On Leave, AY 2025-2026
Beth Coggeshall (Ph.D., Stanford University) specializes in the literature and culture of medieval Italy, with a particular focus on Dante. Her research centers on the intersections of literature, ethics, and cultural identity; medievalism and popular culture; and the transmedia reception of Dante’s works across contemporary global cultures.
A. Dana Weber is an associate professor of German.
Christian Weber is an associate professor of German. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Indiana at Bloomington. His research aims for a comprehensive phenomenological and critical investigation of the human imagination in its various manifestations, ranging from ancient mythologies and Judeo-Christian theology to the emergence of national ideologies and global world-views. C. Weber is also the German program’s graduate and graduate study-abroad adviser.
Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. Her research centers on language and identity, the politics of language, minority languages and translation studies. She explores in particular the performative function of language.
Birgit Maier-Katkin holds a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. Her research centers on 20th and 21st-century German literature and culture with a special focus in exile, transnationalism, memory and border studies as well as human rights. She teaches German language, culture and literature courses, and advises students who minor and major in German at FSU. Maier-Katkin has been recognized with a FSU Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Virginia Osborn (M.A. in French with specialization in SLA; Ph.D. in French, Florida State University) is teaching faculty III and director of the French Basic Language Program. She supervises and works closely with the French teaching assistants. She specializes in 20th century French literature, with a focus on women writers of WWII and the Holocaust.
Jeannine Murray-Román (Ph.D. comparative literature, UCLA) is an assistant professor of French and Spanish specializing in comparative Caribbean literatures and cultures. Her work is grounded in postcolonial, transnational, and performance studies and her research interest in experimental writing includes digital humanities as well as the interface of oral and performance practices and writing in the regions of the archipelagos in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Professor Martin Munro (Ph.D., University of Aberdeen) is an Eminent Scholar and Winthrop-King Professor of French and Francophone Studies. A specialist in Francophone Caribbean literature and culture, he previously worked in Scotland, Ireland and Trinidad. He is director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University.
Reinier Leushuis (M.A. in French, M.A. in Italian, Utrecht University 1993; Ph.D. in Romance languages - French and Italian, Princeton University 2000) specializes in French and Italian Renaissance literature, with a particular focus on early modern dialogue, the literary treatment of love and marriage, Franco-Italian literary connections, literature and spirituality, and the works of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus. He is also the book review editor of the journal "Erasmus Studies" (Brill).
Professor of French, Aimée Boutin received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and her B.A. from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She specializes in 19th-century French poetry, women writers, cultural history, gender studies, art history, soundscapes and the city in literature. Professor Boutin has a long-standing interest in voice and sonic representations. Her first book examined how the mother’s voice was imagined differently by male and female French Romantic poets.
