Professor Bivens examines socialist literature in Germany, 1918 to 1989, through a discussion of narrative, ideology, and the built environment. Grounding the structures of feeling and narrative topoi central to East German literature in the proletarian experience of classical modernity, he moves from the factories and tenements of the Weimar Republic to the socialist cities and peoples’ enterprises of the GDR and back to the contested spaces of the “globalizing” Berlin Republic.

Hunter Bivens is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Professor Rutherford’s work focuses on West Papua. Raiding the Land of the Foreigners (Princeton, 2003) focused on alterity and the limits of the nation in Biak. She is now finishing a book on audience and sovereignty in West Papua, working on a book on technology and colonial experience in the Dutch New Guinea highlands, and beginning projects on secular belief and kinship and modernity in the U.S.

Danilyn Rutherford is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz.

Photo by Tim Laman.

Professor Hong’s Legal Fictions: Afro-Asian Human Rights Cultural Production and the Pax Americana in the Pacific Rim examines the historic relation of post-1945 human rights literature to the Pax Americana, the U.S. military “peace” that restructured the Asia Pacific following World War II. Her second project is provisionally titled Divided Memories: Museums, Monuments, and Memoirs in the Cold War Asia Pacific.

Christine Hong is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Author of Fragmentos de Frankfurt (Siglo XXI, 2009), Materialismus und Messianismus (Aisthesis, Bielefeld, 2008) and Marxismo crítico en México: (FCE, 2007), Stefan Gandler works on the possibility of overcoming the Eurocentric limitations of the Frankfurt School, confronting its Critical Theory of Society with contemporary socio-theoretical debate in Latin America.

Stefan Gandle, Faculty in Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro; Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Unlike others who became part of the Russian Empire as a result of the partitions of Poland, Jews were not viewed as native to the newly colonized territories. Many accepted their doubly alien status; however, there also emerged Jewish views that rejected the assumption that they were necessarily alien. Professor Deutsch discusses the significance of these views against the backdrop of internal Jewish politics and Russian policies.

Nathaniel Deutsch is Professor of Literature, History, and Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Professor Chan-Malik’s research explores the racialization of Islam in the U.S. She examines how national legacies of anti-blackness and late-20th century Black freedom struggles, alongside neoliberal logics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and “multicultural democracy,” have informed constructions of Islamic Terror and Muslim American cultural politics since the 1970s.

Sylvia Chan-Malik is the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Professor Gould discusses political emotion, especially affective stimuli and blockages to political activism. She is interested in political imaginaries and their conditions of possibility; the psychic effects of oppression; social movements as sites of collective world-making; solidarity and its fracturing; political desire; and political despair.

Deborah Gould is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

Professor Jain discusses her analysis of the politics, history, and culture of cancer treatment in the U.S. She is the author of Injury: The Politics of Product Design and Safety Law in the United States (Princeton, 2006) and a book-in-progress, Commodity Violence: The Politics of Automobility (Duke).

S. Lochlann Jain is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.