Warren Sack is currently working on a book entitled “The Software Arts” (for the Software Studies series at MIT Press) where he explores an understanding of computer science as a liberal art and computer programming as a form of writing.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer’s work focuses on medicine, science and media in the United States. He is currently finishing a book manuscript, tentatively titled What Matters: Autism, Neuroscience and the Politics of American Brains, on the alternative histories of American neuroscience, seen through the lens of extreme anti-social forms of autism.

This talk was originally scheduled for March 5th. It has been rescheduled to take place on March 12th.

Karen Bassi’s current  book project, In Search of Lost Things: Classics Between History and Archaeology is a study of visual perception as the source of knowledge about the past in ancient Greek epic, history writing, and drama. The book explores the dominance of vision and visual metaphors in making truth claims, the role of language in distinguishing fiction from fact, and the criteria for establishing the reality of the past.

Interested in the emotional terrains of activism, Deborah Gould’s current project explores political appetites, encounters, and the “not-yet” of politics.

Deborah Gould is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC/Santa Cruz.

As a former director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center, Dan Selden’s long-standing interest in cross-cultural aesthetics extends to film production. Selden focuses on the application of the Western cinematic apparatus to non-Western contexts in an effort to better understand the work of such directors as `Abbās Kiyārostamī and Wong Kar Wai.

Daniel Selden is Professor of Literature at UC/Santa Cruz.

Jennifer Derr’s work explores the configuration and experience of the colonial state in Egypt through its construction of the agricultural environments that lined the banks of the Nile River. Derr traces the intersections of the colonial state in Egypt with the material experiences of environmental infrastructure, resource allocation, disease, and the geographies of colonial capitalism.

Jennifer L. Derr is Assistant Professor of History, at UC/Santa Cruz.

Though an historian of medieval thought, Clare Monagle’s most recent work turns to the twentieth-century and the deployment of the Middle Ages in International Relations Theory. Monagle argues that charting the medieval in this frame enables a new insight into the understanding of historical time that informs the discipline of international relations.

Clare Monagle is Senior Lecturer of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

Katherine Gordy’s current book project traces the interrelations between what she identifies as different “spheres” of Cuban political thought—political doctrine (official sphere), political theory (academic sphere), and daily practice (popular sphere)—in order to challenge accounts that treat Cuban socialist ideology as solely state-originated dogma or as necessarily in opposition to academic and popular forms of political thought.

Katherine Gordy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University.

Karla Mallette is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Lives of the Great Languages, which is a theoretical study of the cosmopolitan language system: the trans-regional and trans-historical mega-languages that were the literary media of cultural life in the pre-modern Mediterranean.

Karla Mallette is Professor of Italian and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan.