Visiting Speakers

Honor Ford-Smith is a scholar, theatre worker and poet. She was educated in Jamaica at St Andrew High School and after studying theatre began teaching at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston. She became co-founder and artistic director of Sistren (Sisters), a theatre collective of mainly working-class Jamaican women that works in community theatre and popular education. Currently Sistren continues to carry out community performance and education in Kingston, Jamaica. Ford-Smith was also a member of the Groundwork Theatre Company, created in 1980 as the repertory arm of the Jamaica School of Drama; it became an autonomous company in 1987.

Donette Francis specializes in Caribbean literary and intellectual histories, American immigrant literatures, African diaspora literary studies, globalization and transnational feminist studies, and theories of sexuality and citizenship. Her book, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (Palgrave 2010), is concerned with the archives, intimacy and narrating history. Through an interdisciplinary and comparative study of novels by contemporary diasporic Caribbean women writers, Fictions charts an alternative history of racial and sexual formation in the Caribbean— moving across historical periods and national contexts. Defining this emergent literature as the Caribbean "antiromance," Dr. Francis writes against the critical impulse to underscore women's agency, and considers instead how Caribbean female subjects dwell in liminal spaces of both vulnerability and possibility. Dr. Francis is currently working on two book projects: The Novel 1960s: Form and Sensibilities in Caribbean Literary Culture, an intellectual history of the Anglophone Caribbean’s transnational literary culture; and Creole Miami: Black Arts in the Magic City, a sociocultural history of black arts practice in Miami from 1980s to present.  She is the editor of “Intellectual Formations: Locating a Caribbean Intellectual Tradition,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2013; and co-editor with Belinda Edmondson, "Special Forum: American Studies—Caribbean Edition," Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2013. 

Anne-Lise François joined the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1999, after receiving her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her teaching and research focus on (mostly) 19th-century British, American and European (French and German) fiction, poetry and thought, with some excursions into the 17th, 18th, and early 20th centuries. 

Prior to joining the faculty at Temple University, Mark Franko was Professor of Dance and Director of the interdisciplinary Center for Visual and Performance Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been Valeska Gert Visiting Professor of Dance and Performance at Freie Universiteit Berlin, and Visiting Professor at DOCH (Dans och Cirkushögskolan, University of Stockholm), and in the dance departments of Université de Paris 8 (Vincennes), Université de Nice (Sophia-Antipolis), Columbia University School of the Arts, Bard College, Performance Studies NYU, and in departments of French literature at Princeton University, Columbia University, Purdue University, and Université Paul Valéry (Montpellier 3).

Will Friedwald is an American author and music critic. He has written for newspapers that include the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Village Voice, Newsday, New York Observer, and New York Sun  – and for magazines that include Entertainment Weekly, Oxford American, New York, Mojo, BBC Music Magazine, Stereo Review, Fi, and American Heritage.

My research on twentieth-century U.S. history focuses on the intellectual, political, and cultural history of the century’s middle decades.  My interests include: political ideologies and movements, especially liberal and left-wing varieties; the development of American ideas about race and ethnicity; and the history of the social sciences and their role in shaping public discourse and public policy.  I have explored these interests in two books: a history of the controversy over the 1965 “Moynihan Report” about African American families and an intellectual biography of influential social critic C. Wright Mills.  I have published articles on a wide range of topics such as the music and prison activism of country singer Johnny Cash, the relationship of the New Left to liberalism, and Southern segregationists’ views of European decolonization.

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Associate Professor in the Departments of History, Sociology, and Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Fatma Müge Göçek is a Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies. Her research focuses on the comparative analysis of history, politics and gender in the first and third worlds. She critically analyzes the impact of processes such as development, nationalism, religious movements and collective violence on minorities.