FACULTY AFFILIATES

Hazel V. Carby is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies at Yale University where she has taught since 1989. Before joining the Yale faculty Professor Carby taught at Wesleyan University for seven years. A graduate of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies she received her Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, U.K. in 1984. From 1972-79 Hazel Carby was a high school English teacher in the East End of London. She received her B.A. in 1970 from Portsmouth Polytechnic. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), Race Men (1998), and Cultures in Babylon (1999). Recent essays include: "A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture," Open Democracy, http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-112-2149.jsp and "The New Auction Block: Blackness and the Marketplace," forthcoming in Lewis Gordon ed. Companion to African American Literature (Blackwell).

Laura Wexler is Professor of American Studies and Women's and Gender Studies, and Chair of the Women's and Gender Studies Program. She is the author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000) and Pregnant Pictures, (2000), co-authored with Sandra Matthews. She is also co-editor along with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay of "Interpretation and the Holocaust" (2001), a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism. She is currently working on little-known photographs from the F.S.A./O.W.I. archives, on Kate Chopin, and on photographic adumbrations of the Holocaust. Her courses include the Junior Seminar in American Studies, the Introduction to Women's Studies and Feminist Theory, a graduate seminar in Feminist Theory, and her graduate seminar on aspects of Visual Culture.

Alondra Nelson (Ph.D., New York University, 2003) is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. She is co-editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life (New York University Press, 2002) and author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race, forthcoming from the University of California Press. Her research interests include the historical and socio-cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine; racial formation processes in biomedicine and technoculture; social movements; and social and cultural theory. Her current research project, “Reconciliation Projects: Slavery, Memory and the Social Uses of Genetics” examines genetic root-seeking and the implications of these practices for contemporary understandings of race, ethnicity, diaspora, kinship, and commemoration.

Michael Denning is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies. He is the author of Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (1987); Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (1987); The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997); and Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004). He has taught graduate courses on cultural theory, social movements, and twentieth-century cultural history, and is currently leading a working group on globalization and culture.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and has served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale University. Her current scholarship centers on migration and violence at the US-Mexico border as a departure point for conceptualizing the uneven processes of capitalist development and globalization. Her other scholarship in comparative ethnic and gender studies examines the relationship of labor and social movements to vernacular cultural production in the western hemisphere. She is the author of Migrant Dreams: Development and Subalternity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, forthcoming from NYU Press. Her essay "Borders of Solidarity: Race and Gender Contradictions in Transnational Labor Movements" appeared in the journal Social Justice in 1999. She received her doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2000. Alicia lives with her partner Stephen Pitti and their two-year old twins, Antonio and Thalia in New Haven CT.

Mary Lui is Assistant Professor of American Studies and History. Her primary research interests include: Asian American history, urban studies, women and gender studies, and public history. She is the author of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton University Press, 2005). The book uses a 1909 unsolved murder case to examine race, gender, and interracial sexual relations in the cultural, social and spatial formation of New York City Chinatown from 1870-1920.

José Celso de Castro Alves was the first project assistant of Yale University's Initiative on Labor and Culture. He is presently Assistant Professor of Black Studies and History at Amherst College and is currently working on a book about social movements in early nineteenth-century Brazil. He co-authored with Antony Dugdale and J. J. Fuser, Yale, Slavery and Abolition (New Haven: The Amistad Committee, 2001).

Joanne Meyerowitz is Professor of History and American Studies. She is the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988) and How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002), and the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994) and History and September 11th (2003). Before joining the faculty at Yale, she taught at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati. From 1999 to 2004, she was the editor of the Journal of American History. Her current project examines theories of human difference in the mid-twentieth-century U.S. Her areas of teaching are twentieth-century U.S. history, women, gender, and sexuality.

Reginald Jackson, Assistant Professor of Theater Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures, received his Ph.D. from the department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His manuscript “Midare Performance and the Aesthetics of Decomposition” examines tropes of degenerescence in relation to conceptions of virtuosity in medieval Japanese dance-drama and calligraphy. Jackson has interpreted for professional Noh actors as part of the Kyoto Art Center’s Traditional Theater Training Program, and from 2005-2006 served as a Fulbright Research Fellow at the Nogami Memorial Institute for Noh Drama Research in Tokyo. When he is not writing about Japanese performance, Jackson enjoys playing electric guitar. In 2007-2008 he will teach courses on Japanese theater, literature, and performance analysis.

George Chauncey is Professor of twentieth-century US history and lesbian and gay history. He received his doctorate in history from Yale in 1989 and then taught for fifteen years at the University of Chicago, as well as for shorter stints at Rutgers, New York University, and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Professor Chauncey is best known for his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic, 1994), which won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Prize for the best book in social history and Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the best first book in history, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Lambda Literary Award. He recently published Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (Basic, 2004), and has co-edited three books and special journal issues and published numerous articles on the history of gender and sexuality. He is currently nearing completion of another book, The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era, which reconstructs the racially-segregated and class-stratified African American, Latino, and white gay male worlds and sexual cultures of postwar New York City, analyzes the generational shift from the culture of the double life to the culture of coming out, and reinterprets the sources of postwar antihomosexualism, the development of gay politics, and the transformation of urban liberalism.

Elizabeth Alexander, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1992, is Professor of African American Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies. She is the author of four books of poems, The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), and American Sublime (2005), which was one of the American Library Association’s 25 Notable Books of the Year as well as one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her collection of essays on African-American literature, painting, and popular culture, The Black Interior, was published in 2004. Her verse play, "Diva Studies," was produced at the Yale School of Drama in May 1996. Alexander has taught at the University of Chicago, where she won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, and Smith College, where she was Grace Hazard Conkling Poet-in-Residence, first director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, and member of the founding editorial collective for the feminist journal Meridians. Professor Alexander is an inaugural recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.” She teaches courses on African-American poetry, drama, and 20th century literature, as well as the survey introduction to African-American Studies.

Terri Francis is Assistant Professor of Film Studies and African American Studies. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She specializes in the history and aesthetics of African American filmmaking in a broad cultural context, in addition to teaching close analysis of film. Her current research examines the stardom of Josephine Baker, the American-born dancer who became a Paris sensation in the 1920s and 30s. This work foregrounds her concerns with interdisciplinary relationships between films and black aesthetic traditions in other art forms. Related research and teaching interests include "race" and ethnicity in American cinema, avant-garde cinema, black documentaries and home movies, and black women's writing and performance.

Shawn Leigh Alexander, who received his PhD in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004, is the Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellow in the Department of History for 2005 – 2007. His areas of specialty are Nineteenth and Twentieth Century African American Intellectual and Social history. His collection of T. Thomas Fortune’s writings, T. Thomas Fortune the Afro-American Agitator: A Reader is with the University Press of Florida. He is currently editing his manuscript “We Know Our Rights and Have the Courage to Defend Them:” African American Civil Rights Organizations in the Age of Accommodation, 1880-1910. He is also working on his next project, a study of African American intellectual and organizational responses to Reconstruction from the 1864 Syracuse, New York National Black Convention to the 1883 Louisville, Kentucky Convention.

Ginette Curry holds a Ph.D. in Post-Colonial Literatures from the Sorbonne University, Paris III. She also has a M.A. in International Relations, Political Science from the Sorbonne. She teaches in FIU's Department of English and reads/writes fluently in three languages: French, English and Italian and is fluent in conversational Wolof, a language from West Africa. Dr. Curry's scholarly publications are both in English and in French. Among those, she published an article in English in the Annals of Cheikh Anta Diop University entitled "Women and Feminine Experience in Lessing's The Four-Gated City" in 1989. She also published articles in French in Bridges, A Senegalese Journal of English Studies: in 1990, she wrote "Le Concept de Liberté dans Un Instant dans le Vent d'André Brink" ("The Concept of Liberty in An Instant in the Wind from Andre Brink"). In her book Awakening African Women: The Dynamics of Change she analyzes the progressive changes West African women experience in contemporary Africa through novels and films. This is a major contribution to the understanding of the historical, socio-cultural, political and economic conditions of women in Africa. In her forthcoming work, Toubab La! Literary Representations of Mixed Race Characters in the African Diaspora, she examines mixed race characters from writers in different geographical and cultural areas--Anglo and French Caribbean, US, Europe, and Africa--within the African diaspora.

Patrick Muana is an assistant professor of English and coordinator of
the Africana Studies program at Texas A&M University, College Station,Texas. He received his PhD in English from the University of
Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. His current book project, "Constructions of
Black Masculinties in African-British Writing: 1760 to Present,"
analyzes texts authored by selected African British writers from the
enlightenment to present by examining how discourses around black
masculinity are framed by strategies of integration, affirmation,
resistance, negation, and rejection. “Constructions” argues for a new perspective on multiple formations of black masculinity from within, emphasizing that African British writers do not define black masculinity by subscribing to a unitary internal/communal ontology of black masculinity. Noting also that African British writers write back to a coercive center and therefore continually strive to destabilize the hegemonies of the center, "Constructions" also discusses the contested relationship between black masculinity and citizenship - the presentation of Englishness and black masculinity as mutually
exclusive with black men as marginalized excesses who threaten to
de-institutionalize white male privileges which are stabilized by
political and cultural hegemonies of the political center.

Michael Veal is Professor of Music and African-American Studies, focusing on ethnomusicology. His work has addressed issues of biography, history, analysis, politics, and technology in various musics of Africa and the African diaspora. At Yale, he has taught courses on African music, jazz, popular music, and ethnomusicological theory and history. Before coming to Yale, he taught at Mount Holyoke College (1996-1998) and New York University (1997-1998). His book Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Temple University Press, 2000) uses the life of one of Africa's most influential musicians of the post-WWII era to explore themes of African post-coloniality, musical and cultural interchange between cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, and the political uses of music in Africa. His book Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press, 2007) examines the ways in which the studio-based innovations of Jamaican recording engineers during the 1970s created a sonic space for the emergence of a distinctly post-colonial Jamaican culture locally, while they worked to transform the structure and concept of the post-WWII popular song globally. His current work-in-progress, "Technotopia" examines the intersection of free-jazz and jazz-rock fusion in the work of Miles Davis. Professor Veal is also a musician and leader of the Aqua Ife big band and small group. 

Jafari Allen, Ph.D., Columbia University, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology. Professor Allen's research interests include gender and sexuality in African diasporas; critical social theory; black feminisms; critical cultural studies; Cuba and the Caribbean; and TBLGQ culture and political organizing.

GRADUATE AFFLILIATES

Carlos A. Miranda, Ph.D. Candidate in African American and American Studies Departments, writes and researches about the relationship between late capital and bio-technologies, specializing in questions concerned with what happens when 'life itself' becomes the object of power, security, accumulation, and political strategy. Working interdisciplinarily, his research traffics in the areas of speculative capital, governance, biotechnology, eugenics, reproductive technology, popular culture, the arts, and law. Miranda's areas of specialization include American and African American Studies; Science and Technology Studies; 19th and 20th Century Theories of Race; and Body Studies. His areas of competence include but are not limited to Social and Critical Theory; Visual Culture; Liberalism and Neoliberalism. Miranda's dissertation project research situates itself at the center of polemics involving conceptions of late capital, humanism, and bio-technologies. The project focuses on the ways the relationship between capital and bio-technologies renders the human body as a conflicted space and demands that scholars reimagine conceptions of racialization, gender, and labor in the global present. Miranda received his B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been Project Assistant for the IRGG since 2006.

Shana L. Redmond, Ph.D. Candidate in African American Studies and American Studies, received her B.A. from Macalester College in African American Studies and Music. Her research interests include cultural production, race and nation formation, protest traditions, and labor and working-class studies.

Uri McMillan, Ph.D. Candidate in African American Studies and American Studies. He received his B.A. in English from Rice University. His academic interests include 20th century Afro-American and American literature, queer theory, film, and cultural studies. His most recent research focused on 20th century narratives of racial passing and the ways in which language and racial/ same-sex desire expose the ultimate instability of race and identity.

Miles Grier, PhD candidate in American Studies at New York University. He received his B.A. in English from Washington University in St. Louis and taught English at St. Louis University High School for three years. He serves as one of the editors of a forthcoming volume Trajectories of Preemption that encourages scholars and activists to consider the long history of preemption as a way of organizing the economics and politics of US empire on domestic and international fronts. To this volume, he contributes an article on the expansion of racial profiling from the war on drugs to the war on terror. Other research topics include minority appointees in neoliberal government, the role of print culture and theater in liberating and constraining early modern whiteness in the Atlantic world, and the impact of 1960s black protest on conceptions of gender and property.

Perin Gurel, Ph.D. Student in American Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies (Graduate Qualification). She received her B.A. in English and in American Studies from University of California, Berkeley. Her academic interests include transnational feminism, vernacular texts in postmodernity, and cultural globalization with special focus on the United States and the Near East. Most recently, she worked as a guest editor for the Columbia Journal of American Studies 2007 edition on Folklore and American Studies.

Charlie Samuya Veric, Ph.D. student in American Studies and member of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, had been educated at the University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila before coming to Yale University. He has edited the critical anthologies of two Filipino nationalist writers, titled Suri at Sipat: Araling Ka Amado (2004) and Anticipating Filipinas: Reading Bienvenido Lumbera as Critic (2006). His interests include postcolonial studies, cultural theory, and American literature in the longue duree. His most recent publications have appeared in eminent journals such as American Quarterly, Common Knowledge, and Rethinking History.

Brandon Terry, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Government and African and African American Studies in 2005, receiving a number of academic awards including the Andrew Mellon/Benjamin Mays Fellowship, the Korean War Memorial Prize, and the Andrew Ramroop Prize. Brandon wrote an opinion column for The Harvard Crimson, and has also written or provided commentary for Time, The Boston Globe, MTV News, The Baltimore Sun, and other publications. Brandon recently completed the MSc in Political Theory Research as the Michael Von Clemm Fellow at Oxford and is presently pursuing a doctorate in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale. His academic interests include philosophy of race and racism, Black intellectual thought, European continental philosophy, political and social movements, conceptions of gender and sexuality, ethics, postcolonial theory, and philosophy of culture.

Sarah Haley, PhD Candidate in African American Studies and American Studies, received her B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College.  Her research interests include prison studies, nineteenth and twentieth-century African American history, women’s and gender history, labor studies, black feminism, and feminist theories of violence.  Her dissertation examines black women and convict labor from Reconstruction through the New Deal.

Van Truong is a doctoral student in American Studies.  She received her B.A. in Writing-Literature with a minor in Ethnic Studies from U.C. San Diego (1999).  Before coming to Yale, she worked with various nonprofit arts and community development efforts in Los Angeles. Her research interests include comparative ethnic studies and literature, particularly related to issues of migration, diasporic identity/community formations, border studies, popular culture, and performance studies.

A. Naomi Paik earned her B.A. from Columbia University in Women's and Gender Studies and Asian American Studies. As a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies, she is writing her dissertation on the U.S. state's production of rightless subjects through its practices of incarceration in detention camps both inside and outside U.S. borders.  She is also earning a certificate in the Women?s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program and is a member of  the Working Group on Marxism and Cultural Theory and the Working Group on Globalization and Culture.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce received his B.A. in African-American Studies and English, with honors, from Columbia University in 2003. His graduate research focuses on a concept he calls black body subjectivity: namely, a system of poetics, sciences, and theologies created and practiced by Afrodiasporic peoples to combat the physical and psychic violence to which their bodies have been subject to under (and beyond) slavery and colonialism. La Marr is also a poet, storyteller, and freelance editor. He seeks freedom, love, and righteousness within and without the Yale community.

Elizabeth W. Son is a doctoral student in American Studies.  She received her B.A. in English from Wellesley College and her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge.  Her interests include histories and theories of racial formations, transnationalism, contemporary American literature and performance studies, with a focus on Black-Asian connections .  Her essay, “The Spaces of Engagement of The Medea Project, Theater for Incarcerated Women,” appeared in e-misférica 3.1 (Summer 2006), the on-line journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics.  Her most recent work examines the transnational negotiations of Japanese colonial histories of violence, in Asian and Asian American works of activism and memory that focus on the performing body.

Deborah Wolf, doctoral student in African American and American Studies, received her B.A. in English from the CUNY Honors College at the City College of New York in 2006. Her graduate research focuses on African American literary history and canon formation; she is particularly interested in issues of cultural memory, migration, modernity, and moments of self-conscious formation of a public racial image.

Larry D. Lyons II is a doctoral candidate in Princeton University's department of English where his research examines articulations of whiteness and the white normative gaze in later 20th century American literature and visual culture. His work is deeply indebted to the fields of masculinity studies, queer theory and black feminist thought. He received his BA in English literature from Rutgers University.

Anna Kesson graduated from the University of Western Australia with a BA Hons (First Class) in Art History and History in 2006.  Her interests lie in exploring, and perhaps mapping, some of the visual histories of humorous images of black people that were in circulation throughout the 'circum-atlantic' world during the nineteenth century. She is particularly interested in the ways visual culture and the performativity/performance of identities intersect through these sorts
of circulations and their reinterpretation by contemporary artists. Anna has also written for publications in Australia in the areas of
digital and bio-art and local history.

David Stein is a member of the imprisonment industrial complex abolition organization, Critical Resistance (criticalresistance.org). He is a Ph.D. student in the joint program in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale. His research focuses on how rehabilitative paradigms are deployed in order to sustain and grow the imprisonment regime in the US. He is also an organizer with Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization and Equal
Rights and Access Committees, as well as a member of the New Haven anti-imprisonment organization, People Against Injustice. He welcomes interest in any and all of these organizations and can be reached at david.stein@yale.edu.