Professor Schiesari is working on the relation between humanism and the post human by rethinking the human and non-human as they are constructed in the Italian Renaissance. Her recent publications include Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto, 2010) and Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies and Desire in Four Modern Writers (UC, forthcoming).

Juliana Schiesari is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Chair of Comparative Literature at UC Davis.

Professor Butler has published Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film (Camden House, 2010) and The Bellum Grammaticale and the Rise of European Literature (Ashgate, 2010). His translation of Der Nister’s Regrowth (Vidervuks) is forthcoming (Northwestern, 2011). The current book, Cruelty and Mystification, explores violence and ruse in modernist fiction.

Erik Butler is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Emory University.

*co-sponsored by Jewish Studies

Doctor Spira works at the intersections of feminist, comparative ethnic and hemispheric American studies, and is completing Movements of Feeling: Neoliberalism, Affect and (Post) Revolutionary Memory in the Americas. The talk provides a reading of (the now converted) Pisagua prison in northern Chile, which intermittently served as a concentration camp for leftists and “sexual dissidents” throughout the 20th century.

Tamara Spira is the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Cultural Studies at UC Davis.

Professor Franko, a UC Humanities Network Scholar, is editor of Dance Research Journal, founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series, and Director of the Center for Visual and Performance Studies at UCSC. He is finishing a book on Martha Graham in the 1940s (Oxford) supported by an NEH research fellowship and a UC President’s Research Fellowship.

Mark Franko is Professor of Dance and Performance Studies in Theater Arts at UCSC.

*sponsored by the IHR

Doctor Metcalf is the Postdoctoral Fellow in an NSF-funded program training graduate students in interdisciplinary inquiry on the co-constitution of ethics and scientific knowledge. His research concerns the construction of ethical inquiry. He proposes new applied ethics methodologies that account for the boundaries drawn within techno-scientific apparatuses, and asks how science and technology might become more responsive to the conditions and consequences of those boundaries.

Professor Terada is the author of Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (Northeastern, 1992); Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject”(Harvard, 2001); Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction (Harvard, 2009); and the in-progress Revolution-Restoration. The paper considers associations between “free speech” and interiority, and their implications in Marx, Heine, and recent student protest.

Rei Terada is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director, Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine.

*co-sponsored by the Affect Working Group

Professor Lombardi-Diop has published on gender and Italian colonial literature, African-Italian autobiographies, and the African diaspora in Italy. Her in-progress book is on the memory of Italian colonialism in Italy’s postwar cultural history. The talk explores Italy as a post-racial society and focuses on when the idea of whiteness as a discursive formation infiltrates Italian popular and mass culture.

Cristina Lombardi-Diop is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at The American University of Rome and Visiting Professor of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley.

Professor Sahota will join the Literature department as an Assistant Professor in 2011. He is finishing Late Colonial Sublime (UC, 2012). His research addresses conflicts of dogmatic and speculative belief cultures in contemporary global society with a special focus on the postcolonial. He has begun a long-term project on the question of reason in the Sikh tradition from the 16th through the 20th century. The first installment of this project will appear as “Guru Nanak and Rational Civil Theology” in Sikh Formations (2011).