Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Paul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London (UCL). Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the €660,000 Holberg Prize, for "his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology and African-American studies".
Steven Kevin Connor, FBA is a British literary scholar. Since 2012, he has been the Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was formerly the academic director of the London Consortium and professor of modern literature and theory at Birkbeck, University of London.
Social movement theory is an interdisciplinary study within the social sciences that generally seeks to explain why social mobilization occurs, the forms under which it manifests, as well as potential social, cultural, political, and economic consequences, such as the creation and functioning of social movements.
Robert Stam is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.
Arif Dirlik was a Turkish-American historian who published on historiography and political ideology in modern China, as well as issues in modernity, globalization, and postcolonial criticism. Dirlik received a BSc in Electrical Engineering at Robert College, Istanbul in 1964 and a PhD in History at the University of Rochester in 1973.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s, as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism, developing a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
Ranjana Khanna is a literary critic and theorist recognized for her interdisciplinary, feminist and internationalist contributions to the fields of post-colonial studies, feminist theory, literature and political philosophy. She is best known for her work on melancholia and psychoanalysis, but has also published extensively on questions of post-colonial agency, film, Algeria, area studies, autobiography, Marxism, the visual and feminist theory. She received her Ph.D in 1993 from the University of York. She has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the University of Utah, and in 2000 began teaching at Duke University, where she is Professor of English, Literature and Women's Studies. Her theorization of subjectivity and sovereignty, including her recent work on disposability, indignity and asylum, engages with the work of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Irigaray, Kant, Marx, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Spivak. From 2007 until 2015, she was the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies, and in July 2017, she was appointed to be the incoming Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, both at Duke University.
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (2016–2021).
Rey Chow is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University. Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.
Ashley Dawson is an author, activist, and professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. Dawson specializes in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities with a particular interest in histories and discourses of migration. Since 2004, Dawson has been a contributing member of the Social Text collective. Dawson was co-editor of Social Text Online from 2010 to 2014 and, by appointment of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), he was also editor of the Journal of Academic Freedom from 2012 to 2014. He has published and edited numerous books, and his essays have appeared in journals such as African Studies Review, Atlantic Studies, Cultural Critique, Interventions, Jouvert, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Screen, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, Social Text, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
Jenny Sharpe is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her research focuses on issues of postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature, theories of allegory, the novel, rethinking models of memory and the archive, and the effect of the Middle Passage. In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.
Ato Quayson is a Ghanaian literary critic and Professor of English at Stanford University where he acts as the current chair of the department. He is also the chair of the newly established Department of African and African American Studies. He was formerly a Professor of English at New York University (NYU), and before that was University Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto. His writings on African literature, postcolonial studies, disability studies, urban studies and in literary theory have been widely published. He is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and the Royal Society of Canada (2013), and in 2019 was elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He was Chief Examiner in English of the International Baccalaureate (2005–07), and has been a member of the Diaspora and Migrations Project Committee of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the UK, and the European Research Council award grants panel on culture and cultural production (2011–2017). He is a former President of the African Studies Association.
Ming Dong Gu is Katherine R. Cecil Professor in the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is a Chinese-born scholar of comparative literature and thought. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago and has taught at various U.S. universities and colleges. He has a wide range of scholarly interests covering English literature, Chinese literature, comparative literature, literary theory, comparative thought East and West, fiction theory, hermeneutics, postcolonial studies, psychoanalytic criticism, and cross-cultural studies.
Roopika Risam is an associate professor of film and media studies and of comparative literature and faculty in the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement cluster at Dartmouth College. She was formerly Chair of the Department of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education at Salem State University. She is a scholar of digital and postcolonial humanities.
Brenda Longfellow is a Canadian filmmaker known for her biographies of female historic figures. Since 2007, Longfellow's focus in her films has been on environmental issues.
Dominic Boyer is an American-born cultural anthropologist, writer, filmmaker and podcaster whose work focuses on relationships between energy and environment, media and politics. He is the son of historian John W. Boyer.
Petrofiction or oil fiction, is a genre of fiction focused on the role of petroleum in society.
Paul Giles is an English-born academic, author and researcher. He is a Professor of English in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney.
Timothy Andres Brennan is a cultural theorist, professor of literature, public speaker, and activist. He is known for his work on American imperialism, the political role of intellectuals, Afro-Latin music, and the problem of the "human" and the humanities in an age of technoscience.
