Speakers

James A. Dator is Professor and Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture, the Program in Public Administration, and the Center for Japanese Studies, of the UH-Manoa. He is a Danforth, Woodrow Wilson, and Fulbright Fellow. Prof. Dator has taught at Rikkyo University (Tokyo), the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, the University of Toronto, and the InterUniversity Consortium for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. He consults widely on the futures of law, governance, education, and space.

Jonna Eagle is Assistant Professor of Film and Media in the Department of American Studies at UH-Mānoa , where her courses include American Film History, War and Media, and American Melodrama. Prior to UH, she taught at Duke University in the Program in Women’s Studies. Her current research explores questions of gender, violence, and embodiment in contemporary screen culture, with a particular focus on representations of war. Her article “A Rough Ride: Strenuous Spectatorship and the Early Cinema of Assaults” will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of the international film journal Screen. A chapter on “Virtuous Victims, Visceral Violence: War and Melodrama in American Culture,” will appear in the upcoming Cultural History of American Warfare. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, Making a Spectacle of Himself, examining the conjunction of masculinity and sensational melodrama in twentieth-century American cinema.

Mark Helbling is a Professor of American Studies at UH. His teaching and research interests include African American history and culture, the Harlem Renaissance, Cultural Theory, and 20th Century American Literature. In addition to teaching at UH, he has taught as a Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia, Ivory Coast, and Germany. His most recent book is The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many, which won the Baldridge Prize given by the Hawai‘i History Honor Society of the American Historical Association. He has numerous chapters in various books and has published articles in many journals, as well as poetry and short stories. Professor Helbling is currently working on a book on the African American Press and the 1920s.

Craig Howes has been the Director of the Center for Biographical Research since 1997, the Editor and Co-Editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly since 1994, and a Professor of English at UH-Mānoa since 1980. His book Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witnesses to Their Fight was a Choice Notable Book for 1995, and his collection Teaching Life Writing Texts, co-edited with Miriam Fuchs, was published in the Options in Teaching Series by the Modern Language Association in 2008, and his collection The Value of Hawai‘i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future (2010), co-edited with Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, is in its fourth printing. He is also the list manager for IABA-L, the principal source of information for members of the International Auto/Biography Association, and has published many essays and reviews on life writing in various journals and collections.

Deane Neubauer is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the UH, Senior Advisor to the East-West Center, and Director of the Globalization Research Network. He has been in the Department of Political Science at UH since 1970, serving as chair of the department from 1975 to 1978. From 1980-88, he was the Dean of the College of Social Sciences; he has also served as Chancellor of UH-Mānoa , and as Vice President for Academic Affairs. Dr. 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.

Joseph Stanton is a Professor of Art History and American Studies at UH-Mānoa. One of his special areas of work concerns the intersection of the visual and literary arts. He has published extensively on American art history with special attention to Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper and has published multiple articles on both of those artists. In one of his recent books, The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature, he examines the picture-books of such artist-writers as Maurice Sendak, Chris Van Allsburg, Arnold Lobel, and William Joyce. His 2011 book, Looking for Edward Gorey, is the culmination of his many years of research into all things Gorey. His scholarly essays have been published in such journals as Art Criticism, American Art, Journal of American Culture, Harvard Library Bulletin, The Lion and the Unicorn, Soundings, Children’s Literature, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Manfred B. Steger is Professor of Political Science at UH-Mānoa, and Professor of Global Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University). He is also the Research Leader of the Globalization and Culture Program in RMIT University’s Global Cities Research Institute. He has served as an academic consultant on globalization for the US State Department and as an advisor to the PBS TV series “Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.” He is the author or editor of twenty-one books on globalization, global history, and the history of political ideas, including the award-winning Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the 21st Century 3rd ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) and the bestselling Globalization: A Very Short Introduction 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Mari Yoshihara is Professor of American Studies at UH-Mānoa. A graduate of the University of Tokyo, she received her PhD in American Civilization from Brown University. Her areas of specialization include U.S. cultural history, U.S.-Asian relations, literary and cultural studies, and gender studies. Her publications include Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (2003), and Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (2007). She also publishes extensively in the Japanese language. She is currently working on a comparative study of cultural policy and art patronage in the United States and Japan.