Speaker Bios
Golfo Alexopoulos is the author of two books, including Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag. She is Professor of Russian history and politics at the University of South Florida and Director of USF’s Institute for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies (IREES).
Nicolas Cadena is a filmmaker and adjunct instructor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Previously he served as a field producer and community partnership manager at StoryCorps, a U.S.-based Oral History & Storytelling project, as well as Program Officer at the environmental documentary nonprofit, The Redford Center.
Sookyung “Vero” Chai is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. With an emphasis on Korean diaspora, her research focuses on the interplay of photography and literature, attending to its sonic, affective, intersubjective, and archival articulations. Prior to Rutgers, Vero earned an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from New York University, where she wrote her thesis on contemporary artists and writers engaging with found family albums. Her first peer-reviewed article “Editing the Archive: Alexandra Bell’s Annotation, Redaction, and Epistemic Resistance in Counternarratives” appeared in Art Journal (vol. 80:2, 2021).
Ana Dopico works on the comparative cultures of the Americas and the Caribbean in the Department of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese. She is Director of the Hemispheric Institute at NYU, which founded the first and most significant digital archive of performance, scholarship, and activism in the Americas. In the last three years, the Institute has leaned into its mission of social justice through a new commitment to Black, Indigenous and Migration cultures in the Americas, and to restorative archival practices and scholarship.
Kate Eichhorn is the author of six books, including The End of Forgetting and The Archival Turn in Feminism. She is Professor and Chair of Culture and Media Studies at The New School.
Chad Hegelmeyer is an independent scholar of twentieth-century and contemporary American literature and a core faculty of the African American Intellectual Traditions Initiative at UC Berkeley. He received a PhD in English from New York University in 2020.
Irene Lusztig is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. She works in a space of delicate mediation between people, their pasts, and the present-tense spaces and landscapes where unresolved histories bloom and erupt. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present, inviting viewers to contemplate questions of politics, ideology, and the complex ways that personal, collective, and national memory are entangled.
She is invested in expanding the form of artful nonfiction through her lyrical use of archival images, her commitment to listening-centered and collaborative methods, patient durational shooting, and open-ended editing. She is the solo director, producer, DP, and editor of three acclaimed feature length documentaries that have screened widely in festivals and are distributed by Women Make Movies: her debut film Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), and the performative documentary Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her newest feature length work, Richland, takes place in and around the Eastern Washington nuclear company town that produced the Nagasaki bomb plutonium and is forthcoming in 2023.
Yana Makuwa is currently a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at NYU, working on the resonances of colonial language policies and practices in contemporary literary production in the Global South. Having previously worked in trade publishing, her work is concerned with the material and practical elements of making literature, as well as the theoretical.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a research fellow at the University of Oxford and currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at NYU.
Yoon Jeong Oh is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature at NYU. She is currently completing her book manuscript about translingual Asian literatures.
Anneke Rautenbach is a writer, editor and doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at NYU, currently based at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) as an Archives and Humanities Fellow. Besides archives and public culture, her academic interests span trans-Atlantic intellectual exchange, postcolonialism and decolonial philosophy, Black Studies, speech-act theory, and performance theory. She is an editor for Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation.
Rebekah Smith is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at NYU. Drawing heavily on archives and archival absences, her current research focuses on four women poets from Buenos Aires, provincial Russia, and New York in the 1970s–80s.
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and History at the New School for Social Research.
Zeb Tortorici is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, and his Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Duke UP, 2018) won several awards. His most recent book, co-edited with Daniel Marshall, is Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies (Duke UP, 2021).
Cristina Vatulescu is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police (Stanford UP, 2010) won the Heldt Prize and the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. She is also the co-editor of The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018), and a Perspectives on Europe special issue on Secrecy (2014). Her articles have appeared in diacritics, Comparative Literature, Poetics Today, Law and Literature, Film and Literature Quarterly, and The Brooklyn Rail. Cristina is currently finishing a book project entitled Illegible Archives? Challenges of Reading The Archival Revolution, and has started work on a new book project entitled Arts of Attention: A Literary Seed Bank.
This symposium is co-sponsored by NYU's Department of Comparative Literature, the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, the Program in Poetics & Theory, the Center for the Humanities, the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Science, the GSAS Office of Academic & Student Affairs, and the Office of the Dean of the Humanities.
