Author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota 2007), Professor Hoad is working on a book about representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. He focuses on A.S. Mopeli-Paulus and Peter Lanham’s Blanket Boy’s Moon to amplify the dissonances between culture and law on the terrain of sexuality.

Neville Hoad is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin.

Professor Yang examines the legal reasoning of the former Justice Department lawyer’s “torture memos” and his arguments that Al Qaeda and Taliban members were not entitled to protections under the Geneva Convention. She explores how Yoo and his critics relied on different historical memories during debates about torture and executive authority.

Alice Yang is an Associate Professor of History at UCSC, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories.

The French ban on the burqa and niqab is only one example of the primacy accorded the face in modern western societies. Professor Seth here argues that the fortunes of the face are tied to the birth of modern individuality, and that the face is both the grounds and the reflection of the modern expressive self.

Vanita Seth is an Associate Professor of Politics at UCSC.

In 2010 gays and lesbians of the U.S. Communist Party began publishing a newsletter, The Queer Communist, whose emblem is a pink triangle superimposed on a hammer and sickle, marking an extraordinary moment relative to the homophobic history and politics of the CPUSA. The paper analyzes this history.

Bettina Aptheker is a Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies and History at UCSC.

Professor Moodie studies the sociality engendered by legal and economic projects for uplift and empowerment, including affirmative action, microfinance, and gender-based rights assertions. Her in-progress book, based on ethnographic work with the Dhanka, examines the gendered impact of affirmative action-based upward mobility.

Megan Moodie is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCSC.

Professor Caldwell examines the politics of poverty, social welfare, care and intimacy in Russia through ethnographic research in Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (California 2011). Her new research is on Russian-African assistance and development relations in the twentieth century. She also studies changing food practices in the postsocialist world.

Melissa L. Caldwell is a Professor of Anthropology at UCSC, and Co-Director for the UCMRP on Studies of Food and the Body.

Although the Melian Dialogue is not much of a dialogue, it is anointed as the foundation of political realism. The paper argues that realism is delusional and defeating. The more inclusive dialogue in Euripides’ The Trojan Women juxtaposes the language of power, war and empire with loss, hopelessness and what Saïd called “the crippling sorrow of estrangement.”

Peter Euben is an Emeritus Research Professor of Political Science and Classical Studies, and a Kenan Distinguished Faculty Fellow Emeritus at Duke University.

Professor Lippit has recently completed a book on contemporary experimental cinema, Ex-cinema: Essays on Experimental Film and Video, and is completing another book on contemporary Japanese cinema and the concept of the world. He is also writing a book on David Lynch and anagrams.

Akira Mizuta Lippit is a Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC. He is also Chair of the Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts.

With African Americans as the primary example, Professor Gray probes the social, intellectual, and political investment in the cultural politics of recognition and visibility in the context of neoliberalism, suggesting that with neoliberalism we have reached the limit of such investments. Looking beyond this investment in representation, recognition and visibility, he examines what other critical modes and sites of cultural analysis and politics are possible.

Herman Gray is Professor of Sociology at UCSC.

Professor Shemek studies intersections of elite and popular culture in early modern Italy, especially among women. Her current research focuses on early modern letter writing. She is completing an edition of Isabella d’Este’s letters and a book on the broader significance of early modern women’s letters. The talk addresses plans to digitize the manuscript sources for her edition and visualize the social network of a Renaissance princess.

Deanna Shemek is Professor of Literature at UCSC.