Participants
Susan Andrade (Ph.D. University of Michigan) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She has completed The Nation writ Small for Duke, co-edited Atlantic-Crosscurrents for Africa World Press (1995), and is currently guest-editing for NOVEL a special issue on comparative African novels. This term she's teaching a grad course on The Novel, and she regularly teaches courses in African and Caribbean literature, feminist theory, postcolonialism, and theory of the novel.
Sabine von Dirke Sabine von Dirke is a faculty member in the German Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She studied history in the Federal Republic and holds a Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University. Her research explores German culture after World War II with special emphasis on countercultural developments, issues of multiculturalism, popular culture and, most recently, the New Economy. She is the author of a monograph entitled All Power to the Imagination!” The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens. Recent articles have focused on German hip hop, pop literature of the 1990s, and literary responses to the New Economy.
Boryana Dobreva ABD student in the German department at the University of Pittsburgh. Before coming to Pittsburgh in 2002, Boryana studied at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and the University of Shumen, Bulgaria, where she graduated with an M.A. in German Philology in 2001. She is interested in contemporary German literature and has worked extensively on topics of migrant literature and Postcolonial and Balkanist theory. Boryana has presented her research at the meetings of national professional organizations such as the German Studies Association. Her dissertation reassesses the German-language literature of Eastern European migration from a transnational perspective, thereby focusing on the negotiation of Balkan identity vis-à-vis the East/West dichotomy constructed in Western thought since Herder.
Randall Halle Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to numerous articles, he is the co-editor of Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, and the double special issue of Camera Obscura on Marginality and Alterity in Contemporary European Cinema (44 & 46). He is the author of Queer Social Philosophy: Critical Readings from Kant to Adorno (U Illinois, 2004). His new manuscript, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic is forthcoming Spring 2008 from Illinois and he is currently co-editing with Reinhild Steingröver After the Avant-Garde (Camden House, 2008), which surveys contemporary avant-garde film from German speaking Europe.
Deniz Göktürk Deniz Göktürk was born in Istanbul, studied in Konstanz/Germany, Norwich/UK, and Berlin, where she received her Ph.D. in 1995. She joined the German Department at Berkeley in fall 2001, after having taught at the University of Southampton/UK for six years. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture: Künstler, Cowboys, Ingenieure: Kultur- und mediengeschichtliche Studien zu deutschen Amerika-Texten 1912-1920 (1998) as well as numerous articles on migration, culture, and cinema. As a translator from Turkish into German she co-edited an anthology of contemporary Turkish literature, Jedem Wort gehört ein Himmel (1991, with Zafer Senocak), and translated novels by Aras Ören and Bilge Karasu. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (published by the British Film Institute in 2002, co-edited with Tim Bergfelder and Erica Carter). She has been collaborating with Anton Kaes and a team of students on the "Multicultural Germany Project" and has organized workshops and conferences such as "Rethinking Diversity in Europe and the USA" and "Goodbye Germany? Migration, Culture, and the Nation State." Germany in Transit. Nation and Migration, 1955-2005, a co-edited sourcebook growing out of this project, was published in 2007 by University of California Press. She is one of the co-founders of TRANSIT, the first electronic journal in German studies, launched by the Berkeley German Department in September 2005. She teaches courses and graduate seminars on: "Transnational Cinemas," "World Cinema/Global Cities," "German Cinema: Space, Borders, and Mobility," "Comedy and Community," "Nation, Migration, and Multiculturalism," "Auteur Cinema: Werner Herzog," "Kafka and Modernism," "Hybrid Cultures: Jews and Turks in Germany," and "German Orientalism."
Lina Insana (PhD U of Pennsylvania, 2000) is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches Italian Literature of the ‘900, Holocaust literature, the literature of the ventennio nero, Sicilian writers, Italian detective fiction, translation studies, Italian American studies, and migration and identity in the Italian context. Her research has focused primarily on representations of the Shoah, with particular emphasis on the intersection of Holocaust and translation studies. Her book, Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (forthcoming from the U of Toronto Press), was the recipient of the MLA’s 2007 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. She has recently begun work on a new project that will explore the role of Sicily in shaping notions of italianità for the modern Italian state. In addition to her work on Levi, Insana has published on Italian American children’s literature, the female canon in Fascist culture, Boccaccio’s defense of literature, and myth in Beppe Fenoglio.
Irina Livezeanu Associate Professor, Department of History, PhD, University of Michigan. Professor Livezeanu is the author of Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Cornell, 1995 and 2000). She has written numerous articles on wide-ranging topics, including "Generational Politics and the Philosophy of Culture: Lucian Blaga between Tradition and Modernism," to “’From Dada to Gaga’: The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism.” Her research includes Eastern Europe, East European Jewry, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe, Intellectuals and Politics, and Nationalism. Her current research topic is entitled The New Generation and the Avant-Garde: Ideas, Art and Politics in Romania, 1914-1947. She has received numerous awards and grants including a Senior Fellowship at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies, Budapest, Hungary, National Council for Eurasian and East European Research Grant, fellowships from the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. and from the American Philosophical Society. She serves as a Board Member for the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.
B. Venkat Mani
Assistant Professor in the German Department at UW-Madison. He is affiliated to a number of research centers and programs, and is the Interim Director of the Global Studies Program.
Mani was educated at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Universität Wien and Freie Universität, Berlin, Bogaziçi Universitesi, Istanbul, and Stanford University. He is the recipient of several fellowships, awards, and grants.
Mani’s teaching and research interests focus on 19th and 20th century German and European literatures. His work engages with theories of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. He has published many articles, book reviews, and short essays. The most recent ones include the book Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and the essay “Democracy in the Line of Fire: On Benazir Bhutto’s assassination” (www.telospress.com). He’s currently working on his second book manuscript, Transposed Signs of Modernity, a study of German engagements with India. The current paper is part of his project on “World Literature/s”, Reading, and contemporary novels.
Giuseppina Mecchia (Ph.D. Princeton, 1997, in French Language and Literature) is Associate Professor of French and Italian and Director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
She has published a book entitled L’Ecrivain et le Politique: Le cas de Maurice Blanchot, 1932-1968 (Rodopi, 2006). She has co-edited and translated with Max Henninger and Tim Murphy a special issue of Sub-Stance entitled Italian Postworkerist Thought (#112, January 2007). Her translation and critical introduction, with Charley Stivale, of Franco Berardi Bifo’s Félix Guattari: Encounters with a Thought to Come is forthcoming with Palgrave McMillan. She has given numerous papers and published essays on political and gender issues in 20th-century French culture. She is currently working on a book about the crossing of contemporary French and Italian critical and political thought from the late 60s onward and on a second book about morality and politics in Marcel Proust.
Hamid Naficy

John Evans Chair of Communications in the department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University. Professor Naficy also holds a joint appointment in the the Department of Art History. At UCLA, he received an MFA in film and television production and a Ph.D. in critical studies in film and television. He is an authority on exilic and diasporic cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas.

Patrice Nganang (Ph.D. Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt)
Assistant Professor of Literary Theory at SUNY, Stony Brook is an author of numerous essays, critical scholarship, journalism, and creative fiction. He publishes in French, German, and English, including the significant studies: Manifeste d’une nouvelle litterature africaine. Pour une ecriture preemptive and Interkulturalität und Bearbeitung. Untersuchung zu Soyinka und Brecht His novels and poetry include most recently Apologie du vandale, La Chanson du joggeur, L’Invention du beau regard. And they have won the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire, Prix Marguerite Yourcenar, and the Prix CREPLA. He has held Taft and DAAD scholarships. One of his current projects includes Cinema and Colony, a monograph on German, French, British and Belgian colonial films.
Lucien Nouis Professor Nouis specializes in 17th- and 18th-century French literature and philosophy, as well as critical theory. In his dissertation, Politiques de l’hospitalité (1630-1796), he focused on the concept of hospitality in the Enlightenment, and its relationship to questions of sovereignty, territory, law, and cosmopolitanism. He has presented conference papers on topics such as religious tolerance in Pierre Bayle, Foucault on heresy, and Jacques Derrida’s shifting positions towards the philosophy of the Enlightenment. He is currently working on a book-length study exploring gift and sacrifice in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Katrin Sieg Associate Professor jointly affiliated with the German department and the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Exiles, Eccentrics, Activists: Women in Contemporary Theatre (1994); Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002); and Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater (forthcoming in 2008). She has published in the areas of German theater and performance, feminist and queer theory, and critical race studies.
Gregor Thum Historian and DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, in 2002. His first book on the transformation of German Breslau into Polish Wroclaw after 1945 (Die fremde Stadt. Breslau 1945. Berlin: Siedler 2003) was translated into Polish in 2006 and won awards both in Germany and Poland. Currently, he is working on a book titled Mastering the East:The German Frontier from 1800 to the Present.
Phil Watts Department of French, Columbia University. Phil Watts received his PhD from Columbia University in 1991. His research and teaching focus on 20th-century French literature and film and the relation between politics and aesthetics. His first book Allegories of the Purge was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize. Since then he has continued to study how literature and film participate in democratic formations, and has published articles on Jean Genet, Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes and film, Jacques Rivette and the cold war, and the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Daničle Huillet.