2006-2008

Elsa Chen

Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Leeds, UK. Her dissertation examined overlooked art exhibitions held since 1993 to commemorate the February 28 Incident, a massacre that occurred in 1947. The commemorations of the Incident in general were instrumental in laying the foundation for new Taiwanese nation building, which is claimed by some to have worsened already conflicted relations in Taiwan as well as in the troubled Pacific region dominated by China, Japan, and the US. Her postdoctoral research investigates how works by renowned contemporary immigrant Chinese American artists migrate transnationally in terms of their aesthetics, cultural signification, historical situations, and cultural reception. She is also initiating a research project with Prof. Griselda Pollock on how European and North American feminisms and feminist art histories have been encountered in Asian art worlds. Her recent publications include The Margins of Becoming: Identity and Culture in Taiwan, Harrison and Storm (eds.), (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006); and two monographs Faces of Memory: the Issue of Self in Art (Taipei: Sanmin, 2005), and Translating Dialogue: Journeys between Art and Social Contexts (Taipei: ArtCo, 2004). Her curatorial project on transnational Asian migration in Taiwan/Asia, City of Swallows: Migration, Post/Colonial Memory, and New Taiwan Colour (2006), was awarded the 1st Prize of the Production Grants to Independent Curators in Visual Arts by the National Culture and Arts Foundation in Taiwan in 2005.

Alessandra Di Maio

Alessandra Di Maio is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches migrant literature and culture in the Italian department and literature from the African diaspora in the department of Comparative Literature. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and her Italian doctorate in Literary Sciences at the University of Bari, Italy. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Palermo, Italy. Among her publications are the volumes Tutuola at The University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), the collection An African Renaissance (ed., Palermo: Kalos, 2006), and Forme transatlantiche: l’arte del romanzo breve (Milan, Mimesis, forthcoming). Among her translations are Wole Soyinka’s Sul far del giorno (Milan: Frassinelli 2007, original title You Must Set Forth at Dawn) and Nuruddin Farah’s Rifugiati (Rome: Meltemi, 2003; original title Yesterday, Tomorrow). Her area of specialization includes migratory, postcolonial, diasporic and black studies, with a particular attention to the formation of national and transnational cultural identities. She is currently at work on a manuscript on the literature of the African diaspora in Italy.

Eulàlia Moles

Eulàlia Moles is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches Chicana and Catalan Transnational Feminist Discourses for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Chicana/o Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley in December 2004, with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the Women’s Studies Department. She is currently working on Envisioning Resistant Spaces Through Chicana and Catalan Decolonial Writings of the 1970s-1990s in Present Globalization, a comparison between the subalternities of Chicana and Catalan feminist and queer women writers who continue to resist histories of Castilian Spanish cultural and political imperialisms.

Babli Sinha

Babli Sinha is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches 20th century British and anglophone literature, film, and post-colonial theory in the Department of English. This year, her courses include “The Imperial Romance and Its Critics” and “Narrative in the British Modernist Novel.” She has recently published Fearing the close-up: the threat of spatial intimacy in Indian cinema of the 1920s ( New Delhi: Biblio, 2005). She is currently undertaking two projects: an article entitled “Empire Films and the Dissemination of Americanism” and a book, Entertaining the Raj: Cinema and the Cultural Intersections of Britain, the United States, and India in the Early Twentieth Century.

2007-2009

Fatima El-Tayeb

Fatima El-Tayeb is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is housed in the Comparative Literature department She is also Assistant Professor for African American Culture and Film in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego. Originally from Germany, she was active in black, migrant, and feminist organizing there and in the Netherlands. She is a former member of the Amsterdam-based queer of color collective Strange Fruit, co-author of the movie Everything will be fine, and co-founder of the Black European Studies Project. Her first book, published in German, explored the relationship between race and national identity in early 20th century Germany. She has published a number of articles at the intersection of queer and feminist theory and diaspora studies, most recently “Urban Diasporas. Race, Identity, and Popular Culture in a Post-Ethnic Europe”, (JCAS Symposium Series 22 10/2006); “Experimentelle (Frei)Raeume: Materielle Realitaeten von Kuenstler/innen of Color,” in Ha/al-Samarai/Mysorekar (eds), re/visionen. Poskoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland (Muenster: Unrast 2007) and “Blackness and Its (Queer) Discontents,” in: Nagl/Lennox (eds), Remapping Black Germany (Amherst: UMass Press, forthcoming). She currently works on a book on the racialization of migrants and minorities in contemporary Europe and the queering of ethnicity as a minoritarian counterstrategy.

Kris Manjapra

Kris Manjapra completed his dissertation in the Harvard History Department in June 2007. A student of modern intellectual history from a transnational perspective, his fundamental interest is in how genealogies of thought develop within global arenas, and amongst entangled histories. Kris Manjapra¹s research deals on modern South Asian and modern German thought, anti-colonial cosmopolitanisms of the interwar years, South Asian diasporic nationalism, the disenchantment of the world in Germany, and the modernist discourses that bridged the colonial divide and occupied colonial and European thinkers alike. His theoretical interests are in hermeneutics and postcolonial historiography. He has published an article on the travels of Indian anti-colonial thinkers to WWI Germany in the Journal of Global History (November 2006), and he is currently working on his book manuscript on Cosmopolitan Encounter between Indian Revolutionaries and German Radicals, 1905-1939.

Sonali Pahwa

Sonali Pahwa is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Theatre department. She teaches a graduate seminar, “Ethnography of Theatre”, in that department, as well as “Language, Media and Community in the Arab World” in the anthropology department. She earned her PhD in sociocultural anthropology at Columbia University in 2007. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Staging Difference: Nation and Generation in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre. Her areas of specialization include anthropology of performance, linguistic anthropology, transnational media, and the Arab world.

Sarah Valentine

In May 2007, Sarah Valentine defended her dissertation, "The Poetry and Thought of Gennady Aigi" in the Slavic Department at Princeton University. The dissertation examines the poetry of Chuvash poet Gennady Aigi (1934-2006), his role in the late-Soviet Moscow avant-garde, and the problems associated with studying work such as his that lies on the canonical and political fringe.

Currently, Sarah is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her postdoctoral research considers the contribution of marginalized writers and artists to Moscow's avant-garde movements of the 1960s-1980s, and she is at work on the book-length study tentatively titled: Gennady Aygi and the Moscow Avant-Garde: The Politics of Difference in Late-Soviet Unofficial Art. This year Sarah will teach "Russian Literature through World Cinema" and "Russia and Asia" in the Slavic Department.

Concurrently Valentine holds a Templeton Foundation grant for research at Princeton's Center for the Study of Religion, where she participates in the interdisciplinary "Cognitive and Textual Methods Seminar." Her research for this project explores the intersection of spirituality and social organization in Moscow avant-garde art of the same era. In addition to her academic work, Sarah writes and translates poetry.

For more information, please contact Laura Clennon via e-mail at clennon@humnet.ucla.edu.