People

Culture Studies

  • Chicana and Chicano Studies

Prof. Aldana's research interests are Maya hieroglyphic history, Mesoamerican art, experimental archaeology, science studies, culture theory. His main publications include: Tying Headbands or Venus Appearing: New translations of k'al, the Dresden Codex Venus Pages and Classic Period Royal 'Binding' Rituals (2011); The Apotheosis of Janaab’ Pakal: Science, History, and Religion at  Classic Maya Palenque (2007).

 

  • Global Studies

Prof. Amar's research explores cultural and social texts and spaces, and retheorizes subjects of gender, nation, colonialism, risk, security, militarization and humanism/humanitarianism as they are articulated in the sites and imaginaries of megacities of the global south. His books include The Security Archipelago: ‘Human Security’ States, Sexuality Politics and the End of Neoliberalism (2011); Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East with Diane Singerman (2006); New Racial Missions of Policing: International Perspectives on Evolving Law-Enforcement Politics (2010);  Global South to the Rescue: Emergent Humanitarian Superpowers and Transnational Rescue Industries (Routledge, 2011).

 

 

  • English
  • Black Studies

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.

  • Religious Studies

Areas of research and teaching include religion and modern philosophy (especially German idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction); the history of Christian thought and culture (with special interest in the traditions of mystical and negative theology, as well as relations between theology and the emergence of modern science and politics); and religion, modernity, and post-modernity (with special interest in secularization, religion and politics, and the religious dimensions of technological culture). Main publications: The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (2008);  Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (1999).

 

 

  • Global Studies
  • Diversity Officer

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.

  • Germanic and Slavic Studies

Susan Derwin is the Director of UCSB's Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and Professor of German and Comparative Literature. For the last five years, her teaching and writing have been devoted to the issues of social reintegration confronting military veterans and to publicly-engaged humanities. She is founding director of the University of California Veterans Summer Writing Workshop and of Foundations in the Humanities, a correspondence program for incarcerated individuals operating in multiple California prisons. She is the author of The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud, and the Novel and Rage Is the Subtext: Readings in Holocaust Literature and Film, as well as essays on trauma, psychoanalysis and literature, moral injury, and narrative healing.

  • Religious Studies

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).

  • Chicana and Chicano Studies

Main research interests: Twentieth-century American literature and Cultural Studies, Chicana/o and Latina/o literature and cultural production, Gay/Lesbian studies and Queer Theory, Comparative Sexualities: U.S. Pan-Latina/o formations. Main publications: Postnationalism: The Emergence of Chicana/o Transnational Culture (2009).

  • Religious Studies

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).