Biographies

Robyn Wiegman

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Women's Studies and Literature and former Director of the Women's Studies Program at Duke from 2001-2007. Her publications include American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), Who Can Speak: Identity and Critical Authority (1995), Feminism Beside Itself (1995), AIDS and the National Body (1997), The Futures of American Studies (2002), and Women's Studies on Its Own (2002). Professor Wiegman's research interests include feminist theory, queer theory, American Studies, critical race theory, and film and media studies. She is currently working on two manuscripts: Being in Time With Feminism focuses on the institutionalization of feminism in the U.S. academy; Object Lessons: The U.S. Knowledge Politics of Identity pays attention to relations of identification and affect in the constitution of identity as an academic object of study.

Jennifer Nedelsky

Jennifer Nedelsky is Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. Her teaching and scholarship have been concentrated on Feminist Theory, Theories of Judgment, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism. In addition to her book, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism (1990), she has published numerous articles in these areas. She is currently is at work on two books Law, Autonomy and the Relational Self: A Feminist Revisioning of the Foundations of Law and Human Rights and Judgment: A Relational Approach to be published by Oxford University Press.

Wendy Brown

Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory, and cultural theory (including feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory). Her current work focuses on the relationship of political sovereignty to global capital and other transnational forces, including those associated with religion, law, culture and moral discourse.
Professor Brown's books include Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), Left Legalism/Left Critique, co-edited with Janet Halley (Duke, 2002), Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, 2006).

Lauren Berlant

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English and Director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. She is author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship(1997), and The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). She has also edited a number of volumes, including Intimacy (2000) and Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004). This talk comes from her forthcoming book, Cruel Optimism.

Ratna Kapur

Ratna Kapur is Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi, and lectures at the Indian Society for International Law. She is also on the Faculty of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. She practiced law for a number of years in New Delhi, and now teaches and publishes extensively on international law, human rights, feminist legal theory and postcolonial theory. Her publications include: Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law (1996), Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law (1996), and Secularism's Last Sigh?: Hinduvata and the (Mis)Rule of Law (1999).

Rosalind Gill

Rosalind Gill is Professor of Subjectivity and Cultural Analysis at the Open University. Previously, she worked as a senior lecturer at the Gender Institute, LSE. She is author of 3 books and more than 60 scholarly articles and book chapters, and her work has been translated into several languages. A committed 'public intellectual' she has made 3 documentaries, and regularly contributes to the media. She is known for her work on gender, media and new technologies as well as for longstanding interests in discourse and narrative analysis. Underlying all her interests is a concern with theorizing the relationship between culture and subjectivity. She is a co-editor of "Feminism and Psychology" and is on the international editorial boards of "Subjectivity"; "Feminist Media Studies"; and "Communication,Culture & Critique".