Featured Speaker

Russ Castronovo (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz) is Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches and writes on literary and cultural issues of the 19th- and 20th-century United States involving race, globalization, aesthetics, and democracy. He is author of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2001); Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 1995); Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, co-edited with Dana Nelson (Duke University Press, 2002); Aesthetics and the End(s) of American Cultural Studies: Special Issue of American Literature, co-edited with Chris Castiglia (2005). He has written articles in boundary 2, American Literary History, New Literary History, American Literature, Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies on figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. His current research project, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and the Anarchy of Culture, examines the rise of a broad commentary on sensation, beauty, and mass culture across novels, university research, urban photography, and motion pictures in the U.S. from 1877-1936.

Guest Speakers

Leslie Bow (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Cruz) is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in Asian American literature, ethnic American literature, and literature by women of color. She is author of Betrayal & Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature (Princeton, 2001), as well as numerous articles on gender and human rights, Asian American women in the academy, critical location, pedagogy, and the work of Amy Tan, Le Ly Hayslip, Jade Snow Wong, Cherrie Moraga, and Wendy Law-Yone. Her current work-in-progress, tentatively titled Transracialism and the Anomalies of Segregation, seeks to uncover how an examination of interstitial communities might expose the nature of status hierarchy and envision alternative means of conceiving coalition. Professor Bow received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, her MA from SUNY-Buffalo, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Paul Lyons (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1990), Associate Professor of English, has taught at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa since 1991. His publications include essays on aspects of U.S. literature in American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, American Literary History, and boundary 2; a monograph entitled “American Pacificism: Oceania In The U.S. Imagination”; and three novels. In addition to his specialization in 19th Century U.S. literature, he researches literary theory, and regional and settler literatures.

Deane Neubauer received his BA from the University of California, Riverside in 1962 and his MA and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965, all in political science. He taught at the University of California, Irvine, Riverside and Berkeley. He has been in the political science department at the University of Hawaii since 1970, serving as chair of the department from 1975-78. From 1980-1988 he was Dean of the College of Social Science at the University of Hawaii. He also served as Chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Vice President for Academic Affairs of the University of Hawaii. He is currently Director of Globalization Research Network, and consultant for Education Program at the East-West Center.