Executive Committee

Carla Cevasco is a scholar of food, the body, material culture, gender, and race in early America. Her first book,Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast, forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2022, explores how Indigenous peoples and colonial invaders confronted hunger in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is working on a second book about feeding infants and children in early America. She is Co-Director of the New Jersey Folk Festival. She received a Ph.D. in American

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University.  Her scholarship involves both the analysis and production of documentary images.  She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry.  She has published on images of the War on Terror, medical portraits, Xrays and crowdshots. For more than

David Kurnick is a Professor of English at Rutgers University. His research and teaching focus on the history of the novel, narrative theory, sociology and literature, and sexuality and gender. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (2012). The book examines the theatrical ambitions of major novelists (William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin) better known for their narrative explorations of domestic and psychological

Preetha Mani is Assistant Professor of South Asian Literatures at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on how representations of the Indian woman are used to shape ideas of regional and national identity, and experiences of belonging, in the aftermath of Indian Independence. She is currently completing a book manuscript, which chronicles the emergence of the short story as a preeminent genre in twentieth century Hindi and Tamil literature. The book proposes a view of Indian literature as a

Carter Mathes is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is a specialist in African American literature, twentieth-century Literature, and African diaspora studies. His first book, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights (2015) focuses on the relationship between sound and literary innovation during the 1960s and 1970s. He has also co-edited (with Mae G. Henderson) a volume on Black Arts Movement writer and critic Larry Neal, “Don’t

Professor Novacich specializes in medieval literature. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, drama and performance cultures, gender studies, archival theory, visual culture, fiction, and travel literature. She has essays on these subjects in an array of journals, including Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, JEGP, postmedieval, and Philological Quarterly. Her first book, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance (Cambridge UP) examines how

Imani D. Owens is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her interests include African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her research has been supported by a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and an NEH funded residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and

Caitlin Petre studies the social processes behind the digital datasets and algorithms that increasingly govern the contemporary world. Using qualitative research methods such as ethnographic observation and in-depth interviewing, she maps the complex relationships between digital analytics, the social actors who create them, and the established experts who make use of them.

Petre’s book, All the News That’s Fit to Click (published September 2021 from Princeton University Press), is a

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is a music theorist and historian specializing in the analysis of American ultra-modernist musical works, the transpacific history of American music, and contemporary composers of East Asian heritage. Previously, she taught at Oberlin College and has held visiting professorships at the Curtis Institute of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, and Bard

Xiaojue Wang is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Comparative Literature. Her research interests include Chinese literature and culture from the late imperial to contemporary periods, cultural Cold War studies in global Asias, Chinese-German intellectual connections, the Sinophone South, film and media studies, sound studies, sonic environmentalism, gender and sexuality, and comparative literature.

She is the author of Modernity

Nancy Yousef specializes in literature and philosophy of the Romantic era. Her research and teaching are centered in British and European Romanticism, but also extend to eighteenth century sources and forward into the later nineteenth-century. She is especially interested in the intersections between philosophical writing and literary form, and in the relations among aesthetics, ethics, and representation of the emotions. She is the author of three books: Isolated Cases (Cornell UP, 2004),