Faculty Board

Jon Snyder (Director of the Consortium for Literature, Theory, and Culture)

Ph.D., Yale University; M. Phil., Yale University

Professor, French and Italian Department

Areas of interest include Italian literature and comparative European literature, of the early modern and modern periods.

Rita Raley

Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara

Associate Professor, English Department

Areas of interest include new media (art, literature, theory) and 20-21C literature in an “international” or “global” context.

Sara Lindheim

Ph.D., Brown University

Associate Professor, Classics Department

Areas of interest include Latin poetry, Sappho, critical and feminist theory.

Sven Spieker

Ph.D., Oxford University

Associate Professor, Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies

Areas of interest include East-Central European literatures, contemporary art (especially in the East-Central-European context), the theory and practice of the historical avant-gardes in East-Central Europe and the US, and the interplay of media, art, and critical theory.

Janet Walker

Ph.D., UCLA Film and TV Study

Professor,  Film and Media Studies

Janet Walker is Professor of Film Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature Programs. She is the recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and of a 2001 Distinguished Teaching Award from UCSB. Author or editor of several books and numerous published essays, her areas of specialization include documentary film; feminism and film theory; trauma and memory; and the social ecology of media.

Richard Wittman

Ph.D., Columbia University

Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture

Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of architecture and town planning, especially of the modern and early modern periods, with secondary research emphases in theory and the historiography of architecture. His primary interest lies in the emergence of modern conceptions and experiences of space, whether architectural, political, personal, scientific, or virtual. His talks and publications explore these themes mainly in connection to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century France, and, more recently, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Rome. He welcomes the opportunity to work with graduate students interested in theoretically informed, culturally oriented approaches to virtually any aspect of architectural history.