Claudio Aguayo
Program: Romance Languages and Literatures (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Critical Theory / Postcolonial Theory / Literary Theory / Marxism / Subaltern Studies / Psychoanalysis / Deconstruction in Latin America /
Engaging with: Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roberto Bolano, Federico Lamborghini, Jaime Guzman Errazuriz, Etienne Balibar, Warren Montag.
Research Interests: Violence and cruelty in the southern cone, Reactionary Thought in Chile, Material violence and psychoanalysis in Latin American Literature, Materialist thought in the Southern Cone, Infrapolitical deconstruction.
Youngkyun Choi
Program: Romance Languages and Literatures (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Critical Theory / Postcolonial Theory / Marxism / Subaltern Studies
Engaging with:
- Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South
- Junyoung Verónica Kim, “Asia–Latin America as Method: The Global South Project and the Dislocation of the West”
- Gavin Arnall, “Hacia una teoría de la práctica teórica: Mariátegui, marxismo y traducción”
Research Interests: Creation and translation of radical theories and practices across the world.
Duygu Ergun
Program: Comparative Literature (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Critical Theory / Literary Theory / Political philosophy / critical aesthetics
Engaging with: Toril Moi, Steven Salaita, Rei Terada
Research Interests: Forms of life, the aesthetic possibilities of autonomy
Yahya Alami Hafez
Program: American Culture (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Queer Theory / Settler Colonialism & Indigenous Studies / Subaltern Studies
Engaging with:
- Roderick Ferguson: The Re-Order of Things
- La Paperson: A Third University is Possible
- Michel Foucault: The Archaeology of Knowledge
Research Interests: Arab/American academic history; Arab-American diaspora and regional social movements; Critical SWANA (South West Asian and North African) studies
Richard Hoffman Reinhardt
Program: Anthropology and History (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Critical Theory / Postcolonial Theory / Critical Race Theory / Gender and Sexuality / Liberation Theology / Queer Theory / Psychoanalysis / Religion.
Engaging with:
Giorgio Agamben, Talal Asad, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire, Joan Copjec, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, WEB DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Édouard Glissant, Félix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Gayatri Spivak, Michael Taussig, Sylvia Wynter, and Slavoj Žižek.
Research Interests:
- I study the anthropology and history of Christianity in global contexts, African and African diasporic religions, psychoanalysis, and theories of religion.
- My dissertation focuses on the history of Capuchin-Franciscan missionaries in the Seventeenth Century in relation to conversion, enslavement, early modern racial assemblages, and categories like idolatry, fetishism, and superstition.
Forrest Holden
Program: History (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Critical Theory / Feminism / Gender & Sexuality
Engaging with:
- Edward Said, Orientalism
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
- Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State
Research Interests: Witchcraft Prosecution in the Russian Empire in the Era of the European Enlightenment. My work attempts to use Russian witchcraft cases to complicate Eurocentric narratives about the emergence of the well-ordered police state and the European “Enlightenment.”
Tuğçe Kayaal
Program: Near Eastern Studies / Woman’s Studies (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Postcolonial Theory / Feminism / Gender & Secuality / Settler Colonialism & Indigenous Studies / Subaltern Studies
Engaging with:
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
- Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory
- Gayle Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader
Research Interests: Dissertation title: “Bodies in War: Politics of Sexuality and War Orphans in Konya (1911-1923)”
Ahmed Zakarya Mitiche
Program: Center for Middle East and North African Studies, International Institute (MA)
Theoretical Interests: Postcolonial Theory / Liberation Theology / Critical Muslim Studies / Decolonial studies
Engaging with: Ramon Grosfoguel, Salman Sayyid, Farid Essack, Hatem Bazian, Houria Bouteldja
Research Interests: Decolonial approaches to the study of Islam, Muslims, and the Islamicate; approaching Islam as a epistemic foundation for liberation.
Raya Naamneh
Program: Comparative Literature (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Postcolonial Theory / Critical Theory / Gender and Sexuality / Literary Theory / Settler Colonialism & Indigenous Studies
Engaging with: Frantz Fanon, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Michel Foucault, Aime Cesaire, Jasbir Puar, Chandra Mohanty, Edward Said, Abdelfattah Kilito, Judith Butler, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins.
Research Interests: Critical decolonial and settler colonial theories as well as gender and sexuality analyses in the context of Palestinian and North African Arabic literature.
Bassam Sidiki
Program: English Language and Literature (PhD)
Theoretical Interests: Postcolonial Theory / Critical Theory / Disability Studies / Settler Colonialism & Indigenous Studies / Literature and medicine / poetry of witness / biopolitics / migration
Engaging with:
- Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer; Remnants of Auschwitz
- Michel Foucault: Lectures at the College de France
- Edward Said: Orientalism; Out of Place
- Jasbir Puar: The Right to Maim
- Hortense Spillers: Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe
- Susan Sontag: Illness as Metaphor; AIDS and its Metaphors
- Alexander Weheliye: Habeas Viscus
- Neel Ahuja: Bioinsecurities
- Hardt and Negri: Biopolitical Production; Empire
- Roman Jakobson: Metaphor and Metonymy
- Deleuze and Guattari: Rhizome
- Donna McCormack: Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing
Research Interests:
- Theorizing new modes of relation between the body and the body-politic, responding to critiques of metaphorizing illness as colonialism and vice versa.
- How illness and larger political processes such as colonialism and migration become connected in modern and contemporary literature, particularly in narratives/lyrical expressions of migration, diaspora, exile, and political violence.