Sydney Mitsunaga-Whitten specializes in modern Irish literature, with a particular focus on the works of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. She also teaches courses in Greek and Latin language and literature. Her interests have most fundamentally to do with what one might call the virulence of genre: genre not conceived as an aesthetic sedative, as an instrument for disengaged contemplation, but as a thing of violence at the personal and communal level - a rupture of the evened-out fabric of social life. She is convinced of the radically ethical import of literature (that it in fact offers an invitation for us to become braver, kinder, and more sensitive human beings) and hopes to convey this to her students through an application of neo-phenomenological reading methods. Moments of delicacy and tenderness found in epic poetry, modernist painting, grunge music, and good pastries are a few of her favorite things. She is currently at work finishing her Ph.D from Yale.