Visiting Speakers

Monique Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books of the year by Barnes & Noble and a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Fiction Book. Truong co-edited Watermark: An Anthology of Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998). She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law.

Laura Ann Twagira is an Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University. She was awarded the 2013 ICOHTEC Young Scholar Book Prize from the International Committee for the History of Technology. The ICOHTEC is interested in the history of technology, focusing on technological development as well as its relationship to science, society, economy, culture and the environment. Twagira was honored for her Rutgers University dissertation on the study of women’s development of food technology in early 20th century colonial west Africa, Women and Gender at the Office du Niger (Mali).

Georgina Van Welie is a co-founder of the SABAB Theatre. She served as Artistic Producer/Script Editor on The Al Hamlet Summit, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, and The Speaker’s Progress.

Megan Vaughan is a historian of Africa and of colonialism. Her first book, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi (C.U.P. 1987) drew on extensive oral historical research in Malawi. In 1991, she published Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Polity and Stanford, 1991), an examination of colonial medical discourse and a critical discussion of the application of Foucault’s theories to colonial contexts.

Fernando Vidal was born in Buenos Aires, received a B.A. from Harvard University, graduate degrees in psychology and the history and philosophy of science from the Universities of Geneva and Paris, and a Habilitation from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has worked on the history of the human sciences from the early modern period to the present and his most recent book studied the “sciences of the soul” between the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Dr. Shelley Weinberg is currently an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois. In 2008, she received her Ph.D  from the University of Toronto. Following this, she received the UIUC Humanities Released Time Fellowship in 2012, then the American College of Learned Societies Fellowship in 2013. Professor Weinberg has written extensively about the philosopher John Locke, specifically honing in on consciousness and skepticism. Her most recent publication, "Locke's Reply to the Skeptic", published in 2013, is situated on this very topic.

Alice Wiemer's work focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on twentieth-century economic and social history.

C.D. Wright, professor of Literary Arts, is winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in March 2011 for her most recent title, One With Others: [a little book of her days], which was also a finalist for the National Book Award and was selected as winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets.