Graduate Students and Their Interests

Regina Arnold (email: rarnold at stanford dot edu)
My interests include the fictions of non fiction, the rhetorics of journalism and documentary, media theory and popular culture.

Karli Cerankowski (email: karlic at stanford dot edu)
Interests: philosophy of identity (naming, claiming, and enacting), social movements and identity politics, cultural production, gender and sexual identity, feminist theory, queer theory, critical ethnography.

Ebony Coletu (email: ebonics at stanford dot edu)
I study the forms of writing engaged most frequently in crisis--from applications for employment, public assistance, and need-based scholarships to cardboard placards raised by the homeless at popular intersections. By noting the places and moments when the disclosure of personal suffering and ambition can be exchanged for monetary support, an overlooked genre of writing appears, mediating ordinary attempts to maintain and transform the quality of life at the limit of personal resources. For this reason, my dissertation partners the critical submission of biographic information with a philosophical anthropology that accounts for the significance of written conditions to living conditions. Research Interests: 19th and 20th Century U.S. Social Welfare History, Modern Philanthropy, Philosophies of Life, Auto/Biographical Studies, Race and Humanism, Comparative Ethics

Vida Mia Garcia (email: campa at stanford dot edu)
I am interested in U.S. national tourism, a term I take to mean not only "domestic" tourism (movement within the United States by U.S. citizens) but "nationalistic" tourism, or travel as a ritual of American citizenship that fosters a collective sense of national history and identity. I bring theoretical and methodological tools from anthropology, literary criticism, cultural studies, and history to bear on a project that expands and revises tourism studies' traditional conception of "the tourist," as well as explores the different complexities that emerge when the terrain traveled shifts from "abroad" to "home" and when we visit not the "other" but "ourselves." My research passions include literature and history of the U.S. West, American imperialism and postcolonial theory, and popular and commodity culture. And donuts. Sweet, sweet donuts.

Nigel Hatton (email: hatton at stanford dot edu)
I study instances and a tradition of the modern novel as universal human rights doctrine marked by characterization, structure, narration, and form intended to shape collective memory, and evoke metaphor indicating the responsibility for human action and solidarity in a fractured world. How might we theorize and understand texts by the world authors/artists who state this human rights, intention for their respective work? To pursue this project, specifically, I read novels, novellas and short stories, and think about them in relation to human rights discourses and political theory, literary and cultural theory, philosophy of literature, liberation theology, and nonfiction journalism and the essay.

Jacqueline Jenkins (email: episteme at stanford dot edu)
I use the tools of cultural studies--theory, ethnography, and discourse analysis--to examine the economic processes, social formations, and political conditions that perpetuate inequity in public schooling. My dissertation investigates a new identity politics that has emerged in the last decade around urban school reform and institutional transformation. I study school reformers' attempts to create equity in public schools through various processes and practices at the school site level, in partnership with educational reform non-profits, as well as through a network of conferences, workshops, and online communities. Research Interests: History of American Public Education; Political Economy of Urban Schooling; Liberalism & Philosophies of Social Identity; Critical Race, Marxist, and Feminist Theories; Cultural Studies.

Ju Yon Kim (email: juyonkim at stanford dot edu)
Performance and race theory; ethnic studies; Asian American literature, theater, and film.

Steven Lee (email: sslee78 at stanford dot edu)
Art and totalitarianism; diasporan and ethnic literatures; Vladimir Nabokov; the Korean minority of Central Asia; Soviet and post-Soviet culture and nationality policy.

Tomas Matza (email: tmatza at stanford dot edu)
Russia; postsocialism as theory and process; neoliberalism; governmentality; the state and the "self"; privatization as a social and cultural process; Soviet and Russian psychology; approaches to culture that combine political economy, with ethnographic research and studies of cultural production.

Allegra McLeod (email: Allegra.Mcleod at stanford dot edu)
Research interests: contemporary critical theories of law and jurisprudence; 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy; social justice activism and its containment; critiques of liberalism; feminist jurisprudence; queer theory.

Siphiwe Ndlovu (email: la.noire.de at gmail dot com)
I am interested in things that are "disappeared" from everyday speech, from "text", from public memory, from the archive, from the material world, from visibility. Of particular interest to me is the way in which things that are "disappeared" are made to re-appear. Focusing on the colonial past of Rhodesia and the post-colonial present of Zimbabwe I look at things that are "appeared" and interrogate what these ruptures mean for the ways in which colonial and post-colonial "states" imagine themselves. I pay close attention to the actual mechanics of disappearance and appearance and analyze why certain things refuse to remain "disappeared". My areas of interest are: Post-Colonial Studies, African Social History, Race and Gender Studies, Subaltern Studies, Film Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural and Social Anthropology.

Teresa Pellinen-Chavez (email: teresapc at stanford dot edu)
My dissertation, Shining Paths: Tourism and the Marketing of Innocence in Southern Peru, is an anthropological study that considers the dramatic transformation of Peru during the last three decades, as seen through the lens of tourism in the Cusco region. The Peru of the 1980s and early 1990s - a state dominated by militia insurgency and government-initiated violence - is virtually unrecognizable today. In its place, the state, with the tourism industry as its most effective rhetorical vehicle, has constructed a public face that is idyllic and spiritual Ð characteristics promoted as inherent or indigenous to Peru. More specifically, the state has capitalized on its Inca ruins, its Quechua-speaking peasants, and the Andean landscape in order to insinuate itself into global fantasies of spirituality, authenticity, and remoteness. At the heart of such self-promotion are two messages: the first is that the ubiquitous images that romanticize Peru as a peaceful land of imposing mountains and happy peasants represent the "true" Peru. The second, corollary message is that the more than 30,000 murders Peru witnessed during the years of violence were an aberration informed by foreign, modern values.

Sarah Ramirez, MPH (Not in residence at Stanford) (email: sramirez at stanford dot edu)
Research interests: History of Epidemiology, Environmental History, Contemporary & Historical Public Health Research, Theories, and Methodologies. Sarah's dissertation project, currently titled "Standardizing Surveillance: Science, Knowledge, and the Making of a Methodological Narrative of Neglect," explores how shifting processes of standardization, aggregation, and surveillance on pesticide monitoring is a vehicle through which Public Health and Science constructs knowledge about the everyday life and health rural and agricultural communities. Drawing on historical approaches, she examines scientific and governmental research on pesticide exposures, monitoring methodologies, and regulations along with testimonies, media coverage, and exposés. She traces epidemiological concepts such as case definition, exposure measurements, and denominators (i.e. "population at risk") to reveal how classification and standardization render certain bodies and certain work, in this case agricultural labor and the health of these bodies, invisible.

Sarah Richardson (email: ssr21 at stanford dot edu)
Science studies, feminist theory.

Adam Rosenblatt
Ethics and political theory, particularly debates over the content and scope of liberalism and international human rights; the dead and the Disappeared as political and ethical subjects; torture; gender and justice; comics (including "graphic novels" and comics journalism) and animation; Latin America.

Jayson Sae-Saue (email: jsaesaue at stanford dot edu)
Critical race studies; Chicana/o and Asian American comparative cultural studies; cultural geography; political economy.

Peter Satyanand Samuels (email: psamuels at stanford dot edu)
Although I entered the Program with the intention of carrying out research on the relationship between human rights and poststructuralism from an anthropological perspective, my work has taken an increasingly legalist and historical turn, as I have moved away from human rights towards thinking about property and its place within legal, political, and economic liberalism and neoliberalism. I now expect to develop my Qualifying Paper topic--the history of eminent domain in the context of British colonialism, with specific reference to India--more fully in my dissertation. I work mainly with professors in the Department of History, although my original home at Stanford--the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, now the newly reconstituted Department of Anthropology--continues to be an important base. Eventually, I expect to complete a JD in addition to my doctorate and gain a law school teaching job, specializing in the areas of property, legal history, and jurisprudence. My other interests include the global spread of the English language, race relations in modern Britain, imperial history, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, social theory, political philosophy, and, on occasion, literary theory.

Eric Sapp (email: ecsapp at stanford dot edu)
Critical and analytic jurisprudence; social and political philosophy; constitutional law and international human rights; legal hermeneutics and literary theory; psychoanalytic theory and cultural criticism; poetics and aesthetics; dada and surrealism; history of late modern philosophy.

Richard Simpson (email: mordenti at stanford dot edu)
Rhetorical strategies of creative non-fiction writing and film-making; history of international documentary practice; radical pedagogy and the public sphere; Marxist theorizations of spatiality; I study the particular role the modern American university plays as mediator between globalization processes and fragmented identity.

Vasile Stanescu (email: vts at stanford dot edu)
Methodologically, my interest is in applying the tools and techniques of literary analysis to those texts not usually analyzed through a literary lens, such as legal briefs, congressional hearings, or psychological studies. Thematically, my interests are in the issues of the commodification of bodies, both animal and human, and the mechanisms by which "imagination"and "empathy" undergrid and support mechanisms of oppression. Topically, I am currently working on the transnational adoption of Romanian children based on an in-depth rhetorical analysis of the Helsinki Congressional Hearing in favor of the practice. And personally, I love Stephen Colbert, satire, and the concept of "truthiness."

Nirvana Tanoukhi (email: naltann at hotmail dot com)

Brian Thompson (email: jbt1 at stanford dot edu)
***In Progress***

Michelle Zamora (email: zamoram at stanford dot edu)
Zamora is a Chicana feminist writer trained in transnational feminisms and poscolonial theory at the New School for Social Research where she received her M.A. in Gender Studies and Feminist Theory. Her dissertation deploys key Mexica concepts as theoretical frameworks for understanding the role of female knowledge in today's MeXicano expressive cultures, specifically in spiritual and performance traditions. Zamora's work traces a genealogy of ideas about the body's relationship to spirit, as well as art/performance as energy movement, from the precolombian Indigenous painted books of Central Mexico to their expression in current MeChicano/MeXicano cultural productions including Danza Azteca, and Chicana-Ind’gena visual and literary arts. Zamora's broader interests are in exploring a Chicana/o aesthetics and historiography that can comment on and/or incorporate their constituent genealogies of ideas about the body and the spiritual epistemologies of which they are a part. She is also committed to liberatory pedagogies that respect forms of knowledge traditionally seen as outside of scientific disciplines and that resist the disciplined/disciplining impulses of academic knowledge formation. Zamora hopes to challenge, through her own work inside and outside of academia, the predominant assumptions of epistemological singularity in so many forms of teaching and research methodologies.

Recent Graduates - their Interests and Placements

Ulka Shapiro Anjaria (email: uanjaria at brandeis dot edu)
I study the way Indian literature--particularly realist novels--written in the two decades before independence (1920s-1947) dealt with the ideological and material struggles that were heightened when Congress-led nationalism began to take an expressly statist form. My focus is specifically on liberal individualism and the urban-rural relationship in authors such as Premchand, Mulk Raj Anand and others. I am also interested in the politics of representation, Marxism, subaltern studies and theories of the realist novel.

Assistant Professor of English and American Literatures, Brandeis University, MA.

Evelyn Alsultany(email: alsultan@umich.edu)
My work argues for the inclusion of Arab-American Studies within the field of U.S. Ethnic Studies and American Studies. I am currently writing my dissertation, “Representing and Racializing Arab- and Muslim- Americans Post-9/11: The Changing Profile of Race in the United States.” Through examining representations of Arabs and Muslims in a variety of media, my dissertation tracks the ways in which Arabs and Muslims have become racialized since September 11th and through the "War on Terror," how racialized discourses from the past are recycled and modified in the present, and how processes of racialization affect rights and citizenship. More broadly, I am interested in Feminist Studies, Latino Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, multiracial identity, creative writing and playwriting. During the 2004-5 academic year, I was be a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Arab American Studies, University of Michigan-Dearborn, where I taught "Arab-American Studies: Race, Gender, and Representation," and completed my dissertation.

Assistant Professor, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

Lisa Arellano (email: larellan@colby.edu)
My dissertation, "Resisting History: Lynching in/and the American Past," examines the "real" and representational history of lynching and vigilantism. More broadly, I study 19th and 20th century U.S. history and literature; critical historiography; and theories of narrative.

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Colby College, ME.

Magdalena (Lena) Barrera (email: mt10@stanford.edu)
My dissertation, "Domestic Drama: Visions of Mexican Families and American Identity, 1910-1941," examines how people of varying class and ethnic backgrounds use the concept and discourse of "family" to tighten (or, in some cases, to loosen) the borders of American identity in the early twentieth century. I analyze three types of texts: literature, music and photography. Rather than provide a seamless definition of "the" Mexican family, I use an interdisciplinary framework to explore the gendered creation of "Mexican American" identity, and how it affected the notion of what it means to be "American" during this time period. My general research and teaching interests include Chicana/o Cultural Studies; Mexican American literature and history, 1880 to 1941; early twentieth century US literature; and historical approaches to literature. I also happen to be a Chicago-area native. That's right--a Chicana from the Midwest!

Post-Doc, Introduction to the Humanities Program, Stanford University

Maya Dodd(email: msdodd@princeton.edu)
Critical legal studies; Modern Indian art; Postcolonial Discourse Analysis; Revolutions in everyday life; South Asian cultural studies and Historiography

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Committee for South Asian Studies Fellow. Lecturer in Anthropology.
Home Department: Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies

Raúl Coronado (email: raulc@uchicago.edu)
My dissertation, "Competing American Colonial Modernities: Politics, Publishing, and the Making of a U.S.-Mexican Literary Culture", turns to the physical boundary between the U.S. and Mexico to tell the story of the creation of a heterogeneous "American" modernity, one that was both U.S. and Latin American. It does so by providing a theoretical history of 19th century Mexican American literature, one that rather than taking literature as the object of study provides an account of how certain genres became specialized and identified as "literature" proper while other genres did not. My broad research interests include: comparative 19th century pan-American literature, modernity and colonialism in the Americas, the history of literary studies and anthropology, and Chicana/o cultural studies.

Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, IL. For further information,
please visit his home page

Manishita Dass(email: mdass1@swarthmore.edu)
Disseration title: "Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and Nation in India"
Interests include: postcolonial theory, nationalism, the transnational circulation and reception of cultural texts; film theory and history; political economy; feminist theory and gender studies; 20th century fiction in English; modernism(s); South Asia.

Visiting Assistant Professor, Film and Media STudies, Swarthmore College, PA.

Shona Jackson(email: soursop@tamu.edu)
Broadly, my work examines literary, historical, political, and national representation in the Caribbean. The dissertation, "Between myth and nation: rethinking Caribbean history, politics, literature, and aesthetics," is a study of how the discourse of myth and history have been manipulated by politicians and cultural thinkers to create narratives of being and belonging that challenge and assume (neo)colonial positions. I use a cross-disciplinary framework, grounded in the humanities and social sciences, to explore the resultant crisis in nationalist discourse in Guyana. I argue that the nation's history is being rewritten as each ethnic group rethinks the narrative of independence in terms of its specific labor history and form of colonial oppression. Contemporary Guyanese cultural discourse reveals the limits of Creole theory and shapes a broader inquiry of narrative in the Caribbean and of (post)colonialism and (post)modernism in the region. In my research, questions also emerge for discussions of Caribbean (West Indian) nationalism and attempts to establish a regional, "New World" identity and an aesthetic. I co-edit the Caribbean Studies Book Series at Lexington Books and I teach at George Mason University in Virginia.

Department of English, Texas A&M, TX.

Beth Piatote (email: piatote@berkeley.edu)
Assistant Professor, Department of Native American Studies, UC Berkeley, CA.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins(email: kwazana@pomona.edu.edu)
My dissertation, "Kitchen Culture: Eating, Literature and the Body Politic", focuses on food and eating in the history, visual culture and literature of the United States. Emphasizing the inseparability of race and gender as mutually constitutive political categories and analytic tools, my work aims to develop methodological contributions to the study of what I term "food culture." Necessarily interdisciplinary, food culture is here broadly defined as the representation of food and eating in cultural artifacts like advertising, literature, film and television and the production of texts specifically concerned with food and eating, such as cookbooks, medical literature and domestic manuals. At the core of my work is the assertion that eating and food culture act as central metaphors for the discussion and negotiation of difference as an organizing concept in American culture. I have worked as a journalist, food writer and social activist and my writing has appeared in Canada's Globe and Mail, the San Francisco Chronicle and Tikkun Magazine.

Assistant Professor, Departments of English and Feminist Studies, Pomona College, CA.