Rockefeller Humanities Residency Fellows
2003-2004
Please note: This program is closed and we are no longer accepting applications for fellow residents.
Laura G. Gutiérrez is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD in Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000, where she wrote her dissertation, Performing Identities: Chicana and Mexicana Performance Art in the 90s. She is the author of several articles including "Mexican Nationalism, Mass Media, and Gender/Sexuality: Unmasking Lies in Ximena Cuevas' Video Art," Latin American Literary Review 29.57 (January/June 2001) and "Deconstructing the Mexican Homeland: Mexico in Contemporary Chicana Performance" in Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexuality. During her residency at the UA, she will be working on Unsettling Comforts: Sexualities in Contemporary Mexicana and Chicana Performance, which is a transnational and cross-cultural study of the representation of sexuality in contemporary artistic performance practices (political cabaret, theater and solo performance). In this project, she examines sexuality as both a social and cultural construction and argues for alternative models of theoretical inquiry on female sexuality that take into account the specificities of Mexicana and Chicana/o culture. At the same time, her study contends that this contemporary performance art itself makes critical interventions into discourses of nation and identity formation, problematizing the relationships between sexuality and other identity markers such as gender, race, nation and culture.
Ashley Tellis received his PhD in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry from the University of Cambridge, England in 1999. Since then, he has been teaching at the University of Delhi and has been a gay rights activist in India. His publications include "Postcolonial Same-Sex Relations: A Theoretical Framework" in Enreca Occasional Papers, "The Return of the Redressed?: Anthropology and Literature in the Construction of the Same-Sex Male Subject in India" forthcoming in Germinal and "The Well of Homeliness: British South Asian Queers" in In a Queer Place: Sexualities and Belonging in Britain and Europe. During his residency at the UA, he will be pursuing his project on Postcolonial Same-Sex Relations in India and the Non-West. In this project, he scrutinizes hegemonic ideas of same-sex politics hitherto dictated by North America and Western Europe by looking at them through the prisms of same-sex politics from the non-west. He argues, for example, that the proliferation of identities by non-governmental organizations ('LGBT' or 'Kothi', for example) in India is linked to the logics of global funding more than to local political processes. Same-sex movements in India draw simultaneously on particular (often problematic) constructions of precolonial legacies, colonial pasts and the postcolonial present to fight battles on an ever-changing, globalized terrain. He hopes to explore the possibilities and limits of these constructions and engage both with theoretical work on identity politics in the US and fieldwork in India and Mexico.
2002-2003
Nayan Shah is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at San Diego. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1988 and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1995. His research and teaching interests focus on the cultural meanings and political practices that both define and unsettle categories of race and sexuality in Asian migrations to North America. His first book project, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001), explored the history of Chinese migration, public health and urban life. His current project is Sexual Aliens: South Asian Migrants, Law and Contested Citizenship. The study follows and focuses on the sexual and social lives of South Asian men who migrated to Canada and the United States from 1900 to 1950. Drawing upon archival research of civil and criminal court records, newspaper reports, and labor camp investigations, he examines how these South Asian men participated in a range of non-normative domestic arrangements, gender roles and sexual behaviors in rural locations where international migrants and native-born Americans converged for seasonal labor. However, U.S. and Candian laws in the early twentieth century tightly restricted South Asian legal migration, naturalization, property ownership, interracial marriage and voting rights. The book manuscript will explore these intimate and social relationships against the backdrop of political and legal challenges to citizenship for South Asians in North America. Parallel to his career as a historian, Nayan has also curated programs and written about contemporary Asian American and Asian Canadian film, video, performance and fiction in Chicago and New York.
Julia Sudbury is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, a women's liberal arts college in Oakland, CA. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology and an MA in Race and Ethnic Studies from Warwick University, England and an MA and BA in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge University, England. She is the author of Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women's Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (Routledge 1998), a study of coalition building among women of color in Britain. She has also published articles on women of color, community activism, globalization and the prison industrial complex in journals including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Justice, Patterns of Prejudice and Feminist Review. Dr. Sudbury is a board member of Critical Resistance, the Prison Activist Resource Center and Incite: Women of Color Against Violence. She has been the recipient of the Gaea Foundation SeaChange Residency and the American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellowship. During 2002-03, she will be working on Freedom Visions: Women of Color, Globalization and the Prison Industrial Complex. Based on fieldwork in Britain, Canada and the US, the project examines the ways in which race, gender, sexuality and nationality articulate with the globalization of capital to produce gendered transnational processes of criminalization and mass incarceration.
2001-2002
Rosemary Hennessy is an Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. She has written on a range of issues in cultural theory, including gender and sexuality, feminism, queer theory and politics. She is the author of _Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism_ (Routledge, 2000); _Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse_ (Routledge, 1993); and co-editor of _Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's Lives_ (Routledge, 1997). Her current project is _Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Collective Organizing on the US-Mexican Frontera_. This project addresses the way gender and sexual politics under neo-liberalism can be understood from the vantage point of organizing taking place on the US-Mexican border now. Through interviews with border groups and extensive research on the history of the region and its transnational ties, Hennessy will inquire into the ways heteronorms and sexual identity categories feature either explicitly or indirectly in organizing aims and practices. She is also interested in broaching a more complex way of understanding sexual politics and its role in the dynamics of organizing collective agency. This “passionate politics” is infused with affective investments that are entangled with, mediate, and spill beyond sexual identities. It is articulated through a range of practices, among them bonds to charismatic leaders, “secular spiritualities,” and traditional beliefs that feature in the work of organizing. How to evaluate these affective relations, the stories through which they are told and translated, the models of sexual politics they sugges, and their lessons for the formation of collective agency in the transnational spaces of neo-liberalism are among the questions her research pursues.
Radhika Mongia is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently working on two projects: one is a critique of recent feminist efforts (particularly the work of Drucilla Cornell, Alison Jaggar, and Martha Nussbaum) to develop a globally adequate conception of the (feminist) subject. The other, which she will pursue during her fellowship, is Genealogies of Globalization, a book length study on state regulation of international migration. Mongia examines archival documents on Indian migration from 1834 to 1917 to chart the cricual colonial histories for some of the chief technologies for regulating migration--namely, the juridical labor contract, medical and police certificates, the modern passport, and the marriage contract. In contrast to existing literature on migration, her work questions the putative legitimacy of the state in controlling migration and suggests that the institutionalization and routinization of these key technologies helps (re)generate, rather than undermine, the colonial conjunctures between discourses of race, heteropatriarchy, nationality and the state. It thus provides a genealogy of globalization attentive to the sedimentation and palpable residues of colonial histories and structures within formations of contemporary globalization. A portion of this research, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” appears in _Public Culture_ (vol. 11 no. 3, fall 1999: 527-556).