Steering Committee

Mercedes Alcalá-Galán, Ph.D Universidad Complutense de Madrid, teaches in the Dept. 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 is the author of the book La silva curiosa de Julián de Medrano (1998) and has published over 35 articles on Early Modern literature as well as contemporary Spanish literature and cinema. She is currently completing a book on Cervantine poetics and has begun a new book project on the literary and pictorial representations of women's sexuality in Early Modern art and literature.

Warwick Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., is research professor in the History Department and the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. Until 2007 he was Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although based in Sydney, he retains an appointment at Madison. With Gabrielle Hecht he edited a special issue of Social Studies of Science in 2002 on “Postcolonial Technoscience.” He is the author of The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (2002, 2003, 2006) and Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (2006). Johns Hopkins University Press will publish The Collectors of Lost Souls: Kuru and the Creation of Value in Science in 2008. Dr. Anderson was recently awarded the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (2005-06) and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2007-08). Grants from the National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council support his new project on the history of scientific investigation of mixed race populations in the twentieth century.

Lisa H. Cooper is Assistant Professor of English.  Her research interests lie in the field of medieval literature, including twelfth-to-fifteenth-century English and French romance; the poetry of Chaucer, his contemporaries, and successors; Latin and vernacular historiography; English and European travel narrative; medieval material culture (especially the intertwined history of labor, technology, and commerce); the formation of urban identity; lexicography; and the history of the book.  Her recent publications include “Urban Utterances: Merchants, Artisans, and the Alphabet in Caxton’s Dialogues in French and English,” New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005): 127-161; “Bed, Boat, and Beyond: Fictional Furnishing in La Queste del Saint Graal,” Arthuriana 15.3 (2005): 26-50, and she is co-editor of an essay collection entitled Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century: Lydgate Matters.  Her current project is a book on the representation of artisanal labor in late medieval literature.

Russ Castronovo is Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies.  His selected publications include Beautiful Democracy:  Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2007); Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, co-edited with Dana Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Aesthetics and the End(s) of American Cultural Studies: Special Issue of American Literature, co-edited with Chris Castiglia (2003).  He is in the beginning stages of a project on the literary history of propaganda.

Guillermina De Ferrari (coordinator and cluster faculty) 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.

Paula Di Dio is a PhD candidate at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in late 19th century and contemporary Argentinean Literature. Her research interests include travel literature, cultural and political theory and popular culture. She has published articles on Argentinean and Cuban literature. Her dissertation deals with the notion of imagined community in its intersection with displacement and dissent.

Susan Stanford Friedman Director, Institute for Research in the Humanities is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies and co-founder of the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle. She is the author of Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (1981, 1987), Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction (1990), and Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998). She is the co-author of A Woman's Guide to Therapy (1979), the co-editor of Signets: Reading H.D. (1991), and the editor of Joyce: The Return of the Repressed (1993) and Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle (2001). Her work ranges broadly across the fields of 20th- and 21st century literary studies in English, cultural and feminist theory, transnational and diasporic studies, narrative theory, modernism, psychoanalysis, and poetics. She is at work on Planetary Modernism and the Modernities of Empire, Nation, and Diaspora and Beyond Melting Pots and Mosaics: Narratives of the ‘New Migration’. She coordinates the Cultural Studies in Global Context Cluster.

Kenneth M. George (cluster faculty) is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist who works on language, religion, art, and violence in island Southeast Asia, and in Indonesia in particular. His first book, Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual (1996), won the 1998 Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in a minority religious community in Indonesia, the book examines the cultural politics that animate the making of history, mourning, and masculinity through ceremonial lyric and ritualized violence. He is now at work on a collaborative project with Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous, exploring the rise of modernist Muslim art publics and artistic subjectivities in national and transnational contexts. He has extensive experience in bridging the humanities and social sciences, especially by way of the multidisciplinary conferences, workshops, and curricular programs he has developed on violence, suffering, and visual culture.

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 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. 

Mary N. Layoun is Professor of Comparative Literature whose research and teaching focus on modern Arabic, Greek, Japanese, English, and Francophone literatures and cultures. Her intellectual interests include nationalisms and gender, comic books and history, science fiction, threat and 'human security,' the World Trade Organization and intellectual property rights, translation; refugee culture; the modern novel. Professor Layoun is the author of Wedded To the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism In Crisis (2001) and Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (1990). She is currently at work on a book entitled Occupying the National Family: Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship in Early Post-WW II U.S. and Occupation Japanand a book and CD-ROM on comparative comic books and “relational literacy.”

Tracy Wendt Lemaster is a doctoral student in English specializing in contemporary literature and women’s literature. Her interests include women’s studies, girl studies, feminist theory, postcolonialism, and popular culture. She is the author of several articles in scholarly book collections entitled And Never Know the Joy: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry (2006), Innovations and Reproductions in Cultures and Societies (2006), Rebecca West’s Fiction and Non-Fiction (2007)and in the refereed journals Atenea: A Bilingual Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences and The Atlantic Literary Review.  Her MA thesis “Sugar and Spice: The Development of the Nymphet from Nabokov’s Lolita to Mendes’s American Beauty” is currently under publication by Cambridge UP in a collection on models of victimization. Her writing is interdisciplinary and borrows from the fields of anthropology, history, media, film, and politics from a women’s studies/feminist perspective. Her current work is with the HEX foundation, a Humanities outreach program funding community service projects as extensions of academic research and foci, where she is developing a media and literacy program for girls, the organization’s first gender-specific project.

Luis 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.

B. 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).

Tejumola Olaniyan is Professor of African Languages and Literature and Louise Durham Mead Professor of English. His major areas of teaching and research are African diaspora and postcolonial literary and cultural studies, and popular culture studies. He has published widely in these areas, including Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics, Indiana UP (2004), Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama , Oxford UP (1995); Co-Editor, Drama and Performance in Africa and the African Diaspora: Special Issue of Research in African Literatures 30.4 (Winter 1999); Editor, On 'Post-Colonial Discourse': A Special Issue Callaloo 16.4 (Fall 1993); and several book chapters and articles in journals such as Cultural Critique, Transition, Theatre Journal, African American Review, Social Dynamics, Callaloo. His co-edited African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory from Blackwell (2007). He is currently at work on a book on political cartooning in Africa.

Karolyn Steffens (project assistant) is a graduate student in English literature. Her interests include 20th Century American, British, and Irish Literature and Trauma Studies. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Indiana University.

Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis is Professor of modern and contemporary African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture, and former Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies. Faculty affiliation includes the Art Department, African Studies, and Women Studies. She is one of the founders of the Visual Culture area at UW-Madison. Her work spans art history, visual culture, and feminist art criticism with emphasis on America (U.S.A.), Britain, and Africa (particularly Nigeria). Her most recent project is The High Report: The National Gallery of Art, Nigeria, A General Condition Assessment, 2007, funded by the Ford Foundation (2007). Select publications include “In Search of a Discourse and Critique/s that Center the Art of Black Women Artists,” 1st in Theorizing Black Feminism/s (1993) and 4th in Feminist Art Theory (2001). Others: "Afrofemcentrism: The Work of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold," 2nd publ. in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (1992); “Interweaving Black Feminism and Art History: Framing Nigeria," Contemporary Textures: MultiDimensionality in Nigerian Art (1999); "Chiasmus: Art in Politics/Politics in Art, Chicano/a and African-American Image, Text, and Activism of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies," Voices of Color in the Americas.  Her art is discussed in The Art of Black American Women: Works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century (1993); Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists (1996); Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (2005); etc. She has had solo and group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI); Minnesota Museum of American Art; National Arts Club (NY); Burpee Art Museum (IL); Studio Museum in Harlem (NY); Schenectady Museum (NY); Fine Arts Museum of the South (AL); Herbert Johnson Museum, Cornell U. (NY); Fine Arts Gallery-College-Camille Cosby Humanities Center at Spelman College (GA); National Gallery (Dakar, Senegal); and Museo Arte Contemporanea di Gibellina (Palermo, Italy), among others.

Neil Whitehead is a Professor of Anthropolgy whose research interests include warfare and violence, shamanism,and the historical anthropology of Amazonia, the Guianas and the Caribbean, as well as the literature of conquest and colonialism. Professor Whitehead has recently published Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (2002)and has transcribed, annotated, and introduced The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh (1998). He is also the author of Lords of the Tiger-Spirit. A history of the Caribs in colonial Venezuela and Guyana, 1498-1820 (1988). He has edited various volumes including: Beyond the Visible and Material (2001), Wolves from the Sea (1995), Readings in the Archaeology and Anthropology of the Island Carib (1995), War in the Tribal Zone. Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (with R.B. Ferguson, 1992, 1999) and Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day: An Anthology (with Peter Hulme, 1992). Professor Whitehead is editor of Ethnohistory and a co-founder of the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle.