Current RCSC Executive Board

2026-2027

President, Dr. Sam Kolodezh, English, University of California, San Diego & NYU: LA, skolodezh@ucsd.edu

Sam Kolodezh is a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego, Loyola Marymount, and New York University: Los Angeles. His research focuses on adaptations of Shakespeare, intermedial theater, queer theory, and how concepts of time shape character and identity on the Early Modern English stage and how characters shape concepts of time and timing. His work has appeared in edited collections as well as journals including Multicultural Shakespeare, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Theater International, and International Journal of Education. He is the co-editor of An Anthology of Contemporary Bengali Plays by Bratya Basu and is the co-editor of an edited collection of essays on Early Modern Theater, Culture, and Camp. His current projects include projects on Ridiculous Theater, Camp in Shakespeare and adaptations of Shakespeare. He is also a practicing theater maker, working as a choreographer in Southern California.

Vice President, Dr. Corrado Confalonieri, Italian Studies, Chapman, confalonieri@chapman.edu

Corrado Confalonieri is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Chapman University, where he holds the Bernardino Telesio Endowed Professorship. He earned two doctoral degrees: a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (Harvard University, 2019) and a dottoratoin Italian Literature and History of the Italian Language (University of Padua, 2014). He taught and conducted research both in Italy and in the United States, serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Wesleyan University (2019-2020), as the Lauro de Bosis Fellow in Italian Studies at Harvard University (2020-2021), and as Assistant Professor at the University of Parma (2021-2024). He is the author of more than forty articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the Renaissance to twentieth-century literature, as well as three books: Torquato Tasso e il desiderio di unità. La “Gerusalemme liberata” e una nuova teoria dell’epica (Carocci, 2022), “Queste spaziose loggie”. Architettura e poetica nella tragedia italiana del Cinquecento (Loffredo, 2022), and Ariosto e la teoria. Intertestualità, ironia e realtà nel “Furioso” e nelle sue letture (Longo, 2025).

Secretary, Dr. Tatiana Sizonenko, Art History, Theory, Criticism, CSU San Marcos, tsizonenko@csusm.edu

Dr. Tatiana Sizonenko is a faculty member in Art History at California State University San Marcos. Her research examines the reception of the Roman–Byzantine legacy and the transmission of Italian Renaissance artistic expertise across the post-Byzantine Mediterranean. Her dissertation, Artists as Agents in Venice: The Case of Gentile Bellini, investigated the role of court artists in artistic diplomacy between Venice and Constantinople. Her current book project, Architect at the Crossroads in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1450–1550, reconstructs the career of Alevisio Lamberti da Montagnana to illuminate architectural exchange among Venice, the Crimean Khanate, and Muscovy.

Dr. Sizonenko has received several fellowships, including the 2024–2025 Villa I Tatti–Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship in Eastern Mediterranean Studies and participation in Harvard University’s From Riverbed to Seashore project, funded by the Getty Foundation. Her research has also been supported by CSUSM faculty research grants and UC San Diego’s Dean of Arts and Humanities Dissertation Research Fellowship, among others. Her work appears in The Land Between Two Seas, edited by Alina Payne and published by Brill in 2022, as well as in other scholarly publications.

In addition to her academic research, Dr. Sizonenko has an extensive curatorial practice spanning the Renaissance, Modern, and Contemporary periods. In 2017 she was named the Environmental Fellow of John Muir College at UC San Diego for her curatorial leadership on the exhibition Weather on Steroids: The Art of Climate Change Science, presented at the La Jolla Historical Society, San Diego Downtown Central Library Art Gallery, and Aquarium of the Pacific Long Beach. Most recently, she served as project curator for Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, a four-venue exhibition in San Diego funded by the Getty Foundation as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art & Science Collide in 2024-25. She edited and contributed several essays to the exhibition book Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work and has previously coordinated and prepared several additional exhibition catalogues and collections of essays.

Treasurer, Christina Kolias, English, PhD Candidate, Claremont Graduate University, christina.kolias@cgu.edu

Christina Kolias is a second-generation Greek American scholar and English PhD Candidate at Claremont Graduate University. She holds both a BA (2018) and an MA (2020) in English from CSU Fullerton, as well as a Women’s and Gender Studies Certificate, a Certificate in College Teaching, and a Student Services Professionalism Certificate from Claremont Graduate University. Christina teaches ENGL 1A: Intro to Composition and ENGL 1B: Advanced Composition and Critical Thinking as an English Adjunct Instructor at Chaffey College. She also works at Claremont Graduate University as an Administration and Communications Graduate Assistant in the Dean of Students Office.

She completed her qualifying exams in Early Modern Studies, with two minor fields in Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) pre-1800 and Women in Studies of Religion. Broadly, her academic work focuses on discourses of power and virginity that position whiteness as a core English value in early modern British literature and culture. She is currently writing her dissertation, “Chastity as Comedy: Exploring Early Modern Representations of Virtue in Post Reformation Comedies,” which seeks to expose why and how the studies of chastity and post-Reformation comedy strategically overlap on the early modern stage, where female chastity can be read as a site of comedic negotiation.

Grad Student Conference Coordinator, Rachel Du Mont-Greenlee, Cultural Studies, PhD Student, Claremont Graduate University, rachel.du-mont-greenlee@cgu.edu

Rachel Du Mont-Greenlee is a Cultural Studies PhD student at Claremont Graduate University and a lecturer of Cultural Memory at Chapman University. She holds a BS in City and Regional Planning (Cal Poly SLO) and an MA in Social Anthropology (Goldsmiths, University of London). Her interdisciplinary research explores how cities function as vessels for memory, identity, and transformation. She focuses on topics including memory studies, architecture, gentrification, preservation, utopianism, museum studies, and material culture. Rachel is interested in how spatial politics and awareness shape our sense of history and belonging. As an academic, writer, and avid reader, her work blends epistemological inquiry with creative storytelling to examine cultural legacies in built and imagined spaces

Ex-Officio Members of the
RCSC Executive Committee

(listed by the year their term ended)

Amy Buono, Art History, Chapman University, 2025

Brittany Asaro, Languages, Cultures, and Literatures, Italian Studies Program, University of San Diego, 2024

Marlin E. Blaine, English, California State University, Fullerton, 2023

Sophia Quach McCabe, Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2022

Barbara Mello, English, California State University, Long Beach, 2021

Heather Graham, Art History, California State University, Long Beach, 2020

Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, Art History, Pepperdine University, 2019

Kent Lehnhof, English, Chapman University, 2018

Wendy Furman-Adams, English, Whittier College, 2017

Bryan Givens, History, Pepperdine University, 2016

Andrew Griffin, English, UCSB, 2015

Martine Van Elk, English, CSU-Long Beach, 2014

Andy Fleck, English, 2013 (now at UT-El Paso)