Françoise Lionnet (Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Michigan) is Professor of French and Francophone Studies & Comparative Literature. She is Director of the Global Fellows Program, an interdisciplinary postdoctoral program at UCLA. A comparatist specializing in 19th and 20th century French, Francophone, British and American literatures, she has written extensively on gender and autobiography, on the traditions of the African diaspora (in the Caribbean and Mauritius in particular), on colonial, postcolonial, or “transcolonial” literatures, and on creolization. She is the author of Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Cornell, 1989) and Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Cornell, 1995). She has edited or co-edited seven journal special issues, including Yale French Studies on “Post/Colonial Conditions” (82 and 83, 1993), L'Esprit Créateur on "Cities, Modernity, and Cultural Memory" (2001), Signs on “Postcolonial, Indigenous, and Emergent Feminisms” (1995) and “Development Cultures” (2004), Comparative Literary Studies on “Intra-National Comparisons” (2003), and MLN on “Francophone Studies: New Landscapes” (2003). With Shu-mei Shih, she co-edited the book Minor Transnationalism (Duke, 2005) on comparative minority discourses. Among her most recent publications are essays in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Johns Hopkins, 2006) and a coauthored piece in Introduction to Scholarship (MLA, 2006).

She directed an NEH Summer Institute in 1995 on "French Cultural Studies: Identities, Communities, and Cultural Practices," and she has received numerous grants and fellowships (e.g. from the American Philosophical Society, SSRC, Fulbright, Rockefeller, UCHRI, UNFPA). She taught at Northwestern University before moving to UCLA in 1998, and she has also been a visitor at Cornell, Duke, the University of Mauritius, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. From 2003-06, she was “special professor” in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is currently working on two books of essays: Dissonant Echoes and Décalages.

  Shu-mei Shih is a scholar of comparative literature with expertise and interest in Chinese, Sinophone,  Asian American, and world literature.  Her research focus also includes transnational feminism, comparative minority discourse, modernism, (post)humanism, and (post)colonialism.  Her first book was a comprehensive study of Chinese literary modernism from the early twentieth century that integrated theoretical,  historical, and textual approaches.  The book, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (University of California Press, 2001), also engaged deeply with theories of colonialism and postcolonialism and has been translated into Chinese (2007).  Her second book, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (University of California Press, 2007), theorizes and substantiates the new category of the Sinophone as the culture and literature of peoples speaking and writing different Chinese languages outside China, especially Taiwan,  pre-1997 Hong Kong,  Southeast Asia, and Chinese America.  She edited a special issue of Postcolonial Studies on the topic of "Globalization and Taiwan's (In)significance"; co-edited (with Françoise Lionnet) Minor Transnationalism (Duke 2005); and also co-edited (with Ying-ying Chien) a special issue of Chung-Wai Literary Monthly on the topic of "Third World and Transnational Feminism."  She publishes widely in various scholarly journals in the U.S., and writes regularly for journals and anthologies in Taiwan and China.  Her current projects include two editing projects, one for PMLA (Publication of Modern Language Association) on the topic of "Comparative Racialization" (October 2008) and the other a co-edited collection of essays entitled Creolization of Theory.  Otherwise, she is either busy trying to invent a new term for a new monograph, called Trialectics with which she hopes to move cross-cultural and transnational studies beyond dialectical models, or exploring the conditions of possibility for the postsocialist human in contemporary China.

   Ali Behdad is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of Comparative Literature Department at UCLA. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Duke University Press, 1994), and A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Duke University Press, 2005). He has published numerous articles on Postcolonial Theory, immigration and nationalism, travel literature, and photography. He is currently working on a book on the history of photography in the Middle East tentatively titled Contact Vision: On Modernity and Photography in the Middle East.

   Felicity Nussbaum is a specialist in British literature (1660-1800), postcolonial and Anglophone studies, and gender studies. Before joining the faculty at UCLA, Prof. Nussbaum taught at Syracuse University and Indiana University, South Bend. Her current projects include a book on the women, performance, and material practices in the eighteenth-century British theatre; and a collection of essays on The Arabian Nights in historical context. She has recently authored two essays on abolition, slavery, and the "Orient."

Professor Nussbaum is the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press 2003), and editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press 2003). In addition, she has published Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives (Johns Hopkins University Press 1995); The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press), co-recipient of the Gottschalk Prize for the best book in its field for 1989; and The Brink of all We Hate: Satires on Women, 1660-1750 (University Press of Kentucky 1984). As co-editor of The New Eighteenth Century: Theory/Politics/English Literature ( Methuen 1987) with Laura Brown, she was instrumental in integrating theoretical work into eighteenth-century studies. With Helen Deutsch she has edited Defects: Engendering the Modern Body, an anthology of essays in the Corporealities series from the University of Michigan Press (2000).

She has been awarded numerous academic honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and an NEH Fellowship. She has also held a Marta Sutton Weeks Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, and a Rockefeller Humanist-in-Residence Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University. She is president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

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  Miwon Kwon trained in architecture as an undergraduate then received a M.A. in photography (both at UC Berkeley), before completing her Ph.D. in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University in 1998. She joined the faculty at UCLA to teach contemporary art history (post-1945) in the same year. Along the way, she helped to curate several exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, was a founding editor and publisher of Documents, a journal of art, culture, and criticism (1992-2004), and defined her area of research and writings to encompass several disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, public art, and urban studies. She is the author of One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002) as well as numerous essays on the practices of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Marclay, Ana Mendieta, Do-Ho Suh, Mark Dion, Gabriel Orozco, Jimmie Durham, Christian Philipp Müller, Josiah McElheny, among others. She received a Scholars Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in 2003-04 and is currently at work on two new book-length projects, one on the art and the city, and the other on the problems of exchange. She is Graduate Advisor for 2005-07.

  A past editor of Theatre Journal, Professor Case has published widely in the fields of German theatre, feminism and theatre, performance theory, and lesbian critical theory. She has published over thirty articles in journals such as Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, differences, and Theatre Research International and in many anthologies of critical works. Her books include Feminism and Theatre and The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture. She has edited several anthologies of critical works and play texts, including The Divided Home/Land: Contemporary German Women's Plays; Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance; Performing Feminisms, and many others. Along with Philip Brett and Susan Leigh Foster, she edits a book series with Indiana University Press entitled Unnatural Acts. Professor Case has been an invited professor in residence at Swarthmore College, Stockholm University, and the National University of Singapore. Her work has received several national awards.

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Maite Zubiaurre (Ph. D. Comparative Literature, Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. She is the author of El espacio en la novela realista. Paisajes, miniaturas, perspectivas [Space and Setting in the Realist Novel. Landscapes, Miniatures, Perspectives] (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), a book on the dialectics of space and gender in European and Latin American realist fiction. She has published extensively on modern Spanish and Latin American women’s narrative, transatlantic feminism, and literary representations of female exile and diaspora. She is currently working on a book on textual and visual representations of the erotic in Spanish popular culture provisionally titled Cultures of the Erotic in Spain 1898-1939.

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