Michelle Acuff, Art

Michelle Acuff is an Assistant Professor of Art. Her recent work explores how the fast paced erasure and transformation of nature--the result of globalized and radical habitat destruction and toxic contamination--restages our relationship to the planet and its inhabitants. In large-scale, immersive environments Acuff transforms and juxtaposes mass produced found objects and Western art historical tropes. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: the Attleboro Museum of Art, MA; the Center for Contemporary Art, WA; The Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, MI; The University of Memphis, TN; The College of William and Mary, VA; the Pendleton Center for the Arts, OR. During her recent sabbatical Acuff completed two month-long fellowships, the first at the Ragdale Foundation in IL, and the second at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in VA.

Her Web site is www.michelleacuff.com

Bruce Magnusson, Politics, Director

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, English

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.

Jason Pribilsky, Anthropology

Jason Pribilsky is an Associate Professor of Anthropology.

Elyse Semerdjian, History (Spring 2011)

Elyse Semerdjian is an Associate 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.

Nicole Simek, French

Specializing in French Caribbean literature, Professor Nicole Simek is the author of Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation. She has published articles on parody, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory, and has co-edited volumes devoted to literary cannibalism (Feasting on Words: Maryse Condé, Cannibalism, and the Caribbean Text, Princeton: PLAS, 2006) and representations of trauma in French and Francophone literature (Dalhousie French Studies, Winter 2007). She is currently working on the deployment of humor in the Antillean novel. Professor Simek holds a B.A. and an M.A. in French from Case Western Reserve University, and received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2005.