Keynote Speaker:

Hamid Naficy
(Department of Art and Art History, Rice University)
Hamid Naficy is Nina J. Cullinan Professor of Art and Art History/ Film and Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, Rice University. He has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diasporic cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas. His English language books are: An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diaspora Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (Routledge, 1999), The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (co-edited, Harwood Academic Publishing, 1993), and Iran Media Index (Greenwood Press, 1984). He has also published extensively in Persian, including a two volume book on the documentary cinema, Film-e Mostanad (Tehran: Entesharat-e Daneshgah-e Azad-e Iran, 1978-79). He is currently completing Cinema and National Identity: A Social History of Iranian Cinema (University of Texas Press). His publications have been anthologized, reprinted, and translated into many languages, including French, German, Italian, and Persian.

Speakers:
Gayatri Gopinath
(Women and Gender Studies, UC Davis.)
Gayatri Gopinath is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at UC Davis. She received her Ph. D. from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature and has done work on Anglophone and Postcolonial Literatures; Queer Theory; Popular Culture; South Asian Diasporic Cultural Politics and Literatures; Gender, Colonialism and Nationalism; and Race, Sexuality and Migration. Her work on sexuality, diaspora and South Asian popular culture has appeared in various anthologies and journals including Diaspora, Positions, and GLQ. She is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled Impossible Subjects: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, forthcoming from Duke UP. Her publications include "Local Sites, Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Deepa Mehta's Fire," in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship, Sexualities, and the Afterlife of Colonialism, eds. Arnaldo Cruz Malave and Martin Manalansan (New York: NYU Press, 2002); "Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame," in Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary M. George (New York: Westview Press, 1998); and "Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion," in "New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies," eds. Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe, special issue of positions: East Asia cultures critique.

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
(Dept. of History of Art, UC Berkeley)
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby received her degree from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before taking her post as Associate Professor at UC Berkeley. She has done work on Orientalist European Art since 1700 and her publications include "'Egypt! Egypt!': Delacroix's Post-Napoleonic Orient" in Beth Wright, ed., Companion to Delacroix, forthcoming; "Nudity a la Grecque in 1799," Art Bulletin; "Mamelukes in Paris: Fashionable Trophies of Failed Napoleonic Conquest", published Morrison Library Inaugural Lecture; "Rumor, Contagion and Colonization in Gro's Plague Stricken of Jaffa (1804)", Representations; "Dilemmas of Visibility: Contemporary Women Artists' Representations of Female Bodies," in Larry Goldstein, ed., The Female Body, Figures, Styles, Speculations, 1991.

Riché Richardson
(Dept. of English, UC Davis)
Riché Richardson received her Ph.D. in American literature from Duke University in 1998 and is now an Assistant Professor in the department of English at UC Davis. Her area of specialization is African American literature with a focus on studies of the South in the United States. Other interests include critical theory, cultural studies, feminism and gender studies, and the relation of feminism and philosophy. Most recently, she was a 2001-2002 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University. Her forthcoming and developing publications treat topics such as the status of the South in formations of race and masculinity in the African American context, Southern rap, psychoanalysis, race and masculinity in contemporary African American literature and film, and transnational and diasporan perspectives in contemporary Southern studies. She is completing a booklength study entitled Masculinity, Black Identity, and the American South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta and is a member of the executive council of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. A Montgomery, Alabama native, her interests include collecting Southern folk art and making mixed-media appliqué art quilts.

Sirida Srisombati
(History of Consciousness Program, UC Santa Cruz)
Sirida Srisombati is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz and holds an M.A. in Critical Studies from USC's School of Cinema-Television. Her dissertation analyzes the relationship between contemporary discourses of globalization, popular culture, and transnational subjectivities. Focusing on the circulation of cultural objects (ranging from television + digital media to fashion + food) between Bangkok and Los Angeles, she traces the development of illicit economies and material networks to posit the emergence of distinct Thai-US transnational subjectivities in Southern California. She has presented on various aspects of this topic at Console-ing Passions (Bristol, UK 2001), the Society of Cinema Studies (Denver, CO 2002), and Race and Digital Space 2.0 (Los Angeles, CA 2002).

Organizers:
Monika Mehta
(Chancellor's Post-Doc, Dept. of Comparative Literature and
The Film Studies Program, UC Berkeley)
Monika Mehta is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California at Berkeley, affiliated with Film Studies and Comparative Literature. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. At Berkeley, she is working on her book project, "Selections: Cutting, Classifying, and Certifying in Bombay Cinema," which focuses on censorship of sex in Bombay cinema. She is also doing research on her next project which examines how globalization reconfigures the relations amongst the Indian State, Indian diasporic communities and Bombay cinema.

Tamao Nakahara
(Ph. D. Candidate, Dept. of Italian Studies, D.E. in The Film Studies Program)
Tamao Nakahara is completing her dissertation, "Busty Babes and Boiled Babies: The Status of Exploitation in Post-war Italian Cinema," in which she examines "high" and "low" films, as well as representations of "Italian-ness" in Italian and Hollywood cinema. Forthcoming publications from her third chapter include "Barred Nuns: Italian Nunsploitation Films" in Alterimage (Wallflower/Columbia University Press) and "Horrific Habits: Nunsploitation Horror" in Horror Zone (Verso). She director of the
Born to Be Bad: Trash Cinema Conference and Film Festival.