Ilka Kressner

Assistant Professor of Hispanic and Italian Studies

Degree/Institution: PhD University of Virginia
Office: HU 239
Phone: (518) 442-4142
Fax: (518) 442-4111
Email: ikressner@albany.edu

Academic Focus

Spanish American literature (20th and beginning 21th century), intermediality, performance and comparative studies of theater and film, conceptions of space in art

Bio

Ilka Kressner received her PhD from the University of Virginia (2006) and MA in Comparative Literature (Spanish, French, Musicology, 2002) from the University in Tübingen, Germany. She joined the department in the fall of 2006 as a Visiting Assistant Professor, and in the fall of 2009 as an Assistant Professor.

Focusing on 20th century to contemporary Spanish American literature and film, her research interests include intermediality (relations between text, image, and sound), conceptions of space in the text (encompassing the related topics of vertigo, free fall, and velocity). Her scholarship and teaching examine Spanish American literatures from a variety of cultural and national contexts, often from a comparative perspective.

Selected Publications

She has articles published or accepted for publication in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (“Space as a Metafictional Marker: Borges’ “Tema del traidor y del héroe” and Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno ”), Confluencia (“Hibridaciones corpóreas: los “ejemplares raros” de Botánica del caos de Ana María Shua”), Hispanic Review (“Poemas del caer – el motivo del vértigo en las obras de Edgardo Dobry, Roxana Crisólogo y Ylonca Nacidit-Perdomo”), Hispanófila (“Emisiones poderosas – El impacto de la radio en Pantaleón y las visitadoras y La guaracha del Macho Camacho ” ), and Revista Chilena de Literatura (“Imprólogo’ de Octavio Paz: Apuntes poético-poetológicos sobre la poesía de Vasko Popa”). She has written an article on contemporary Cuban photography for Culturas y letras cubanas en el siglo XXI (Ed. Araceli Tinajero, forthcoming). She has also contributed to Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia (Ed. María Claudia André and Eva Paulina Bueno, Routledge, 2008) and World Literature in Spanish: An Encyclopedia. (Ed. Maureen Ihrie and Salvador Oropesa; forthcoming).

Teaching

Recent classes taught:
Literatures and Cultures of the Borderlands (Aspn 529)
Spanish American Poetry and Theater (Aspn 326)
Literature and Human Rights (Aspn 446)
Literatures of the Hispanic Caribbean (Aspn 414)