Visiting Scholar

Daniel Leeman Smith

Director, Playwright, Dramaturg, Producer, and Program Manager of NYU's Creative Career Hub
Daniel Leeman Smith is a proud two-spirit citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He is a New York City based director, playwright, dramaturg, producer, and theatre educator whose work is positioned at the intersection of art, education, community, and activism, focusing on Native joy.

Recent credits include Stories of the Land (Dramaturg, Long Wharf Theatre), Chicago: Pigeon (Dramaturg, New Native Play Festival, Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program), Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being) Or A Boarding School Play (Director, Alter Theater...

SA Smythe

Writer, Artist, and Assistant Professor of Black European Cultural Studies in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA

SA Smythe is a blktrans nonbinary theorist, multi-instrumentalist, transmedia storyteller, and educator currently based in Tkaronto and Rome. Smythe’s antecartographic practice conjures black belonging and is concerned with the thrival of our relations beyond every border. They weave blktrans poetics, performance, light sculptures, sound composition, photography, and found footage/archival ephemera. Smythe’s transmedia work has been featured internationally in collaborative and solo performance exhibitions, film and multimedia installations,...

Eric Stanley

Chair in LGBT Equity and Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley

Eric A. Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory.

Eric’s first manuscript Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke 2021) argues racialized anti-trans/queer violence is...

Shannon Steen

Associate Professor the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley

Shannon Steen writes and teaches about a variety of topics, but primarily about performance in its social and political contexts. Her book The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea will be published with the University of Michigan Press in 2023. Prior to that she authored ...

Estelle Tarica

Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at UC Berkeley

Estelle Tarica (PhD Comparative Literature, Cornell, 2000) is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), concerning the discourse of indigenismo and mestizaje in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia and focusing on the work of José María Arguedas, Rosario Castellanos and Jesús Lara. Her current book manuscript examines the circulation and reception of Holocaust...

David Thomson

Film Critic and Historian

David Thomson is a British film critic and historian based in the United States, and the author of more than 20 books. His reference works in particular — Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008) and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (6th edition, 2014) — have been praised as works of high literary merit and eccentricity. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, called him "probably the greatest living film critic and historian" who "writes the most fun and enthralling prose about the movies since Pauline Kael". John Banville called...

Victor Vich

Writer, Academic

Widely esteemed as one of the most insightful and original writers and academics in Peru today, Victor Vich is an Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP). His interdisciplinary approach to understanding Peru's complex literary, cultural, and political histories and current landscape has resulted in a number of groundbreaking studies, and he was instrumental in establishing at PUCP an interdisciplinary master's degree program in cultural studies.

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Kalindi Vora

Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Rachel Carson Book Prize 2018), takes up questions of technology, colonialism and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her second book is Surrogate Humanity: Race Robotics and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019), co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, a project on the racial and gendered politics of robotics and artificial intelligence. With the...

Linda Williams

Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and Film & Media at UC Berkeley

Linda Williams taught courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and “body genres” of all sorts). She has also taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Luis Bunuel and Pedro Almodovar, melodrama, film theory, selected “sex genres,” and The Wire. Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993) and Reinventing Film Studies (co-edited...

Jennifer Wolch

Professor of Urban Planning, Geography and Former Dean of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design

Jennifer Wolch is a scholar of urban analysis and planning. Her past work focused on urban homelessness and the delivery of affordable housing and human services for poor people. She has also studied urban sprawl and alternative approaches to city-building such as smart growth and new urbanism. An early investigator of animal-society relations in cities, she has proposed strategies for human-animal co-existence in an urbanizing world. Her most recent work analyzes connections between city form, physical activity, and public health, and develops strategies to address...