Professor Blum teaches courses in Italian language, literature, and culture. She is a literary scholar and translator. Her main research interests include futurism, modernism, contemporary Italian women writers, and migration studies. She is author of Rewriting the Journey in Italian Literature: Figures of Subjectivity in Progress, and The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power. Her work is also published in volumes of collected essays on futurism and Italian colonialism and in journals such as Italica, Philological Quarterly, and South Central Review. She is currently working on a research project exploring developments of the fantastic narrative mode in Italian literature.

Deborah Contrada taught Italian Language and Literature. Her research includes Medieval Lyric Poetry, Italian Women Writers, and Italian-American Studies.

Blandina Kaduma Giblin was the first instructor of Kiswahili at the University of Iowa.  She taught Kiswahili in the Department of Linguistics from 1991 to 2006, and since August 2006 has taught courses at all levels as Lecturer in Kiswahili in the Department of French and Italian.  She has been co-director of several Study Abroad programs in Tanzania.  She has served as an external examiner at several colleges and universities, including the University of Alabama and Grinnell College.

Wendelin's areas of graduate teaching expertise included: 19th-century French literature and culture, especially Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism; the novel, non-fictional prose (the travel narrative, the preface, the salon, the letter); aesthetics and interarts discourse; the relationships between literature and the plastic arts, technology and cultural expression.

Geoffrey maintains interests both in foreign language teaching and in Renaissance literature. He is working slowly on a pedagogic anthology of French poetry from the Middle Ages to Apollinaire, writing up discussions of some of these poems. His goal is to help advanced readers of French who can only read poetry at what might be termed a novice or intermediate level move to a more advanced level of that set of skills.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Michel Laronde has directed a good number of graduate students’ dissertations. He was the winner of the 2013-14 Graduate College Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award for the Humanities and Fine Arts. His book-length publications include Résurgence de l’Histoire dans la fiction. Les massacres du 17 octobre 1961 à Paris (2021), Rethinking Reading, Writing, and a Moral Code : Postcolonializing High Culture in the Schools of the Republic (Lexington Books, 2014), his own translation of Postcolonialiser la Haute Culture à l’Ecole de la République (2008), Autour du roman beur. Immigration et Identité (1993), and two edited volumes, Leïla Sebbar (2003) and L’Ecriture décentrée. La langue de l’Autre dans le roman contemporain (1996).

Steven Ungar teaches Cinema, French Studies, and Comparative Literature. His book-length publications include Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (1983), Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930 (1995), Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005, with Dudley Andrew), and Cléo de 5 à 7 (2008). He has written essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Ponge, Jean Rouch, Jean Vigo, Patrick Modiano, W.G. Sebald, René Vautier, André Bazin, and Jean-Luc Godard.