Participants
Fran Bartkowski
Roya Biggie
Sealy Gilles
Sealy Gilles has degrees from Carleton College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her teaching experience ranges from community college and continuing education programs to her current position as Associate Professor in the English Department at Long Island University in Brooklyn. She also serves as co-chair of her department. Although her degree and early publications are in Old English literature, more specifically the Anglo-Saxon elegies found in the Exeter Book, recent work centers on the later Middle Ages and the early modern period. In particular, she is interested in epidemic disease and its manifestations in the literature of medieval and early modern England. Related projects include a study of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as a text written in the time of plague and readings of plague pamphlets from sixteenth and seventeenth century London.
Susanne Hafner
Elizabeth Johnson
Elizabeth Johnson is a doctoral candidate in Geography at the University of Minnesota and an adjunct worker in the CUNY system. Her doctoral dissertation, “Animating Futures, Reanimating Biopolitics” explores the new ways in which geckos, lobsters, jellyfish and other animals have become relevant to politics. She completed her MA in Geography in 2008 on issues of tourism and biodiversity conservation in Western Sichuan, China. Prior to her graduate studies she was a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, where she taught courses in environmental change at Chongqing Institute of Technology.
Marnia Lazreg
Marnia Lazreg is professor of sociology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, City University of New York. She is a former fellow of the Bunting Institute (Harvard University); the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women (Brown University); the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (Italy); and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She has a wide-ranging experience in development having worked at the World Bank and held consultancies for UNDP, UNRISD, CIDA and UNESCO among others. She has organized and led gender and development workshops in a number of countries, including North Korea, China, Vietnam, Pakistan, and North Africa. In addition to her work on development, she has carried out research and written extensively on social class, colonial history, cultural movements, human rights, gender, Islam and geopolitics. Her latest books are: Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton University Press, 2008), and Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton University Press, 2009), which is in its second printing.
Wendy Lee
Wendy Lee is an assistant professor in the English Department at Yale University. She recently received her Ph.D. in English at Princeton University where she was a Newcombe Fellow in Religion and Ethics. Her research focuses on uncooperative emotions—like impassivity, hostility, and shame—in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel, and especially in the work of Jane Austen. She is interested in how cultures of sympathy and benevolence produce dysphoric feelings and in the forms of alienation that attend the sentimental practices of novel-reading. Wendy is a former journalist and an occasional contributor to The New York Times Styles Section. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and M.Phil. from Cambridge University, where she was a Kellett Fellow at Clare College.
Howard Meltzer
Howard Meltzer is an Associate Professor and Deputy Chair for Music at BMCC. Before returning to CUNY, he taught at the University of North Texas and Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. His primary field of research is aesthetics and the philosophy of music; his most recent publications are Ways of Listening, a textbook in the history and philosophy of Western music in preliminary release this fall and “Constant Change,” an essay on music’s ontology in [Im]Permance: Cultures in/out of Time (Carnegie Mellon/Penn State University Press). A performer and music theorist, Dr. Meltzer has a B.Mus in piano performance from Manhattan School of Music and a PhD in Historical Musicology/Music Theory from Columbia University.
Lee Quinby
Lee Quinby is a Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York City. The author of three books, Millennial Seduction (1999), Anti-Apocalypse (1994), and Freedom, Foucault, and the Subject of America (1991), she is also editor of Genealogy and Literature (1995) and co-editor of Feminism and Foucault (1988), Gender and Apocalyptic Desire (2006), and Reel Revelations: Apocalypse and Film (forthcoming 2010)
Christopher Schmidt
Christopher Schmidt is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. He is the author of a book of poems, The Next in Line (Slope Editions 2008), and his writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review, Court Green, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, SubStance, Arizona Quarterly, and many other venues. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Waste Matters, which examines treatments of garbage, detritus, and waste in 20th-century art and literature.
Sylvia Tomasch
Sylvia Tomasch is Professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Recent publications include articles on the history of medieval studies, Chaucer, medieval antisemitism, historical cartography, and medieval postcoloniality.
