POLITICAL EMOTIONS: A NEW AGENDAS CONFERENCE
Friday and Saturday, October 3-4, 2008
9:00am-5:00pm
University of Texas at Austin
Lady Bird Johnson Room, CMA 5.160 (campus map/room map)
Free and open to the public
Participant Biographies
Keynote Speaker: Lauren Berlant
Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is author of a national sentimentality trilogy that spans the U.S. 19th century to the present: The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991); The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008); and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997). She is also editor of 4 volumes focusing on affect and emotion: Intimacy (2000); Venus Inferred, with Laura Letinsky (2001); Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest with Lisa Duggan (2001); and Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004). Additionally, as co-editor of Critical Inquiry, she has just edited a 2-volume special issue on the concept of the case, On the Case. Her current project, Cruel Optimism, focuses on political depression.
Samuel Baker
Samuel Baker teaches in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he specializes in British Romantic literature and in literary and cultural theory. He has published essays on Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, and Matthew Arnold, among other authors; his first book, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture (forthcoming in 2009) traces the British Romantic idea of culture back to how the Lake Poets and Lord Byron engaged with the emergence of Britain's hegemony at sea. New projects underway explore Walter Scott's legacy in American public culture, the evolution of philosophical dispositions in the Romantic novel, and "historical cosmology" as a conceptual apparatus. He is spending 2008-2009 as a Fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.
Deborah Gould
Deborah Gould is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She was involved in ACT UP for many years and now is part of Feel Tank Chicago. Her research interests are in the affective stimuli and blockages to political imaginaries and to political action. Her first book--Moving Politics: Emotion in the Fight Against AIDS--is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press (Fall 2009).
Gayatri Gopinath
Gayatri Gopinath is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2005) as well as numerous articles on gender, sexuality and diasporic cultural production. Most recently her work has appeared in the Blackwell Anthology of LGBT Studies (eds. Molly McGarry and George Haggerty, 2008).
Neville Hoad
Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota, 2007), and co-editor (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) of Sex & Politics in South Africa: Equality / Gay & Lesbian Movement / the Anti-apartheid Struggle (Double Storey, 2005). His work has also appeared in Postcolonial Studies, GLQ, Cultural Critique, Public Culture, South Atlantic Quarterly, Development Update, Current Anthropology, and in several anthologies. He is currently working on a book about the literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
Liza Johnson
Liza Johnson is an artist and filmmaker. Her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker Art Center, and the Centre Pompidou, as well as the New York, Berlin, and Rotterdam Film Festivals, among many others. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm and the Sundance Institute, and has published a number of articles and interviews about art and film. Johnson is Associate Professor of Art at Williams College.
Heather Love
Heather Love is the M. Mark and Esther K. Watkins Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her A.B. from Harvard University in Literature and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in English. Her areas of interest include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?"). She has published essays in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Grey Room, New Formations, Postmodern Culture, and Rhizomes and in the collections Bad Modernisms, Rethinking Tragedy, and Gay Shame. She is currently at work on project on the source materials for Erving Goffman’s 1963 book Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity (“The Stigma Archive”).
Martin Manalansan
Martin F. Manalansan IV is an anthropologist who studies queer issues, culinary and corporeal cultures, and Filipino migration. He is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies. Before going back to academia in 1999, he worked in AIDS prevention education, research, and program evaluation for ten years in New York City in two non-profit agencies, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS. He presently serves as co-president of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists and board member of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. He is the Social Science Review Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and is a member of the Social Science Research Council Working Group on Gender and Migration. His publications include three edited collections: Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America which was the winner of the 2001 Cultural Studies Book Prize by the Association for Asian American Studies, (with Arnaldo Cruz-Malave) Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, and (with Katharine Donato, Donna Gabbacia, Jennifer Holdaway and Patricia Pessar, Jennifer Holdaway) a special issue of the International Migration Review (2006) entitled “Gender and Migration Revisited.” His book Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003) was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize by the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists. His essays have appeared in journals such as Social Text, positions: east asia cultures critique, and GLQ. His current projects include Manila’s urban modernity, return migration to the Philippines, and the cultural politics of space, food, and olfaction in Asian American immigrant communities of New York City.
Roberto Tejada
Roberto Tejada joins the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of exhibition catalogs that include Manuel Álvarez Bravo: In Focus, América Foto Latina, Mexico/New York, and Luis Gispert: Loud Image. Tejada’s books in media theory and art historical scholarship include National Camera, Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment and A Ver:Celia Alvarez Muñoz. A poet and literary translator, he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature award for his translations of the Cuban poet José Lezama Lima. His books of poetry include Mirrors for Gold, and he continues to co-edit Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, a journal he founded in Mexico City (1991).
Sasha Torres
Sasha Torres teaches media studies and critical theory at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of Black, White and In Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (2003) and editor of Living Color: Race and Television in the United States (1998). She has served as a co-editor of Camera Obscura, and on the editorial boards of Aztlán, GLQ, Meridians and Television and New Media. Her current research investigates US television's responses to the policies and political culture of the Bush years.
Amy Villarejo
Amy Villarejo is chair of the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance at Cornell University, where she also teaches in the Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program. She is author, among other books, of Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Duke) and of the forthcoming Ethereal Queer, as well as a number of essays in journals such as New German Critique and Social Text.
Michele White
Michele White is an Assistant Professor of New Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. MIT Press published The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship in 2006. Recent articles include: “Where Do You Want to Sit Today? Computer Programmers’ Static Bodies and Disability,” Information, Communication and Society 9, 3 (2006); “Television and Internet Differences by Design: Rendering Liveness, Presence, and Lived Space,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 12, 3 (2006); and “My Queer eBay: ‘Gay Interest’ Photographic Images and the Visual Culture of Buying,” in Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire, ed. Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Nathan Scott Epley (Routledge, 2006). White’s current book project, which is entitled Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay, suggests how eBay promises to fulfill all desires, deliver any object, and provide an equitable community but tends to produce normative gender, racial, and sexuality positions and a setting in which people are expected to work for the company without economic compensation.
