RACHEL ADAMS is professor of English and American studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Her current research is about intellectual disability and the arts.
MIEKE BAL is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to seventeenth-century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism, and migratory culture. Her thirty books include A Mieke Bal Reader (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (University of Toronto Press, 2002), and Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (University of Toronto Press, 3rd edition 2009). Bal is also a video-artist, and her experimental documentaries on migration included A Thousand and One Days; Colony; and the installation Nothing Is Missing. Occasionally she works as an independent curator.
MIKHAL DEKEL is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the City College, City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2010). Her articles and translations have appeared in ELH: English Literary History, Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ), Callaloo, and Guernica, as well as in various anthologies.
AGNESE FIDECARO is an independent scholar who has taught English, comparative literature, and gender studies at the University of Geneva. She is currently writing a book titled Exposed Bodies: Crises of Experience in 20th-century Literature. Other areas of research include contemporary women's authorship, the politics of language and identity, and women's literary history. She coedited Le genre de la voix (Equinoxe 23, 2002), Profession: créatrice: la place des femmes dans le champ artistique (Antipodes, 2007), and Femmes écrivains la croisée des langues/Women Writers at the Crossroads of Languages, 1700–2000 (MētisPresses, 2009).
INDERPAL GREWAL is chair and professor of the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University. She is author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Duke, 1996) and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke, 2005); coeditor, with Caren Kaplan, of Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and Introduction to Women's Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (McGraw Hill, 2001, 2005). Her areas of research include feminist theory, cultural studies of South Asia and its diasporas, and postcolonial and feminist transnationalisms. She is currently working on a book-project titled “Feminism, Security and Postcoloniality in an Age of Terror.”
MARIANNE HIRSCH is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, as well as the codirector of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. She is a former editor of PMLA. Most recently, she coauthored, with Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory and History (University of California Press, 2010). Her other publications include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Harvard University Press, 1997) and the forthcoming The Generation of Postmemory: Visual Cultures After the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012). She has edited and coedited a number of books, including The Familial Gaze (Dartmouth, 1999), Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (Modern Language Association of America, 2005), and Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (Columbia University Press, 2011).
TSUNG-YI MICHELLE HUANG is an associate professor of geography at National Taiwan University. She is the author of Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai (University of Washington Press, 2004). Her current project seeks to explore narratives of female success and spatial imaginations of city connections in contemporary China.
MIN JIN LEE’S debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires (Grand Central Publishing, 1007), was a Top 10 Novels of the Year for The Times (London), NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Her short fiction has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her writings have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, The Times (London), Vogue, Travel + Leisure, the Wall Street Journal, and Food & Wine. Her essays and literary criticism have been anthologized widely. She served as a columnist for the Chosun Ilbo, the leading paper of South Korea, for three consecutive terms. She lives in Tokyo with her family and is working on her novel Pachinko.
CHI-SHE LI currently teaches at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University. His published works focus on cultural globalization in late-Victorian England and in contemporary East Asia. Now he is engaged in a project on circuitous connections between mid-Victorian novels and finance capitalism.
NANCY K. MILLER is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She has published extensively as a feminist literary critic, specializing in women’s writing and autobiography. Her books include Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death (Indiana University Press, 2000) and But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives (Columbia University Press, 2002). She is coeditor of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (University of Illinois Press, 2002), as well as the forthcoming Rites of Return and Picturing Atrocity: Reading Photographs in Crisis. Her most recent book is a family memoir, What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past (University of Nebraska Press, 2011).
GERALDINE PRATT is professor of geography at the University of British Columbia. She is author of Working Feminism (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and coauthor of Gender Work and Space (Routledge, 1995). Her coauthored play, Nanay: a testimonial play, was performed in Vancouver and Berlin in 2009.
ELSPETH PROBYN is SA Research Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies, and codirector of the Centre for Postcolonial and Globalization Studies at the University of South Australia. She has written extensively on the lived body, and her books include: Blush: Faces of Shame (Minnesota University Press, 2005); Remote Control: New Media and Ethics, edited by Catharine Lumby and Elspeth Probyn (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (Routledge, 2000); Outside Belongings (Routledge, 1996); Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1993); and Creating Value. The Humanities and Public Engagement, edited by E. Probyn, S. Muecke, and A. Shoemaker (Australian Academy of Humanities, 2006). Her new research focuses on local communities, taste, and place within the transglobal food system and is funded by an Australian Research Council grant.
MARISA BELAUSTEGUIGOITIA RIUS is currently chair of the Gender Studies Program of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has a doctorate in ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in psychoanalytic theory and Ibero American literature. Her work focuses on the development of new pedagogies related with precarious spaces such as prisons, transnational feminism, race, gender at the borders of the nation, comparative Latina and Chicana theory, and the relation of art, activism, and academia. She has published several books and articles in national and international journals around those themes. She works currently at the prison of Santa Martha Acatitla in Mexico City in the development of murals as a space for voice, demand, and visibility of the interns and their claim for justice and education. Her main publications are Enseñanzas desbordadas (UNAM, 2008) and Güeras y prietas: género y raza en la construcción de mundos nuevos (UNAM, 2009).
VICTORIA ROSNER is associate dean of the School of General Studies at Columbia University, where she also teaches in the Department of English. She is the author of Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2005), awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She has guest edited in journals including WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Scholar and Feminist Online, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She is currently at work on a book, “Machines for Living: Literature, Modernization, Domesticity,” and a memoir.
SIDONIE SMITH is the Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan and the 2010 president of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA). Her fields of specialization include autobiography studies, narrative and human rights, feminist theories, and women's studies in literature. Her most recent books include the second edition of Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Personal Narratives, coauthored with Julia Watson (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, coauthored with Kay Schaffer (St. Martin’s Press, 2004). She is currently collaborating with four colleagues on a book on autobiographical hoaxes.
ARA WILSON is director of the Program in the Study of Sexualities and associate professor of women’s studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons and Avon Ladies in the Global City (University of California Press, 2004) and is currently completing Sexual Latitudes: The Erotic Life of Globalization, an interdisciplinary exploration of globalization as a condition for sexuality. Her new research on the political economy of intimacy looks at medical tourism to Thailand and has been published in Ong and Chen, eds., Asian Biotech (University of California Press, 2010) and Body and Society (2011).
MELISSA W. WRIGHT teaches in the Department of Geography and the Department of Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her publications include Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2006) and a number of articles in geography, cultural studies, and feminist journals. She has conducted research on social activism, capitalist exploitation, and urban politics in northern Mexico for twenty years and is now investigating the experience of violence and militarization on border communities along both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border.
SANGTIN WRITERS
REENA’S activism began in 1998 as an instructor in a women’s literacy center in the Mahila Samakhya Programme of Sitapur District in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She became a board member of Sangtin in 2003 and emerged as an effective mobilizer in the villages. Reena founded a dairy cooperative in the Kunwarapur village and worked to integrate it with the movement-building activities of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (Sangtin Peasants’ and Laborers’ Organization). Reena works on women’s political participation, social violence, and rural livelihoods and has traveled in several states of India to participate in dialogues on these subjects.
RICHA NAGAR is professor of gender, women and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota and a founding member of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan in Sitapur, India. She coauthored Sangtin Yatra (2004), Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism Through Seven Lives in India (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and A World of Difference: Encountering and Contesting Development (Guilford Press, 2009), and coedited Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (SUNY Press, 2010). Richa’s research on gender, race, and communal politics among South Asian communities in postcolonial Tanzania and her subsequent work have resulted in numerous articles. Since 1996, her research, organizing, and creative work have focused mainly on collaborations that seek to reconfigure the political terrain and processes associated with “empowerment” projects aimed at “the poor.”
RICHA SINGH, a founding member of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) in Sitapur, India, stepped into activism in 1991 as a member of the office staff in Mahila Samakhya (MS) in Banaras and later emerged as a mobilizer and district coordinator in the Saharanpur and Sitapur programs of MS. In MS, Richa participated in dialogues on gendered violence and informal education on regional and national platforms. The coauthorship of Sangtin Yatra marked the beginning of her full-time movement-building work with peasants and workers of Sitapur to build SKMS, which currently focuses on access to irrigation and livelihoods, and on socioeconomic violence.
SURBALA, a coauthor of Sangtin Yatra, is a founding member of Sangtin, now Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS). Since 1996, her activism has focused on mobilizing poor women, peasants, and laborers in the villages of India’s Sitapur District. After working in Mahila Samakhya-Sitapur for five years, Surbala left her job to begin full-time organizing for Sangtin. She formed a chikan embroiderers’ collective and worked on issues ranging from gendered violence, casteism, and communalism to rural people’s livelihoods. Surbala has traveled in several states of India and the United States to participate in critical dialogues on these subjects.