Postcolonial Representation[s] & the U.S.
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Centennial House, UC Santa Barbara

Keynote Speaker: Bishnupriya Ghosh

Bishnupriya Ghosh is a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She came to UCSB with a doctorate from Northwestern University, a B.A. from Wellesley College, and a B.A. from Presidency College (Kolkata). Her teaching interests are global studies, postcolonial theory and media studies, and gender/sexuality studies. Apart from publishing essays on literature, film, postcolonial criticism and theory in journals such as Screen, boundary 2, The Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and in several anthologies, Ghosh’s first monograph on globalization, literary markets, and the political imagination of South Asian writing in English, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers University Press), appeared in 2004; she has also co-edited a volume of critical essays, Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film (Garland, 1997). She is working on a second manuscript on the corporeal idioms of famous contemporary female icons marked as “South Asian” such as Phoolan Devi, Taslima Nasrin, Arundhati Roy, and Mother Teresa; Corporeal Intimations: The Material Life of South Asian Female Icons rethinks received dismissals of icons as overexposed mass mediatized commodities and resituates them hieroglyphics of social power in South Asian contexts. As she completes Corporeal Intimations, Ghosh is beginning research on a third project on a spectral modernity evidenced in twentieth-century gothic and speculative fiction from South Asian postcolonial contexts. At UCSB she is active in the Multi-Research Group, “The Subaltern and the Popular”; most recently, she is engaged convening a UCHRI short-term research focus group on risk, uncertainty, and globality, “Speculative Globalities,” in February 2007.

Conference Presenters

Ann Marie Alfonso-Forero is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Miami. Her dissertation focuses on the fiction of Bharati Mukherjee, Cristina Garcia, Edwidge Danticat, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and her research interests include Anglophone postcolonial literatures, ethnic American literatures, and transnational feminisms.

Michial Farmer received his BA in English from Toccoa Falls College in 2004 and his MA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 2007. Beginning in August, he will be a PhD student and teaching assistant at the University of Georgia. His interests include Southern and existentialist literature and popular culture.

Gabriela Frank is a native of Germany. She completed her BA in Political Science at CSU Stanislaus, where she currently is a graduate student in the English department. Her declared emphasis is American Literature, and her research interests include 19th century German American literature in particular. Influenced by her undergraduate studies, Gabriela looks for manifestations of political concepts in works of fiction. She has been an invited speaker at Chapman University in May 2004, discussing the effects of the American military presence in Germany. Gabriela is currently being considered for the Sally Casanova Predoctoral scholarship. She lives in Modesto with her two children.

Stefka Hristova is currently a graduate student in the Visual Studies program at University of California, Irvine. She holds an MA degree in Communication Studies from California State University, Los Angeles.

Rosie Kar is a second-year graduate student in the Comparative Literature Program at UCSB. Her fields of interest include 20th century Asian American literature and media representations, post-colonial theory, North American fiction, and Francophone literature and culture. She received her undergrad degrees in 2004 from UC San Diego in Literatures of the World and Chemistry. In what little free time she has, she enjoys writing, reading everything she can get her hands on, listening obsessively to all kinds of music, filling up her passport, belly dancing, classical Indian dance, Polynesian dance, painting, decoupage, printmaking, and sleeping. Born and raised in Orange County, California to South Asian professionals, she was exposed to a wide variety of written and performative art through her family, local festivals, and traveling the world. In her research and writing, she draws upon personal experiences and social observations. She attempts to explore the edges of awareness, where the conscious and the unconscious intertwine, through word play, vernacular and abstract language, verbal color and form. Her interests in written art are to challenge, uplift, inspire, and transform.

Danielle La France earned her Master's degree from UCSB in 2005 in Comparative Literature and is currently working on a dissertation comparing the feminist implications of ghost stories written by Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and Mexican women authors published in literary magazines in the early twentieth century.

Eric Martinsen is a doctoral candidate in English with a Ph.D. emphasis in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he is writing a dissertation entitled "Narrativizing Global Moments in Twentieth-Century Fiction and Film." His research focuses on representations of intense transcultural exchanges and the interpretative crises they provoke in contemporary postcolonial fiction, U.S. ethnic writing and film.

Elizabeth Nixon is currently studying postcolonial and narrative theory at Ohio State University.

Mary Seliger is a fifth-year graduate student in Comparative Literature at UCSB. She received a J.D. from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles in 1982. She obtained an M.A. from UCSB in Latin America and Iberian Studies in 2003. Her dissertation research project explores the dialogue between American literary and legal narratives in the twentieth century.

Lily Wong is a second-year graduate student from the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Santa Barbara. She has published translations in Pots magazine, the Taipei Poetry Festival, and was the editor for Full Tilt a journal of East-Asian poetry and translations. Her research interests rest in the intersection of post-colonial/globalization theories and literatures; East-Asian oral/religious cultures; and Ethnomusicology.

Mark Young is completing his Master's Degree in American Literature at San Diego State University. His research interests include photographic representations of Latin Americans, mythological tropes in American children's literature, and the european roots of American satire. His forthcoming thesis explores the mythological dimensions of Kurt Vonnegut's early novels and short stories.