Mirjam Künkler

Mirjam Künkler

Assistant Professor in the Department for Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

Mirjam Künkler (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Assistant Professor in the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, USA. She has published on religion-state relations and Islamic thought in 20th century Iran and Indonesia, and edited with Alfred Stepan, Indonesia, Islam and Democracy, Columbia University Press (2013), and with John Madeley and Shylashri Shankar, A Secular Age: Beyond the West, (2014). Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals Comparative Studies of Society and History, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Journal of Law and Religion, Democratization, Comparative Politics, Journal of International Affairs, and Party Politics, as well as edited volumes. In her next project, she turns to questions about the post-revolutionary transformation of the legal system in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and female religious authority in Shi'i Islam. Künkler is co-PI of a two-year Oxford-Princeton research cluster on “Traditional authority and transnational religious networks in contemporary Shi‘i Islam," of the two-year project “Religion and Constitutionalism” at the Institute of Advanced Study in Bielefeld, and of the “Iran Social Science Data Portal” funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

Lena Burgos Lafuente

Lena Burgos Lafuente

Assistant Professor, Latin American Literature, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University

Lena Burgos Lafuente (PhD NYU, 2011) is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University. She specializes in poetry, Latin American essay writing, sound studies, and transatlantic literary crossings in the first half of the twentieth century. She has published articles on the Spanish Republican exile in the Caribbean, Caribbean literature, and the essays of Jorge Luis Borges, and edited special issues on poet Julia de Burgos (CENTRO Journal, 2014) and philosopher María Zambrano (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2015).

Burgos-Lafuente is working on two book manuscripts. In Poéticas del destiempo: literatura y política en el Caribe de mediados de siglo XX, (forthcoming 2017), she discusses the critical juncture at which prevailing ideological positions induced by the Second World War in the Caribbean met a new political poetics of postwar literature in the encounter between Caribbean writers and Spanish exiles in the late 1940s and 1950s. In Pedagogies of Progress: Listening to the Long 1950s in Puerto Rico, she examines the dissonances between sonic and visual cultures in the artistic production of 1940s-1960s Puerto Rico. Burgos-Lafuente was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2014-2015.

Working Group Affiliation

Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy

Clara Mattei

Clara Mattei

Economics, The New School for Social Research

Clara Mattei is Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. She holds a PhD jointly from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (SSSUP) in Pisa, Italy, and Université de Strasbourg, Ecole Doctorale Augustine Cournot in Strasbourg, France, an MA in Philosophy from Pavia, and a BA in Philosophy from Cambridge University. Her research explores a comparative view of post-World War I monetary and fiscal policies and she brings broad interdisciplinary engagements to her work in the history of economic thought and methodology.

Working Group Affiliation

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Julie Livingston

Julie Livingston

Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History, New York University

Julie Livingston is a Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and a member of the Social Text Collective. Her work lies at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. Livingston is concerned with the human body as a moral condition and mode of consciousness; care as a social practice; taxonomy and the relationships that subvert or upend it; the relationship between species; African thought and political and moral imagination; and the environmental consequences of capitalism and economic growth. She is the author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2019); Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012), and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press, 2005). She has also coedited a number of books and special journal issues. The recipient of numerous awards, she has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and in 2013 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Working Group Affiliation

Black Atlantic Ecologies

Bernardita Llanos

Bernardita Llanos

Professor, Spanish Language and Literature, Chairperson, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Loyola University Chicago

Bernardita Llanos M. is Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at Loyola University Chicago. She received her PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brasilian Literatures and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. In 1994 she published (Re)descubrimiento y (re)conquista de América en la ilustración española, which received a publication grant from the Program of Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and U.S. universities. Many of her articles on Latin American culture and women writers have appeared in American, Latin American, and European journals. She co-authored Reinas de otro cielo. Modernidad y autoritarismo en la obra de Pedro Lemebel (2004). She edited Letras y proclamas: la estética narrative deDiamela Eltit (2006). She is president of the International Association of Literature and Culture of Hispanic Women.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Nadia Loan

University of Oregon

Nadia Loan is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research interests focus on Islam and modernity, gender, religion and media and textual traditions. She is currently teaching at the University of Oregon on modern Islam, gender in Muslim societies, and new media practices in South Asia. She received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 2012.

Elena Loizidou

Senior Lecturer in Law, Birkbeck Law, UK

Dr Elena Loizidou, BA (Keele) LLM, PhD (Lancaster), Senior Lecturer in Law, joined the School of Law, Birbeck in January 2000. Dr Loizidou is the Programme Director & Admissions Tutor for the FT LLB (UCAS). Dr Loizidou's research interests include anarchism and political theory, theories of gender and sexuality and law and culture. Dr Loizidou is currently working on a monograph on anarchist practices and theory. Her recent publications include Judith Butler: Ethics Law Politics (2007) London, Routledge and 'This is what democracy looks like', in Martel and Casas Klausen (eds) How not to be Governed: Reading and Interpretations from a Postanarchist Left, New York, Lexington Press (2011).

Kena Lorenzini

Kena Lorenzini

Photographer

María Eugenia Lorenzini nació en Talca. Sicóloga de profesión, desarrolló un importante trabajo como fotógrafa, formando parte de una generación que buscó retratar el rostro gris de Chile durante la dictadura militar. En esos años trabajó como reportera gráfica en el semanario Hoy y la revista Análisis, labor gracias a la cual reunió un importante archivo fotográfico que concentró en su libro Fragmento fotográfico, arte, narración y memoria. Chile 1980-1990. El catálogo recoge más de 120 imágenes, acompañadas de un texto de Patricia Verdugo y una reseña sobre la historia de la fotografía, de Luis Alegría. En la actualidad, María Eugenia Lorenzini se encuentra abocada al ejercicio de su profesión. Los originales de una parte significativa de su trabajo fotográfico realizado en dictadura fueron donados por la autora al Museo Histórico Nacional.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Amanda Lotspike

Amanda Lotspike

Project Collaborator and Researcher, ESE:O

Amanda Lotspike graduated Phi Beta Kappa at the University of California, Davis with a B.A. in International Relations and Women and Gender Studies. With support from the U.S. State Department’s Gilman International Scholarship and the UC Davis President’s Fellowship, she carried out ethnographic research in Santiago, Chile in 2011, working to understand how community health promoters in popular sectors of Santiago push the ontological notions of the body within a neoliberal political economy. She is currently working as a Project Collaborator and Researcher for ESE:O.

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Heather Love

Heather Love

R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Heather Love is R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Chair at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches courses in twentieth-century literature and culture, queer studies, disability studies, film, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on the scholarship and legacy of Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"). She is currently at work on a book on the politics of social stigma and the problem of comparison in the fields of disability studies, queer theory, and critical race studies ("The Stigma Archive").

Jennifer Luong

Jennifer Luong

Constitutional and Human Rights Lawyer, JD University of Toronto

Jennifer Luong is a Canadian constitutional and human rights lawyer whose practice focuses on equality challenges to parentage laws and the constitutional right to collective bargaining. She represented the Attorney General of Ontario in Grand et al. v. Ontario, the settlement of which led to the passage of Ontario's All Families are Equal Act, 2016 and in Re S.M., in which the Ontario Superior Court struck down the spousal requirement for joint adoption applications as unjustifiably discriminating on the basis of marital status. She received her AB (Mathematics) from Dartmouth College in 2009 and her JD from the University of Toronto in 2013.

Working Group Affiliation

Motherhood and Technology

Janet Lyon

Janet Lyon

Associate Professor of English, Penn State University

Janet Lyon co-developed the Disability Studies program at Penn State, and subsequently created the undergraduate minor in Disability Studies, which she currently directs.  She has published widely on the literature and culture of modernism and is at work on a book linking the conceptual appearance of disability as concept with the coeval development of modernist aesthetics.  She has delivered several invited talks on this subject, and recently published a portion of the project appeared in the flagship field journal Modernism/modernity: “On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew” (18.3, September 2011, 551-74).

Katherine Magyarody

Katherine Magyarody

Author and Independent Scholar PhD University of Toronto

Katherine Magyarody is an author of young adult fiction and an academic researcher. She is the recipient of a 2017 Robert J. Dau PEN Award for Emerging Writers and her debut novel, The Changeling of Fenlen Forest, was longlisted for the 2020 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her academic research centers on the representation of peer groups as a method of imperial cultural consolidation nineteenth-century children’s literature. She has published articles in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Hungarian Studies Review, the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, and The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Her reviews of contemporary children’s fiction and nonfiction appear in School Library Journal.

Selina Makana

Selina Makana

Assistant Professor of African History, University of Memphis

Selina Makana is an Assistant Professor of African history at the University of Memphis. Her research and teaching focus on African women’s social history, gender and militarism, transnational feminisms, and African diaspora studies. Her current monograph uses oral interviews with former women combatants and archival records to probe the relationship between gender and militarism in contemporary Angola. This research explores how nationalist projects and armed insurgent organizations utilize gender—in particular ideas of masculinities and femininities —to consolidate power and perpetuate violence. In 2017-2020, she was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality and a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She holds a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of California-Berkeley. Makana has been a Fulbright Fellow at Stanford University. Her recent publications have appeared in Meridians: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism, Gender & History, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Women’s History. Selina Makana is a member of the African Feminist Initiative and serves on the editorial advisory board of Feminist Africa.

Working Group Affiliation

Motherhood and Technology

Hebe Mattos

Hebe Mattos

Professor of History, University Federal Fluminense

Hebe Mattos is Professor of History at University Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Brazil. She was visiting Professor at Columbia University (Ruth Cardoso Chair, ILAS/Institute of Latin America Studies, 2013/2014), at Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (2004) and at the University of Michigan (1996). She is the author or co-author of numerous books on Brazilian slavery and post-emancipation society, including Memórias do Cativeiro. Família, Trabalho e Cidadania no Pós-Abolição/ Memories of Captivity. Family, Labor and Citizenship after abolition(2005);  Das Cores do Silêncio. Significados da Liberdade no Sudeste Escravista, Brasil-sec. XIX / Colors of Silence. Meanings of Freedom in 19th Southeast Brazil/ (1995, 1998, 2013) - for which she received the Brazil National Archive Research Award (1993), and The Abolition of Slavery and the aftermath of emancipation in Brazil (with Rebecca Scott et allii, 1988). She’s one of the coordinators of The Oral History and Image Lab of UFF where she co-directed the collection of documentary films Present Pasts.

Working Group Affiliation

The Digital Black Atlantic

Laura Mauldin

Laura Mauldin

Sociology, University of Connecticut

Laura Mauldin's research draws from the fields of medical sociology, science and technology studies (STS), and disability studies. She uses ethnographic methods to show how individual experiences are situated within institutional structures and a larger sociocultural context. All of her research is concerned with how science, technology, and medicine shape contemporary life and is based on the contention that disability – like race, class, or gender - is a political and social category. Her aim is to give voice to the experiences of individuals and families who utilize healthcare services and/or medical technologies in order to show the ambivalent qualities of technoscientific change, the politics of disability and illness, and to suggest what healthcare policies or issues need to be further researched or improved. 

Professor Mauldin attended the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where she majored in linguistics and focused on ASL for her thesis. She has also worked at the Texas School for the Blind in the deaf/blind department where she was trained in Orientation and Mobility and how to work with deaf/blind individuals. After graduating, she briefly entered the Interpreter Training Program at Austin Community College. But during the first semester there, she was accepted as a graduate student in ASL and Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, which is the only liberal arts university for the deaf in the world and everything is conducted in ASL.  As a Master's student, she also spent time in Bristol, UK as a visiting scholar in Deaf studies at the University of Bristol (sadly, the Deaf Studies Centre is now closed, but you can read about it here) and a summer completing the certificate in Sexuality, Culture and Society at the University of Amsterdam. 

Mauldin entered the PhD program in Sociology at the Graduate Center - City University of New York (CUNY), where Barbara Katz Rothman chaired her dissertation committee. After finishing, she was invited to be a visiting professor for one year in the Science, Technology and Society department at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). She also taught an introduction to sociology course at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is housed within RIT. The following year, she returned to New York City and began her tenure track position at the University of Connecticut where she is jointly appointed in Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Human Development/Family Studies, with an affiliation in the Department of Sociology. 

Mauldin is currently developing new research projects related to spousal/partner caregiving, disability, and medical technologies. She still has interests in deaf-related topics. She is on the Board of Corporators for the American School for the Deaf and maintains her interpreting certification with the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. She is co-chair of the Disabilities Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and active in the Disability and Society Section of the American Sociological Association. She is also affiliated with (or just a fan of!) a variety of other groups, initiatives and professional associations, such as the NYU Council for the Study of Disability, the Future of Disability Studies project at Columbia, the Well Spouse Association, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY, the Society for Social Studies of Science, Society for Disability Studies, American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, National Women's Studies Association, and Sociologists for Women in Society. 

Working Group Affiliation

The Future of Disability Studies

Julie E. Maybee

Julie E. Maybee

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Lehman College, City University of New York

Julie E. Maybee is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY).  She is the Coordinator of the new Disability Studies Minor at Lehman, and is affiliated with the Masters in Disability Studies Program in the School of Professional Studies at CUNY along with the Department of African and African American Studies at Lehman. Her interest in Africana philosophy and 19th Century Continental philosophy—especially Hegel (Picturing Hegel: An Illustrated Guide to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic, Lexington Books, 2009) and the post-Hegelians—led to a broader exploration of the lived experiences of social identities—race, class, disability, ethnicity, gender—as well as the disadvantage and discrimination that accompany those identities in our society.  Her most recent piece, “The Political is Personal:  Mothering at the Intersection of Acquired Disability, Gender and Race” (in Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jen Cellio eds., Syracuse University Press, 2011), explores some complexities of identity created by the social consequences of becoming the mother of a newly disabled, black daughter.

Anne McClintock

Anne McClintock

Professor of English and Gender Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Anne McClintock's research interests include: Victorian British Literature and Culture, Twentieth Century American Culture and Literature, Gender Studies and Theories of Sexuality, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, Irish Literature and Culture.  She is the author of Simone de Beauvoir (1990); Olive Shreiner (1991); Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995) and co-editor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997); and Of Race and Queer Sexuality (1999).

Working Group Affiliations

Engendering the Archive

Reframing Gendered Violence

Frank Mecklenburg

Frank Mecklenburg

Director of Research and Chief Archivist, Leo Baeck Institute

Dr. Frank Mecklenburg is Director of Research and Chief Archivist at Leo Baeck Institute, a research library and archive that documents the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, but also including documents dating back to the middle ages. LBI was founded in 1955 as a repository for the books, papers, photos and documents that were salvaged from Central Europe after World War II and donated to the Institute.

As Chief Archivist, Dr. Mecklenburg is responsible for overseeing the acquisition of new collections for the Institute’s extensive archival holdings. In this capacity, he works closely with community organizations to identify potential donors and liaises directly with donors and their families to arrange the gift of their personal papers and artifacts. As Director of Research, he oversees the award of grants to scholars through the Institutes’ various fellowship programs.

Dr. Mecklenburg is also responsible for ensuring the preservation of the Institute’s archival holdings and expanding access to them. Dr. Mecklenburg played an instrumental role in the conception, development, and implementation of the Institute’s digitization project, called DigiBaeck, which put the majority of LBI archival holdings online by 2012.

He joined Leo Baeck Institute in 1984 as an archivist and took on his current role in 1996. He supervises the Berlin Branch of the LBI Archives at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and he represents LBI New York in the LBI International Executive Committee, which coordinates the efforts of the international Leo Baeck Institutes.

Born and educated in Berlin, Germany, Dr. Mecklenburg lives in Manhattan with his wife Atina Grossmann, a professor of History at NYU. They have two adult children.

Education
Ph.D. in Modern German History – Technische Universität Berlin

Languages
German, native speaker
English, fluent written and spoken

Associations
German Studies Association
Jewish Studies Association

Susan Meiselas

Susan Meiselas

Photographer

Susan Meiselas received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University. She joined Magnum Photos in 1976.  She is the author of three books: Carnival Strippers, Nicaragua, and Pandora's Box and editor of five collections: Learn to See, El Salvador: The Work of 30 Photographers, Chile from Within., Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History and Encounters with the Dani.  She has co-directed two films: "Living at Risk" and "Pictures from a Revolution" with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. In 1998 she developed akaKURDISTAN, an innovative online website for collective memory and cultural exchange. Her retrospective book and recent exhibition In History was produced with the International Center for Photography, New York.

Meiselas' coverage of human rights violations and the insurrections in Central America was widely published throughout the world. One-woman shows include: Whitney Museum for American Art; FOAM, Amsterdam; Hasselblad Center, Sweden; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum Folkwang, Germany. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow. Her work is included in American and international collections. Meiselas is presently serving as the President of the Magnum Foundation.

Working Group Affiliations

Women Mobilizing Memory

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