TIMOTHY ABDELLAH FUSON completed his Ph.D. in Music at U. C. Berkeley and is both a scholar and performer. His dissertation on the music of the Lila ceremony of the Gnawa of Marrakesh is entitled "Musicking Moves and Ritual Grooves Across the Moroccan Gnawa Night." Dr. Fuson has taught and lectured extensively on a wide range of musical traditions of the Americas and of the Middle East and North Africa. He records and performs with The Dunes, a North African Fusion groove band; Gnawatronic, weaving the ritual grooves of Moroccan Gnawa trance music with modern techno dance beats; and Sendebar, an ensemble specializing in medieval music of the Iberian peninsula.
Email: fuson@berkeley.edu
TREVOR GETZ is Professor of African History at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Slavery and Reform in West Africaand co-author of textbooks such as African Histories, Exchanges: A Global History Reader, and Modern Imperialism and Colonialism. His graphic history Abina and the Important Men will be available from Oxford University Press in August 2011, and he is currently working on a cosmopolitan history of Africa as well a world history textbook.
Email: tgetz@sfsu.edu
THOMAS B. GOLD is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Prof.Gold’s research focuses on many aspects of the societies of East Asia, particularly mainland China and Taiwan. His publications on mainland China have covered numerous topics, including youth, popular culture, personal relations, civil society, and private business. Professor Gold regularly teaches Introductory Sociology, the Sociology of Development and Globalization, and Contemporary Chinese Society. In 2008 he taught an undergraduate seminar on “The Simpsons’ Global Mirror.” He won a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Division of Social Science in 2007.
tbgold@berkeley.edu
SALLY J. SUTHERLAND GOLDMAN is a Lecturer in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at U. C. Berkeley and has lectured, taught, and published widely in the areas of Sanskrit epic and literature and traditional South Asian constructions and representations of gender. She is the Associate Editor of the VālmīkiRāmāyana Translation Project and the editor of Bridging Worlds: Studies on Women in South Asia (Berkeley: Centers for South and Southeast Asia Studies, U. C. Berkeley 1991. Reprint: Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1991). A frequent visitor to India, she spent the Spring of 2010 as a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jahwarhal Nehru University.
Email: sjsg@berkeley.edu
ROSEMARY JOYCE is Professor of Anthropology at U. C. Berkeley and recently appointed a member of President Obama's Cultural Property Advisory Committee.. Her research is concerned with questions about the ways prehispanic inhabitants of Central America employed material culture in actively negotiating their place in society. Much of her published work is concerned with the use of representational imagery to create and reinforce gendered identities, and includes examinations of Classic Maya monumental art and glyphic texts, and of Formative period monumental and small-scale images. Some of this work also involves mortuary analysis. She specializes in the study of ceramics, including analysis of the functional implications of vessel distributions, and of the symbolism of representational pottery vessels and figurines. As a museum anthropologist, she has worked with curated collections, including photographs and historical archives, in both North America and Honduras.
Email: rajoyce@berkeley.edu
SUSAN MOULTON is Professor of Art History at Sonoma State University. She earned graduate degrees in Art History from Stanford University and studied Art History and Archaeology at the University of Padua in Italy. She has lectured widely on art history and Archaeomythology and has created more than one hundred courses in her field including the sacred feminine in history and pre-history, secular and Christian iconography in the Italian Renaissance, and cross-cultural topics in American and California art. She also manages a small farm in northern California with horses, llamas, pigs, goats, exotic birds, gardens and fruit trees and is a practicing painter and sculptor.
Email: susan.moulton@sonoma.edu
ANNA MUZA, received her Ph.D. at the State Institute for Theater Art, in Moscow, Russia, where she taught European drama and literature prior to her relocation to the United States in 1992. Since 1996, she has been teaching Russian literature, drama, and theater at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research has been devoted to the work of Anton Chekhov, as well as modern theater and visual culture; she has written on Chekhov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Tom Stoppard, and co-edited a volume of Kazimir Malevich’s writings on film.
Email: amuza@berkeley.edu
MICHAEL NYLAN is Professor of Chinese History at UCB. Her specialty is Early China: seven centuries of Warring States through Eastern Han (475 BC-AD 220), with an emphasis on the sociopolitical context; aesthetic theories and material culture; and belief. Her many publications include Lives of Confucius: Civilization's Greatest Sage Through the Ages (with Thomas Wilson); China's Early Empires, supplement to The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, Ch'in and Han, ed. with Michael Loewe. In progress, she is working with Chinese archeologists on an interactive Web site devoted to the ancient Chinese capital of Chang’an.
Email: mnylan@berkeley.edu
MARTHA SAAVEDRA is Associate Director of the Center for African Studies at U. C. Berkeley. Trained as a Political Scientist, she has taught at St. Mary’s College of California, UC Berkeley and Ohio University. Her research has ranged from agrarian politics, development and ethnic conflict in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan to gender and sport in Africa to a new collaborative project on representations of Africa in Chinese popular culture. At the Center, she co-coordinates the UnderstandingSudan.org curriculum project, oversees public programs and fellowships, and works closely with the African languages program among other things
Email: martha@berkeley.edu .
ALEX SARAGOZA is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a favorite presenter at ORIAS. His current research investigates the privatization of the Mexican economy in general in light of its relationship to that of the U.S., and that of the tourism industry in particular. He formerly served as the Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies and was subsequently Director of the UC Study Center in Mexico.
Email: alexsara@berkeley.edu
SANCHITA SAXENA is the Associate Director of the Center for South Asia Studies (CSAS) at UC Berkeley. In the summer of 2010, Sanchita was a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. where she was working on a book (Forthcoming, 2012. Policy Reforms Influencing Competitiveness in the Garments and Textiles Industries: Case Studies from Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. New York: Cambria Press, Inc.) which examines domestic coalitions in the garment industry, and their influence in enacting policy reforms in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. Sanchita received her Ph.D. in Political Science (focus on Comparative Political Economy) from UCLA in 2002. Her research interests include politics of economic policy and reform, the role of NGOs in development, local economic governance and decentralization, and international trade.
Email: sanchitas@berkeley.edu
JASON M. SCHLUDE is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. While he teaches on Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern history and archaeology, his present research focuses on the relationship between Rome and the ancient Iranian empire of Parthia. Before Duquesne, Prof. Schlude taught at universities in the Bay Area, where in 2007 he began development of a curriculum enrichment program on ancient Rome for elementary and middle school students -- a project in which he is still engaged.
Email: jschlude@scu.edu
MELANIE TANIELIAN is a PhD. Candidate in History of the Middle East at the University of California, Berkeley and currently teaches a course on the History of the Modern Middle East at the University of San Francisco. She earned her MA degree in the History of the Middle East, as well as BA degrees in Religious Studies and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She has lived, studied and traveled extensively in the Middle East and conducted research for her dissertation in Lebanon, where she lectured at the Lebanese University. Her interests are the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East in general and in particular the urban experience and remembrance of World War I as it played a role in the formation of the Post-Colonial Lebanese state.Email: mtanielian@usfca.edu
GOWRI VIJAYAKUMAR is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at U. C. Berkeley. Her research interests include gender, development, and globalization. She has a background in international education. Her current project focuses on women who work in IT outsourcing centers in India, particularly in small towns.
Email: gowri@berkeley.edu
LESLIE ANN WOODHOUSE completed her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Her research, which analyzes the political roles played by royal consorts and concubines, focuses on the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries in Thailand. She was a Fulbright IIE grantee to Thailand from 2004-05. Leslie is an independent scholar currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Email: leslie.woodhouse@gmail.com