Faculty & Staff

Ms. Markwell knows the challenges and opportunities available to grad students because she was one too! Ansley graduated from Georgetown University in May 2023 with a Master of Arts in Global, International, and Comparative History. Now, she is working directly alongside Professor Ortiz to enhance our program’s blooming culture. She brings experience in Higher Education with a strong background in Student Affairs and Residence Life as well as experience in market research and political polling. You can find her in Car Barn

Cameron is a proud double Hoya hailing from Orange County, California. She earned a B.A from the Georgetown College of Arts and Sciences and is currently pursuing her M.A. in Engaged & Public Humanities. She is thrilled to serve as the Media and Program Support Specialist this year and connect with past, present, and future students about the program.

Dr. Ananya Chakravarti is associate professor of history. Her first book, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India (Oxford University Press, 2018) received an honorable mention for the Association of Asian Studies’ Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize, awarded to the best first book on South Asia. She is currently working on her second monograph, The Konkan: Identity, Mobility and History on an Indian Ocean Coast, supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a textbook, forthcoming from Routledge, South Asia Beyond Borders, on modern South Asian history. Her work in publicly engaged humanities has included projects in Goa, India, Cairo, Egypt and Washington, DC. She is particularly interested in the ethics and politics of archiving and historical erasure.

Dr. Bernie Cook is Associate Dean in Georgetown College and Founding Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is the author of Flood of Images: Media, Memory and Hurricane Katrina (University of Texas Press, 2015) and editor of Thelma & Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film (University of Texas Press, 2007). A native of New Orleans, Cook wrote Flood of Images as an intervention in the ongoing process of remembering and understanding Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, a contested process with implications for racial and ecological justice. Since 2015, both on campus and in Louisiana, Cook has helped to connect members of the GU272+ Descendant Community with students and colleagues to develop shared projects focused on reparative justice. He is currently in production on a documentary series entitled Since Last We Met, which shares stories of the living descendants of the 272 enslaved people sold by the Jesuits of Maryland in 1838 and explores the possibilities for reconciliation and justice from the descendants’ perspectives. I Am The Bridge (2023) is the first film in this series. He is a member of the core faculties of the Film and Media Studies Program and the American Studies Program, and he has created and taught a range of courses at Georgetown focused on documentary media, film studies, social justice, and the American past. He was Founding Chair of the University Core Requirement in Humanities & Culture, and he is a member of the Board of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative. He has been active in Digital Humanities and Public Humanities at Georgetown and has participated in national-level conversations about the future of the Humanities, including presenting at the National Humanities Conference. Cook earned a PhD in Cinema Studies from UCLA, a graduate certificate in Documentary Filmmaking from George Washington University, and a BA and an MA in English Literature from Georgetown University.

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2019, Corrigan was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle.

Corrigan served as a juror for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures was published by Little, Brown in September 2014.

Corrigan’s literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading! was published in 2005. Corrigan is also a reviewer and columnist for The Washington Post‘s Book World. In addition to serving on the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, she has chaired the Mystery and Suspense judges’ panel of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Emily C. Francomano is Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is also a Senior Scholar for the Digital Humanities and an active faculty member in the Global Comparative Literature, Global Medieval Studies, and Liberal Studies Programs. She joined the faculty at Georgetown University in 2001 after graduate work at Hunter College and Columbia University and a year as a Fulbright Fellow in Spain. Professor Francomano’s research revolves around the intersections of medieval and Early Modern literature, translation, gender studies, manuscript culture, and book history. Her historical and theoretical research on translation parallels her work as a translator. Recent publications include “Reinventing Medieval Iberian Studies” in the Revista Hispánica Moderna (2021) and The Prison of Love: Romance, Translation, and the Book in the Sixteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Her current projects include the NEH sponsored translation and edition of the thirteenth-century Spanish Libro de Apolonio, which she is preparing with Clara Pascual-Argente (Rhodes College), a book on Neo-Medievalism in contemporary Spanish media, and continuing collaborative work on digital-medieval manuscript culture with Heather Bamford (The George Washington University).

Derek Goldman is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University and co-Founding Director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, based in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, which he co-founded with Ambassador Cynthia Schneider in 2012 with a mission “to harness the power of performance to humanize global politics.” In 2015 he was honored to receive the prestigious President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar–Teachers. He is an award-winning stage director, playwright, producer, adapter, developer of new work, teacher, and published scholar, whose artistic work has been seen around the country, Off-Broadway and at numerous major regional theaters, as well as internationally. From 2007–2016, he served as Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University.

Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, PhD, is a historian of medicine, medical humanities scholar, physician, and Faculty Director of the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative. A first-generation immigrant born in Bombay, India, she also grew up in the United Kingdom before settling in the States. Her research focuses on diagnosis and clinical reasoning. She is writing a cultural and intellectual history of diagnosis and detective practices—The Doctor and the Detective: A Cultural History of Diagnosis (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins University Press).

More broadly, she is engaged with the relationship between medicine and the humanities writ large. Areas of interest include health equity and the history of health disparities, intellectual history of medicine, 19th century and early 20th century literature and medicine, and cultural responses to illness. This interdisciplinary work seeks to recenter the experiences of marginalized communities, broaden the narrative canon, and promote health equity.

Dr. Krishnan earned her MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and her DPhil (PhD.) in English Literature from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She completed her Internal Medicine residency at Duke, where she was a Faculty Affiliate at the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in General Internal Medicine and History of Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians, and practices hospital medicine. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, Literature and Medicine, Modern Language Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Poetry, and has won awards from the Academy of Health Communication and National Endowment for Humanities.

Sherry Linkon is Director of Writing Curriculum Initiatives and Professor of English and American Studies. She has published on working-class studies, deindustrialization, and pedagogy, including her most recent book, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (Michigan 2018). For 17 years, as co-director of the groundbreaking Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, she led community workshops and digital humanities projects on local history and culture; organized conferences that brought academics from multiple disciplines together with industrial and service workers, artists, and activists; collaborated with community groups on projects about education, immigration, and race; and led institutes for secondary teachers and college faculty on how to engage students in hands-on research about their local communities. She also hosted a weekly public affairs radio program, served on the board of a community agriculture group, appeared in over a dozen documentaries, and created and still edits the Working-Class Perspectives blog, which offers commentary on class, labor, education, and media for followers around the world.

Mireya Loza is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the American Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her areas of research include Latinx History, Labor History and Food Studies. Her book, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom (UNC Press), examines America’s largest guest worker program. Her first book won the 2017 Theodore Saloutos Book Prize awarded by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian’s Latino Center. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown, she taught in the Department of Food Studies at New York University and held the position of Latinx Civil Rights Curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). She continues to curate at the NMAH and some of the public history projects and exhibitions she has contributed to include the Bracero History Archive, Girlhood (It’s Complicated), Latinas Talk Latinas, and Escúchame: The History of Spanish Language Broadcasting.

Nicoletta Pireddu is Inaugural Director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, Director of the Global and Comparative Literature Program, and Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Georgetown University. She served as Interim Chair of the Italian Department (2018-1019), as Director of Graduate Studies in Italian (2010-1013), and as Director of the FLL Hager Scholars Program Colloquium (2016-1017).

She is also a core member of the Medical Humanities Initiative and an affiliated faculty member of the Earth Commons.

Beyond Georgetown, Prof. Pireddu is a Board Member of the American Comparative Literature Association and Chair of the Program Committee. She has served in several executive committees of professional associations in the humanities and is an editorial member of various scholarly journals—among them, CompLit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society (The official journal of the European Comparative Literature Society) and Annali d’italianistica.

Her research and publications engage with European literary and cultural relations, interdisciplinary approaches to literature, translation theories, national and transnational identities, borders and migration. Her most recent volumes include Migrating Minds. Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (2022), Reframing Literary, Critical, and Cultural Theories (2018), and the first annotated English edition of Scipio Sighele’s works–The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society (2018).

Prof. Pireddu is the recipient of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Award, the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Distinguished Service Award from Georgetown University, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Howard Foundation.

Lisa Strong is the Director of Art and Museum Studies MA Program and Professor of the Practice at the Department of Art and Art History. Her research interests include antebellum American landscape and genre and the history of museums. She recently completed an essay on painter Karl Bodmer for an exhibition at the Joslyn Museum of Art, Faces from the Interior: The North American Portraits of Karl Bodmer. Her current project is a history of America’s first museums. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown University, Lisa Strong was Manager of Curatorial Affairs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Assistant Professor at James Madison University.

Kathryn Temple, former chair and member of the English Department at Georgetown University, was the Georgetown principal investigator on the Mellon-funded grant “Connected Academics: Preparing Doctoral Students of Language and Literature for a Variety of Careers.” She publishes on subjects related to Law & the Humanities and the History of Emotion. Her most current book project, Loving Justice: Blackstone’s Commentaries, Legal Emotions, and Anglo–American Conceptions of Justice, was issued by NYU Press in Spring 2019.