Partial List of External Participants and Brief Biographies

Keynote Address / “The Imaginary of Jihad:
Bodies of Thought and Bodies”
Stephen Chan was the Foundation Dean of Law and Social Sciences at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, and recently served as Dean for a second time. He has been a member of the University of London Senate and remains at SOAS as Professor of International Relations. A detailed account of his accomplishments and interests appear at http://www.stephen-chan.com/international/. Professor Chan recommends viewing his online YouTube lecture – “Political Thought on the Just Rebellion” – that provides helpful background for the keynote address.

“Beyond ISIS:
Gender-based Violence in Iraq”
Nadje Sadig Al-Ali is the author of Iraqi Women: Untold Stories From 1948 to the Present and co-author with Nicola Pratt of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq. She is also Professor of Gender Studies and Chair at the Center of Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. Born to an Iraqi father and German mother, she lived in Egypt for several years and was involved in the Egyptian women’s movement. Al-Ali graduated from the University of Arizona (BA), University of Cairo (MA), and received her doctorate (PhD) in Anthropology at SOAS in 1998. She is also President of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) and member of the Feminist Review Collective. Alongside her academic career, Nadje Al-Ali is a political activist, founder of the Iraqi British organization Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq, and member of the London branch of Women in Black, a worldwide network of women who are against war and violence.

“Representing the Disappeared Body:
Hunger Strikes and Force Feedings at Guantanamo”
Naomi Paik, whose research and teaching interests include Asian American and comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration. Her manuscript, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016), reads testimonial narratives of subjects rendered rightless by the U.S. state through their imprisonment in camps. She has published articles on the indefinite detention of HIV-positive Haitian refugees at Guantánamo in Social Text and Radical History Review. She has also published on post-September 11th attacks on academic freedom, particularly on postcolonial studies, in Cultural Dynamics. She earned her doctorate in American studies from Yale University and held the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the Early Career Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Humanities Center of the University of Pittsburgh.

“Neither Necro nor Bio:
Black Queer Diaspora and the Question of Life and its Requirements”
Rod Ferguson is a professor of African American and Gender and Women’s Studies in the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). Previously, he was a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN). His academic interests include African-American literature, queer theory and queer studies, classical and contemporary social theory, African-American intellectual history, sociology of race and ethnic relations, and black cultural theory. Ferguson is also known for his critique of the modern university and the corporatization of higher education, in particular.

“The Incapacitating Scene:
Framing Life at Guantánamo”
Keith Feldman is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California (Berkeley). His recent book, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press 2015), analyzes a broad archive of texts that have mediated and repeatedly contested the entanglement between the post-civil rights United States and Israel’s post-1967 occupation of Palestinian territory. Taking a transnational approach to this entanglement, the book theorizes and historicizes the mutual constitution of U.S. and Israeli national exceptionalism and the cultural politics of relation that contested these connections across U.S., North African, and West African geographies. A Shadow over Palestine tracks processes of comparative racialization (of Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, “terrorism,” Whiteness, Jews, and African Americans) that were both routed through and interrupted by imaginative geographies incommensurate with the nation-state.

Please Note that Prof. Jabri has notified us that she will not be presenting “Genocidal Violance, the Life of Monuments, and the International” at the Workshop.
Vivienne Jabri is Professor of International Relations and War Studies, King’s College, University of London. She is an Assyrian-background scholar active with the Assyrian diasporic community. Her research considers threats to minority populations in the Middle East, and especially to women, by ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria. She is the author most recently of War and the Transformation of Global Politics, and The Postcolonial Subject.

“’Life Given Straight from the Heart’:
Securing Body, Base, and Nation in Wartime Hawai`i”
Juliet Nebolon is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies program at Yale University. She received her B.A. in American Studies and Sociology from Wesleyan University. Her research interests include transpacific imperialisms, settler colonialism, war/militarization, critical race studies, and transnational feminism. Her dissertation, “Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai`I and the Making of Transpacific Empire,” explores the interconnected regimes of military occupation and settler colonialism under martial law in Hawai‘i during World War II through narratives of health, domesticity, education, internment, and the landscape.

“Displacing Difference:
Spectres of Money, Labor and Memory in Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City”
Ivan V. Small is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor at Central Connecticut State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian studies from Cornell University, a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University and a B.A. in History from Boston College. Dr. Small is also a faculty affiliate with the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, the UConn Asian & Asian American Studies Institute, and an executive board member of the War Legacies Project.