Nancy Nicholls

Nancy Nicholls

History, Pontificia Universidad de Chile / History, Universidad Academia di Humanismo Cristiano

La profesora Nancy Nicholls se ha especializado en las temáticas de historia y memoria, e historia del tiempo presente, utilizando entre otras, la metodología de la historia oral. Actualmente participa como co-investigadora en el Proyecto Fondecyt Regular ‘Antropología e historia de la industria ballenera en Chile (1935-1983)’, dirigido por Daniel Quiroz. Participa, en calidad de asesora e investigadora, del proyecto de creación del ‘Archivo Testimonial de víctimas de la Represión, 1975-1990’, de la Fundación de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Cristianas, FASIC.

El enfoque multidisciplinario ha guiado parte de las investigaciones que realiza, haciendo confluir en el análisis de las problemáticas históricas del tiempo presente, los enfoques y herramientas provenientes de la historiografía, pero también de la antropología, el teatro, el cine y la literatura. La utilización de fuentes orales, literarias y audiovisuales, ha posibilitado la exploración, en sus trabajos, del vasto campo de la subjetividad, la representación y el imaginario en relación a los fenómenos históricos.

Lorie Novak

Lorie Novak

Artist & Professor of Photography & Imaging, NYU

Lorie Novak’s photographs, installations, and Internet projects explore issues of memory and transmission, the relationship between the intimate and the public, the shifting cultural meanings of photographs, and how we can use archives to reframe the past and suggest new narratives. Her work has been in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Her collaborative collectedvisions.net, 1996-present, exploring how family photographs shape our memory, was one of the earliest interactive storytelling websites. Novak is the recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, a NEA Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (Italy), Bogliasco Foundation, (Italy); ArtSway (England), Mac Dowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her photographs are in numerous permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Jewish Museum, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Novak is a Professor of Photography & Imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and the founder and director of Future Imagemakers, a social practice project at Tisch Photography & Imaging that offers a free digital photography workshop to NYC area high school students. See www.lorienovak.com.

Working Group Affiliations

Engendering the Archive

Women Mobilizing Memory

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

Tavia Nyong'o

Tavia Nyong’o

Professor, Performance Studies, Yale University

Tavia Nyong'o is a professor of performance studies at Yale University, where he teaches in the American Studies, African American Studies, Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Theater Studies programs. His books include The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018). He is working on two current research projects — a study of Samuel Delany and the emergence of queer of color speculation, and a set of essays considering cultural appropriation through the lens of queer East African aesthetic production. He is a longstanding member of the Social Text editorial collective and co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson.

Working Group Affiliation

Queer Aqui

Garnette Oluoch-Olunya

Garnette Oluoch-Olunya

Adjunct Lecturer, Literature, St. Paul’s University, Kenya,

Garnette Oluoch-Olunya is an adjunct Lecturer in Literature at St. Paul’s University, Kenya, a Strategic Consultant with the Godown Arts Centre in Nairobi, and holds a PhD in English from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She was Senior Lecturer and founding Director of the Center for Creative and Cultural Industries at the Technical University of Kenya, building on the GoDown’s collaborative work with Natverkstan Institute of Sweden, the British Council, and Goldsmiths, University of London, in partnerships that sought to link academic research with arts practice. She sits on the editorial board of Jahazi, a Journal of Culture, Arts & Performance, and is a Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Scholarship (Ubuntu Project), University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticities, Co-Director

Nana Osei-Kofi

Nana Osei-Kofi

Nana Osei-Kofi is Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. A critical feminist scholar, her current research centers on the experiences and conditions faced by people of African descent in Europe generally and Sweden specifically. Osei-Kofi has published a wide range of articles and book chapters on the AfroSwedish condition and has a forthcoming single-authored book titled Identity and Kinship: AfroSwedish Places of Belonging. Osei-Kofi is also the editor of a forthcoming special issue of Meridians that will be available in early May 2023, and that highlights scholarship on European BIPOC Feminisms and Queer of Color Critiques. 

Aya Ouais

Aya Ouais

Aya Ouais is an abolitionist organizer and recent graduate of Columbia University with a B.A. in History, born and raised in Casablanca, Morocco. As a student, she specialized in the histories of anti-racist social movements in the United States. Her experience in New York City organizing has allowed her to learn the possibilities of using research to collaborate with and uplift the voices of working class organizers. Currently, Aya is a Research Assistant at the Racial Capitalism Working Group.

Rupal Oza

Rupal Oza 

Associate Professor, Department of Women and Gender Studies, Hunter College, CUNY.

Rupal Oza is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work focuses on political economic transformations in the global south, the geography of the right-wing politics, and the conjuncture between development and security. Her first book, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization was published in 2006 by Routledge, New York and by Women Unlimited, India. She has several articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has written on special economic zones, the discourse of security, and Hindutva politics India. Her current project examines the relationship between sexual assault, caste, and land in Haryana, India. She is also working on a collaborative project that examines foreclosures and gentrification in New York City.

Working Group Affiliation

Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence

Ana Gisele Ozaki

Ana Gisele Ozaki

Ph.D. Candidate, Architecture and Urban Development, Cornell University

Ana G. Ozaki is a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Architecture and Urban Development at Cornell University, with specializations in Africana and Latin American studies. Her dissertation investigates the complex ways colonial ideologies of race have interfered with modern architectural understandings of climate in Brazil and its connections with Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique. Through feminist and postcolonial theory, her research investigates how domestic architecture has worked to accommodate white settlers and tame local "climates" in its environmental and socio-political conceptions while elucidating the cross-cultural and South-to-South exchanges between tropicalized sites, subjects, and practices. She has worked as a writer, researcher, architect, and public educator.

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticities, Co-Director

Ayse Parla

Ayse Parla

Sabanci University (Turkey)

Ayse Parla is on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Sabanci University (Turkey).  She is the recipient of a TUBITAK research grant for a collaborative project on "Forms of organization among new migrants: A comparative analysis of Bulgarian Turks, Iraqi Turkmens and Moldavians in Turkey." (with Mine Eder and Didem Danis). Her recent publications include: "Irregular Workers or Ethnic Kin? Post nineties labor migration from Bulgaria to Turkey." International Migration 45(3), 2007; “Longing, Belonging and Locations of Homeland among Turkish Immigrants from Bulgaria.” Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 6(4): 543-557, 2006; and "Marking Time along the Bulgarian-Turkish Border." Ethnography 4(4), 2003.

Anita Patil-Deshmukh

Anita Patil-Deshmukh

Assistant Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

After a long and distinguished career as a faculty pediatrician/neonatologist in Chicago, and her time at HSPH, Dr. Anita Patil Deshmukh returned to her native India with a vision. The government of the state of Maharashtra had supported her education and, along with HPSH, given her the tools to become who she is today – medical doctor, advocate for populations without a voice, passionate believer in human dignity and the right to health – and Anita knew she wanted to give back to her country and community, and give others the opportunity to flourish.

In 2009, she joined Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research (PUKAR), an independent research collective started by Professor Arjun Appadurai that conducts multi-sectoral, cross disciplinary research on issues related to Urban poor. PUKAR has focused on Kaula Bandar, a slum community of more than 10,000 people who, despite being located in India’s financial epicenter, have health outcomes as poor as those in the country’s rural and tribal districts. In collaboration with HSPH and New York University, Dr. Patil Deshmukh and the PUKAR team have developed a unique and highly innovative community-based participatory research (CBPR) model, in which youth from slum communities, called “barefoot researchers,” serve critical roles in informing study design, and even doing data collection. She accompanies the barefoot researchers as a mentor and as a student, teaching and modeling research methods while gaining insights that help inform a relevant and meaningful research agenda. This and other PUKAR projects have democratized the research process, one of the core objectives of the collective, and she and the PUKAR team have used the data collected to bring direct health interventions to Kaula Bandar. Their advocacy has resulted in the establishment of regular government health camps there, and the placement of a new municipal water supply to the community, the first time the slum will have legal water access in its 50 years of existence.

Dr. Patil Deshmukh’s deep and abiding care and respect for those who have not yet been afforded the opportunity to achieve their dreams, whether it be clean water for their children to drink, a better understanding of their community and the world around them or a chance to work for an organization that respects and even integrates their unique experiences and vision in its mission.

Throughout her twenty years of work with marginalized families on the south side of Chicago as a neonatologist, and as director of PUKAR in Mumbai, Dr. Patil Deshmukh connects with patients and community members with humility and respect while simultaneously recognizing broad patterns in the creation and persistence of poverty, and her emotional, financial and intellectual investment into PUKAR staff and researchers as well as the Mumbai community in which they work is truly inspiring.

Barbara Penner

Barbara Penner

Professor, Architecture, University College London

Barbara Penner is a Professor at the University College, London. She is author of Bathroom (2013) and Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (2009), and co-editor of Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (2017), Forty Ways to Think about Architecture (2014), Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009), and Gender Space Architecture (2000). Her work explores commercial architecture (hotels/department stores), tourist destinations (honeymoon resorts), and domestic spaces, technologies, and infrastructure (bathrooms/kitchens). Informed by interdisciplinary feminist theory, she investigates how everyday spaces enable the formation of social and cultural identities and promote social inclusion or its opposite.

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticities, Co-Director

Shilpa Phadke

Shilpa Phadke

Assistant Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Affiliation: Centre for the Study of Contemporary Culture, School of Media and Cultural Studies, Urban Aspirations Project: TISS PUKAR Max Plank Institute Initiative

Qualification: M.A. (SNDT), M.Phil. (Cambridge, U.K.), Ph.D. (TISS)

Areas of Interest: Gender and the politics of space, the middle classes, sexuality and the body, feminist politics among young women, reproductive subjectivities and pedagogic practices

Teaching: Centre for Media and Cultural Studies: Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Basic Course, Semester I, 3 credits.

Gender, Media and Culture, Optional Course, Semester III, 2 credits.

Gender, Space and Culture, Optional Course, Semester IV, 2 credits.

Vidyadhar K. Phatak

Vidyadhar K. Phatak

Vidyadhar K. Phatak, after 37 years of experience in various sub-fields of urban planning and development in government agencies in Mumbai,retired from the service of Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority as its Principal Chief, Town and Country Planning Division on February 29, 2004. His interests include - Urban and Shelter Sector Studies, City Development Strategy, Preparation and appraisal of projects for the Development Banks and Financing local governments and Structuring projects for Public-Private-Partnership.

He was associated with various sub-project specific EA studies of MUTP, “PM10 Reduction Strategy for Mumbai” and developing computer based project accounting system. During the last two years of this period he has also been on the Board of Directors of the Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation (MRVC) as Director (Infrastructure and Commercial Development). In that capacity he has initiated a study of development of air rights on the suburban railway stations in Mumbai.

Suren Pillay

Suren Pillay

 Professor of Sociology, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center 

Associate Professor Suren Pillay is a Senior Researcher and Acting Director at the Center for Humanities Research. He holds a Phd (with Distinction) in Anthropology from Columbia University, and an MA (cum laude) in Development Studies from the University of the Western Cape. Between 2007 -2010 Suren was seconded to the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa where he led research on the effects of violence and crime on citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa, and conducted research on migration and xenophobia. Prior to that he was a Senior Lecturer in Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape. His current research focuses on the constitution and reconstitution of the ‘Political’ and Justice in Africa; and the politics of knowledge production in postcolonial societies. His most recent publications include the co-edited volume with Chandra Sriram , Peace vs Justice? The Dilemma of Transitional Justice in Africa (James Currey/UKZN: 2010), which was recognized by the American publishing association with an award for “Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2010”. His most recent journal article “Crime Community and the Governance of Violence in post-Apartheid South Africa”, Politikon, 2009, was highlighted by the African Studies Association (USA) as one of the ‘ten most downloaded articles in African Studies’ in 2009-2010. He is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled The Partisan’s Violence. Suren is also an editor of Social Dynamics, and a frequent contributor to the press.

Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Professor of Sociology, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. At the Graduate Center, she is also Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society and Coordinator of the Women’s Studies Doctoral Certificate Program. She is author of two books, In the Flesh: the Cultural Politics of Body Modification and Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture, as well as Editor of The Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body. She is currently the Chair of the Section on the Body and Embodiment of the American Sociological Association. Her current projects include a book for the Routledge Series Intergrating Science and Culture, on brain science in everyday life.

Frances Fox Piven

Frances Fox Piven

Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center

 Before coming to the Graduate Center, Prof. Piven taught at Boston University, Columbia University, New York University Law School, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Bologna. She is past Vice-President of the American Political Science Association,  has served as program co-chair of the annual political science meetings, and is a past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.  She is currently President of the American Sociological Association. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the President's Award of the American Public Health Association, and the American Sociological Association's Career Award for the Practice of Sociology, as well as their award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. Her books deal with the development of the welfare state, political movements, urban political, and electoral politics.  Among them are REGULATING THE POOR (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award in 1972, and updated in 1993); POOR PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS (1977); THE NEW CLASS WAR (1982; UPDATED 1985); WHY AMERICANS DON'T VOTE (1988); THE MEAN SEASON (1987); LABOR PARTIES IN POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES (1992); THE BREAKING OF THE AMERICAN SOCIAL COMPACT (1997); WHY AMERICANS STILL DON'T VOTE (2000); and THE WAR AT HOME (2004); Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (2006). 

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Sonya Posmentier

Sonya Posmentier

Associate Professor of English, New York University

Sonya Posmentier is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at New York University, where she teaches African American and Black Diasporic literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and environmental literature. Her first book Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature was published in 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and is a recipient of the William Sanders Scarborough award from the Modern Language Association. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Public Books, and elsewhere, and she has published poems in Grey, Seneca Review, and Perihelion.

Working Group Affiliation

Black Atlantic Ecologies

Eve Powell

Eve Powell

Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Eve M. Troutt Powell teaches the history of the modern Middle East. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003) and the co-editor, with John Hunwick, of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton Series on the Middle East, Markus Wiener Press, 2002). She has also written a number of articles on the history of African slavery in the Nile valley, and on Saint Josephine Bakhita, a former Sudanese slave canonized in 2000.

Troutt Powell received her B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Penn, she taught for ten years at The University of Georgia. She has received fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt and the Social Science Research Council, and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2003 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Troutt Powell is now working on a book about the memory of slavery in the Nile valley, which examines how slaves and slaveholders wrote, sang or talked about the experience of servitude and its meaning in their societies. Both her research and her teaching explore the relationship between Africa and the Middle East, and thus connect her closely to Africana Studies and African Studies at Penn.

Nicola Pratt

Nicola Pratt

Reader of the International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick, UK.

Nicola Pratt is Reader of the International Politics of the Middle East at the University of Warwick, UK. She has written on human rights, civil society and democratization in the Arab world, including Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Lynne Rienner, 2007). More recently, she has written on issues of gender, war and security in the Middle East. She is co-author, with Nadje Al-Ali, of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (University of California Press, 2009), co-editor, also with Nadje Al-Ali, of Women and War in the Middle East (Zed Press, 2009) and co-editor with Sophie Richter-Devroe of a special issue of International Feminist Journal of Politics on ‘Critically Examining UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security’ (December 2011) as well as articles in International Studies Quarterly and Third World Quarterly, amongst others. She is joint leader of the ‘Reconceptualising Gender’ research network between Warwick and Birzeit University (Palestine). She currently holds a British Academy mid-career fellowship for a project entitled, ‘Middle East Women: The Personal and the Geopolitical’.

Gonzalo Rabanal

Gonzalo Rabanal

Performer

Gonzalo Rabanal estudió Comunicación Audio Visual en el Instituto Arcos, periodo donde emprende la elaboración de un trabajo de obra que se proyecta de lo particular a lo colectivo, abriendo lugar a una multiplicidad expresiva. Ha sido reconocido el año 1989 con la beca Fundación Andes y el año 2010 con la beca Fundación Ford. Actualmente cursa como alumno de postgrado el Magíster en Artes Visuales en la pontificia universidad católica de chile.