EDITOR AND BOARDS

SENIOR EDITOR
FOUNDING ADVISORY BOARD
FOUNDING EDITORS AND EDITORS EMERITAS

ADVISORY BOARD:

Ravina Aggarwal is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Smith College. Her scholarship is based on extensive field research in the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh in North India, where she has worked on issues of border identity, nationalism, cultural performances, media, and peace and conflict. Her publications include Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India (Duke University Press 2004), Into the High Ranges, an edited volume published by Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2002, Forsaking Paradise (a collection of short stories by the Ladakhi author, Abdul Ghani Sheikh, which she translated and edited, published by Katha Press, 2001). She has also written about women's expressive genres, feminist ethnography, militarization, and the politics of travel in India. raggarwa@smith.edu

Sonia E. Alvarez is Professor of Politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she also is affiliated with the Latin American and Latino Studies and Women’s Studies Departments and the Chicano/Latino Research Center. She is the author of Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics (Princeton, 1990) and co-editor of The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy, with Arturo Escobar (Westview, 1992) and Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements, with Evelina Dagnino and A. Escobar (Westview, 1998). Her writings on feminisms, social movements, and democratization have appeared in Signs, Feminist Studies, Revista Estudos Feministas, Estudios Latinoamericanos, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Debate Feminista, Meridians, Revista Mora, and a number of edited collections and social movement publications. Professor Alvarez is currently completing a new book, entitled Contentious Feminisms: Cultural Politics, Policy Advocacy, and Transnational Organizing in Latin America, under contract with Duke University Press.

In Brazil, Alvarez has been Fulbright visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and the Inter-Disciplinary Graduate Program in Social Sciences at the State University of Campinas and visiting scholar at the Center for Philosophy and Human Sciences at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Between 1993 and 1996, she coordinated the Rights and Social Justice Program for the Brazil Office of the Ford Foundation. Since 1998, she has been director and co-principal investigator in the “Hemispheric Dialogues” Program at UCSC, a project aimed at bridging Latin American and Latina/o Studies through curricular innovation and action-research partnerships; and is involved in “The Transnational Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas,” a Greater Bay Area research group of Chicana/Latina and Latin American(ist) feminist scholars. Alvarez also served on the national advisory panel of the Ford Foundation’s “Crossing Borders, Rethinking Area Studies” Initiative (1998-2001) and is on the editorial advisory boards of several feminist and Latin American studies journals in the U.S. and Brazil. She was recently elected Vice-President (and President-elect) of the Latin American Studies Association.

Kum-Kum Bhavnani is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Global and International Studies, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches on women and development. She also chairs the program in Women, Culture, Development. She was the Inaugural Editor for Meridians from 2002-2002. She is the co-editor of Feminist Futures (2004: Zed Press -- with John Foran and Priya Kurian), editor of Feminism and Race (Oxford University Press,2000), and co-editor with Ann Phoenix, of Shifting Identities Shifting Racisms: A Feminism & Psychology Reader (Sage Publications, 1994). She has lectured widely in the United States (e.g. Visiting Professor at Oberlin College, Ohio) and abroad. She has presented keynote addresses at numerous international conferences including in Brazil and South Africa. She is the recipient of several awards for her teaching. In April 1994 she was Independent Observer for South African Elections. Currently she is a member of the Feminist Review Editorial Collective.

Ginetta Candelario is Associate Professor in Sociology and Latin American and Latina/o Studies and a member of the Study of Women and Gender Program Committee at Smith College. Her research interests include Dominican communities and identity formations, race and ethnicity in the Americas, beauty culture, Latina/o communities and identity formations, museum studies, Latin American and Latina feminisms.

Her first book, Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Identity From Museums to Beauty Shops is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2007. Her edited volume, Generizando: Los estudios de género en la República Dominicana al inicio del tercer milenio, a collection of recent gender and women’s studies research in the Dominican Republic, was published in April of 2005. Her current research is on Dominican feminist thought and activism, 1880-1961, which she plans to develop into a book length study. Previous publications include “‘Black Behind the Ears’ and Up Front Too?: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic,’” Public Historian: Special Issue on Latinos in the Museum, Fall 2001 and winner of the 2002 G. Wesley Johnson Best Article Prize from the National Council of Public Historians; “Hair Race-ing: The Dominican Beauty Shop, the Body and the Self,” Meridians: Race, Feminism, Transnationalism, Vol. 1, No. 1; “On Whiteness and Other Absurdities: Preliminary Thoughts on Dominican Racial Identity in the United States.” Proceedings of the Congreso Internacional: La República Dominicana en el Umbral del Siglo 21 Pontîfica Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Pontîfica Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1999; “(Re)Visiones: A Dialogue on Aids, Activism and Empowerment” with Marina Alvarez, in Ella Shohat, ed. Makeshift Dwellings: Multicultural Feminism in the Age of Globalization. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. "The Latest Edition of the Welfare Queen Story: Dominican Women on Welfare in New York City" co-authored, in Phoebe: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Politics and Ethnic Studies, State University of New York College at Oneonta, Spring 1996.

She has received research and dissertation fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, Five Colleges, Inc., the City University of New York Graduate Center, Smith College Mellon Fellowships and a Rappaport Foundation Fellowship. She was a Fulbright Scholar in the Dominican Republic at FLACSO and INTEC during the spring and summer of 2003, during which she furthered her current project on feminism and anti-haitianism in the Dominican Republic.

She is the Latina/o Studies Program Track Chair of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for 2004-2006 and the Sociology of Culture Program Track Chair for the American Sociological Association Meeting 2006. In addition to being a long standing member of LASA and ASA, she is a member of the American Studies Association and of the Berkshires Women’s History Conference Association. Finally, she member of the editorial boards of various journals including: Meridians: Race, Feminism, Transnationalism, Ethnic Studies, and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnicities.

Katie Geneva Cannon, Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education, teaches Womanist/ Feminist/ Mujerista Theologies, Theology and Culture, Ethical Codes in Slave Narratives, and Social Teachings in African American Sacred Rhetoric. She is the author of Black Womanist Ethics (1988), Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (1995), and Teaching Preaching: Isaac R. Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric (2002). Her forthcomingbooks focus on "The Pounding of Soundless Heartbeats: A Womanist Mapping of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," and "Race, Sex, and Insanity: Zora Neale Hurston's Account of the Ruby J. McCollum Trial."

Inderpal Grewal is Professor in the Women's Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Duke, 1996), co-editor (with Caren Kaplan) of Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices; Introduction to Women's Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (Mc-Graw Hill, 2001, 2005), and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke, 2005). Her areas of research include: feminist theory, cultural studies of South Asia and its diasporas, British and U.S. imperialism, and contemporary feminist transnationalisms.

Ambreen Hai is Associate Professor of English at Smith College. She teaches colonial and postcolonial Anglophone literature from Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean, and contemporary literary theory. She also serves on the board of Women's Studies. Her scholarly work is primarily on South Asia, and includes publications on Kipling, Forster, Rushdie, Suleri, and Sidhwa, and a book manuscript on the agency of postcolonial literature. ahai@smith.edu

María Herrera-Sobek is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Academic Policy at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is a Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies where she also holds the Luis Leal Endowed Chair. She is the author of three books including The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis and seventeen editions and/or co-editions on Chicana/o literature and culture with an emphasis on feminist issues. Her book Chicano Folklore: A Handbook is forthcoming and her latest book project is "Constructing Nationhood and Ethnicity: La Malinche, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and La Llorona in Art and Literature."

Michelle Joffroy is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Smith College. She is currently completing a manuscript on the intersection of gender, history, and literature in the representation of 1968 in Mexico. Her research includes work on contemporary Mexican and Chicana narrative, feminist literary theory, and transnationalism and gender in Mexican/borderland fiction. mjoffroy@smith.edu

J. Kehaulani Kauanui is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses on nationalism, gender & sexuality, and legal approaches to the study of race & indigeneity. In 2000, she earned her doctorate in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work appears in the following journals: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Pacific Studies, The Contemporary Pacific, Social Text, Women's Studies International Forum, The Hawaiian Journal of History, American Indian Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Mississippi Review, Comparative American Studies, American Studies; and `Oiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal. Currently, she is completing her first monograph, Rehabilitating the Native: The Politics of Hawaiian Blood and the Question of Sovereignty (under review).

Deborah K. King teaches sociology at Dartmouth College, participates in the Women's and Gender Studies Program, and chairs the African and African American Studies Program. Her research interests include race, class and gender and critical legal studies. Her book project, Improvisational Politics, uses the aesthetics of African American women's quilting traditions as a conceptual framework for examining the political thought and activism of African American women in the twentieth century. Other research projects include a study of the representations of race and gender on prison postcards and an examination of the social reproduction of mammy representations in cyberspace and in African American women's culture.

Kimberly Kono is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Smith College. She teaches courses on modern Japanese language, literature, and culture. Her research examines the construction of race, gender and romance in Japanese literature produced in colonial Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s. Professor Kono is also working on another project that focuses on the travel writing of Japanese women who toured Japan's colonies during the first half of the 20th century. Other research interests include Japanese film and immigrant writing. kkono@smith.edu

Amina Mama has held the position of Chair in Gender Studies at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa since January 1999. She provides intellectual and strategic leadership to the African Gender Institute, where she also served as the Director (1999-2002). She initiated and currently convenes the ‘Gender and Transformation’ graduate programme in gender studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. She has authored and edited a number of published works, including Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (Routledge 1995), which was recently listed as one of Africa’s 100 Best Books in the twentieth century, Engendering African Social Sciences (co-edited and published by CODESRIA 1997), and The Hidden Struggle: Statutory and Voluntary Sector Responses to Violence Against Black Women in the Home (Whiting and Birch 1996). In addition, she has a chapter entitled, “Inventing the African: Scientific Psychology and Colonialism,” in Discourses on Difference and Oppression (Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society 2002).

Mary Romero is Professor of Justice Studies at Arizona State University. She is the 2004 recipient of the Society for the Study of Social Problems' Lee Founders Award for a career of activist scholarship. She is the author of Maid in the U.S.A. (reissued as a Tenth Anniversary Edition), and co-editor of several books, including Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities (Blackwell 2005), Latina and Latino Popular Culture (NYU Press 2002), and Women's Untold Stories (Routledge 1999). Her most recent articles are published in Critical Sociology, Villanova Law Review, Law & Society Review, British Journal of Industrial Relations, University of Cleveland Law Review and DePaul Law Review.

Ranu Samantrai is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author of AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation (Stanford 2002) and numerous articles on feminism, contemporary Britain, diasporic politics and aesthetics, and radical democracy. rsamantr@indiana.edu

Nancy Saporta Sternbach is Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Smith College. She has published widely on Latina playwrights, Puro Teatro (2000), co-edited with Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, and a complementary volume of criticism on Latina playwrights, Stages of Life (2001) published by the University of Arizona Press (co-written with Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez). Some courses she has taught are as follows: "The Bronze Screen: Latino in Literature and Film"; "Contemporary Latina Playwrights"; "Latina and Latin American Women Writers"; "Central American Literature"; "Testimonial Literature"; "Modernismo, Decadence, Turn of the Century"; "Latin American Society in the Novel"; "Survey of Latin American Literature"; "Spanish Conversation and Composition." She has served as the Resident Director of the PRESHCO program in Córdoba, Spain and advises students on Study Abroad options. Her latest research project is a book about the future of Spanish departments in the U.S. nsternba@email.smith.edu

Ella Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University. She has lectured and published extensively on the intersection of gender, post/colonialism, multiculturalism and transnationalism as well as on Zionist discourse, orientalism and the representation of the Middle East, focusing largely on the questions of Israel/Palestine and Arab-Jews (Mizrahim.) Her award-winning publications include Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (U. of Texas Press, 1989; a new edition is forthcoming from I.B. Tauris), Unthinking Eurocentrism (co-authored with Robert Stam, Routledge, 1994), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (co-edited, U. of Minnesota Press, 1997), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT Press & the New Museum, 1998), Forbidden Reminiscences, (Bimat Kedem LeSifrut Publishing, 2001) and Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (co-edited, Rutgers University Press, 2003).) Her book Taboo Memories, Undisciplined Words is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Shohat and Stam are currently in the final stages of writing The Culture Wars in Translation (NYU press) and Flagging Patriotism (Routledge). Shohat is also currently co-editing a book on the Middle Eastern diasporas throughout the Americas (University of Michigan Press.) A recipient of Rockefeller fellowship, she has served on the editorial board of several journals, including Social Text, Critique and Meridians. Her writing has been translated into diverse languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Polish, Italian, and Turkish.

Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, where she teaches pacific, comparative ethinc and world literatures. A poet and critic, she has recently published a volume of poetry, Alchemies of Distance and has another book forthcoming on the traditional comic theatre of Samoa.

Elizabeth Spelman is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies, and the Barbara Richmond 1940 Professor in the Humanities. Her published writings fall roughly into three main areas. Her interest in what has come to be called critical race feminism is perhaps most thoroughly represented in Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Beacon Press, 1988). In it and related articles she explores the meaning of the intersection or intertwining of ‘racial,’ gender and other aspects of women’s identities. Another sustained focus of inquiry has been the ways in which our emotions are shaped by and give shape to political dimensions of human relationships. In Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Beacon, 1997), she examines the positive and negative implications of regarding sufferers as tragic figures, or objects of compassion, or bearers of experiences from which others can learn or otherwise profit. Most recently, Professor Spelman has been exploring the ubiquity and variety of repair activities humans engage in – from fixing cars to mending friendships to repairing the larger social and political fabric. Much of her teaching in the past few years has involved exploring the nature of such activities, and the kinds of knowledge, skills and judgment they require. Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World was published by Beacon Press in 2002.

Gina Athena Ulysse is Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. She was trained in anthropology at the University of Michigan and is also a poet/performer. Her interests include ethnography, political economy, gendered representations and performance within Black Diaspora contexts. She is the author of several articles on class and color in Jamaica, fieldwork conflicts, and reflexivity. Her first book, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importing and Self-Making in Jamaica (Sepember 2007, University of Chicago), based on her doctoral research focuses on the dialectic between Jamaican female independent international traders' economic agency and self-making practices.

To push the boundaries of cultural anthropology, Ulysse considers spokenword an "alterednative" form of ethnography that captures the visceral often absent in structural accounts. Her poetry has appeared in The Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Diaspora in the United States, edited by Edwidge Dandicat; Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism; and Ma Comere, Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. Her work is also included in the anthropological anthologies, Women on the Verge of Home, edited Bilinda Straight (SUNYPress) and Resisting Racism and Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights, edited by Faye V. Harrison (AltaMira Press). A dynamic performer, she has performed at conferences including the American Anthropological Association Meetings, American Ethnological Association Meetings, PRISM conference and in colleges and universities including Bates College, Berry College, Brown University, Emerson College, New School for Social Research, University of Florida as well as in Berlin at the House of World Cultures' Black Atlantic project in 2004. www.ginaathenaulysse.com

Susan Van Dyne, a member of the founding Meridians collective, is Chair of the Program for the Study of women and Gender at Smith. Her work on contemporary American women's poetry includes Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems (North Carolina, 1993) and essays on Rita Dove and Cathy Song. Her new book, Proving Grounds: The Politics of Reading Contemporary Women Poets explores the politics of representation and emerging critical practices in constructing and contesting American literary traditions. With Marilyn Schuster, she co-edited Women's Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts Curriculum (1985). In 2002, she organized and directed an all-college course called "Globalization: Mapping the Debates"; in 2004-05, co-directed a Kahn Institute project on "Claiming the Right to Write" on life-writing by "minoritized" writers, and teaches "The Cultural Work of Memoir," on life-writing and queer subjectivities.svandyne@smith.edu

Kamala Visweswaran is an active member of Saheli for South Asian Women and teaches in the Anthropology department of the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minnesota, 1994) and her book, Family Subjects: Women, Feminism, Indian Nationalism is forthcoming. Her current work also spans race and the history of anthropology, subaltern studies, and diaspora theory.