Skip to main content

World Cultures & Literatures

World Cultures & Literatures

Contact Us

World Cultures & Literatures
University of Houston
613 Agnes Arnold Hall
Houston, TX 77204-3006
Phone: 713.743.8350
Fax: 713.743.2693

Faculty

Mohan Ambikaipaker, Associate Professor & WCL Associate Director

Ph.D. University of Texas - Austin. Current areas of interest in Anthropology: anthropology of race and modernity, global antiblackness, African and South Asian diasporas, activist anthropology, auto-ethnography, critical university studies.

Alexander Adkins, Lecturer

Ph.D. in English from Rice University. Dr. Adkins’ research focuses on Postcolonial Literature and Satire.

Alessandro Carrera, Professor, WCL Graduate Director

“Dottore in filosofia,” Università degli Studi, Milan, Italy. Ph.D. by Publications in Music, Humanities, and Media, University of Huddersfield, U.K. Director of Italian Studies, Graduate Director of World Cultures and Literatures. Fields of interest: Italian literature and Cinema, Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Music and Philosophy, Cinema and Philosophy.

Daniel Centeno, Visiting Scholar

Daniel Centeno Maldonado received his PhD in Journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. He has been a professor at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Venezuela), Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) and The University of Texas at El Paso. Currently he teaches film and literature courses at the University of Houston.

Jinaeng Choi, Assistant Professor

Jinaeng Choi is an assistant professor in the Modern and Classical Languages Department at the University of Houston and teaches courses on Korean literature and culture. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California – Los Angeles’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. She also holds an M.A. from the State University of New York-Stonybrook’s Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, and another M.A. from Korea University’s Department of Spanish Language and Literature.

Dr. Choi is currently working on a book project that involves a detailed analysis of the literature created by Korean Latin American literary communities in the late 19th and 20th century, focusing on the intricate interplay between nation-building narratives, migration histories, and the plurality of voice. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she situates her study of literature within the broader intellectual and aesthetic traditions and debates that are associated with the notion of borders.

Marie-Theresa Hernández, Professor, WCL Undergraduate Director

Ph.D. Rice University (2001). Director of Jewish Studies, Theories of globalization, historiography, religious studies, ethnography, narrative, literary criticism, visual studies, Latin American Studies, Latino Studies, Gender Studies

Duy Lap Nguyen, Assistant Professor

Ph.D. University of California, Irvine (2013). Critical and postcolonial theory, visual studies, Vietnamese studies, world cinema and literature.

Bhavya Tiwari, Associate Professor

Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin (2014). Research interests: comparative and world literature, translation studies, global modernisms, and postcolonial theory in South Asian, Anglo American, and Latin American literary traditions.

Robert Zaretsky

Robert Zaretsky has a joint appointment between the Honors College and the department of modern and classical languages (MCL) in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. He teaches a variety of Honors and MCL courses, ranging from the histories of existentialism and terrorism to the histories of Paris and Berlin.

Marc Zimmerman, Professor Emeritus

Other faculty from the department of modern and classical languages also frequently teach WCL courses and participate in the program.