Ackar Abbas, opening speaker, is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine.
Dina al-Kassim, faculty panel moderator, is an associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley.
Konstantin Butz, panelist, is a PhD student in American Studies at the a.r.t.e.s. Research School at the University of Cologne, Germany. He got his "Magister Artium" in American Studies and Cultural Studies from the University of Bremen in 2007. His research interests include youth cultures; (un-)popular literature and (un-)popular music.
Anna Guercio, conference organizer, is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. She got her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from Brown University in 2003 and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 2007. Her research interests include literary translation, translation theory, contemporary poetry, and world literature.
Adriana Johnson, faculty respondent, is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine; Ph.D., Duke University; B.A., Duke University
Crystal Hickerson, panelist, is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine and got her M.A. from SUNY Buffalo in 2008. Her research interests include: aesthetics and models of thought; intersections between poetry, continental philosophy, urban design and visual culture; problematics of voice, style, and tone in discourse; hybridity and genre; poetic novels of 20th c. Latin America and postmodern world literature; modernisms and the avant-garde
Arlene Keizer, faculty panel speaker, is an Associate Professor of English and of African American Studies at UC Irvine. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1996, M.A., Stanford University, 1988.
Sandy Kim, panelist, is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at USC. She spent her undergraduate years at Stanford University, where she double-majored in English Literature and Human Biology. Her current research interests focus on the impossibilities and possibilities of thinking the aesthetic, the ontological, and the political together (in various combinations and permutations), particularly within psychoanalytic and/or Marxist paradigms. The literary traditions she draws from are Korean literature, Latin American literature and English literature.
Lance Langdon, panelist, graduated from Swarthmore College in 2000 with a major in English Literature and a minor in History. In his eight years as a teacher in the San Fernando Valley and on the West-Side, he taught everything from seventh grade Algebra to twelfth grade Chicano/a and Latin American Literature. After moonlighting in CSUN's credentialling and creative writing programs, he returned to the full-time study of literature here at UCI in the fall of 2008. He is currently struggling with the latest in a long and rather anticlimatic series of existential dilemmas over his course of study, this one concerning the relative merits of historicist, rhetorical, and compositional approaches to 20th century literature. He is pretty sure that most members of his audience will have read more of Foucault than he.
Calee M. Lee is currently a M.A. student in the department of English
and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton.
With a B.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from New York University, her
professional and research work has centered around dramatic
literature, new media writing, and genre theory. She is currently
writing her M.A. thesis on the influence of Samuel Beckett's genre
expanding work on contemporary female playwrights and will be applying
to Ph.D. programs for the 2011-2012 school year.
and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton.
With a B.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from New York University, her
professional and research work has centered around dramatic
literature, new media writing, and genre theory. She is currently
writing her M.A. thesis on the influence of Samuel Beckett's genre
expanding work on contemporary female playwrights and will be applying
to Ph.D. programs for the 2011-2012 school year.
Adonia Lugo, panelist, is a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Adonia received her B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College in 2005. Her research focuses on intentionality and authenticity in culture change movements. Alternative economies and and the alternative transportation movement make practice-oriented interventions in the market-driven landscape that has developed in automotive LA. As grassroots activists and policy-oriented advocates seek to redesign sociality in the United States, how do they negotiate issues of public and private space in the setting of Los Angeles? Using the embodied practice of bicycling as a locus, Adonia studies issues of consciousness, phenomenology, and urban habitus at nonprofits and in the street.
Bill Maurer, faculty panel speaker, is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at UC Irvine; PhD: Stanford, 1994. He is the director of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.
Chandler McWilliams, panelist, is a writer, artist, and programmer. He studied film and photography at Columbia College in Chicago and later political science and philosophy at the University of Illinois; and went on to complete graduate work in philosophy at The New School For Social Research in New York City. While in graduate school, he returned to programming, an art he began a decade earlier. Relearning to program had a profound impact, and offered a new medium for theoretical and artistic exploration.
Chandler is a lecturer in the Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA, and is the co-author of Form + Code in Design, Architecture, and Art - due out on Princeton Architectural Press in Fall 2010. His current work focuses on themes of affect, repetition, computation, and epistemology.
Chandler is a lecturer in the Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA, and is the co-author of Form + Code in Design, Architecture, and Art - due out on Princeton Architectural Press in Fall 2010. His current work focuses on themes of affect, repetition, computation, and epistemology.
Jane Newman, faculty respondent, is a Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine; PH.D., Princeton University. She has recently completed a book entitled: Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque.
Ariel Perloff, panelist, received a B.A. in Rhetoric with minors in Philosophy and Creative Writing from UC Berkeley. She is currently a graduate student in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Her interests include phenomenology, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis, the modern and postmodern novel, painting, photography, and affect.
Nasrin Rahimieh, faculty respondent, is a Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine; Maseeh Chair and Director, Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture; Ph.D., University of Alberta, 1988
Abraham Romney, conference organizer, is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. He got his B.A. in English with Spanish minor at BYU-Idaho in 2005, and his M.A. in English from the University of Oregon in 2007. His research interests include the history of rhetoric; translation; 19th and 20th-century Latin American literature and philology.
Norman Makoto Su, panelist, recently graduated with his PhD under Professor Gloria Mark in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. He has research interests in HCI, CSCW, and ubicomp. Fundamentally, his research investigates how are people, in their everyday social spheres, appropriating and shaped by technology when seeking to accomplish a particular domain's work. He has done studies on the temporal micro-interactions between information workers and their computational artifacts in their organizations and the political processes by which such technology become ingrained in their respective social spheres.
Ameeth Vijay, conference organizer, is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. He got his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2004. His research interests include migration and globalization.
