Paul Atkins (Assistant Professor, Asian Languages & Literature)
From Zen Babbler to Poetic Saint: Fujiwara no Teika at the Intersection of Medieval Japanese Literature and Politics

Atkins' project is a study of the poetry and poetics of Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), one of the most influential writers in the classical Japanese literary tradition. Two questions receive extended consideration: What was the nature of the relationship between poetic activity and political power; and how did Teika managed to radically differentiate his work from that of his peers and predecessors while staying within or redefining the boundaries of poetic discourse?

Tani Barlow (Professor, Women Studies)
Vernacular Sociology, Banalization, and the Event of Women in China

Barlow analyzes the history of middlebrow social theory and its relation to transnational commercial advertising in the late Qing dynasty and Republican eras. Barlow illustrates how the advertising culture starring cute women using trade marked, imported commodities and a body of translated vernacular theories about "society" voiced the aspirations of professional elites.

Tami Blumenfield (Dissertator, Anthropology)
Visual Representations of the Na: Reclaiming a Medium

Blumenfield draws on ethnographic research to explore visual mediation and filmmaking practices in Na communities of southwest China. She considers ethical questions raised by collaborative research and government involvement in community representation, and contextualizes these questions by probing new trends in media production and distribution within, and beyond, China.

Tom Foster (Professor, English)
Ethnicity and Technicity: Nature, Culture, and Race in the Cyberpunk Archive

Foster engages narratives produced by writers of color who question how race and ethnicity both survive and are transformed within high-tech, computer-mediated social formations in relation to attempts to foreground issues of race and colonialism within cyberpunk science fiction.  Where contemporary technocultures have always drawn heavily on speculative fiction to define claims for the cultural implications of new technologies, Foster locates a series of interventions in the racial imagery of postmodern technoculture, at the level of its speculative and fictional dimension, interventions that have to be theorized in terms of contemporary shifts in the meaning of "nature" and "culture."

Trevor Griffey (Alvord Fellow, History)
"Integrating a Burning House": Black Worker Struggles for Affirmative Action in the Age of Deindustrialization

Craig Jeffrey (Assistant Professor, Geography)
Performing Democracy: Dramatic Experiments in Public Action

Jeffrey addresses the question of how and to what extent youth theatre is contributing to novel forms of cultural expression, democratization, and education; and how a linked program of research, educational innovation, and outreach work might facilitate further positive change. Jeffrey addresses this question through participatory series of interventions — or 'dramatic experiments' — aimed at understanding and promoting connections between youth theatre, educational institutions, and democratic social movements in the Pacific Northwest and Uttar Pradesh, India.

Moon-Ho Jung (Associate Professor, History)
Race Radicals: Asian American Political Struggles in the Age of Empire

Jung concentrates on Asian American radical struggles, both within the United States and across the Pacific, and the convergent rise of legalized racism and antiradicalism in American culture from the 1890s to the 1930s. Ultimately, Race Radicals will attempt to explain how these struggles challenged, justified, and reproduced anti-Asian racism in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.

Ron Krabill (Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences)
Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media, Democratization, and the End(s) of Apartheid

Linda Nash (Assistant Professor, History)
Engineering a Modern World:  Environments, Technology, Agency

Nash is studying the efforts of US policymakers and engineers to export large-scale technologies overseas as part of the post-World War II commitment to global "development" and the ultimate unraveling of the paradigm of technology-driven modernization.  Nash's project questions the presumptive notion of liberal human "agency" that underlies modern social scientific writing.  Building on recent work in science and technology studies, she focuses on the crucial role of specific environments in shaping – and re-shaping – human knowledge and plans while emphasizing that the capacity for "agency" might be better understood as something that emerges from the interaction of humans with particular places and things.

Vince Schleitwiler (Dissertator, English)
Shades of a World Problem: Reading the Literatures of Black and Asian Migrations

Schleitwiler examines the literatures of African American, Japanese American, and Filipino migrations across U.S. imperial domains in the twentieth century to consider how notions of race are made and remade in uneven and unpredictable ways across a global field of imperial competition.  Drawing on the immanent theorizations of literature, literacy, and narrative form constitutive of African American cultural traditions, it seeks to reveal how the dominant racial ideology of U.S. imperial nationalism is conditioned upon intersections of black and Asian racial histories that elude it – or that it must suppress.

Crispin Thurlow (Assistant Professor, Communication)
Elite Mobilities: The Discursive Production of Luxury and Privilege

Elite Mobilities is a critical discourse analysis of the re-orderings of class under global capitalism, focusing on the intersection of geographic and social mobilities in "luxury tourism" where super-elite commodity lifestyles are aggressively reconfiguring supposedly anachronistic notions of distinction and superiority. By scrutinizing those with privilege – those who stand to benefit most from the status quo – Thurlow means to show how elitism is rhetorically and semiotically established as a normative ideal in relation to which all consumer-citizens, regardless of wealth or power, are constantly persuaded and taught to position themselves.

Ta Trang (Dissertator, Anthropology)
Health Rites: Medicine, Market, and Malpractice in Contemporary China

Ta's ethnographic project examines how Chinese citizens engage in various health-seeking strategies – and in some cases desperate life-seeking strategies – in an environment of expanding economic liberalization and restructuring of the Chinese healthcare system. The undergoing transformation is emblematic of the operational logics and rationalities that constitute modern, scientific development in contemporary China and is revealing of the contradictory agenda of economic growth and the cost to human health.

Geoffrey Turnovsky (Assistant Professor, French & Italian Studies)
The Literary Market: Authorship, Society, and the Birth of a Modern Cultural Field in Old Regime France

Turnovsky's project studies the development of authorship in 17th- and 18th-century France through a study of the "literary market," considered as a key institution of modernization both as it allowed writers to become free from patrons, and because it exploited and victimized them. Turnovsky studies the “market” as an imagined space, distinct from the book trade, which reflected the shifting hopes and anxieties of writers grappling with the decline of the old patronage system, and which, in turn, shaped their expectations as modern authors before a new, anonymous public.