The 2003 Institute

Culture and Globalization

June 17th - August 11th, 2003

Overview | Faculty | Students | Schedule | Symposium

2003 Faculty

Gillian Harkins, Assistant Professor, English, gharkins@u.washington.edu

Gillian Harkins, Assistant Professor (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2002) specializes in late twentieth-century United States literature and culture. Her research explores the intersections of gender, sexuality and violence in narratives of national belonging at the end of the twentieth century, focusing on the relation between legal and literary representations of incest. Her current work-in-progress examines the role of the national family romance in contemporary U.S. incest narratives, arguing that these narratives replace genealogies of descent, which have historically coupled family and nation, with new figures of domestic inheritance that work to expose the epistemic violence of such historical coupling. Her work contributes to current scholarship on citizenship and sexuality in transnational American Studies as well as to literary studies of twentieth century fiction. Additional research interests include Modern and Contemporary American Literature, female novelists, autobiography, trauma, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, feminist and queer theory, and citizenship.

Chandan Reddy, Assistant Professor, English, ccreddy@u.washington.edu

My research focuses on the transformations and inventions of literary forms that issue from history of non-western migration to the "west." In particular, I've been interested in twentieth century Black and Asian migrations from the Caribbean basin and Asia to the United States. Presuming that migration is not solely a demographic phenomenon, but also a transformation of the political economic, social, and epistemological structures of "western" modernity, I approach the study of "racialized" migration as an account of the heterogeneity and unevenness of modernity and its core institutions, especially the nation-state. The project is aimed also at thinking about the intersections and discontinuities between Black and Asian immigrant racializations in various institutionalized critiques. In addition to the literary, cultural and legal study of race and migration, of political economy and the nation-state, I continue to work in the field of non-western and immigrant "gay and lesbian" sexualities. My most recent research has focused on the "individual" as an object of knowledge in contemporary globalization.

Nikhil Singh, Assistant Professor, History, nsingh@u.washington.edu

Selected Bibliography:

Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
2005 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award sponsored by the Organization of American Historians
2005 Norris and Carol Hundley Award, Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association
2005 Washington State Book Award, sponsored by The Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library
The Afro-Asian Century (with Andrew Jones), (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Re-Thinking Black Marxism (with Brent Edwards and Penny Von Eschen), (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

Matthew Sparke, Associate Professor, Geography and International Studies, sparke@u.washington.edu

In recent years most of my work has been focused on globalization. I teach a large introductory course on the topic at UW called Introduction to Globalization website, and I am writing a textbook entitled Introduction to Globalization for Blackwell. Based on research funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, I have also authored another book and a number of articles for academic journals on related themes: including the ways in which globalization processes are remaking nation-states, the links between globalization and American dominance, and the impact of economic interdependency on border regions. Some of the most recent of these publications are listed below.

Matthew Sparke with Elizabeth Brown, Dominic Corva, Heather Day, Caroline Faria,Tony Sparks, and Kirsten Varg, 2005 "The World Social Forum and the Lessons for Economic Geography," Economic Geography 81(4): 359 - 380
Matthew Sparke, 2004 "Political Geographies of Globalization: (1) Dominance," Progress in Human Geography, 28,6 777-794.
Matthew Sparke, 2006 "Political Geographies of Globalization: (2) Goverance," Progress in Human Geography, 30,2 1-16.

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