PARTICIPANTS
Hosam Aboul-Ela is an associate professor, who teaches courses in postcolonial literature, literary theory, and world literature. His research takes a radically comparative approach, combining exploration of the various fields of globalization theory, postcolonial studies, literature of the Americas, translation studies, and Arab cultural studies. His work examines the point of connection between the literary and the social through the historicization of critical theory. He is the author of Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition (U of Pittsburgh P, 2007) as well as critical articles appearing in American Literature, Arab Studies Journal, Edebiyaat, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, and Rethinking Marxism. He has also translated Voices by Soleiman Fayyad (Marion Boyars, 1993) and Distant Train by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid (Syracuse UP, 2007). His current projects include a new book examining the link between literary culture and empire in the United States from World War II to the present and a translation of the novel talassus by Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim. He is also co-editor with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of "Theory Around the World", a new publication series translating critical theory from outside Europe and North America. He regularly teaches English 2325, 3301, 3365, and 8386.
Tani Barlow is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Asian History and Director of the T.T. and W.F. Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University. A leading scholar of modern Chinese history and a critical theorist, Barlow taught at the University of Washington, where she was a professor of history and women's studies. She served for several years as that university's director of the Project for Critical Asian Studies. Barlow is the founding senior editor of positions: east asia cultures critique, one of the world's leading interdisciplinary journals on Asia. The publication received the prestigious 2005 Best New Journal Award by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals of the Modern Language Association. Barlow is the author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (2004); New Asian Marxisms (2002); Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua (co-author.
Lisa Balabanlilar is Assistant Professor of South Asian history at Rice University. Her research explores the Central Asian heritage of the Mughal emperors of India. As the direct descendants of the empire builders Chingis Khan and Tamerlane, the Mughals systematically and self-consciously manipulated their Central Asian genealogical and cultural legacy. Not only did this effort serve to define their imperial identity and political viability in their new conquest territories in South Asia, but Mughal loyalty to Turco-Mongol institutions and traditions positioned the ruling dynasty of India in the center of the early modern Islamic world as the direct successor of a powerful political and religious tradition
Publications include "Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction: Turco-Mongol Imperial Identity on the Subcontinent," Journal of World History 18.1 (2007) 1-39; "Begums at the The Mystic Feast," forthcoming, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, May, 2009. Balabanlialar's book, "The Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction: Exile, Memory and Imperial Identity in Mughal Idia," is currently under review by Cambridge University Press.
Mahmoud A. El-Gamal, Ph.D is Chair of the Department of Economics and Professor of Economics and Statistics at Rice University in Houston, TX, where he also holds the endowed Chair in Islamic Economics, Finance, and Management. Before joining Rice in 1998, he was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has also worked as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester, and the California Institute of Technology, and as an Economist in the Middle East Department at the International Monetary Fund. In the second half of 2004, he served as scholar in residence at the U.S. Department of Treasury. He has published extensively in the areas of econometrics, economic dynamics, financial economics and econometrics, economics of the Middle East, and the economic analysis of Islamic Law. His recent books include Islamic Finance: Law, Economics, and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold (with Amy Jaffe, Cambridge University Press, 2010, forthcoming)
James Faubion is Chair of Anthropology at Rice University. He thinks and writes on power and the impetuses of its coalescence into the religious, the political, and the religio-political and the politico-religious. He is currently in the last stages of completing a book-length conversation with George Marcus, Paul Rabinow and Tobias Rees on designs for anthropology of the contemporary. His plans in the near future include two books. One, tentatively titled What Becomes a Subject: Fieldwork in Ethics, critically develops Michel Foucault's analytics of the ethical domain through a series of bioethnographic portraits. The other, tentatively titled Spiritual Biopolitics geneaologically investigates the past, present and increasingly global future of the intersection of biopolitics and the sacralization of the body.
He is conducting long-term research into what might be thought of as the technocratization of the intellectual and the contemporary norms and forms of interdisciplinary and interscientific collaboration. One focus of this research is comprised of the actors and institutions engaged in the Greek branch of an EU-wide project in setting the parameters of social and technological planning known as FORESIGHT. Another is comprised of the actors and institutions engaged in the realization of s Collaborative Research center, slated to be up and running in 2010.
Rosemary Hennessy is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her publications include NAFTA From Below: Maquiladora Workers, Campesinos, and Indigenous Communities Speak Back (2006), Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (2000), Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives (1997), and Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993). Her research interests include feminist culture theory, sexuality studies, and U.S.-Mexican studies. She is currently working on a book on the cultures of transnational organizing, Fires on the Border.
Ruri Ito is Professor of transnational sociology at the Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. She is interested in the gender dimension of immigration policies and the globalization of the reproductive sphere. With the members of the research collective “International Migration and Gender,” she has conducted research in the recent years on the migrant reproductive labor in East and South-East Asia, focusing on the different modalities in which women migrants are mobilized to sustain the biological and social reproduction of the “nation” in the context of Asian societies facing low fertility and rapid ageing. Her publications include International Migration and ‘Cross-border Gender Regimes’ (co-edited with Mariko Adachi, 2008, in Japanese); “Crafting Migrant Women’s Citizenship in Japan: Taking “Family” as a Vantage Point,” International Journal of Japanese Sociology, 2005; “The ‘Modern Girl’ Question in the Periphery of Empire: Colonial Modernity and Mobility among Okinawan Women in the 1920’s and 1930’s” in Modern Girl Around the World, Duke University Press, 2008.
Mary E. John received her higher education at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of Poona, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has studied in the fields of economics, philosophy and women’s studies. Between 2001-2006 she was associate professor and deputy director in the Women’s Studies Programme at the JNU, New Delhi; and since 2006 is Director at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, an autonomous research institute which receives support from the Indian Council of Social Science Research. The Centre is embarking on an M.Phil/Ph.D. teaching programme in Women’s studies in collaboration with the Indira Gandhi National Open University from 2009-10.
Mary has been writing and intervening actively in the fields of feminist politics and women’s studies for many years. She has lectured in many places including Japan, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Australia, France, Italy, South Africa, the US and Canada. An early book was Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories (co-published in 1996 by UC Berkeley Press and Oxford University Press, Delhi). Since then she has published numerous articles and edited volumes on topics related to sexuality, politics, development and comparative feminisms. She has recently co-authored a report Planning Families, Planning Gender which examines the dynamics within families in those districts of north India with the lowest female-male child sex ratios; and has edited Women’s Studies in India: A Reader (published by Penguin India in 2008). She is planning a comparative project tentatively entitled Feminist Futures and the Role of Education.
Betty Joseph is Associate Professor of English at Rice University and a faculty affiliate with the Chao Center and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. She works in two fields: eighteenth-century British literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel; and colonial/postcolonial studies. She teaches courses that feature histories of the novel, the British Empire, colonialism, the emergence of nationalism and its cultural forms, globalization, feminist theory and political economy. She is the author of Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago, 2004), and is currently at work on two projects. The first is a book manuscript in progress titled The Ends of Work: Global Flows, the Discourse of Labor and Postcoloniality that examines the recent changes brought about in the status of work, by the forces of privatization, globalization and new media technologies. The second, Cultures of Mercantilism 1670-1757, is a study of the literary and cultural byproducts of English mercantilism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Kin Chi Lau teaches Cultural Studies in Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her area of teaching is contemporary Chinese literature and society, comparative literature, global culture, translation, local governance, gender and peace, and critical pedagogy. She has been involved in various efforts linking theory to practice, and has attended international conferences in various countries on theorizing alternative practices of social movements. She is former Board Chair and Council Chair of Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA), and Co-chairperson of People’s Plan for the 21^st Century (PP21). She is currently member of the Board and International Coordinating Committee of PeaceWomen Across the Globe (PWAG), and Board Member of China Social Services and Development Research Centre (CSD). She has edited/co-edited books including /Colours of Peace: Stories of 108 Women in China/ (2007); /The Masked Knight: Collection of Writings of Sub-Commander Marcos /(2006); /Subaltern Studies /(2005); /China Reflected/ (2003); /Resurgent Patriarchie//s: Challenges for Women's Movements in Asia/ (1999); /Beyond the Financial Crisis: People//’//s Responses and Alternatives in Action/(1999);./Alliance of Hope/ (1997);/ Shaping Our Future -- Asian Pacific People's Convergence/ (1996); /Disciplines, Knowledge and Power/ (1996); /Asian Women’s Alternatives in Action/ (1996). Her writings are on contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese history and society, negotiating violence, ecology and livelihood, peace and gender, alternative practices in Asia and Latin America, and alliance building.
Steven W. Lewis is the Baker Institute’s fellow in Asian studies and faculty adviser for the Jesse Jones Leadership Center Summer in D.C. Policy Research Internship Program. He is also a professor in the practice at the Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University, where he also serves as an associate director. He received his doctorate in political science from Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests are focused on exploring the growth of a transnational Chinese middle class, the influence of advertisements in new public spaces in Chinese cities, the development of privatization experiments in China’s localities, and the reform of China’s energy policies, national oil companies and international energy relations. Lewis has been head of the Transnational China Project at the Baker Institute since 1997. He has also served as the organizing researcher of the Northeast Asia Energy Cooperation Workshops, a series of academic meetings held to discuss energy, energy security and environmental policy coordination between the United States, Japan and China, as well as for the Coastal Cities Summit surveys and U.S.–China–Middle East energy relations conferences that bring together Chinese and Rice University scholars. He has also conducted studies, research and given briefings for The National Bureau of Asian Research; Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; the Sichuan Petroleum Administration; the Korean Economic Institute; and the World Petrochemical Congress. Lewis is also an associate fellow of Asia Society International, a member of the advisory board of Asia Policy, and an academic adviser to the U.S.–China Working Group of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Rosalind Morris is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She is also a former Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia. A scholar of both mainland Southeast Asia and South Africa, she has published widely on topics concerning the politics of representation, the mass media, the relationship between violence and value, gender and sexuality, and the changing forms of modernity in the global South. Her most recent book is Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia (Duke 2009). Other books include In the Place of Origins: Modernity and its Mediums in Northern Thailand (Duke 2000) and New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (Westview 1994). Forthcoming in 2010 are an edited volume, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (Columbia) and a collection of essays entitled Wars I Have (not) Seen (Seagull).
Tejaswini Niranjana is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, India. She is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context Berkeley, 1992), and co-editor of Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Kolkata, 1993). More recently she has published Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006). She has contributions in the Subaltern Studies volumes, and is one of the Executive Editors of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.
Claudia Pozzana is an Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Bologna University. Her research is on early 20th century China, intellectual configurations, and contemporary Chinese poetry. She has translated and edited a selection of Works by Li Dazhao, and a various anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry. Most recently she has edited and translated Bei Dao, Speranza Fredda (Einaudi, Torino, 2003), and Yang Lian, Dove si ferma il mare (Scheiwiller, Milano, 2004). Two books on Chinese poetry are forthcoming: a theoretical approach to contemporary Chinese poetry and an introduction to the study of classical Chinese poetry.
Carol Quillen holds an A.B. (U.S. history) from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. (European history) from Princeton. She is the author of /Rereading the Renaissance/ (Michigan, 1998) as well as several articles on humanism and contemporary critiques of it, and the editor of /The Secret/ /by Francesco Petrarch/ (Bedford/St. Martins, 2003). She teaches at Rice University, where she is an associate professor of history and a faculty affiliate in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Dr. Quillen has received grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Whiting Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University’s Center for Renaissance Studies, and Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. Her current research focuses on relationships among the discursive practices of humanism and the conceptions of the human that it authorizes. Dr. Quillen was the first director of the Boniuk Center (founded 2004), which seeks to understand and to promote conditions conducive to sustainable peace among persons of different religions (www.boniukcenter.org <http://www.boniukcenter.org>). Since 2006 she has served as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.
Valerio Romitelli is a member with the Department of Historical Disciplines at the University of Bologna, Italy. He teaches the history of political parties and movements, as well social sciences methodology. He is Director of the Ethnology and Thought Research Group and also affiliated with the Center of Modern French Philosophy of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His research interests and publications focus on Italian political history,modern contemporary Europe. His social scientific approach is ethnographic, and aims to rethink threatened populations through their own words. The application of this method is seen in numerous studies in the region of Emilia-Romagna, studies which have – in the most recent examples - focused on contact between immigrants and the array of Italian social service offices. His publications include, Romitelli V., Fuori della società della conoscenza. Ricerche di etnografia del pensiero (Outside the knowledge society. Researches on the ethnography of Thought), Infinito Edizioni. Roma 2009 ( pp. 315) and L’odio per i partigiani. Perché e come contrastarlo (Hate against partisans: why and how to act against it) (pp.127),Napoli, Cronopio, 2007, pp. 127
Alessandro Russo teaches Sociology at the University of Bologna. His research interests include classical sociological theories and the modern Chinese politics. He has recently edited the Italian version of Durkheim’s L’évolution pédagogique en France and published a book on sociology and psychoanalysis (La sociologia di Freud, 2008). He has worked on the history of modern Chinese education (Le rovine del mandato, 1985, with a new edition in preparation) and on a new theoretical approach in the study of the Cultural Revolution. He is finalizing the revision of a book on the first sequence of the events (Theatre, Politics and History.The Initial Scene of the Cultural Revolution). He is preparing also a book on the question of subjectivities in sociology (Equality and Community. Theories of the Subjectivities in Sociology).
Elora Shehabuddin is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Political Science at Rice University and teaches primarily in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Center for Asian Studies. Before coming to Rice, she was Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University and A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University. Her dissertation, "Encounters with the State: Gender and Islam in Rural Bangladesh," examined how impoverished rural women understand and negotiate between competing Islamist and secularist discourses in the arenas of law, development, and formal politics. The dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association's Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Religion and Politics in 2002. She has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She spent 2004-5 as a Research Associate in the Women's Studies in Religion Program at the Divinity School at Harvard University. Her publications include articles in Signs, Journal of Women's History, and Asian Survey; chapters in the edited volumes Eye to Eye: Women Practicing Development Across Cultures and Gender, Politics, and Islam; and a book Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (1992) and Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (2008). She is currently a Carnegie Scholar and working on a new project, "Women at the Muslim Center: Islamist Ideals and Democratic Exigencies."
Holly Shissler is Associate Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Director of Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, USA. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies covers some of the most important and controversial regions globally and consistently ranks in the highest tier of those dealing with Middle Eastern studies. Selected publications include: Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey (I.B. Tauris 2003); “Beauty Is Nothing To Be Ashamed Of: Beauty Contests As Tools of Women’s Liberation in Early Republican Turkey,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, African and the Middle East, 2004; “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 2007; “Womenhood Is Not for Sale: Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel Against prostitution and for Women’s Employment,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 2008.
Diana Strassmann is Professor of the Practice in Rice University's Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, a faculty affiliate at Rice's Chao Center for Asian Studies, and director of Rice's Program in Poverty, Social Justice, and Human Capabilities. She is the founding editor of the journal Feminist Economics and a co-founder of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). Feminist Economics promotes dialogue about feminist economic perspectives and publishes research aimed at improving the lives of children, women, and men around the world. In 1997, the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) named Feminist Economics the Best New Journal in its international awards competition. The journal has attained high ISI impacts and rankings, both among women's studies and economics journals. Supported generously by Rice University and other major donors, the journal has attracted a wide readership, with individual subscribers in over 50 countries, and a distribution to over five thousand libraries worldwide. Strassmann received her A.B. in economics from Princeton University and her M.A. and Ph. D in economics from Harvard University. She has published widely in the fields of feminist economic theory, economic regulation, and environmental policy. Her current research focuses on gender, economic well-being and social justice.
Neferti Tadiar is Professor of Women’s Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University. Her research is on the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality and liberatory movements in the context of global relations, with a focus on contemporary Philippine and Filipino cultures and their relation to political and economic change. She is the author of /Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization/ (Duke University Press, 2009), /Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order /(Hong Kong University Press/ Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004), Winner of the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism (2005), and co-editor (with Angela Y. Davis) of an anthology of essays, entitled /Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation /(2005). She recently guest edited the Special Issue of /The Scholar and Feminist Online/, “Borders on Belonging: Gender and Immigration” [http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/] and is currently working on several book projects, including /Discourse on Empire: Becoming Human in a Time of War/ and /Aesthetics/Affect/Asia/ (with Jonathan L. Beller).
Tiejun Wen is an economist and expert on rural questions, is Dean of the School of Agriculture and Rural Development, Renmin University of China, Beijing. He is also the University’s Vice-Chairman of Academic Committee, Director of Rural Reconstruction Centre, and Director of Institute of Rural Finance. His other social roles include Deputy President of the China Rural Economic Society, Director of the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute, Deputy Secretary-General of the China Macroeconomic Research Foundation, and Member of the State Consultative Committee on Environment Protection. He has had 11 years of experience as worker/peasant/soldier, and 11 years of experience as researcher at the grassroots on rural reform experimental zones. His major publications include /Rural Reconstruction: Theory and Practice /(2006), /The Three Rurals and Centenary Reflection/ (2005), /Deconstruction of Modernization/ (2004), and /Studies on Institutional Innovation in Rural China/ (2000). His main research areas on China include rural finance, rural tariff reform, rural governance, construction of the new socialist village, water conservancy and rural institutional development, rural information system, and rural conflicts and their resolution. He has also conducted research on comparison of the development of developing countries, and has been invited to lecture in many countries. Professor Wen was awarded “Top Ten Economists in China” by CCTV (2003), “Chinese Ambassador of Environmental Protection” by the State Bureau of Environmental Protection (2006), and Excellent Thesis Award by Du Rensheng Foundation Research on Rural Development (2005), and Changjiang Dushu Award (2000).
