Keynote Speaker

Shelley Streeby
Shelley Streeby is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her teaching and research interests include U.S. literature and culture, sensationalism and sentimentalism, popular and mass culture, inter-American studies, U.S. imperialism, science fiction, and working-class cultures. She is the author of American Sensations: Class, Race, and Production of Popular Culture (2002), for which she received the American Studies Association’s 2002 Lora Romero Prize for the best first book that engages issues of race in relation to nation, gender, sexuality, and/or class. She has also published numerous articles on race, class, and American literature, including “Haunted Houses: George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne,and Middle-Class America” and “Joaquín Murrieta and the American 1848.”

Click here to download Streeby's recent article "American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the
US-Mexican War" from American Literary History.

Conference Presenters

Stephanie A. Amsel
Stephanie A. Amsel is a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research interests include medieval and Italian literature. She also writes poetry and fiction.

Yanoula Athanassakis
Yanoula Athanassakis completed her Bachelor's at UCSB's English Department with an interest in early modern studies, then went on to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she got her M.A. in English and took courses in contemporary minority and immigrant narratives. She plans to continue in this field take an emphasis in global literatures.

Jacob Berman
Jacob Berman is a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Santa Barbara who works on 19th Century American representations of the Middle East, Islam and Arabs and how these representations are an integral facet of the discourse of 19th Century American national identity. He has recently published an article entitled "Domestic Terror and Poe's Arabesque Interior" in the Canadian journal American Studies. He received his BA from Washington and Lee University and MA from University of Chicago.

Christina Bertrand
Christina Bertrand received her B.A. in English Literature from CSU Long Beach. She is currently working on her M.A. at CSU Long Beach, focusing on 20th Century American Literature, and she plans on pursuing a Ph.D. in this field. Her research interests include countercultural movements, modernism, post-World War II literature, and postcolonial theory.

Kathryn Dolan
Kathryn Dolan received her BA in English from UCLA, focusing on American Studies, and her MA from San Jose State University. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century American literature, global studies, and California/Western studies.

James Groom
James Groom is a Ph.D. candidate in English at CUNY: Graduate School University Center.

Danielle La France
Danielle La France is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Women's Studies here at UCSB. She wrote her master's thesis on short stories published by women in Mexican and Argentine literary magazines after WWII.

Noah Lopez
Noah Lopez hails from Tucson, Arizona and is interested in file-sharing and piracy as resistance, punk rock and hip-hop historiography, issues of modernity in melodrama and film noir, and the intersection of high art and the street. He is currently at work on a book mapping the migration patterns of some 1418 birds of the Northern Hemisphere, and is the proud owner of a 7-year old rat terrier named Fredo.

Jennifer Roscher
Jennifer Roscher is a fourth-year graduate student in Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation explores the intersection of anti-slavery and nationalist discourses in 19th and 20th century U.S. and Cuban literature.

Nicole Starosielski
Nicole Starosielski is a first year student in the Film and Media Studies PhD program at UCSB. She is interested in studying emerging and experimental media and technology from interdisciplinary and global perspectives as well as the combination of academic analysis with production of hybrid media works. She received her B.A. from the University of Southern California in 2005 in Cinema-Television and English.

ShiPu Wang
ShiPu Wang will receive his Ph.D. in Art History from University of California, Santa Barbara, in June 2006. In addition to his scholarship in modern art and theory, Mr. Wang is a writer for several
international art magazines. His essays are published in books and journals including Semiotics and Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, and Significance (The National Art Education Association, 2004), Journal of Aesthetic Education (Taiwan National Center for Arts Education, 2005) and AAPI Nexus: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Policy, Practice and Community (UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2006).

Aimee Woznick
Aimee Woznick earned a B.A. in English and Italian from SUNY Buffalo, where she wrote an Honors thesis entitled "'The Past Was Not Yet Dead': Imagining Community through History in Hawthorne, James, and Morrison." She is currently studying 19th and 20th century American literature at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests include community theory, narratives of national progress, race studies, and literatures of the North American West.