Speaker Bios:

Guest Speakers

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago.  His research interests encompass modern Indian social and political history, modern Bengal, Labor history, Asian studies, philosophical discourses of modernity, and postcolonial theory.  He is a Faculty Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, holds a visiting position at the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University, and an Honorary Professorial Fellowship with the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia .  He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a co-editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies.  He has also served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Public Culture.  His books include: Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton: 1989, 2000), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000; second edn. forthcoming in 2007), Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2000), and Provincializzare l'Europa (Chicago, 2000).  He has also edited (with Shahid Amin) Subaltern Studies IX (Delhi: OUP, 1996), (with Carol Breckenridge, Homi Bhabha, and Sheldon Pollock) Cosmopolitanism (Duke, 2000), and (with Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori) From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Delhi: OUP, 2007).  French and Spanish translations of Provincializing Europe are due out in 2008.

Chakrabarty was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2004 and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006.

Professor Chakrabarty's current research is focused on the development of history as a profession in South Asia in the first half of the twentieth century and its relationship to public life.  He has also been working on changing forms of mass-politics in the subcontinent.  He has been published in Critical Inquiry; Economic and Political Weekly; Biblio; History and Theory; and Public Culture along with numerous other anthologized essays and articles.

Georgina Dopico Black is Associate Professor in New York University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese.  Her publications include Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (winner of the 2001 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize), Suplemento al Tesoro de la Lengua Española Castellana de Sebastián de Covarrubias (with Jacques Lezra), and En un lugar de la Mancha: Homenaje a Manuel Durán (Co-editor with Roberto González Echevarría.)  She is Director of NYU's Medieval and Renaissance Center and Coordinating Editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

Doris L. Garraway is an associate professor of French at Northwestern University.  Her research and teaching interests include French Caribbean and Haitian literature and historiography, the Haitian Revolution in literature, and early modern French literature and anthropology.  Her book, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2005), examines narratives, histories and fictions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French slave societies, with particular emphasis on the role of gender and sexuality in social relations of domination and constructions of race.  Her edited volume, Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in early 2008.  She has published articles on colonial and postcolonial Caribbean writing in Callalou, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, and her forthcoming essays will appear in the collections Tree of Liberty and The Postcolonial Enlightenment (Oxford, eds. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa), as well as in the International Journal of Francophone Studies.  She is a past recipient of a fellowship from Northwestern's Kaplan Center for the Humanities, and is an affiliate at the Center in 2007-08.

Professor Garraway has delivered lectures at Duke University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Penn State University, and the University of Washington, and she regularly presents papers at conferences and colloquia around the country.  In October 2004 she organized an international symposium at Northwestern entitled "The Haitian Revolution: History, Memory, Representation."  Professor Garraway has been Director of Graduate Studies in Northwestern's Department of French and Italian since 2005.

Olakunle George is associate professor of English and Africana Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Brown University.  His research interests include African literature, postcolonial studies, and literary and cultural theory.  His book Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (State University of New York Press, 2003) was named a "CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title" in 2004.  His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature; Diacritics; Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Research in African Literatures; and Representations.  His current book project is entitled Pagans and Patriots: Conversion and the Text of Africa.

Lewis Gordon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Judaic Studies and Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University.  Professor Gordon works in the areas of Africana philosophy, philosophy of human and life sciences, phenomenology and philosophy of existence, social and political philosophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion and Afro-Jewish Studies.  He was Executive Editor of volumes I-V of Radical Philosophy Review: Journal of the Radical Philosophy Association and co-editor of the Routledge book series on Africana thought.  He is Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica and is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.  His most recent books are Disciplinary Decadence (Paradigm) and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge UP).

Joseba Gabilondo is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Michigan State University.  His research interests include Hispanic and Hollywood Cinema, Globalization, Modern Spanish Literature, Basque Literature, Atlantic Studies, and Gender Studies/Queer Studies.  He is the author of Remnants of the Nation: Prolegomena to a Postnational History of Contemporary Basque and From California with Love along with numerous articles.  He is currently revising two works entitled The Barbarian Divide: Neoliberalism and Multiculturalism at the New European Border (Intellectuals, Migrants, and Terrorists in Spain) and Basque Literatures: A Cultural Introduction (1545-2000).

Moyo Okediji is a Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Colorado at Denver and the curator of African, African American, and Oceanic arts at the Denver Art Museum.  He is the publisher of the University of African Art Press at www.universityofafricanart.org.  His books include: The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth-Century American Art and African Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images in Yoruba Art.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Speakers

Mercedes Alcalá-Galán received her Ph.D from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and specializes in Early Modern Spanish literature.  Her research is oriented primarily towards topics in poetics, literary theory, gender studies and cultural studies with regard to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.  She has also been working on questions concerning contemporary women's literature.  She is the author of the book La silva curiosa de Julián de Medrano. Estudio y edición critica (1998) and has published over thirty five articles on Early Modern literature as well as contemporary Spanish literature and cinema.  She is currently completing a book on Cervantine poetics and is researching aspects regarding the literary and pictorial representations of women's sexuality in Early Modern art and literature.

Alda Blanco is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.  Professor Blanco specializes in contemporary Spanish literature and culture, and has dedicated much of her research and writing to investigating questions of the intersection between gender and cultural production.  Her book, "Escritoras virtuosas: narradoras de la domesticidad en la Españ a isabelina," studies an important, but nevertheless forgotten, generation of Spanish women writers.  She has also published on the feminist author, María Martínez Sierra.  Currently she is working on a book-length project titled,"Writing the Spanish Empire."

Jill H. Casid is Associate Professor of Visual Culture Studies in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  As a historian, a theorist of visual culture, and a practicing artist in photo-based media, her work explores the productive tensions between theory, the problems of the archive and the writing of history, issues of gender, race and sexuality, and the performative and processual aspects of visual objects and imaging.  Her research in visual studies and in vision and aesthetics includes her book Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (2005) and her forthcoming book Shadows of Enlightenment—both with the University of Minnesota Press.  She has just begun a new book project, “The Volatile Image: Other Histories of Photography,” that reconsiders photography as a complex and unstable medium.  Her interest in pursuing the implications of “trans” for the study of visual culture extends to the international visual culture conference on the theme of “trans” which she co-organized (at University of Wisconsin-Madison in October 2006), the video exhibition she guest curated for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2006), and the anthology she is planning on "Visual Transculture."  In addition to creating a new curriculum in visual culture studies and contributing to the development of curatorial and museum studies, she also directs the new Visual Culture Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Guillermina De Ferrari teaches Latin American and Caribbean literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD from Columbia University. She specializes in contemporary Caribbean narrative and Postcolonial theory. She is the author of Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (The University of Virginia Press, 2007). Her articles can be found in The Latin American Literary Review, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, The Hispanic Review, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, among others. She is currently working on a book on the topic of friendship and civil societies in contemporary Cuban narrative.

Henry Drewal is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Art History and Afro-American Studies in the Department of Art History and the Adjunct Curator of African Art at the Elvehjem Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He received his B.A. from Hamilton College and his M.A. in African Studies and Ph.D. from Columbia University.  His research interests include African and African Diaspora art history.  He has served as Curator of African Art at the Neuberger Museum-SUNY-Purchase (1986), The Cleveland Museum of Art (1988-90), and Curator of African Art at the Toledo Museum of Art (1989).  Over the years he has published several books and edited volumes and many articles on various aspects of African art, primarily on the arts of Yoruba-speaking peoples of West Africa and the Yoruba diaspora in the Americas.  His books include: Beads, Body and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe, The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, Gelede: Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba, and Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought.  He has curated many exhibitions of African art, the most recent being Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe (with John Mason), which toured five US cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, Madison, and New York) between 1998-2000.  The book/catalogue for the exhibition was a finalist for the Arts Council of the ASA award in 2001.  Recently, he has begun research (funded with a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies) on the arts, identities, cultures, and histories of African descendants in India.  In addition, he is currently working on a major book and traveling exhibition entitled "Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and other Afro-Atlantic Water Spirits" being organized by the Fowler Museum of Cultural History - UCLA.

Deborah Jenson is Interim Director of the Center for the Humanities and Associate Professor of French.  Her research is focused on legacies of the French and Haitian Revolutions, in literary, colonial, and postcolonial studies.  Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France considers the political and historical valences of models of representation in French romantic literature.  A new book manuscript, Beyond the Slave Narrative: African Diasporan Texts from the Haitian Revolution, under contract with Liverpool University Press, assesses political texts by Haitian Revolutionary leaders and poetry from the popular milieux of courtesans in the Haitian Revolutionary era in relation to Anglophone models of the Black Atlantic and the slave narrative.  She edited an issue of Yale French Studies devoted to consideration of the Haitian Revolution in Nineteenth Century French Studies, "The Haiti Issue."  English and French critical editions (with Doris Kadish) of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's colonial novella Sarah are forthcoming with MLA Editions.  Jenson has published numerous articles on colonial and postcolonial topics in journals including The Yale Journal of Criticism, Differences, L'Esprit créateur, and The International Journal of Francophone Studies, as well as in French and Haitian collections.

Theresa M. Kelley is Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at University of Wisonsin-Madison.  She received her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Washington, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University.  She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanties (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Texas, University of Wisconsin—Madison and its Institute for Research in the Humanities.  She is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship and a John D. Simon Guggenheim fellowship for her current book project, a study of the role of botany in British Romantic culture titled Clandestine Marriage.  She has written widely on aspects of Romanticism, late-eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy, and critical theory.  She is author of Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge 1988), co-editor of Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (New England 1995), and Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge 1997), winner of the 1998 award for best scholarly book published in 1997 given by the South Central Modern Language Association.  She is co-director, with Richard Sha, of a developing on-line Gallery of Romantic Visual Culture to be housed on the Romantic Circles site.

Luís Madureira holds a degree in Comparative Literature, and is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese.  His major areas of specialization include Luso-Brazilian colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as Modernism and Modernity in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.  He has published two books, Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone-African Literature: Narratives of Discovery and Empire (2007), which studies figurations of empire, nation and revolution in Portuguese and Lusophone African literatures, and Cannibal Modernities (2005), a reexamination of the Brazilian and Caribbean avant-gardes from a postcolonial perspective.  He has published several articles on topics ranging from African and Luso-Brazilian literature and cinema to early modern travel narratives and postcolonial theory.  His current research focuses on Mozambican theatre and the politics of time in contemporary Lusophone fiction.

Bala Venkat Mani is Assistant Professor in the Department of German.  He is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for German and European Studies, the Center for European Studies, the Global Studies Program, and the Program in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at UW-Madison.  He holds a BA (1993) and MA (1995) in German Studies from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an MA (1996) and PhD (2001) in German Studies from Stanford University.  Mani’s teaching and research interests include 19th and 20th century German and European literatures, literature by authors of non-German heritages, feminist literature, and gay and lesbian literature; theories of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.  He is the author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (Forthcoming, University of Iowa Press, Spring 2007).

 

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