hosted by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at
UC Irvine
panel descriptions and participant bios
screening:
experimental film shorts "global visions: memory-traces, libidinal imaginaries, and intercessory images"
maps, directions, and helpful links
many thanks to our CONFERENCE SPONSORS:
UCI Department of Comparative Literature, UCI Humanities Center, International Center for Writing and Translation, UCI Critical Theory Emphasis, Critical Theory Institute, UC Humanities Research Institute, Department of Asian American Studies, Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies, Department of French and Italian, Department of German, Department of History, Department of English, Postmodern Culture, the Philosophy Graduate Students, and the Program in Women's Studies
FRIDAY MAY 5th 4:00pm
EMERGENT SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDTABLE
"ANECDOTES ON THE ACADEMIC PUBLIC(ATION) FETISH"
Moderators: Chuan Chen and Wendy Piquemal
This roundtable highlights the process through which these professors have engaged a cross-section of disparate disciplinary and critical formations to publish their first monographs or articles. Roundtable participants will discuss the negotiation of yet unconsolidated scholarly investments and more legible trajectories of scholarship in relationship to publication, which continues to signal a particularly weighted form of entry into academic public spheres. The roundtable will also gravitate around the ins-and-outs of first publications, including publication venues, audiences and mediums.
FACULTY PANELISTS:
Melinda Chen, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley
Melinda (Mel) Chen is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley, on leave while she completes the second year of a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA. She grew up in Illinois and studied computer architecture before beginning Ph.D. studies in Linguistics at U.C. Berkeley, where an interest in issues of silence, gender, and minority language politics led to involvement in the Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality. Her current book project explores stealth and explicit dehumanization, gendered, immigrant and racialized silences of language theories, and the stakes and workings of linguistic reclamation, integrating feminist theory, linguistics, cognitive science, and “race” and queer studies. Her new project concerns transgender participation among first- and second- generation “Asian” immigrants to the U.S., and the complicities and interrogations therein of “domestic” (U.S.) pan-Asian colonialist metaphors of gender. Computers continue to haunt her, in the forms of hobbyist consumerism, ill-fated repairs and melancholic fantasies of perfect design.
Glen Mimura, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, UC Irvine
Glen Mimura is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine. His research examines the complex, dynamic and uneven relations between media, social movements and popular culture. His forthcoming book, Ghostlife of Third Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), brings together two concerns: 1) the history of Asian American media arts since the late 1960s in the changing, late Cold War and post-Cold War contexts of nationalism and globalization; and 2) the recent history of film and cultural theory at the interface of Marxism and poststructuralism. Professor Mimura's current project, Economies of Excess, examines post-civil rights formations of race and sexuality, and their articulations in popular culture, consumer capitalism and social space. He received his Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz and has been awarded the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Fellowship; the Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside; and the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund (CLPEF) National Fellowship, US Department of Education.
Deborah Vargas, Assistant Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies, UC Irvine
Deborah R. Vargas is Assistant Professor in the Chicano/Latino Studies Program at UC Irvine. Her areas of research include Chicana/Latina cultural production; racialized sexualities; transnational feminisms, cultural studies, and popular culture. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology, with an emphasis in Women’s Studies, from UC Santa Cruz. Professor Vargas was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow 2003-4 and has received research grants from UC MEXUS and the Smithsonian Institution Center for Latino Initiatives. Her publications include “Tejana Artists” and “Selena” in the Encyclopedia of Latina and Latino Popular Culture in the United States (Arizona State University Press, 2004); "Rosita Fernández: La Rosa de San Antonio” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies (Vol. 24, Number 2&3, 2003); and “Cruzando Frontejas: Remapping Selena’s Tejano Music Crossover” in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change (University of Illinois Press, 2002).