email:

Go ahead and send me an email. I am generally available, and usually respond in a day or so. Sometimes I take longer, however, so don’t email me about a paper or exam the night before or the morning of, asking for vital information that will change what you will write or study. Generally speaking, if I don't get back to you after 3 or 4 days, send me another email; I forget, emails get dropped into the Junk mail folder, other stuff goes wrong. I won't be annoyed.

office hours:

I’m in my office (2122 FLB, on the second floor of FLB, on the north side of the building) every Wednesday after class, from 2-3. Come prepared with specific questions or ideas—it’s  generally unproductive  when a student arrives and says “I have no ideas don’t know what I want to write about.” It’s okay to come from time to time to just chat, but don’t ‘occupy’ my office hours—other students need to talk, too, and a surprising number of people don’t knock or let me know they’re waiting. If you can't come to my regularly scheduled office hours, just email me so we can come up with an appointment time, or better still, see if I'm available right after class.

Robert Rushing is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. He works on modern literature and popular culture (especially film and television) in English, Italian and French. He has published on topics from 19th-century Italian lyric poetry and modern Italian literature, to spaghetti Westerns and the television series Dr. Who. His first book, Resisting Arrest is about popular culture and detective fiction; his most recent book, Descended from Hercules (Indiana University Press), is about action films and television that focuses on the muscled male body, from silent classics like Cabiria (1914) to contemporary fare like 300, or Spartacus: Blood and Sand; it won the 2017 Best Film/Media book from the American Association for Italian Studies. He has also co-edited academic books on the television series Mad Men and Orphan Black.

He/him

Professor Rushing

Meredith is an PhD student in Comp Lit, working  — in English, Latin, ancient Greek and Italian — on the classical reception in the Romantic period; nature and architecture; expressions of grief in poetry and gender and sexuality.

Meredith Francisco

Sasha is a second-year graduate student in the Program in Comparative & World Literature. She graduated from the University of South Dakota in 2019 with a BA in English & French and minors in Spanish & music. Her work centers around 20th century French, Russian, Spanish, and English literatures with a focus on surrealism, the avant-grade, and women’s writing. In her limited free time, she enjoys reading (duh), embroidering, and rewatching episodes of The X-Files.

Sasha McDowell

Modje (pronounced: mōj) is a PhD student in the Comparative + World Literature department where she studies the influence of pre-modern Arabic and Persian poetry, philosophy, and intellectual history on medieval, early modern, and modern European and English thought. She’s also interested in the art and archaeology of the Near and Middle East, translation, and literary + popular representations of female rage.

Modje Taavon