Biographical Information
on Participants of the
Gender, War, and Militarism Conference
Nadje Al-Ali is a social anthropologist working at the new Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. She specializes in women and gender issues in the Middle East, especially women’s movements and activism in Egypt and Iraq. She has also been working on the gendered aspects of transnational migration and diaspora mobilization with special reference to Bosnia and Iraq. Her publications include Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (Zed Books 2007); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000) and New Approaches to Migration (ed. Routledge 2002) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Most recently, she has co-authored a book entitled What Kind of Liberation? Women, Gender and Political Transition in Iraq (University of California Press, forthcoming). Nadje Al-Ali considers herself an activist academic and is a founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action on Iraq. Act Together is a London-based group of Iraqi and British women raising consciousness about the effect of war and occupation on women and gender relations in Iraq (www.acttogether.org). She is also a member of Women in Black, UK.
Rita Barnard completed her undergraduate education at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch in South Africa. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1990. She is Professor of English and Director of Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania. She serves on the Executive Committees of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and the African Studies Center and is a member of the Council for University Scholars. Barnard’s scholarly interests include twentieth-century American literature, postcolonial studies (especially African and South African literature), modernism, globalization and transnational cultural studies, and contemporary women writers. In 2005 she received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Barnard’s first book, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1995, and her second book, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place, is just out from Oxford.
Sigal Ben-Porath received her Ph.D. in political philosophy from Tel-Aviv University in 2000. Subsequently she was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. She moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 to become a special assistant to the president, as well as research associate at the Graduate School of Education, where she is currently an assistant professor. She teaches courses on the philosophy of educational policy, theories of justice, and ethics in practice. Her research focuses on the intersection between political philosophy and education, with an emphasis on issues of democratic citizenship, justice and education. She has published articles on the regulation of intimacy, on civic education in wartime, on post-war care ethics, and on just relations between adults and children. Her book Citizenship under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict was published in 2006 by Princeton University Press.
Victoria Bernal is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. Herresearch has addressed a range of issues relating to gender, migration, nationalism, transnationalism, development, cyberspace, and Islam. She has carried out ethnographic research in Eritrea, Tanzania, and the Sudan. Bernal has been the recipient of a number of prestigious grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She is the author of Cultivating Workers: Peasants and Capitalism in a Sudanese Village (Columbia University Press 1991) which analyzes rural transformations and the complex interplay of development policies, labor migration and peasant households. Her articles and chapters have appeared in numerous collections as well as in anthropological, African Studies, and interdisciplinary journals, including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, African Studies Review, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review. She is currently writing a book about diaspora and cyberspace, focusing on the Eritrean diaspora’s engagement in national politics and their creation of a transnational public sphere on line. The project investigates the new kinds of political subjectivities and sovereignties emerging in the contexts of international migration and new media.
Ariane Brunet is the Founder of the Coalition on Women’s Human Rights in Conflict Situations and is the Co-founder of the Urgent Action Fund. Brunet is currently the Coordinator of the Women’s Rights Program at Rights and Democracy in Montreal. In addition, Brunet is the Coordinator of a Coalition project to monitor the work of the International War Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda on gender-based crimes against women. She is the author of numerous articles and has contributed to many edited books on women, war, rights, and citizenship.
Charlotte Bunch is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University. Bunch has been an activist, author, and organizer in the women's, civil, and human rights movements for four decades. A Board of Governor’s Distinguished Service Professor in Women's and Gender Studies, Bunch was previously a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a founder of Washington D.C. Women's Liberation and of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly. She is the author of numerous essays and has edited or co-edited nine anthologies including the Center’s reports on the UN Beijing Plus 5 Review and the World Conference Against Racism. Her books include two classics: Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action and Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women's Human Rights.
R. Charli Carpenter holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon and is currently Assistant Professor of International Affairs at University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching interests include international norms and identities, gender and violence, war crimes, comparative genocide studies, and humanitarian action. She is the author of Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate 2006). Dr. Carpenter's current research focuses on the human rights network, investigating why certain issues but not others end up on the international agenda. She is particularly interested in the human rights of children born as a result of wartime rape and has recently edited a collection of essays on this topic entitled Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones (Kumarian 2007). Her current book project centers on the social construction of children's human rights during the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Deborah Cohler is an Assistant Professor of Women Studies at San Francisco State University. She researches the intersections of lesbian subjectivity, nationalism, and gender identity in early-twentieth-century England as well as the transnational production of queer identities in the early-twenty-first century. Particularly interested in the effects of war-time nationalist discourses on constructions of sexuality and gender, she has published articles on the rise of lesbian identity on the British home front in World War I (Journal of the History of Sexuality) and the gendered and sexual landscape of post-9/11 U.S. mass culture (Feminist Media Studies). She is currently completing a book entitled Queer Inversions: Gender Deviance, Female Sexuality, and Nationalism for the University of Minnesota Press.
Daša Duhačekis a professor of Philosophy and coordinator of the Women’s Studies Center in Belgrade, Serbia. She teaches at the Women’s Studies Center and at the University in Belgrade. She is co-author of Common Passion, Different Voices: Reflections on Citizenship and Intersubjectivity (2006) and has authored many articles in theoretical journals. Dasa Duhacek researches and writes in the area of feminist philosophy. Her primary focus is on the work of Hannah Arendt.
David L. Eng is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Diasporas and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke University Press 2001). In addition, he has co-edited with David Kazanjian Loss: The Politics of Mourning (University of California Press 2003) and with Alice Y. Hom Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple University Press 1998). Most recently, he co-edited with Judith Halberstam and Jose Muñoz a special issue of Social Text (2005) entitled "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" Professor Eng is the current co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Asian American Writers' Workshop as well as the former chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Cynthia Enloe is Research Professor of International Development and Women’s Studies at Clark University. Her research and teaching explores feminist ways of making sense of women in globalized factories, war, militarism and international politics. Among her recent books are Bananas, Beaches and Bases (2000), Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (2000), The Curious Feminist: Women in an New Age of Empire (2004) and just published, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (2007). In recent years, Enloe has been invited to lecture and give special seminars on feminism, militarization, and globalization in Japan, Korea, Turkey, Canada, Britain and numerous colleges across the U.S. She has written for Ms. Magazine and Village Voice and has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC. She serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including Signs and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!. She is co-author of two national best-sellers: Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006) and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them (2005), both written with her brother, David Goodman. In addition to producing and hosting Democracy Now!, Goodman also publishes a weekly opinion column, syndicated by King Features.
Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 500 stations in North America. Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! is broadcast on Pacifica, college, community, and National Public Radio stations, public access cable television stations, and PBS stations, satellite television (on Free Speech TV, channel 9415 of the DISH Network and Link TV, Ch 9410 on Dish Network and Ch. 375 of DirecTV), and the internet.
Marie Gottschalk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the former graduate chair of the department. She specializes in health policy, organized labor, business, public policy, and criminal justice. A former journalist and editor, she is the author of The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press 2000) and The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America(Cambridge University Press 2006), which won the 2007 Ellis Hawley Award from the Organization of American Historians.
Inderpal Grewal is Professor of Women's Studies at University of California, Irvine and the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Culture and Theory. Her research interests include transnational feminist theory; gender and globalization, human rights; NGO's and theories of civil society; theories of travel and mobility; South Asian cultural studies, postcolonial feminism; and Victorian imperial culture. She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Duke 1996) and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (2005), and (with Caren Kaplan) has written and edited Gender in a Transnational World: Introduction to Women's Studies (2001) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational: Feminist Practices (1994). Currently she is working on a book-length project on the relation between feminist practices and security discourses.
Sondra Haleis Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She has published Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State(Westview Press,1996) and many articles and book chapters on the topics of international gender studies; gender and social movements; women, war, conflict, and genocide; gender and citizenship; exile studies; and cultural studies. Her regional interests are in the Middle East and Africa. She is the co-editor of The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and is currently co-editing Sudan’s Killing Fields: Perspectives on Genocide,under contract by the University of Michigan Press. Her work in progress is on gender and perpetual-conflict situations and political organizing in exile. Professor Hale is an activistwho was a founder of Feminists in Support of Palestinian Women and is the founder and coordinator of the Darfur Task Force. Hale’s activism also includes various anti-war/anti-occupation activities (Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon). In addition to various teaching awards Professor Hale was given the Fair and Open Academic Environment Award from the Academic Senate of UCLA and has received awards from NSF, American Association of University Women, National Endowment for the Humanities, and others.
Elizabeth L. Hillman is Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law, Camden. Hillman received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Hillman’s work focuses on United States military law and history since the mid-20th century, especially the definition and prosecution of military crime and the role of gender and sexuality in military culture. A veteran of the U.S. Air Force, she taught history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and at Yale University and now teaches military law, constitutional law, legal history, and estates and trusts. She is the author of Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial (Princeton University Press 2005) and co-author of the casebook, Military Justice: Cases and Materials (LexisNexis 2007, with Eugene R. Fidell and Dwight H. Sullivan). Recent chapters and articles include “The Female Shape of the All-Volunteer Force” in Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (2007); “Guarding Women: Abu Ghraib and Military Sexual Culture” in One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers (2007); and “Gentlemen Under Fire: The U.S. Military and ‘Conduct Unbecoming,’” 26 Law & Inequality (forthcoming 2007). For the 2007-08 academic year, she is Visiting Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
Tami Amanda Jacoby is Associate Professor of Political Studies and Acting Director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She has published numerous articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict, women's movements in the Middle East, Terrorism, and Canadian Foreign Policy. She is the author of Bridging the Barrier: Israeli Unilateral Disengagement (Ashgate 2007), Women in Zones of Conflict: Power and Resistance in Israel (McGill-Queen's University Press 2005), and co-editor of Redefining Security in the Middle East (Manchester University Press 2002).
Ayako Kano is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania where she also serves on the executive committee for the Women's Studies Program. She is the author of Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2001) and is currently writing a book on Japanese feminist debates on issues such as prostitution, reproduction, labor, and militarism.
Caren Kaplan is Chair of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group and Professor in Women and Gender Studies at University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in 1987 and worked at Georgetown University and UC Berkeley before joining the faculty at UC Davis in 2004. Professor Kaplan is the author of Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Duke 1996) and the co-editor of Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minnesota 1994), Between Woman and Nation: Transnational Feminisms and the State (Duke 1999), and Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (McGraw-Hill 2001, 2005). Her current research focuses on visual culture, militarization, and technologies of location and navigation. The recipient of a 2006-07 ACLS Digital Innovation fellowship, Professor Kaplan's multimedia scholarship includes “Dead Reckoning: Vision, Mobility, and the Social Construction of Targets,” Vectors 2:2 (Jan. 2007) http://vectors.iml.Annenberg.edu/ and the forthcoming “Precision Targets" http://www.precisiontargets.com.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Kashani-Sabet received her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar. She completed her M.A., M.Phil., & Ph.D. in history at Yale University. Her book, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1999) discusses Iranian nationalism and analyzes the significance of land and border disputes, with attention to Iran 's shared boundaries with the Ottoman Empire (later Iraq and Turkey), Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf region. Her book is being translated into Persian by Kitabsara Press, Tehran, Iran. She is finishing a book on the history of women in modern Iran. She is also completing a book on America's historical relationship with Iran and the Islamic world.
David Kazanjian is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minnesota 2003). He has also co-edited (with David L. Eng) Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California 2003); The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries (Aunt Lute Books, 2004); and (with María Josefina Saldaña) a special issue of Social Text (no. 92, Fall 2007) "The Traffic in History: Papers from the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational Histories of the Americas."
Liz Kelly is Roddick Chair of Violence Against Women at London Metropolitan University, where she is also Director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (CWASU). She has been active in the field of violence against women and children for almost 30 years. She has published over 100 book chapters, journal articles and research reports and is the author of Surviving Sexual Violence (University of Minnesota Press 1988), which established the concept of a “continuum of violence.” CWASU has a strong reputation for feminist policy relevant research, which makes connections between forms of violence against women and child abuse. Recent publications include: Rape: A Gap or Chasm (Home Office 2005) the largest study of attrition in rape cases; Fertile Fields: Trafficking in Persons in Central Asia (IOM 2004); and “It’s Just Like Going to the Supermarket”: Men Buying Sex in East London (CWASU, 2007). CWASU recently launched the first MA on woman and child abuse in Europe. As an engaged academic, Professor Kelly is a Commissioner for the Women’s National Commission, the Fawcett Society’s Commission on Women and the Criminal Justice System, and chairs the End Violence Against Women Coalition.
Gwyn Kirk is a scholar-activist concerned with gender, race, and environmental justice in the service of genuine security, peace-making, and creating a sustainable world. Her current research focuses on organizing efforts to promote cleanup and healing from environmental contamination caused by war and preparations for war. Kirk holds a Ph.D. in political sociology from the London School of Economics. She is the co-editor of Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (McGraw-Hill, fourth edition 2007), a book that is used in women’s studies classes and by feminist activists. She has written widely on eco-feminism, militarism, and women’s peace organizing. She is a founding member of the International Women's Network Against Militarism, which links scholars and activists dealing with negative effects of US military bases, budgets, and operations on local communities in the Asia-Pacific region and the United States. She is a member of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—San Francisco.
Demie Kurz is Co-Director of the Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania and has a secondary appointment in the Sociology Department. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University and is the author of For Richer, For Poorer: Mothers Confront Divorce (Routledge 1995). Her research focus is on the sociological study of gender and the family and she has published in a variety of areas in this field. Her current book project focuses on how parents and teenagers negotiate teens’ adolescence and she has published several papers on this topic. She is also a founding member of the Carework Network, a network of researchers, policy makers, and practitioners who are concerned with promoting research and policy on carework and has co-edited Child Care and Inequality: Re-thinking Carework for Children and Youth (Routledge 2002).
Susan Lindee is Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Lindee’s research focuses on the history of genetics, radiation genetics, and military technology. She teaches courses on the history of biology, science and popular culture, science and war, and science and gender. She earned her Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cornell University (1990). Her books include Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (University of Chicago 1994), Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine (Johns Hopkins University 2005), The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (with Dorothy Nelkin, University of Michigan 1995 and 2004); and (as co-editor) Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology in the Age of Genetics (University of California 2003). Her current research, working title “Scientific Violence,” focuses on the impact of militarization on the scientific community in twentieth-century America. She recently (2007) published a paper on two linked social and intellectual networks of two militarized scientific fields, wound ballistics and aviation medicine, as they developed 1940-1960.
Ritty Lukose is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Dr. Lukose’s research focuses on the relationship between education, democracy, modernity, and globalization. It seeks to understand how education becomes a contradictory site for social change and transformation, with a strong focus on gender, at the intersection of caste and class formation. Her work, so far, has looked at higher education, student politics, youth culture, and transnationalism in Kerala, India. She has completed a book manuscript entitled Learning Modernity: Gender, Globalization, and Youth in Kerala. Her work engages the anthropology of education, modernity, and international development, the history and philosophy of education, globalization, youth cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, ethnographic theory and practice, South Asian Studies, and Asian-American and Diaspora Studies.
Shannon Lundeen is the Associate Director of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from Stony Brook University in 2005. Her areas of interest include feminist theory, queer theory, feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, and feminist legal theory. Dr. Lundeen serves on the Editorial Board of the International Journal in Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. She is co-editor of The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics (Springer 2006) and Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan (State University of New York Press 2007). She is currently working on a book project that examines claims of right and recognition for sexual minorities in juridical contexts.
Catherine Lutz is Professor of Anthropology at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University where she teaches courses on war and militarization, United States and Pacific societies, and race and gender. She is the author of Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Beacon 2001), a historical case study of the effects of Fort Bragg on Fayetteville, NC. Her other books include Reading National Geographic (with Jane Collins, Chicago 1993), Unnatural Emotions (Chicago 1988), based on her field research in Micronesia, and the co-authored collaborative ethnography, Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics (New York University Press 2007). She is editor of the forthcoming The Bases of Empire: The Struggle against US Military Outposts (Pluto Press with The Transnational Institute 2008). She is immediate past president of the American Ethnological Society, and recipient of the Leeds Prize, the Victor Turner Prize, and the Sterling Award. Some of her research has been conducted for activist organizations, including a domestic violence shelter, Cultural Survival, and the American Friends Service Committee.
Dyan Mazurana is Research Director at the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University, USA. Mazurana's areas of specialty include women's human rights, war-affected children and youth, armed conflict, and peacekeeping. Mazurana is one of the primary authors of Women, Peace and Security: Study of the United Nations Secretary-General as Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1325 (United Nations 2002) and has published over 40 scholarly and policy books and essays in numerous languages. Most recently Mazurana co-authored Where are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique: Their Lives During and After War (Rights & Democracy 2004) and co-edited Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping (Rowman & Littlefield 2005). Mazurana works with a variety of governments, UN agencies, human rights and child protection organizations regarding improving efforts to assist youth and women affected by armed conflict, including those associated with fighting forces. She has written and developed training materials regarding gender, human rights, armed conflict, and post-conflict periods for civilian, police, and military peacekeepers involved in UN and NATO operations. In conjunction with international human rights groups, she wrote materials now widely used to assist in documenting human rights abuses against women and girls during conflict and post-conflict reconstruction periods. She has also worked with international NGOs and the ICRC to dialogue with leaders of armed opposition groups worldwide to help strengthen and promote their adherence to international humanitarian and human rights law. Her research focuses on the experiences of armed conflict on youth combatants and civilian populations and their efforts for justice and peace. She has worked in Afghanistan, the Balkans, and southern, west and east Africa. Her current research focuses on Uganda and South Sudan.
Julie Mostov is Associate Vice Provost for International Programs and Associate Professor of Politics at Drexel University. She specializes in studies on gender and nation, the politics of national identity, and sovereignty and citizenship. Her recent publications promote the notion of soft-borders, transnational citizenship, and relational sovereignty, and explore gender and sexuality in the politics of national identity. Publications related to this work include, Soft Borders: Rethinking Sovereignty and Democracy (Palgrave Press, forthcoming) as well as her book with Rada Ivekovic, From Gender to Nation, (University of Bologna/Longo Editore 2002 and Zubaan Press 2004). In addition to this academic research, Mostov has been actively involved in development projects in Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, and Moldova, and programs and grants to stop violence against women in the U.S. and abroad. She is Co-Principal Investigator of a Grant to Reduce Violent Crimes Against Women on Campus awarded to Drexel, University of Pennsylvania, and University of the Sciences in Philadelphia by the Department of Justice (2003-2005; 2005-2007). She is also a member of the Board of Directors of Women Against Abuse, Inc.
V. Spike Peterson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona, with courtesy appointments in Women’s Studies, Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, and International Studies. Her research interests include feminist international relations theory, global political economy, and critical poststructuralist and feminist theorizing. Her most recent book, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (2003), introduces an alternative analytics for examining intersections of ethnicity/race, class, gender and national hierarchies in the context of today’s globalizing–and polarizing--dynamics. Her current research investigates informalization and ‘coping, combat and criminal economies’ in conflict zones.
Raka Ray is Associate Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asia Studies, and Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Ray’s areas of specialization are gender and feminist theory, domination and inequality, cultures of servitude and social movements. Publications on social movements include Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (University of Minnesota 1999; and in India, Kali for Women 2000), “Women’s Movements in the Third World: Identity, Mobilization and Autonomy” with Anna Korteweg (Annual Review of Sociology 1999) and Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics, co-edited with Mary Katzenstein (Rowman and Littlefeld 2005). She is at present writing a book titled Cultures of Servitude: The Making of a Middle Class in Calcutta and New York with co-author Seemin Qayum.
Katherine Sender is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the book Business, not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market (Columbia University Press 2004) and a new article, “Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Neoliberal Project,” in Critical Studies in Media Communication (2006), as well as many other articles on GLBT media and marketing. She is currently working on a new book on audience perceptions of makeover reality shows, “The Big Reveal: Makeover Television, Audiences, and the Promise of Transformation.” She is also the producer, director, and editor of a number of documentaries, including “Off the Straight and Narrow: Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Television” (1998), and “Further Off the Straight and Narrow: New Gay Visibility on Television” (2006).
Heather J. Sharkey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches classes in Islamic, Middle Eastern, and North African studies, and on the history of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish relations. Before joining the Penn faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut. She holds degrees from Yale (Anthropology, BA), the University of Durham, England (Middle Eastern Studies, MPhil), and Princeton (History, PhD). Her first book, entitled, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, appeared from theUniversity of California Press in 2003. Her second book, entitled American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Her articles have appeared in several edited volumes and academic periodicals.
Susan Shepler is Assistant Professor of International Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University. She received her Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley for research on the reintegration of former child soldiers and changing models of childhood and youth in post-war Sierra Leone. She has published articles on performance and child rights, on the special concerns of girl child soldiers, on transnational child fosterage in West Africa, and on education and politics in Sierra Leone.
Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. She received her Ph.D. from University of Southern California and her J.D. from Boston College Law School. Her research is in the area of gender and international security, focusing on analysis of war-making and war-fighting. Dr. Sjoberg’s first book, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (Rowman and Littlefield 2006), presents a feminist reformulation of just war theory and an application of that reformulated theory to the wars in Iraq since the end of the Cold War. She is also author (with Caron Gentry) of Mothers, Monsters, and Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (Zed Books 2007). Her work has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics and International Studies Quarterly. She also has articles forthcoming in International Politics, Security Studies, and International Studies Perspectives. Dr. Sjoberg is currently serving as the Program Chair for the Western Region of the International Studies Association. She is also the Vice-Chair and Program Chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association. Her current work has two directions: deriving feminist explanatory hypotheses for the causes of war, and analyzing the gendered discourses of war ethics.
Jennifer Terry is Chair and Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California at Irvine. She is the author of An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor of Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Indiana University Press 1995) and Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (Routledge 1997). She has written articles on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science in the United States, and contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals. She is writing a book on “Killer Entertainments: Militarism and Consuming Desires of American Empire.” The project focuses on the history of military morale management in the US during the expansion of the nation into an international empire by theorizing the dynamics of governmentality and sentimentality as they manifest in the mutual provocations between entertainment forms, hygienic technologies, and militarism. A multi-media excerpt of “Killer Entertainments” appears in Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Special Issue on Difference (Fall 2007).
Elisabeth Jean Wood is Professor of Political Science at Yale University and Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In her research on civil wars—patterns of political violence, the logic of collective action, the conditions for robust negotiated settlements—she draws on ethnographic field research, formal modeling, and analysis of macroeconomic, human rights violations, and other data. Her research currently focuses on patterns of sexual violence during war. She is the author of Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge University Press 2000) and Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge University Press 2003).
