Participants

erdagErdağ Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish & Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He is the award winning translator of Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red and A.H. Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace. His most recent book is Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge 2013). Under the working title Occupied Istanbul, his current research project examines the Allied occupation of Istanbul after World War I. He leads the Duke in Turkey program in Istanbul each summer and is co-director of the Duke Rethinking Global Cities project.

 

DSC03665miriam cooke is Braxton Craven Distinguished Professor of Arab Cultures at Duke University and Director of the Duke University Middle East Studies Center. She has been a visiting professor in Tunisia, Romania, Indonesia, Qatar, Dartmouth College and the Alliance of Civilizations Institute in Istanbul. Her writings have focused on the intersection of gender and war in modern Arabic literature and on Arab women writers’ constructions of Islamic feminism. She has written about Arab cultures with a concentration on Syria, the Arab Gulf and the networked connections among Arabs and Muslims around the world. Her latest book isTribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (2014).

 

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Ara Wilson (Women’s Studies, Cultural Anthropology) conducts ethnographic research on global capitalist modernity with a focus on Bangkok. Her work includes The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City (University of California 2004) and related articles on queer and gender issues, cultural political economy, and medical tourism in Bangkok. Spring 2015 she will teach a graduate seminar on Infrastructure and has a forthcoming article in Signs, “The Infrastructure of Intimacy” (2016).

 

 

FabioLanzaFINALB&W_022 Fabio Lanza (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2004) is associate professor of modern Chinese history in the Departments of History and East Asian Studies of the University of Arizona. His main research interests are political movements and urban history of twentieth-century China. He is the author of Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney) of De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change (Routledge, 2013). He is currently completing a manuscript on Maoism, Asian Studies and intellectual activism in the U.S. and France and has just started a new project on Beijing urban space under Maoism.

 

annAnne-Maria Makhulu teaches in Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke. Her research interests cover: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, neoliberalism, Marxism, and finance. Her book, Making Freedom: Squatter Politics and Domestic Life in Cape Town, is due to be published in 2015. Makhulu is also a contributor to Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (2004), New Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (2010), as well as author of “Ethics of Scale: Relocating Politics After Liberation” (2010) and “The Conditions for After Work: Financialization and Informalization in Posttransition South Africa” (2012). She is a co-editor of Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities (2010). A city girl, through and through, Anne-Maria heads “home” to New York or London or Cape Town or Johannesburg ever chance she gets!

 

geniferGENNIFER WEISENFELD, Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. And her most recent book Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012; Japanese edition, Kantō Daishinsai no Sōzōryoku: Saigai to Fukkō no Shikaku Bunkaron, Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan’s worst national disaster of the twentieth century. In addition to co-editing the volume Crossing the Sea: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu, with Gregory Levine and Andrew Watsky (Princeton University Press, 2012), she has written numerous journal articles, including several on the history of Japanese design, such as, “‘From Baby’s First Bath’: Kaō Soap and Modern Japanese Commercial Design” (The Art Bulletin, September 2004) and the core essay on MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido company’s advertising design. She is currently working on a new book on the history of Japanese advertising and commercial design titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan.

 

ralphRalph Litzinger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of Other Chinas, the first major ethnographic study to examine the role of ethnic minority intellectuals in post-socialist debates about ethnicity, marginality, national belonging in the reform era. He has published numerous essays in anthropology, cultural studies, and East Asian Studies journals. His more recent work concerns the politics of migrant education, labor, and zones of exclusion and precarity on the fringes of Beijing and other cities in China. He is the editor of “The Labor Question in China: Apple and Beyond” and the co-editor of a special online journal issue of the flagship journal Cultural Anthropology on the self-immolations in Tibet as a form of protest (here and here). He is co-editing, with Carlos Rojas, Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China (under review at Duke Press), and is currently completing a manuscript, Migrant Futures: The Regulation of Life on the Urban Fringe. At Duke, Professor Litzinger started the first Focus Program on China, and directed Duke’s Asian/Pacific Studies Institute from 2001-2008. Since 2008, he has been the faculty director of the Duke Engage Migrant Beijing project, a service and research initiative with a migrant middle school in Beijing. In 2010, he co-developed the Global Semester Abroad Program, a comparative educational initiative looking at environment, health, and development issues in China and India. Professor Litzinger holds a joint appointment in the Women’s Studies Department at Duke, is an affiliated member of Duke’s Global Health Institute, and is on the international advisory board of the Central Nationalities University in Beijing. From 2010-2013, he was a visiting professor at the Beijing University Health Sciences Center.

 

TJonesTerril Jones is a longtime foreign and business correspondent who has lived for 16 years in Asia. He travelled to China on numerous assignments in the 1980s, and last September completed a three-year assignment in Beijing with Reuters covering Chinese businesses, domestic politics and foreign policy. He also was based in Japan and France, with assignments in South Korea, throughout Europe, in north and west Africa and the United Nations for 15 years with The Associated Press. He was a founding editor of Forbes Global magazine, was the Detroit-based automotive correspondent for Forbes and the Los Angeles Times, and was a Silicon Valley correspondent for the L.A. Times. He studied Chinese leadership studies at the University of Michigan for a year as a Knight-Wallace Fellow, and digital media for six months at Ohio State University as a Kiplinger Fellow.

 

106811o_hacohen0003Malachi Haim Hacohen is Bass Fellow, Associate Professor of History, Political Science and Religion, and Director of the Center for European Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Karl Popper – The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He has published essays on the Central European Jewish intelligentsia, Cold War liberalism, and cosmopolitanism and Jewish identity in The Journal of Modern History, The Journal of the History of Ideas, History and Theory, History of Political Economy, Jewish Social Studies, and other journals and collections. He is completing Jacob & Esau Between Nation and Empire: A Jewish European History.  He coordinates Vienna for Global Cities.

 

PHOTO MIGUEL 2014

Miguel Rojas-Sotelo is Adjunct Professor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke University, Special Events Coordinator for the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University. Miguel is a visual artist, filmmaker, media activist, scholar, and curator. Miguel worked as visual arts director for the Ministry of Culture of Colombia (1995-2001) where he developed participatory cultural policy and implemented programs for the visual arts community. He has written and published numerous articles and reviews on decolonial aesthetics, subaltern studies, the global south, contemporary visual circuits, culture and power, Latin American visual production, cultural politics and subjectivity, performance and film studies. As curator he has worked on single and collaborative projects in Latin America and the US. Currently works at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke University is the Director of the NC Latin American Film and New Media Festival.  Miguel is finishing a book title The Other Network: La Havana Biennale and the Global South (forthcoming in 2015).

 

 

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Sumathi Ramaswamy is Professor of History & International Comparative Studies. She is cultural historian of South Asia and the British empire and her research over the last few years has been largely in the areas of visual studies, the history of cartography, and gender.   She is currently finishing a monograph titled Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe.  Her interest in urban history emerges from a new project she will be soon starting in which she considers among other things colonial Indian cities as sites that attract educational philanthropy.

 

guoGuo-Juin Hong was born and raised in a rural area in Eastern Taiwan with father who emigrated from Mainland China and mother a native Taiwanese. After two years of obligatory military service upon graduation from college, he came to the US, receiving first a MA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University and then PhD in Rhetoric and Film at the University of California, Berkeley. Hong is currently Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Director of the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, and Co-Director of the Humanities Laboratory on Audiovisualties at Duke University. His book, Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; paperback edition 2013), is the first and only full-length study of Taiwan cinema in English language that covers its entire history since the colonial period. Hong has published articles on topics such as 1930s Shanghai cinema, New Taiwan Cinema, documentary and queer movement. Hong teaches courses on Chinese-language cinemas, Chinese literature and culture, film theory and historiography, melodrama, documentary, and audiovisual culture. He has been involved in music and theater and active in documentary production.

 

victoria

 

 

Victoria Szabo is an Associate Research Professor in Art, Art History & Visual Studies and International Comparative Studies. She is also the Program Director for Information Science + Information Studies. Her work is on the critical and practical affordances of database-driven spatial media such as digital maps, games and virtual worlds, and mobile applications, and she is currently working on augmented reality projects in Durham, NC and Venice, Italy. She has a PhD in Victorian literature and professional background in academic technology. Her discussion group session will focus on the concept of the digital city and its relation to the material world.

 

sibelSibel Bozdogan holds a professional degree in architecture from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey (1976) and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1983). Her research interests refocused on Istanbul’s urban history, especially on issues of public space, urban heritage and collective memory. In addition to numerous articles on these topics, her publications include her seminal Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (University of Washington Press, 2001) which won the 2002 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Koprulu Book Prize of the Turkish Studies Association; and most recently, Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Books, 2012) co-authored with Esra Akcan. In Fall 2010, she curated the 1930-1950 section of the collaborative Istanbul 1910-2010: City, Built Environment and Architectural Culture Exhibition at the Santral Museum, Istanbul Bilgi University.

 

Erik Harms

 

Erik Harms is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International & Area Studies at Yale University, specializing in urban anthropology, Southeast Asia, and Vietnam. His ethnographic research in Vietnam has focused on the social and cultural effects of rapid urbanization on the fringes of Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City. His book, Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), explores how the production of symbolic and material space intersects with Vietnamese concepts of social space, rural-urban relations, and notions of “inside” and “outside.” He has published articles in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, City & Society, Pacific Affairs, Positions, and is the co-editor of Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity (Hawaii, 2013). Harms is currently writing a book about the demolition and reconstruction of the urban landscape in two of Ho Chi Minh City’s New Urban Zones, Phu My Hung and Thu Thiem. Please visit his project website for more information on this research visit: http://newurbanvietnam.commons.yale.edu/.

 

 

Sasha NewellSasha Newell is an assistant professor of Anthropology at North Carolina State University. He wrote The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire, winner of the Talbot Prize and finalist for the Herskovitz Award. While his primary research was in Côte d’Ivoire, he has also worked with Congolese in Paris and is currently writing about storage space, memory, and materiality in the US, with much of his fieldwork collected in North Carolina. He has taught at NYU, UVA, and College of the Holy Cross, and received a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois. He received his BA from Reed College and his PhD from Cornell University.

 

Robin Visser

Robin Visser is Associate Professor of Chinese and Associate Chair of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research specialties are modern Chinese literatures, urban studies, environmental studies, and visual culture. Her book, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Duke UP, 2010), analyzes Chinese urban planning, fiction, cinema, art, and cultural studies at the turn of the 21st century. Her current research analyzes relational ontologies within Sinophone eco-literature.

 

WMaderthaner

Wolfgang Maderthaner, General Director of the Austrian State Archives, was previously the Head of the Association for the History of the Working-Class Movement (Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung) for many years. His research and publications, which have appeared in many languages, focus on Austrian working-class and social history, modern European cultural history, Urban Studies and Cultural Studies, history of political economy and historical methodology. Some of his publications include: Unruly Masses. The Other Face of Fin de Siècle Vienna (with Lutz Musner, 2008); L’autoliquidation de la raison. Les sciences de la culture et la crise du social (2010); Neoliberalismus und die Krise des Sozialen (with Andrea Grisold 2010); Untergang einer Welt. Der Große Krieg 1914-1918 in Photographien und Texten (2013) and Der Wiener Kongress. Die Erfindung Europas (editor, 2014).

 

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Andreas Weigl is an Assistant Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, a scholar on the staff of the Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna, and, since 2011, the head of the “Austrian Urban History Research Group.“ He was visiting professor at the Universities of Innsbruck (2010) and Vienna (2012). His main fields of research are historical demography, urban history, economic history, and social history of medicine.

 

jotasamper2

 

Jota (Jose) Samper, PhD has been working as an architect, planner and artist for 13 years and has taught architecture and urban design. Born and raised in Medellín, he studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín. Since then, he has done research, art and architectural projects in seven countries: Colombia, Panama, United States, Mexico, Brazil, India and France. His work has won more than 6 national (U.S.) and international awards. In 2010, his project “Living rooms at the Border,” which he designed with the team while at estudio teddy cruz, exhibited at the (Museum of Modern Art) MoMA in New York City. He is lecturer at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His work dwells in the intersection between urban informality (Slums) and urban violent conflict. He is a fellow of the “Drugs, Security and Democracy, SSRC”. Also an advisor for the “Strategic Masterplan for the Innovation District of Medellin”. Along with his work as a teacher of planning and design, he is co-founder and co-director of DukeEngage Medellin, Colombia since 2007. This is an alternative video and photographic archive and mapping with marginalized communities in the City of Medellin.

 

 

Monica%20Amor

 

Monica Amor teaches Modern and Contemporary art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has written art criticism and essays for Art Margins, Artforum, Art Journal, Art Nexus, Grey Room, October, Poliester, Third Text, and Trans. She has curated several exhibitions, among them: “Altering History/Alternating Stories for the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas (1996), “Beyond the Document” for the Reina Sofia in Madrid (2000) “re-drawing the line” for Art in General in New York (2000), “Gego Defying Structures” for the Serralves Foundation in Porto (2006) and “Mexico: Expected/Unexpected” for Le Maison Rouge in Paris (2008). She has lectured at The Ohio State University and Sara Lawrence College, and has taught at Hunter College, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, the Instituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Theories of the non-object: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela 1944-1969 is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

 

mazmudarRanjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) and co-author with Nitin Govil of the forthcoming The Indian Film Industry (2015). Her writings have appeared in anthologies as well as in journals such as Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Screen, Social Research, Journal of Television and New Media, Economic and Political Weekly, Film International. She has also worked as a documentary film maker and her productions include Delhi Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (Co-Directed)

 

Yan Song

Dr. Yan Song is Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and Director of the Program on Chinese Cities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests includes low carbon and green cities, land use planning and scenarios, plan evaluation, land use regulations, spatial analysis of urban spatial structure and urban form, land use and transportation integration, and how to accommodate research in above fields by using planning supporting systems such as GIS and other computer-aided planning tools.

 

 Burak Erdim

Burak Erdim is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Architectural History at North Carolina State University. He recently received his Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Virginia where he also completed a Master’s degree in Architecture. Erdim’s dissertation is entitled, “Middle East Technical University and Revolution: Development Planning and Architectural Education during the Cold War, 1950-1962.” His current research focuses on the postwar period and analyzes the conceptualization of architecture, planning, and construction as the central component of social and economic development projects within the multiple political contexts of the Cold War.

 

Bredna Chalfin

Brenda Chalfin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida and UF Center for African Studies Faculty Affiliate. Chalfin holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Amherst College. Her areas of expertise are Political and Economic Anthropology with a focus on West Africa, state-processes, sovereignty, maritime frontiers, infrastructure, the built environment, and neoliberal reform. Chalfin is the author of two monographs, Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity (Routledge, 2004) and Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa (University of Chicago, 2010), along with scholarly articles in Current Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Africa, and Politique Africaine, among other journals. She is currently engaged in two major research projects: one on urban infrastructure and public life in Ghana’s high-modernist port city of Tema and another on emerging modalities of off-shore governance related to deep-water oil prospecting in the western Gulf of Guinea. Her manuscript, Infrastructures of Bare Life: The Vital Politics of Waste on Ghana’s Urban Fringe, is under review with MIT Press. Chalfin co-directed the SSRC 2014 Dissertation Proposal Development Workshop “Oceanic Studies: Seas as Sites and Subjects of Interdisciplinary Inquiry” and serves on the executive committee for the SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship.

Jordan Sand teaches the history of Japan at Georgetown University and writes widely on urbanism and material culture in East Asia. For more information see the link www.georgetown.edu/faculty/sandj

A Duke project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's "Partnership in a Global Age"