Prof. Batiste's interests include the relationships between representation, performance, identity, race, and power. Her research and teaching focus on the ways in which cultural texts, like literature, theater, performance, film, art, and bodies, act as imaginative systems that create identity, cultural values, human interactions, and possibilities of justice. Her teaching reflects this in the broad array of materials she uses to bring students to an interdisciplinary understanding of texts, theory, and history. Her book, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era African American Performance (Duke University Press, 2011) examines the complicated ways African Americans participated in American ideologies of cultural imperialism—ideologies like expansionism and primitivism. Professor Batiste's most recent work focuses on performance, affect, and violence in millennial Los Angeles.

Professor Clitandre (Ph.D Berkeley)  was the  recipient of a University of California President's Postdoctoral  Fellowship. She works on the theoretical frameworks of the African Diaspora, migration and displacement as well as transnationalism, with a particular focus on Haiti and Haitian diasporic literature. Her teaching interests include diaspora studies, anticolonial literature, postcolonial Caribbean  Women's literature, and NGO and Humanitarian intervention in Haiti  post-earthquake. Professor Clitandre is also the founder of Haiti  Soleil, a nonprofit organization that focuses on engaging youth and  building community through the development of libraries in Haiti. Her book on the writings of Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, the first sustained full-length interpretive literary analysis on the celebrated author, was published by The University of Virginia Press in 2018: Edwige Danticat. The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary.

Research interests: History of religions, Judaic studies. Books include: The Bodies of Nations: A Comparative Study of Religious Violence in Jerusalem and Ayodhya" with Roger Friedland (History of Religions, 1998); Changing Places: Jerusalem's Holy Places in Comparative Perspective with Roger Friedland (Israel Affairs, 1999); To Rule Jerusalem with Roger Friedland (2nd Revised Edition, 2000); Sacred Urbanism: Jerusalem’s Sacrality, Urban Sociology, and the History of Religions with Roger Friedland (2007).

Prof. Holdrege is a comparative historian of religions specializing in South Asian and Jewish traditions. Her research and teaching interests focus on historical and textual studies of Hindu and Jewish traditions and also engage broader theoretical issues arising out of critical interrogation of analytical categories such as the body, space, scripture, and ritual. Her publications include Bhakti and Embodiment: Fashioning Divine Bodies and Devotional Bodies in K???a Bhakti (forthcoming 2014);  Refiguring the Body: Embodiment in South Asian Religions (Co-editor, with Karen Pechilis, forthcoming); and Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture (1996).