Executive Committee

Anita Bakshi is an Instructor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on Housing and Open Space Design, Visualization, and Research Methods. She is also an affiliated lecturer for the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies (CHAPS) Program, teaching courses on Heritage and Planning in Divided Cities and Cultural Heritage and Community Organizing. She has a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California – Berkeley.

Carla Cevasco is a scholar of food, the body, material culture, gender, and race in early America. Her first book, Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast, forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2022, explores how Indigenous peoples and colonial invaders confronted hunger in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is working on a second book about feeding infants and children in early America. She is Co-Director of the New Jersey Folk Festival. She received a Ph.D. in

Elin Diamond is a Professor of English and the author of of Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater(1997) and Pinter's Comic Play (1985); she is also the editor of Performance and Cultural Politics (1996). Her many journal publications include essays on seventeenth and twentieth century drama, and Freudian, Brechtian, and feminist theory. Her work continually explores the connection between performance and feminist or critical theory, using texts from early modernism through

William Galperin is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers, where he specializes in the literature and culture of the British Romantic period. He is the author of Revision and Authority in Wordsworth (1989), The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Johns Hopkins, 1993), and The Historical Austen (2002). His new book, The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday, will be published by Stanford University Press in 2017. He is the

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University.  Her scholarship involves both the analysis and production of documentary images.  She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry.  She has published on images of the War on Terror, medical portraits, Xrays and crowdshots. For more than a

Anjali Nerlekar has an academic career that spans India, Bahrain and the United States. Her research interests include multilingual Indian modernisms; modern Marathi literature; Indian English literature; Indo-Caribbean literature; world literatures; translation studies; Caribbean and postcolonial Studies; Indian print culture; Indian visual studies; archipelagic studies.

Her book, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016) is also being

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is a public historian and scholar of early American social history. She coordinates the History Department's Public History Program, including the Certificate in Public History and Public History Internship, and is also an Associate Graduate Faculty Member in the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies Program. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Leicester and an MA in Modern History from Queens University Belfast, and researches poverty, labor,

Imani D. Owens is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her interests include African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her research has been supported by a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and an NEH funded residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and

Andrew Parker is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature. His research concerns the history and practices of literary theory, especially post-war theory in France and its world-wide dissemination.  His most recent book is The Theorist’s Mother, which attends to traces of the maternal in the lives and works of canonical theorists from Marx and Freud to Lacan and Derrida.  He was the editor and co-translator of Jacques Ranciere’s The Philosopher and His Poor, and have co-edited five other

Leah Price is a Henry Rutgers Distinguished Scholar. Her books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic Books, 2019, Ukrainian translation 2020, PBK Christian Gauss Award); How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton UP, 2012; Patten Prize, Channing Prize, honorable mention for James Russell Lowell Prize) and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 2000). I also edited Further Reading (with Matthew Rubery, Oxford UP 2020), Unpacking my

Maurice Wallace is associate professor of English at Rutgers. His fields of expertise include African American literature and cultural studies, nineteenth-century American literature, the history and representation of American slavery, and gender studies. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995, a book on the history of black manhood in African American letters and culture, and is co-editor with

Nancy Yousef specializes in literature and philosophy of the Romantic era. Her research and teaching are centered in British and European Romanticism, but also extend to eighteenth century sources and forward into the later nineteenth-century. She is especially interested in the intersections between philosophical writing and literary form, and in the relations among aesthetics, ethics, and representation of the emotions. She is the author of three books: Isolated Cases (Cornell UP, 2004),