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).

Drawing on the narratological theories of Genette (“voice”) and Mieke Bal (“focalization”), Professor Jordan’s talk offers a new approach to understanding the illustrations to Dickens’s Bleak House (1852- 53) that emphasizes elements of retrospection, fantasy, and multiple temporality.

John Jordan is Professor of Literature, UCSC.

Professor Ochoa works at the conjuncture of the ethnography of media, modernity in Latin America, and queer/transgender studies. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Misses and Mass Media in Venezuela (Duke, forthcoming) is a queer diasporic ethnography of femininity, spectacle, and nation in Venezuela.

Marcia Ochoa is Assistant Professor of Community Studies at UCSC.

Professor Frangos’s “Queer Morphologies” explores metamorphosis and non-human embodiment in literature from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance as sites of queer possibility and potentiality. The project asks how human/animal metamorphoses surface and resurface to produce and negotiate nonnormative configurations of sexuality, gender, and kinship.

Professor Frangos is Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.

Doctor Koelle researches how to develop data visualizations that represent spatial experience as subjective and relational rather than as defined through place. The goal is to map animal and human movements and constraints across the American West at different scales to facilitate an affective and aesthetic experience and provide a way to think about the politics of movement and immobility, from habitat destruction to transit budget cuts.

Sandra Koelle is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Stanford University.

Professor Bell’s in-progress Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France explores articulations between anti-Semitism and imperialism that shaped the emergence of European racial thought. Arguing that colonial expansion helped French anti-Semitism adopt its modern racializing guise, the book also examines how anti-Semitism participated in the ideological elaboration of the imperial project.

Dorian Bell is Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.

This talk reports on work that detects the kind of rhetorical structures a person uses when attempting to persuade an audience to believe or act in a certain manner. Professor Anand discusses the collection and annotation of 3000 English and 500 Arabic blogs for a variety of rhetorical structures implicated in persuasion by communication theorists and a computational system that tries to learn from these annotations.

Pranav Anand is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCSC.

Using Mikhail Bakunin’s theorization of authority as a starting point, this talk explores secrecy as a strategy for political enlightenment, and calls attention to earlier conceptions of “propaganda” as education that were lost with the militarization of the term in the twentieth century.

Megan C. Thomas is Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC.

Professor Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), is at the Stanford Humanities Center this year. She is working on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman’s Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Stigma serves as a methodological case study for thinking through the challenges and possibilities of comparative studies of social exclusion.

Heather Love is Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.