Michael Ralph

Michael Ralph

Assistant Professor, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Metropolitan Studies, NYU

Assistant Professor, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Metropolitan Studies; Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis , Africana Studies , American Studies ; Director, Metropolitan Studies Ph.D. 2007 (Anthropology), University of Chicago; M.A. 2002 (Anthropology), University of Chicago; B.A. 2000 (Africana Studies) Morris Brown College.

Areas of Research/Interest: Citizenship, Sovereignty, Risk, Liability, Urban Youth Culture, Diaspora, Postcolonialism

Select Publications: Manuscripts Forensics of Capital: Risk and Liability, Citizenship and Sovereignty, in Senegal (Forthcoming).

Benjamin Eastman, Michael Ralph, and Sean Brown, eds. 2008. America’s Game(s): A Critical Anthropology of Sport. London: Routledge.

Articles: Michael Ralph, ed. 2011. 'The Security of Justice.' Introduction to "Law & Order, Crime & Capital in the 19th-21st century U.S." Special issue of Souls.

Michael Ralph. 2009. 'Barack Obama is (not) who you think he is.' The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture. 2(2): 76-77.

Michael Ralph. 2009. ‘Commodity.’ Social Text 100 27(3): 78-84.

Michael Ralph. 2009. ‘Diaspora.’ Social Text 100 27(3): 94-101.

Michael Ralph. 2009. ‘Hip hop.’ Social Text 100 27(3): 141-146.

Michael Ralph. 2009. 'Barack Obama is (not) who you think he is.' The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture. 2(2): 76-77.

Michael Ralph. 2009. “Thief’s Theme.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108(8): 541-562.

Michael Ralph. 2009. “‘It’s hard out here for a pimp…with…a whole lot of bitches jumpin’ ship’: Navigating black politics in the wake of Katrina.” Public Culture 21(2): 341-374.

Michael Ralph. 2008. “Killing time.” Social Text 26(4): 1-29.

Michael Ralph. 2007. ‘“Crimes of History”: Senegalese Soccer and the Forensics of Slavery.’ Souls 9(3): 193-222.

Michael Ralph. 2007. ‘Prototype: In Search of the Perfect Senegalese Basketball Physique.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 24(2): 311-316.

Michael Ralph. 2007. ‘Epilogue: It was all a dream.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 24(2): 238-263.

Michael Ralph. 2006. ‘“Flirt[ing] with death but “still alive”: The sexual dimensions of surplus time in hip hop fantasy.’ Cultural Dynamics 18(1): 61-88.

Michael Ralph. 2006. ‘“Le Sénégal qui Gagne”: Soccer and the Stakes of Neoliberalism in a Postcolonial Port.’ Soccer and Society 7(2-3): 300-317.

Michael Ralph. 2005. ‘Oppressive Impressions, Architectural Expressions: The poetics of French colonial (ad)vantage, regarding Africa.’ In African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective. Steve Salm and Toyin Falola, eds. Univ. of Rochester Press, pp. 22-48.

Michael Ralph. 2005. Review of Wilson J. Moses’ Afrotopia, Transforming Anthropology 13(2): 166-68.

Sherie Randolph

Sherie Randolph

Assistant Professor of History and Afro American and African Studies, University of Michigan

Sherie Randolph is assistant professor of History and Afro American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The former Associate Director of the Women’s Research & Resource Center at Spelman College, Randolph received her Ph.D. from New York University in 19th- and 20th-century American history with concentrations in African Diaspora and women and gender history. She has received several grants and fellowships for her work, most recently being awarded fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Rutgers University’s Institute for Research on Women and the Center for Race and Ethnicity. Randolph’s principal teaching and research interests focus on the historical intersections of race, gender, class and empire in the United States. She is currently revising a book manuscript titledBlack Feminist Radical: Florynce “Flo” Kennedy.

Rayna Rapp

Rayna Rapp

Anthropology, New York University

Rayna Rapp (former Rayna R. Reiter) is a professor and associate chair of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health; the politics of reproduction; science, technology, and genetics; and disability in the United States and Europe. She has contributed over 80 published works to the field of anthropology, independently, as a co-author, editor, and forward-writing, including Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent's Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge. Her 1999 book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, received multiple awards upon release and has been praised for providing "invaluable insights into the first generation of women who had to decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancies on the basis of amniocentesis result". She co-authored many articles with Faye Ginsburg, including Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship, a topic the pair has continued to research.

Working Group Affiliation

Science and Social Difference

Michael Rembis

Michael Rembis

Director of the Center for Disability Studies and Professor of History, University at Buffalo

Michael A. Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He came to Buffalo from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a visiting scholar in the Department of American Studies and the Department of History. His work, which has appeared in many journals and edited collections, has won several awards, including the 2008 Irving K. Zola Award, awarded annually by the Society for Disability Studies to emerging scholars. His first book, Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960, is available from University of Illinois Press. He is currently working on a disability history anthology co-edited with Susan Burch, forthcoming from University of Illinois Press and an Oxford University Press Handbook on Disability History, which he is co-editing with Kim Nielsen and Cathy Kudlick. In 2012, Rembis and co-editor Kim Nielsen launched the Disability Histories book series also with University of Illinois Press.

Since completing the PhD in history, Rembis has served as co-founder and member of the Disability Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, where he helped to create an undergraduate curriculum in Disability Studies. He also spent two-years working with faculty and administrators at the University of Notre Dame, building their Disability Studies Forum. Most recently, Rembis has been fortunate to benefit from a close collaboration with David Gerber (Distinguished Professor of History) at the University at Buffalo, where they have worked to establish the Center for Disability Studies and create a formal master’s level (MA) degree concentration in Disability Studies. He serves on the American Historical Association’s Task Force on Disability and the Board of Directors of the Society for Disability Studies.

J.T. Roane

J.T Roane

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Cincinnati

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is also part of the University’s urban futures initiative. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on a manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, which historicizes multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage Black communities articulated in Philadelphia in the second half of the twentieth. 

Working Group Affiliation

Science and Social Difference

Julia Miele Rodas

Julia Miele Rodas

Assistant Professor of English, City University of New York

Julia Miele Rodas is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY). She teaches writing at CUNY’s Bronx Community College and is on the faculty of the Master’s program in Disability Studies at the CUNY School of Professional Studies. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Literature & Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, the Victorian Review, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Explicator, and other venues. She has also served as a contributing editor of the Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File, 2009) and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. She is currently working on a book—Autistic Disturbances—that theorizes the role of autistic rhetoric and aesthetic in literature.

Akira Drake Rodriguez

Akira Drake Rodriguez

Assistant Professor, Stuart Weitzman School of Design and School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania

Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School in the Department of City & Regional Planning.  Her research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. Dr. Rodriguez’s forthcoming manuscript, Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing (University of Georgia Press 2021), explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments.  This research offers the alternative benefits of public housing, outside of shelter provision, to challenge the overwhelming narrative of public housing as a dysfunctional relic of the welfare state. Dr. Rodriguez was recently awarded a Spencer Foundation grant to study how parent and educational advocates mobilize around school facility planning processes in Philadelphia.    

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticities, Co-Director

Harilyn Rousso

Harilyn Rousso

Writer and Activist

Harilyn Rousso is a writer, painter, educator, social worker, psychotherapist and activist who has worked in the disability rights field, with a particular emphasis on issues of women and girls with disabilities, for more than twenty-five years. She is the founder of the Networking Project for Disabled Women and Girls of the YWCA/NYC, a unique mentoring program that has been replicated widely, and the President of Disabilities Unlimited Consulting Services, which provides education and training on disability equity issues.

In addition to her memoir, Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back,Rousso is the author of numerous publications on gender and disability, including Disabled, Female and Proud! and Strong Proud Sisters: Girls and Young Women with Disabilities (available online at http://www.centerwomenpolicy.org/pdfs/dis3.pdf and is the co-editor of Double Jeopardy, and Addressing Gender Equity in Special Education. She is also the executive producer of the award-winning documentary Positive Images: Portraits of Women with Disabilities, which was shown on PBS.

Rousso is a former board member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Sister Fund and Educational Equity Concepts, and a former commissioner with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. In 2003, she was selected by the National Women’s History Project as an honoree for National Women’s History Month.  http://www.nwhp.org/resourcecenter/biographycenter.php

Rousso’s educational background includes a B.A. in economics from Brandeis University, graduate work in economics at Harvard University, a Masters in Education from Boston University, a Masters in Social Work from New York University, and a Certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the New York School for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.  

Working Group Affiliation

The Future of Disability Studies

Jon S. Sensbach

Jon S. Sensbach

Professor of History, University of Florida

Professor Jon Sensbach received his Ph.D. in 1991 in early American history from Duke University, his B.A. in 1980 from the University of Virginia. He joined the University of Florida Department of History in 1998 after teaching at the College of William and Mary and the University of Southern Mississippi. He teaches the Department’s foundation graduate course on early America and has recently taught a graduate seminar on the Black Atlantic as well as undergraduate courses on the Atlantic slave trade, colonial America, and the American Revolution. Professor Sensbach has been an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center and an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. His most recent book is Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Harvard, 2005), and he is also the author of A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (North Carolina 1998). He is at work on a study of religious awakenings in the early South and Atlantic world.

Carla Shedd

Carla Shedd

Associate Professor, Urban Education, CUNY Graduate Center

Carla Shedd's work focuses on timely issues related to criminal justice; race, law and society; social inequality; and urban policy. Her current research centers on New York City’s juvenile justice system, specifically investigating how young people’s institutional experiences influence their placement on and movement along the carceral continuum. She is the author of Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), which explores obstacles facing urban adolescents in Chicago; the book received the 2015 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award Presented by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Race, Gender, and Class. Shedd has been published in the American Sociological Review and Sociological Methods & Research. Shedd’s current research examines the juvenile justice system in New York City, investigating how young people’s linked institutional experiences influence their placement on and movement along the carceral continuum.

Leticia Sabsay

Leticia Sabsay

Department of Politics and International Studies, The Open University

Leticia Sabsay is a Research Associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies at The Open University. Her appointment is part of the ‘Oecumene - Citizenship after Orientalism’ ERC project. Her areas of specialism encompass: critical social theory; feminist cultural and visual studies; and queer theory. Prior to taking on this role she studied sociology, and subsequently became Assistant Professor of Communications, at the University of Buenos Aires before leaving Argentina in 2002. Since then, she has continued to collaborate with this University as a faculty member of the Gino Germani Research Institute in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Sahar Sadjadi

Sahar Sadjadi

Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies, Amherst College

Sahar Sadjadi is a physician, anthropologist and assistant professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender studies at Amherst College. She is currently completing a book based on an ethnographic multi-sited study of the clinical practices around gender non-conforming children in the US and the revision of the psychiatric category, Gender Identity Disorder in Children. 

She studied medicine at Tehran University of Medical Sciences and received her PhD in medical anthropology at Columbia University. She conducted an ethnographic multi-sited study of the clinical practices around gender non-conforming children and the revision of the psychiatric category, Gender Identity Disorder in Children. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and National Science Foundation. During the 2012-13 academic year, Dr. Sadjadi was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She joined Amherst College faculty in 2013 for the position of Gender, Science and Technology. She is currently writing about the medical interventions that suppress or delay puberty in children.

Working Group Affiliation

Science and Social Difference

Zakia Salime

Zakia Salime

Associate Professor in Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies, Rutger's

How to understand the complicities and cross-fertilizations of the discursive regimes of war and terror and neoliberal globalization? What are the gendered spaces in which states and neoliberal economic forces interest to produce gendered subjectivities, desires and agency? How does this interplay of classed, racialized and gendered forces create marginalization and subordination but also spaces for participation and contention ? How has the mobilization of the discourse of gender equality, religious identity, and citizenship rights shaped movements and state transitions in North Africa and the Middle East?

These questions locate Salime’s research and teaching at the zones of frictions and tensions between universalist regimes and racialized categories of development, democratization and rights, and their gendered configurations.

Salime’s book: Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minnesota, 2011) illustrates this interplay of global regimes of rights and local alternatives, by looking at the interactions among the feminist and the Islamist women’s movements. The book shows how these interactions have transformed the state gender policies, the public discourse about women’s rights and the movements themselves. Salime ethnographic analysis illustrates the importance of certain ‘movement movements’ as entry for understanding continuities and ruptures in these movements’ strategies, discourse and forms of organization. Locating her analysis at the intersection of feminist and Islamist politics, Salime shows how these negotiations of rights and democratic participation has led to the feminization of the Islamist movement one the one hand, and the Islamization of the feminist movement on the other. Her book shows how these movements’ endeavor to influence the state legislation of women’s rights, their transnational forums, and their effective use of the media and political alliances, have led to some of the most spectacular forms of protest by women in North Africa and the Middle East.

Between Feminism and Islam critically re-assesses fissures in liberal feminist theory, which has primarily looked at Muslim women as objects of a discourse of liberation rather than as agents negotiating global policies and building alternative understandings of rights. Salime is currently working on a second book manuscript on urban youth movements of cultural expression and the gendered spaces in the context of revolutionary Middle East.

Yara Sallam

Yara Sallam

Transitional Justice Officer, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)

Ms. Yara Sallam is the Transitional Justice officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). Yara previously worked as the Women Human Rights Defenders Program director at Nazra for Feminist Studies (Egypt), a professional legal assistant at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) in The Gambia, as a researcher on Freedom of Religion and Belief at EIPR, and as a research assistant at the Institute of Research for Development (IRD) focusing on women’s rights in Egypt. Yara earned two degrees of law (LL.B) – a Licence of Law from Cairo University in Egypt and Maîtrise of Commercial Law from Paris I University Pantheon Sorbonne in France in 2007. She has also been awarded a Master of Laws degree (LL.M.) in International Human Rights Law at the Law School of Notre Dame University, the United States of America (2010).

George Emilio Sanchez

George Emilio Sanchez

Performance Artist and Activist

George Emilio Sanchez is a writer, performance artist and social activist living and working on the ancestral homelands of the Lenapehoking, or Land of the Lenape, today known as Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York. Most recently he premiered XIV at Dixon Place in New York City in 2019. He recently was named the Keith Haring Fellow by the MacDowell in New Hampshire, and he is a Social Practice artist-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center in New York City. He teaches at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island and is the Performance Director for Emergenyc, a program that explores the intersection between arts and activism. Following the premiere of his latest work In the Court of the Conqueror at Abrons Arts Center in March 2022, the piece will be presented at Su Teatro in Denver, Co. and the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Rebecca Sanchez

Rebecca Sanchez

Assistant Professor of English, City University of New York

Rebecca Sanchez is an Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University and a member of the MLA’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. Her research interests include transatlantic modernism, Deaf and disability studies and poetics. She is currently working on a book project entitled Deafening Modernism, which analyzes the impact of communicative norms on twentieth century writing.

Working Group Affiliation

The Future of Disability Studies

Abhay Sardesai

Abhay Sardesai

Smt. P. N. Doshi Women’s College of Arts

Abhay Sardesai has been the Editor of ART India, the premier art magazine of India, since November 2002. Under his editorship, the magazine has developed a Culture Studies-oriented approach and has become more inter-disciplinary in its theme-based explorations. He has been a Visiting Faculty in Aesthetics at the Department of English, University of Mumbai, and has also been the Chair of Humanities, Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, Mumbai. He teaches at the Smt. P. N. Doshi Women’s College of Arts and also at various other institutions like Jnanapravaha and TISS. He writes in English and translates from Marathi, Konkani and Gujarati. An associate of the research collective PUKAR, he was the Director of the Writing Across the City project which explored the inter-relationships between literatures and literary cultures in the city of Mumbai. He has written widely on Art and Literature and read from his work at various places including the University of Princeton, University of Cambridge, Mumbai University, S.N.D.T. University, Sarai and NGMA.

Barbara D. Savage

Barbara D. Savage

Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Barbara D. Savage's website

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women

Barbara D. Savage is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1995. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in twentieth century African American history; the history of American religious and social reform movements; and the history of the relationship between media and politics.

She is the author of Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) which won the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Award for the best book in American history in the period 1916-1966. In addition, she is co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), a collection of new work from scholars associated with a three-year Ford Funded project coordinated with Professor R. Marie Griffith at Princeton University.

Her most recent book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press, 2008), is an historical examination of debates about the public responsibility of black churches and the role of religion in racial leadership. Savage has published several articles related to that project, including "Biblical and Historical Imperatives: Toward a History of Ideas about the Political Role of Black Churches," in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed., Vincent Wimbush (New York: Continuum Press, 2000) and "W. E. B. Du Bois and 'the Negro Church,'" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March, 2000).

She was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Smithsonian Institution for work on her first book. She also has received fellowship awards for work on her current project from: the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University; the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion; and the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center on Black Culture.

Savage received her doctorate in history from Yale in 1995, and also holds a law degree from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia. Prior to entering graduate school, she worked in Washington, DC, as a Congressional staff member and as a member of the staff of the Children's Defense Fund. During graduate school, she served as Director of Federal Relations, Office of the General Counsel at Yale University.

At Penn, among other University commitments, she served as a member of the recent Presidential Search Committee. She also is a faculty member for the National Endowment for the Humanities College and University Teachers' Institute on the Civil Rights Movement, held during the summers at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.

Working Group Affiliation

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Project Director

Lena Sawyer

Lena Sawyer

Lena Sawyer is a cultural anthropologist who teaches in the Department of Social Work at Gothenburg University, Sweden. I am interested in exploring creative and revolutionary pedagogies, methodologies, and collective knowledge-making practices. During the last few years, I have worked collaboratively on exploratory Arts-Based projects. For example one project with Nana Osei-Kofi, engaged the coloniality of Swedish public commemoration (a performance paper and video installation around the statue The Iron Well in Gothenburg). Another, together with the writing group Kollektiv Omsorg, co-created practices of black feminist care through letter writing.

Asma Sayeed

Asma Sayeed

Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA

Asma Sayeed is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at UCLA in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her primary research interests are in early and classical Muslim social history, the intersections of law and social history, gender, and the history of Muslim education. Her book, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press) analyses Muslim women’s religious education, specifically their transmission of ḥadīth from the rise of Islam to the early Ottoman period. She received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She was previously Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Lafayette College (Easton, PA), where she taught courses in Islam and World Religions. She has published on topics related to Muslim women and their religious participation in journals such as Studia Islamica and Islamic Law and Society and has contributed a number of encyclopedia articles on women’s history in early and classical Islam. She recently undertook archival research in Syria on Muslim women’s education in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods under the auspices of a Fulbright fellowship.