Professor Franko, a UC Humanities Network Scholar, is editor of Dance Research Journal, founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series, and Director of the Center for Visual and Performance Studies at UCSC. He is finishing a book on Martha Graham in the 1940s (Oxford) supported by an NEH research fellowship and a UC President’s Research Fellowship.
Mark Franko is Professor of Dance and Performance Studies in Theater Arts at UCSC.
*sponsored by the IHR
Professor Alduy is chair of Renaissances, an interdisciplinary forum on the present and future of early modern studies, and director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University. One of her current projects is Archaeology of a Close-Up: The “Blasons anatomiques” and the Prehistory of Obscenity, which looks at the intersection between the field of obstetrics, its book market, and the pre-history of obscenity.
Cécile Alduy is Associate Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University.
Doctor Metcalf is the Postdoctoral Fellow in an NSF-funded program training graduate students in interdisciplinary inquiry on the co-constitution of ethics and scientific knowledge. His research concerns the construction of ethical inquiry. He proposes new applied ethics methodologies that account for the boundaries drawn within techno-scientific apparatuses, and asks how science and technology might become more responsive to the conditions and consequences of those boundaries.
Historians of Latin America have spent much energy studying historical legacies. The notion that “the past weighs heavily on the present” is a standard frame for historical analysis. Stepping outside this paradigm, Professor O’Hara’s book project examines how Mexicans thought about, planned for, and accessed the future from the mid-colonial period into the early republic.
Matthew O’Hara is Associate Professor of History at UCSC.
Professor Terada is the author of Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (Northeastern, 1992); Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject”(Harvard, 2001); Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction (Harvard, 2009); and the in-progress Revolution-Restoration. The paper considers associations between “free speech” and interiority, and their implications in Marx, Heine, and recent student protest.
Rei Terada is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director, Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine.
*co-sponsored by the Affect Working Group
Professor Lombardi-Diop has published on gender and Italian colonial literature, African-Italian autobiographies, and the African diaspora in Italy. Her in-progress book is on the memory of Italian colonialism in Italy’s postwar cultural history. The talk explores Italy as a post-racial society and focuses on when the idea of whiteness as a discursive formation infiltrates Italian popular and mass culture.
Cristina Lombardi-Diop is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at The American University of Rome and Visiting Professor of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley.
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.