Volume 60, #2 //April 2018
Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. His book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, told through the story of the Arab and Indian settlement and commercialization of East Africa during the nineteenth century. He is currently working on a history of the dhow trade between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taking on issues of empire, international law, mobility, writing, and scale.
Andrew Canessa is an anthropologist at the University of Essex (UK) and has been working among Aymara speakers in highland Bolivia since 1989. He has published widely on indigenous issues, focusing on identity, mobilisation, race, and gender. Among his publications is Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life (Duke, 2012). More recently he has been working on an ESRC funded oral history on Gibraltarian identity in the twentieth Century, “Bordering on Britishness.”
Jessica Cattelino is a scholar of indigenous sovereignty, the cultural politics of nature, and everyday American political processes and imaginations. She is author of High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008), which examines the cultural, political, and economic stakes of tribal casinos for Florida Seminoles, and which won the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize (for best book published in the previous two years) from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Her current research, which tells human stories of ecological restoration, examines the cultural politics of water in the Florida Everglades. Research funders include the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. Cattelino collaborates on a related anthropological and photographic exhibition and is part of a large NSF Long-term Ecological Research project on the Florida Everglades. She is an associate professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies and an affiliate in American Indian Studies at UCLA.
Jeffrey Culang is a Visiting Research Scholar with the Middle East and Middle East American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he recently completed his PhD in history. He is currently at work on a book manuscript that historicizes Egypt’s encounter with secular concepts essential to the nation-state system. In addition to his research, Jeffrey serves as Associate Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
Sarah El-Kazaz is Assistant Professor of politics at Oberlin College. Her current book project mobilizes a multi-sited ethnography in Cairo and Istanbul to examine the political economy of urban transformation in Middle Eastern cities. She is the co-guest editor of the special section, “The Un-Exceptional Middle Eastern City” in City and Society. El-Kazaz received a BA from the American University in Cairo, an MA from New York University, and her PhD from Princeton University.
Guo-Quan Seng is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the National University of Singapore. He researches the histories of Chinese migration, empires, and colonies, and global capitalism in transregional Asia. His publications include the co-authored book (with Loh Kah Seng, Edgar Liao, and Lim Cheng Tju) The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (NUS Press 2012).
Adam Mestyan is Assistant Professor in the History Department at Duke University. He is interested in the social history of power and nationalism in Arab societies. His first monograph was Arab Patriotism—The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). His next scheduled major publication is Magical History and Muslim Printing in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Cairo: Ifao, 2019). His present project is entitled Modern Arab Kingship.
Paige Raibmon is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She is grateful for the privilege to live and work on the un-ceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. She is author of Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast (Duke University Press, 2005), and co-author (with Elsie Paul and Harmony Johnson) of the collaborative work Written as I Remember It: Teachings (ʔəms tɑʔɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder (UBC Press, 2014).
Mircea Raianu is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, with research interests in modern South Asia and global capitalism. He is currently at work on a book manuscript, provisionally entitled The Incorporation of India: The Tata Business Firm between Empire and Nation. Raianu holds a PhD in History from Harvard University (2017) and a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley (2009).
