VILASHINI COOPPAN Assistant Professor of Literature, UCSC Vilashini Cooppan is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing, published by Stanford University Press in 2009. Her most recent scholarship engages postcolonial studies, race and ethnicity, and comparative and world literature. Fall 2014 Colloquium Series: October 15: Bali Sahota October 22: […]

NIRVIKAR SINGH Sarbjit Singh Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies and Professor of Economics, UCSC Professor Singh explores how Sikh Studies in the North American academy is engaging with intellectual currents that can broadly be termed "post-modern." More specifically, he critiques the asymmetrical privileging of Western ‘post-modern’ scholarship on Sikhs against the Sikh community’s […]

JUNED SHAIKH Assistant Professor of History, UCSC Juned Shaikh works on labor, urbanity, and caste in India. His book focuses on the entanglements and contradictions of space in Bombay city in the 20th century. It explores the role of caste –more particularly the former untouchable or Dalit castes – in city planning, labor markets, trade […]

DEAN MATHIOWETZ Associate Professor of Politics, UCSC Dean Mathiowetz’s current work is about the pleasures of luxurious superordination, as a form of what he calls “political sadism.” His work makes sense of the challenges that luxury poses for the realization of democratic aims, and explores the possibilities offered by leisure as a counterpoint to these […]

DAVID L. CLARK Professor of English and Cultural Studies and Associate Member of the Department of Health, Aging and Society, McMaster University, Canada In addition to completing a book on Immanuel Kant’s late work, (Bodies and Pleasures in Late Kant), David Clark is pursuing two projects: one on the question of animality, atrocity, and the […]

TERRY BURKE Research Professor of History, UCSC Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, “Moroccan Islam.” In his most recent book The Ethnographic State, Professor Burke argues that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers influenced by British colonial […]

Maya Peterson's work stands at the intersection of environmental history and imperial history. Her current book project explores the ways in which a focus on the physical environment might open up new avenues for thinking about modernity and colonial relationships in Central Asia under Russian and Soviet rule. She is Assistant Professor of History at […]

Naveeda Khan’s work traverses spaces of religious crisis and conflict in urban Pakistan to everyday life on shifting land and emergent perceptions of climate change in riparian Bangladesh. Her current interest is to explore the physiognomy of the natural from within the social and the theological. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins […]

Carolyn Dean is currently working on a co-authored book project entitled Colonial Things, Cosmopolitan Thinking: Locating the Indigenous Art of Spanish America. Recognizing that the humanistic disciplines have often had an uncomfortable relationship with objects created outside Western traditions, this project seeks to illuminate how indigenous things in the colonial past have been used and […]

Madhavi Murty works in the fields of feminist media studies, gender and globalization, nationalism and South Asian cultural studies. Madhavi is currently working on a book manuscript titled Myths of the Real: Political Economy and the Spectacle of the Ordinary in Post Reform India. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture […]