Participant Biographies
Rita Barnard is Professor of English and Director of the Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance (Cambridge UP, 1997) and Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (Oxford UP, 2006). Along with Grant Farred, she edited After the Thrill is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa, a special issue of SAQ. Her recent writing includes the chapter on Modern American fiction in the Cambridge Companion to American Modernism and essays on various topics in postcolonial and cultural studies, ranging from Oprah’s Book Club, to beauty contests, and underground comix. She is currently working on a book on global modernities and a collective memoir entitled Verwoerd’s Daughters.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a professor of English at Temple University. Her recent critical books include Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, a book of essays (University of Alabama Press, 2006) and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Alabama also reprinted DuPlessis’s classic work The Pink Guitar in 2006. Her recent books of poetry are _Drafts 1-38, Toll_ (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). Torques, Drafts 56-78 is forthcoming from Salt Publishing in 2007. DuPlessis was the recipient of a 2002 Pew Fellowship for Artists and a grant for residency at Bellagio in 2007.
Tim Dean is Professor of English and associate faculty of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, and the Department of Comparative Literature at University at Buffalo (SUNY). He is the author of Beyond Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and co-editor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (2001). His presentation on bareback pornography at Slought Foundation draws on research for his book Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Rita Felski is Chair of Comparative Literature and William R. Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, The Gender of Modernity, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture and Literature after Feminism, and has recently guest-edited issues of journals on the subjects of everyday life, rethinking tragedy, and feminist theory and beauty. She is currently completing two books: a Blackwell's manifesto on Uses of Literature and an edited volume on The New Tragic Theory.
Jennifer L. Fleissner has taught at Brown, UCLA, and Indiana University, where she is currently Associate Professor of English. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (University of Chicago Press, 2004) as well as articles published or forthcoming in American Literature, differences, ELH, and Critical Inquiry. She is presently at work on two projects, Novel Appetitrsity Press.
Kathryn R. Kent is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies (on leave 2006) at Williams College. She is the author of Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Duke, 2003), and her work has also appeared in journals such as American Literature and GLQ. An essay of hers was recently reprinted in the collection, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds. (Minnesota, 2004). She is currently working on two projects: one on early twentieth century lesbian fiction and one on gender and sexuality in the Girl Scouts.
Janet Lyon is associate professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State University, where she is also co-director of the new Disability Studies Program. She teaches courses in British and Irish modernism and gender/sexuality, and has published articles most recently on gender and sexuality in modernism, on Roma culture and modernist sociability, and on eugenics, faciality and disability, as well as a book on the history/theory of the manifesto. She is at work on a book project about modernist salons and sociability, and another on modernist experimentalism and disability.
Douglas Mao is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. Having earned his doctorate in English at Yale, he taught at Princeton and Harvard before joining the Cornell faculty. A specialist in early twentieth-century poetry and fiction, he is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (1998) and the co-editor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (2006). In 2003, he was president of the Modernist Studies Association; in 2004, he held a Guggenheim fellowship. He's currently finishing a book on aesthetic environments and human development in literature from 1860 to 1950.
Richard Meyer is the first dedicated Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He comes to Penn from the University of Southern California where, as an Associate Professor of art history and director of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Program, he has taught extensively on identity politics in the visual arts. Dr. Meyer was awarded the 2003 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and is a frequent contributor to Artforum.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of a book about aesthetic and political strains of cosmopolitanism, entitled Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006), and the co-editor, with Douglas Mao, of a volume of essays about the new modernist studies, entitled Bad Modernisms (2006). She is the co-editor of five other books, including The Turn to Ethics (2000) and Media Spectacles (1993), and she is now at work on two new projects: After the National Paradigm: Translation, Comparison, and the New World Literature, a book-length study about the effects of globalization on national paradigms of literary culture; and Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization, an edited volume that calls for reading contemporary novels across several geographies of production, circulation, and translation