Raul Tadle "FOMC Sentiment Extraction and its Transmission to Financial Markets" Since December 2004, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the governing board that determines U.S. monetary policy, has expedited the release of the minutes of its meetings from six to three weeks after the meetings are held. The reasoning behind this move is that […]

Cathy Thomas "Defining the Fête: The Utopian Potential of Drag, Disease and Diaspora in Oonya Kempadoo's Carnival Imaginary" The catharsis associated with Caribbean Carnivale has always been situated in the body. This paper considers the fête bodies of a transnational costume designer, the Queen of the Band and a gay reveler living with AIDS in […]

Trung Nguyen "War Material: Vietnamese Objects of Post-War Subjectivity" Hong-An Truong and Dinh Q. Le are two widely received diasporic Vietnamese artists whose installations have engaged with the interpretative terrains and problematics of memory, subjectivity, and colonialism through Vietnamese historical experience. This presentation will study two of their respective pieces that explicitly confront modes of […]

Rebecca Ora "Filming Israel From Afar: Ambivalent Diasporic Visions in Performative Non-Fiction" Citing her recent short film The Intifada-ing and the work of other Jewish American women filmmakers, I discuss the ability of performative nonfiction to map new geographic territories through ethical panic and identity-loss responding to diasporic relationships with Israel-Palestine. This paper cults from theorizations […]

Veronika Zablotsky "Dealing with the East: Orientalism and the Ideas of Eurasia in Contemporary Geopolitics" In this talk, I mobilize Edward Said's critique of Orientalism (1978) as a Europrean "style of thought," a "corporate institution" and a "systematic discipline" that produces, manages and deals with the "Orient" by means of discourse to think about the idea […]