Shampa Biswas, Director

Shampa Biswas is Global Studies Director and Associate Professor of Politics at Whitman College. Professor Biswas has published extensively on postcolonial international relations, nationalism, globalization and South Asian politics. Her current research examines the intersections of colonial power and the production of sovereignties.

Bruce Magnusson

Bruce Magnusson is Associate Professor of Politics. His major teaching and research interests are in international, transnational, and comparative politics, with a particular focus on Africa. His published research has focused on democracy and legitimacy in West Africa. His current research agenda addresses questions at the intersections of ethnicity, security, violence, and justice in Africa, including:

1. the intellectual and institutional history of ethnic and religious ascription in population censuses in colonial and postcolonial Africa;
2. the relationship of census categories to territorial administration and electoral competition along ethnic and religious lines;
3. censuses and elections as vectors of violence; and
4. globalization and U.S.-Africa security policy.

Gaurav Majumdar

Gaurav Majumdar received his B.A. from the University of Delhi (1992), M.A. from the University of Rochester (1993), and Ph.D. from New York University (2003).

His research and teaching interests include postcolonial and modern British literatures, film, and Victorian literature. He is particularly interested in the modern novel, revisions of cosmopolitanism in literary studies, and figuration.

Gaurav's book, Migrant Form: Modernist Play and Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray, is forthcoming from Peter Lang in 2009. He has published articles on James Joyce and Howard Hawks, as well as several book reviews. He also has forthcoming publications on critical cosmopolitanism and on Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.

The recipient of the Dublin Award for the Study of Global Multiculturalism in 2008, Gaurav is currently working on a project that studies the representation of "failed" constructions in unfamiliar spaces. This project will investigate the cosmopolitan impulses within what Paul Gilroy has termed "postcolonial melancholia," examining the differences of that melancholia with introspective critique for dissent and reconstitution.

Jim Russo

Jim Russo serves as the Director for the Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology (BBMB) program, an interdisciplinary major program in the molecular life sciences. He teaches the core course in Biochemistry, which explores the disease burden caused by malnutrition, both nutrition deficits and calorie excesses. He has developed a course on Infectious Diseases, which explores the global impact of infectious disease and introduced global public health and epidemiology to the curriculum. His scholarly activity extends from the biomedical sciences into public health nutrition. His molecular level research is centered on the role of Vitamin A metabolism in maintaining immune system protection against infectious disease, while his policy work has focused on the creation and implementation of local and state school district policies for improving student learning through improved nutrition and health. He also serves as the Health Professions Advisor at Whitman College, assisting students preparing for careers in medicine, nursing, and public health.

Elyse Semerdjian

Elyse Semerdjian is an Assistant Professor of Islamic World/Middle Eastern History at Whitman College. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2003 and specializes in the history of Ottoman Syria. Her research has focused on the history of Islamic law and society that has resulted in a book entitled “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Community and Law in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) that explores the historical discourse on illicit sexuality and the legal practice of Aleppo’s shari’a courts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She is currently using Islamic sources to reconstruct the history of Aleppo’s historic Christian communities and its Armenian community in particular. She recently returned from a Fulbright in Syria (2007-2008) where she conducted archival research on Aleppo’s early Armenian community

When she is not teaching or researching, she can likely be found listening to music or playing her own on her ’oud.

Zahi Zalloua

Zahi Zalloua is Assistant Professor of French and General Studies. His book Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2005) focuses on ethics in the work of sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne. He has also edited an issue of L’Esprit Créateur (Spring 2006) entitled Montaigne and the Question of Ethics, and co-edited, with Nicole Simek, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies on representations of trauma in French and Francophone literature (2007). He teaches courses in early modern literature, experimental fiction, feminism, and contemporary literary theory. His current research focuses on the ethics of readings, posthumanism, and theories of alterity in the age of globalization.