skills, and public speaking. Terri has also taught journalism classes for Georgetown University’s Summer Discovery Program.
Before her graduate work, Terri worked for the Office of Survivor Affairs and Speakers Bureau at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Terri was part of Honors Humanities' first cohort of doctoral teaching fellows, has taught HHUM 205 in the past, and is assisting with the instruction of HHUM 105 in fall 2011.
