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| Research |
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Faculty |
Graduate Students
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Completed Dissertations |
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| Faculty
Research Projects |
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| As a professor of English,
Carl Gutiérrez-Jones’s
current research examines race, paranoia and legal rhetoric.
Although the research focuses primarily on the ways in
which race and legal battles are represented and critically
explored in literature, Gutiérrez-Jones is particularly
interested in the interdisciplinary quality of these issues.
His latest book,
Critical Race Narratives: A Study
of Race, Rhetoric and Injury, engages several fields
(including sociology, history, socio-biology, legal studies
and cultural studies) in order to compare a common rethinking
of race and disciplinary tools that draws heavily on narrative
experimentation. He is currently pursuing a book-length
project devoted to race and paranoia in contemporary culture.
In addition, he is preparing a book-length study that
examines encyclopedic logic as engaged and critiqued in
contemporary culture. Gutiérrez-Jones is also co-author
of two web projects: the Affirmative
Action and Diversity Project, and the Race
and Pedagogy Project. |
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| As a professor of Black Studies and
Sociology,
George Lipsitz studies how the rapid
movement of of products, people, ideas, images, commodities,and
culture across national borders influences struggles for
social justice. His recent and forthcoming publications
analyze the relationships linking the tradition of abolition
democracy in the United States to struggles for global
justice. Lipsitz's publications include
American Studies
in a Moment of Danger,
The Possessive Investment
in Whiteness, and
Dangerous Crossroads. |
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| As an associate professor of English,
Mark
Maslan's current book-in-progress is False
Lives: Biographical Fraud and Contemporary Fiction,
a study of biographical fraud in contemporary personal
narrative and fiction. It reads controversies concerning
the reliability of certain personal narratives, together
with novels about the falsification of the past, as symptoms
of a cultural imperative to reconsider group identity
in the wake of the demise of race as a valid concept.
It distinguishes between two models of group identity:
one that grounds it in a continuous shared history, and
another that locates it in shared experiences of historical
disruption. It shows that personal narrative generally
relies on the first model, whereas novels of impersonation
and cultural theory employ the second. Revelations of
false reporting become enactments of the historical discontinuities
that constitute group identity when absorbed into fictional
or theoretical frameworks. False Lives examines
three such frameworks: diaspora, passing and trauma. |
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| Christopher
Newfield is professor of American culture
at UCSB. His research focuses on the processes of creativity
and innovation, with a double focus on cultural and technological
factors. He publishes on a range of topics that include
the effects of higher education on society, corporate
culture, culture and economics, the role of identity in
socio-economic development, civil rights history, and
the future of the middle class, He has conducted extensive
fieldwork in a range of technology-dependent industries
and has wide experience with the university side of copyright,
patenting, and technology transfer. Professor Newfield
has recently published
Ivy and Industry: Business
and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980,
and is working on its sequel, entitled The Innovation
Crisis: Business and the American University, 1975-2005.
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| Associate Professor of History
Ann Plane is currently working on
a project entitled "When I Awaked": Dreaming
and Dream Narratives in the Cultures of Seventeenth-century
New England. This is a book-length study of the indigenous
theories of dreams and their practical uses both for European
colonists and American Indians in southern New England.
Both societies found dreams to offer meaningful encounters
with supernatural forces, and thus members of each culture
were curious about the meaning and status of dreams in
local cosmologies. However, over the course of the century,
European ideas about dreams and dreaming shifted and changed
in the move from early modern to modern culture, and earlier
English and Native ideas were relegated to the level of
"folk belief." This aspect of colonization was
perhaps at least as difficult for natives as the economic,
political, and religious shifts accompanying it. |
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| Professor of Art History
Bruce Robertson has three large research
interests which are the impetuous for a number of projects.
The first is the nature of the performance of race in
ante-bellum visual culture, an issue that grows out of
the work of the genre painter William Sydney Mount (1807-1868).
He has a book-length study of one painting, The Power
of Music, in progress, and is co-organizing a major
survey of genre painting with the Metropolitan Museum
of Art. The second interest is the history of museums
and the relationship of museums and university material
collections: his case studies are London University and
the South Kensington Museums, and the University of California
and its museums. Also, because of his work in museums,
he is interested in current issues of governance, curating,
financing and public outreach. Finally, Professor Robertson
has a long term interest in early twentieth-century modernism
and the intertwining of nativist and primitivist ideas. |
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