"The Rubble and the Ruin: Spec Ops:The Line as Anti-War Game" Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in new media and globalization in the arts. In her analysis of photography, film and digital media, Murray seeks to illuminate these technological expressions in their cultural contexts. Soraya Murray is Assistant Professor […]

“Goldfinger" and the Decline of the Classical Hollywood Narrative The 1964 film Goldfinger, released right after the break-up of the Hollywood studio system, presented a new kind of narrative that did not conform to the classical Hollywood three-act model. In this talk, I will examine how Goldfinger differed dramaturgically from the classical Hollywood style and […]

"Bhakti Demands Biography: Crafting the Life of a Tamil Saint" Blake Wentworth’s current work revolves around a central feature of south Indian political life in premodernity, the mapping of sexuality onto the political domain such that lordly power is beautiful. By tracing the genealogy of this trope, he explores the interplay between ancient Tamil poetics […]

"Teaching Natural Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment" Michael Nauenberg has published on the foundations of quantum mechanics and has written extensively on the development of calculus in the seventeenth century with particular reference to the work of Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Barrow. His current work is on Newton’s development of celestial […]

"The Rice Queen's Brown Boy Dream: On Pedophilic Modernity, Performance and Queer Asia" Eng-Beng Lim works on transnational, Asian and queer issues through the lens of performance. His current work is on cultural pedagogies of neoliberal Asia that are produced on the one hand by large-scale transnational theatrical productions and on the other hand by […]

Interested in the emotional terrains of activism, Deborah Gould’s current project explores political appetites, encounters, and the "not-yet" of politics. Deborah Gould is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

PAs a former director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center, Dan Selden’s long-standing interest in cross-cultural aesthetics extends to film production. Selden focuses on the application of the Western cinematic apparatus to non-Western contexts in an effort to better understand the work of such directors as `Abbās Kiyārostamī and Wong Kar Wai. Daniel […]

Jennifer Derr’s work explores the configuration and experience of the colonial state in Egypt through its construction of the agricultural environments that lined the banks of the Nile River. Derr traces the intersections of the colonial state in Egypt with the material experiences of environmental infrastructure, resource allocation, disease, and the geographies of colonial capitalism. […]

Though an historian of medieval thought, Clare Monagle’s most recent work turns to the twentieth-century and the deployment of the Middle Ages in International Relations Theory. Monagle argues that charting the medieval in this frame enables a new insight into the understanding of historical time that informs the discipline of international relations. Clare Monagle is […]

Katherine Gordy’s current book project traces the interrelations between what she identifies as different “spheres” of Cuban political thought—political doctrine (official sphere), political theory (academic sphere), and daily practice (popular sphere)—in order to challenge accounts that treat Cuban socialist ideology as solely state-originated dogma or as necessarily in opposition to academic and popular forms of […]