CLAS Introduces New Chairs and Directors
Jack Kugelmass (Photo
Courtesy Jewish Studies)
Dragan Kujundzic (Photo
by Jane Dominguez)
Milagros Peña (Photo by
Jane Dominguez)
Christine Sapienza (Photo
by Jane Dominguez)
Kenneth Sassaman (Photo
by Jane Dominguez)
Robert Wagman (Photo
by Jane Dominguez)
Carolyn Wiltshire (Photo
by Jane Dominguez)
Jack Kugelmass is the new director of the Center for Jewish Studies. He comes to UF this year from Arizona State University and holds the Melton Professorship at UF and also is a member of the anthropology department. Kugelmass earned a PhD in anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York City, and for a number of years directed the folklore program at the University of Wisconsin. He has published widely on Polish Jewish culture, American Jewry, urban anthropology and other areas of American and public culture.
Dragan Kujundzic is the new chair of the Germanic and Slavic studies department. He received a BA from the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at Belgrade University and a PhD in Russian and literary theory from the University of Southern California in1986. He comes to UF from the University of California at Irvine, where he served as director of Russian studies and founding director of the International Center for Writing and Translation. His current research involves analyzing the empire and vampirism, which he calls vEmpire. He also is examining Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, as well as the films of the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and Serbian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev. He plans to offer an undergraduate course called Vampire Stories, which will include a reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula and psychoanalysis, cinema, and post-colonial issues related to the topic.
Milagros Peña is the new director of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research. An associate professor of sociology, she earned her MA and PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1985 and 1990, respectively, and has taught at UF since 1999. Her research interests include women’s studies, social movements, race and ethnic relations, and the sociology of religion.
Christine Sapienza is the new chair of the communication sciences and disorders department. She received a BA and MA in speech pathology and audiology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1987 and 1989, where she also earned her PhD in speech science in 1993. She came to UF in 1993 and is the associate director of UF’s Institute for Advanced Study of the Communication Processes and a research health scientist with the Brain Rehabilitation Research Center at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Gainesville. Her research interests include the study of normal and disordered speech and voice production in both the adult and pediatric populations.
Kenneth Sassaman is the interim chair of the anthropology department. He came to UF in 1998, after receiving a PhD from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1991. His research interests center around the prehistory of hunter-gatherer societies in the American Southeast, particularly aspects of social organization, technology and monumentality. He is well recognized as an expert on the Archaic period in Southeastern archeology.
Robert Wagman is the new chair of the classics department. He earned his master’s and PhD from The Johns Hopkins University in 1984 and 1989, respectively, and his research focuses on Greek religion, poetry and paleography. Before coming to UF in 1990, he taught at the University of Virginia for one year.
Carolyn Wiltshire is the interim director of the linguistics program. She earned her PhD in 1992 from the University of Chicago and specialized in phonology, phonetics and Dravidian languages. Before coming to UF in 1995, she taught at Yale and Brown Universities. Her current teaching and research involves phonological theory, word structure, phrasal syllabification, expressive language, and Dravidian and Romance language phonology.