Visiting Scholar

Nora Alter

Professor of Theater, Film, and Media Arts

Nora Alter is a professor at Temple University’s School of Theater, Film, and Media Arts. She served as Chair of the Department from 2009-2013. She is founding director of Temple’s Venice Study Abroad Summer Program and is former founding Director of FMA’s Los Angeles Study Away Program. Alter is culturally fluent in European and North American arts and culture. Alter completed her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of Florida. Alter is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The...

Laurie Arnold

Associate Professor of History, Director of Native American Studies, and Chair of Humanities at Gozanga University

Laurie Arnold is an enrolled citizen of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes. She is Associate Professor of History, Director of Native American Studies, and the Robert K. and Ann J. Powers Chair of the Humanities at Gonzaga University. In 2019-20 she held the Frederick W. Beinecke Senior Research Fellowship at Yale University and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. Her first book, Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination, was published by the University of Washington Press. Her...

Berit Ashla

Director of Philanthropy for Fremont Group

Berit Ashla is Director of Philanthropy for Fremont Group, a San Francisco based family office, designing the family’s integrated philanthropy practice. Prior to joining Fremont, Berit led Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ West Coast advisory office managing client engagements with individual, family foundation, and corporate donors. She holds a wealth of experience in grantmaking, foundation governance, education, social justice, arts, and sustainability.

As Senior Advisor at the Tides Foundation, Berit led donor engagement, grantmaking, and fund development...

Neda Atanasoski

Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland

Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity(University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures(co-authored with Kalindi Vora, Duke University Press, 2019). She...

Erika Balsom

Film Scholar, Critic, and Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London

Erika Balsom is a Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, focusing on the histories, aesthetics, and politics of nonfiction cinemas.

She has published extensively on the intersections of art and the moving image, often focusing on questions of technological change and/or examining the relationship between artistic practices and their institutional contexts.

She is the author of TEN SKIES (2021), An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (2018), After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video in Circulation (2017), and ...

Nima Bassiri

Social Theorist, Historian & Philosopher of the Human Sciences, and Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University

Nima Bassiri is a social theorist, historian, and philosopher of the human sciences, and an assistant professor at Duke University, where he teaches in the Program in Literature, Duke’s interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies program. He is also the co-director of Duke’s Institute for Critical Theory, where he convenes the Critical Theory Workshop.

His first book, Madness and Enterprise (University of Chicago Press), explores how turn-of-the-century psychiatrists across Europe and North America deployed an economic style of reasoning to resolve...

Judith Butler

Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author of several books: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic...

Michael Dear

Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning At UC Berkeley

Michael Dear is Professor Emeritus in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor in the Bartlett School of Planning at University College, London. His graduate education was at University College London and the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Berkeley in 2009, he worked for two decades at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Michael was the founding editor of the scholarly journal Society and Space: Environment & Planning D, and is a leading exponent of the Los Angeles School of...

Jennifer Doyle

Professor of English at University of California, Riverside

Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English and Cooperating Faculty in Art. She is the author of Shadow of My Shadow (2024), Campus Sex/Campus Security (2015),Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2007). She is co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996).

She and Jeanne Vaccaro (University of Kansas) are the co-curators of Scientia Sexualis, an exhibition for ICA LA which will run from early...

Yi Gu

Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at University of Toronto

Yi Gu is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a focus on Asia, especially China. Her current research interests lie in the agrarian imaginary and various extractive regimes including those of historical socialism. Her previous work examines epistemic shifts and perception, landscape and nation-building, and Chinese photography. Her book Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2020) points out an ocular turn of China’s twentieth century as a foundation for a...