Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Mattia investigates the relationship between Italian modernist poetry, specifically that of Umberto Saba (1883–1957) and Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), and opera.

“The main goal of my research is to examine this influence and shed new light on the study of Italian poetry... [and] offer a new perspective on the study of the western poetic canon of the 20th century and the role of Italian culture in the field of the humanities.”

He reports, “I have always been interested in Italian modernist poetry. After years of close reading and study, I detected melodramatic tropes and themes that have a direct operatic heritage, but this link has not yet been fully explored in the extensive scholarship on Saba and Montale. I see my dissertation as an opportunity to bring together two important traditions of Italian culture—opera and poetry—allowing each to shed light on the other, and to confirm the importance of Italian culture in the humanities.”

Mattia was born and raised in Pesaro, Italy, which he describes as “a lovely city on the Adriatic Sea, otherwise famous for being the birthplace of the composer Gioachino Rossini.” He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Bologna, where his undergraduate research focused on the relationship between Russian and Italian poetry of the early 20th century. At Yale, he has been a member of the organizing committee for the annual Italian Film Festival, which brings the best of the most recent Italian films to campus. He has also presented papers at academic conferences around the U.S.

Eric Bianchi is writing “Prodigious Sounds: Music and Learning in the World of Athanasius Kircher,” a 17th-century German Jesuit priest who lived in Rome and “wrote massive tomes on music and acoustics, magnetism, secret codes, volcanoes, China, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the Tower of Babel, among other things. Most of what he wrote was wrong—spectacularly wrong,” says Eric.

His dissertation, advised by Ellen Rosand, explores Kircher’s fascination with “celestial music, improbable echoes, contraptions for making music automatically—in short, all manner of rare and prodigious sounds.” He argues that while “these matters are of little concern to modern music scholarship, they were of vital importance in Kircher’s day. In fact, they are a more accurate guide to Baroque musical taste and connoisseurship, since they reflect the social and intellectual preoccupations of the age.”

The origin of his project was “an image from one of Kircher’s music treatises [that] grabbed my attention: a singing sloth from South America, ringed about with scholarly Latin prose. Once had I stopped laughing, it got me thinking about how the study of music has changed since Kircher’s day, when ‘music’ didn’t even exist as a separate academic discipline. I use Kircher to assess the state of musical knowledge in Baroque Italy: not only what people ‘knew’ in 1650, but why they studied and heard music so differently than we do today.” As part of his research, Eric spent a year in Italy, following Father Kircher’s path through the streets and archives of Rome.

A native of Hagaman, New York, Eric earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Villanova University before coming to Yale.

Haydon Cherry comes from a small town in New Zealand. He enrolled at the National University of Singapore intending to study physics and math, but the experience of living in Southeast Asia prompted him to learn more about the history of the region. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies and a master’s degree in history, and came to Yale in 2004. He us currently working on a dissertation titled “Down and Out in Saigon: The Social History of the Urban Poor, 1858–1939,” advised by Benedict Kiernan.

“Over the past two years, my research has taken me to France and Vietnam to gather documents for my dissertation on the social history of the urban poor in colonial Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). The first part of my study focuses on the economic and demographic changes in colonial Vietnam that produced the urban poor. The second part charts the careers of several exemplary individuals, a prostitute, an orphan, a rickshaw puller, a poor Frenchman, who lived through, and contributed to, those changes.”

Haydon, who was married to Megan Lindsay (History) on October 10, says that when he tears himself away from his work, he enjoys “reading detective novels, listening to music before Brahms, and following one-day international cricket.”

David Currell’s dissertation, “Epic Satire from Homer to Dryden,” supervised by David Quint, explores “the idea that the heroic plots, characters, and codes of behavior formalized in the genre of epic poetry include space for antiheroic types and type-scenes that later authors revived, imitated, or developed to satirical ends.” Concentrating on English poets and dramatists of the late 16th and 17th centuries, he traces “how mock-heroic and burlesque elements inhabit high forms, and how an increasing degree of dignity and vivacity was accorded characters who voiced skeptical critiques of the militarism that apparently sustained these genres.” The study builds on his “longstanding interests in satire, ancient and modern, mixed generic forms in general, and writing that mingles or exists on the border of serious and comic.”

A native of Melbourne, Australia, David attended the University of Melbourne, where he studied both literature and mathematics. He explains the origins of his scholarly interests this way: “In learning to read Greek and Latin, I became increasingly absorbed in the critical notes of textual variations printed in modern editions, whether due to their surface resemblance to math formulas or to my unexceptional talents as a translator. I began studying the transmission of these texts through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including senior year work on the history of Western scripts and assisting on the collation of manuscripts and printed texts for a digital edition of Terence.”

Dan Gustafson reports that his academic interests lie primarily in the field of 17th- and 18th-century British literature, theater, and political history. His dissertation, titled “Stuart Restorations: History, Memory, Performance,” explores “the influences of the English Restoration period (1660–1688) and the political and social excesses of its Stuart kings on the literature and culture of the 18th century.” His project “is about memory, cultural transmission, and 18th-century British literature. It explores the relationship of some 18th-century authors to the recent past, specifically the period of the Stuart Restoration to the throne. Using contemporary theories of performance and cultural memory, I’m interested in rethinking how the troubled past of the Stuarts and the ways in which they are re-imagined fit into the trajectory of the ‘long’ 18th century and the narratives of literary, political, and cultural change that often characterize it. I’m hoping that bringing together the two fields of cultural memory studies and 18th-century literature will allow them mutually to illuminate each other in new ways.” His advisors are Joseph Roach and Elliott Visconsi.

David Huyssen is working on “Terrible Town: Intersections of Wealth and Poverty in Progressive Era New York,” with David Blight as his advisor.

“My dissertation studies interactions between rich and poor New Yorkers from 1890 to 1920, re-examining the notion that Progressive-era reforms greatly altered or improved domestic class relations in the United States,” he explains. “My research challenges that notion, demonstrating instead that crucial aspects of class relations received reinforcement or deteriorated despite, or in many cases because of, quintessentially ‘Progressive’ reform efforts. Exploring class intersections against the backdrop of growing u.s. empire, expanding boundaries of state and private social welfare, and increasingly violent conflicts at home and abroad, will, I hope, illuminate the change and continuity of Progressive-era class relations.”

David says he has been interested in U.S., class relations “for as long as I can remember, which I chalk up (at least partially) to experiencing a kind of traumatic cognitive dissonance at the age of seven when my family moved from a quiet, leafy Milwaukee neighborhood to New York. I found myself confronted simultaneously with private-school classmates whose wealth exceeded anything I had ever encountered, and the ubiquitous signs of the crack epidemic, poverty, and homelessness in the city, which were literally driven home to me by my mother’s reporting on them for New York Newsday and later The New York Times. When I began to study Progressive-era history for the first time in high school, I noticed resonances between historical and contemporary inequality on the one hand, and various themes in public discussions around that inequality on the other: themes of personal responsibility for poverty on the part of the poor, public accolades for rich philanthropists, and a broad faith in capitalism’s ability to sort out the problems, among others.”

David graduated from Harvard in 2002, after studying at L’Institut d’Études Politiques, Université de Paris vii, and Columbia University in Paris. At Yale, he is active in GESO and “proud of the contributions GESO made in advancing the discussion between 2005 and 2007 around work-life issues for graduate-student parents, not least because I was able to take advantage of Yale’s excellent parental relief policy, introduced in 2007, when my son, Benjamin, was born in August 2008!”

Sebastian Lecourt’s dissertation, “Anthropologies of the Secular: Religion and the Social in the Victorian Imagination,” is advised by Linda Peterson and Katie Trumpener. In it, he focuses on Victorian anthropological writing about religion, “writing that attempts to define religion, not as a matter of belief or opinion, but as an integral and non-voluntary aspect of cultural life,” like race or ethnicity. “What ultimately interests me is how during the 19th century it becomes possible, or desirable, to talk about religion, race, and ethnicity as equivalent categories. My point of reference here is certain unresolved questions within contemporary pluralist theory, which sometimes finds it useful to equate religion with these things, but at other times takes great care to separate them as problems. How we want to define ‘religion’ relative to other kinds of affiliation is an ongoing dilemma for domestic and global politics, and it was very much the Victorians who began to theorize it.”

Born and raised in Angwin, California, Sebastian lived in Dover, New Hampshire, as a teenager, before attending Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Richard Suchenski’s research focuses on the development of cinematic modernism, internationally, and on the relationship between film and the other arts. His dissertation is titled “Utopian Romanticism and the Poetics of Scale: Modernist Explorations of the Cinematic Long Form,” and his advisor is Dudley Andrew.

The project examines “long-form film projects whose temporal scale pushes the limits of what a film experience is or can be. I have an introductory chapter on the silent era and then there are chapters on Gregory Markopoulos’ 80-hour Eniaios and the American avant-garde... more ‘theatrical’ modes of long-form filmmaking from the 1970s... and Jean-luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema, with Bela Tarr’s 1994 Satantango featuring prominently in the conclusion. The projects discussed here are singular both in their formal ambition and their modes of presentation, utilizing the unique characteristics of the film screening situation and their unusual duration to create a particularly intense form of spectatorial engagement that is wedded to or related to a larger utopian program... Situated, on the one hand, between both the Hollywood epic and television, and, on the other, between 19th (the panorama, opera) and 21st (video installations) century modes of large-scale artistic presentation, this form of cinema acts as a nexus through which currents from the other arts can interpenetrate.” He is also working on a formal history of Japanese experimental film.

Richard was born in St. Louis and attended Princeton University, where he majored in East Asian Studies. When not pursuing his research, he curates film programs of various kinds both at Yale and in other cities. His wife, Christina Corrigan, works at Yale as the Asian Support Specialist for the Visual Resources Collection. Beginning fall 2010, he will be assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College.