Sarika Chandra is Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University. Her research focuses on contemporary American studies and globalization. Her current project explores the convergence of concepts such as Americanization, travel, ethnicity and nationalism with theories of globalization.
Daniel Laforest received his Ph.D. in Literature from the Université de Québec at Montréal in 2006. His project at the Center is entitled “The Extra-urban Problem in Contemporary North American Literature: Literary Subjectivities, Identity Questionings and the Experience of Remote Place at the time of Globalization.” It addresses the main imaginary configurations in contemporary North American literature that prefigure—or result from—the problematic habitability of extra-urban spaces. French Canadian and American contemporary literary works are at the heart of this project, Laforest writes, since “in the unique overlapping of the singular and the social offered by literature, we observe the constant apparition of new dispositions towards memory and the possibility for the self to construct its subjectivity in relation to different places.”
Mark Pettigrew received his B.A. in Anthropology at Harvard and his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley. He has taught at Columbia University and is currently Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Queens College, CUNY. He specializes in Classical Arabic Literature with an emphasis on the cultural history of the Arab-Islamic world. His dissertation, which is currently being prepared for publication, focuses on the medieval Arab-Islamic discourse on Pharaonic Egypt. His current research project deals with paradigms of medieval Arab-Islamic magic.