Professor Howie thinks about how contemporary American poets reimagine early Christianity, using transfiguration to talk about the persistence in transformation of figures, and how poetic and theological concerns speak to gender and sexuality. His books include Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (Palgrave, 2007) and the co-authored Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (Manchester, 2010).

Cary Howie is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University.

Professor McKay examines the performance of masculinities among a group of men often considered exemplars of masculinity: merchant sailors. The talk explores their gender projects across liminal space (ocean-going ships) and in productive and reproductive spheres. Professor McKay is co-editor of the forthcoming New Routes for Diaspora Studies (Indiana) and working on Born to Sail? Racial Formation, Masculinity and the Making of Filipino Seafarers.

Steven McKay is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Labor Studies at UCSC.

Professor Hamel is working on a history of religious representations in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine and the notion of monotheism. He examines recent histories of monolatry and monotheism and accounts of religious mediations, asking whether monotheism is to be explained as a response to the Babylonian and Persian empires or as an episode of cultural borrowing and translation of religious stories and practices.

Gildas Hamel is S.O.E. Lecturer in History at UCSC.

Scientists and humanists have found common interests in understanding correlations between neural events and complex human behavior. Over the past thirty years we have studied how aspects of human visual perception arise from neural processes that occur in the anatomical substrates of human vision. Professor Switkes discusses how understanding the brain’s recoding of spatial and chromatic information sheds light on the neural basis of visual behavioral phenomena.

Eugene Switkes is Professor of Chemistry and Psychobiology, UCSC and Affiliate Professor of Vision Sciences and Optometry, UC Berkeley.

Professor Terada considers Pasolini’s turn away from Italian politics in his late prose and Salò, and the alternative models of working-through and legibility subsequently engendered in the “absence” of hope for renewal. Professor Terada’s books include Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Harvard, 2001) and Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction (Harvard, 2009).

Rei Terada is Professor of Comparative Literature, UCI

This colloquium is co-sponsored by the Affect Working Group

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.