Avraham Astor, PhD Candidate, Sociology 
Avraham studies relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Spain.  His dissertation focuses on the causes of regional and local variation in responses to mosque establishment.  

Guillermo Salas Carreño, PhD Candidate,  Anthropology
My research explores the diversity of the ideologies of social differentiation in the regional society of Cuzco, in the Southern Peruvian Andes. I analyze the semiotic mechanisms that allow this diversity to coexist legitimizing and reproducing social hierarchies across cultural differences.

Amy Carroll, Assistant Professor of American Culture and English
Amy Sara Corroll's current book project offers analyses of the performative uses of the allegorical in post-NAFTA (1994-2004) cultural production from Mexico City and the U.S.-Mexico border. Its archive spans performance art, cabaret, theatre, photography, cinema, installation, hacktivism, and architecture.

Roxana Galusca, PhD Candidate, English Language and Literature 
Roxana's work is on the interrelation between U.S. neoliberal cultural politics and trade liberalization post-1980s. She interrogates cultural representations of U.S. borders in the context of global economic markets, with an eye to neoliberal discourses of cultural exchange and cultural difference/tolerance.

Tayana Hardin, PhD Candidate, American Culture
Tayana Hardin is interested in literary representations of cabaret and dance culture in both African-American and francophone literature of the interwar period.  She specifically asks how these highly gendered and eroticized representations illustrate the anxieties, promises and tensions of black internationalism as it emerged in Paris, France at this time.

June Howard, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English, American Culture, and Women's Studies
June is currently working on a study of regionalism from the latter nineteenth century to the present.  Her project for GELS focuses on the way the local commitments and global connections of fiction challenge the national framework implied by the category, American literature.

Oana Mateescu, PhD Candidate, Anthropology and History
Oana studies the reconstitution of communal ownership over forests in postsocialist Romania, with a focus on the role that graphic and material artifacts play in articulating arguments, establishing credibility and formulating evidentiary practices in legal and extra-legal contexts.

Shachar Pinsker, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies
Shachar studies Yiddish literature and culture produced in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s, and the place of the endeavor in Israeli cultural memory. He also examines the role of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish culture in contemporary Israel.

Sadia Saeed, PhD Candidate, Sociology
Sadia's research focuses on the politics of Islamization of the Pakistani state through a focus on the historically shifting relationship between the state and religious minorities. In particular, she considers the meanings that notions of Islamic statehood, religious rights, and Muslim citizenship have acquired through processes of nation-state formation.

Lydia Soo, Associate Professor of Architecture, Adjunct Associate, Professor of History of Art
Lydia's project investigates the earliest written and visual sources for non-European buildings.  Known to British architects during the second half of the 17th century, they contributed to a radically new understanding of architecture as a phenomenon relative to place and custom, challenging the traditional notion of the classical style as universal and absolute.