CINDY AUSEC was born and raised in California. After graduating from high school, she entered the U.S. Army, where she was trained as a German linguist and spent four years in Germany. After army service, she earned a B.A. in International Relations from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Cindy then re-entered the Army as an Officer, served for three more years, and then worked for McDonnell Douglas for ten years. In 1998, Cindy returned to school and earned a Masters Degree in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Arizona. Cindy is currently a graduate student of Near Eastern Religions, a joint Ph.D. program between the University of California Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. Her major is Egyptian Religion with a minor in Israelite and Canaanite Bronze and Iron Age Religions.
Email: causec@berkeley.edu
PATRICIA BERGER, Associate Professor of Chinese Art, is a member of the Group in Buddhist Studies and currently chair of the Department of the History of Art at U. C. Berkeley. Before joining the Berkeley faculty in 1997, she served as Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and taught at Oberlin College and the University of Southern California. Her most recent book, Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (University of Hawaii, 2003) deals with the 18th-century Qing court's use of Buddhist art in their relationship with Mongolia and Tibet. She also co-authored a series of exhibition catalogs on Buddhist art in China and Inner Asia, including Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism (University of Hawaii, 1994), Mongolia: The Legacy of Chinggis Khan (Thames and Hudson, 1995), Tibet: Treasures from the Roof of the World (Bowers Museum, 2003), and Three Emperors (Royal Academy, London, 2006). Her current research focuses on Buddhist painting and photographic portraiture in early 20th-century China and Inner Asia.
Email: pberger@berkeley.edu
CYNTHIA BROWN, Ph.D., taught history and education at Dominican University of California from 1981 to 2001, including a “Big History” course in 1993. Since 2001 she has taught “Big History” part-time, while writing Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (New Press, 2007). Her earlier books include: Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986, American Book Award, 1987, re-issued by Africa World Press, 1990); Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History (New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1988); Connecting With the Past: History Workshop in Middle and High Schools (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994); and Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).
Email: cbcynthia@earthlink.net
DEBORAH CLEARWATERS is Director of Education and Public Programs at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, where she oversees the development of educational materials and programs about Asian art and culture for diverse audiences. She holds a Master’s Degree in Japanese Art History from the University of Maryland, speaks conversational Japanese, and has worked in museum education for more than ten years. Deborah is an ongoing student of the Japanese Way of Tea as well as Sundanese dance from West Java, Indonesia.
LINCOLN CUSHING is an archivist and graphic artist. He has spent the better part of his career documenting and preserving historic political posters. Formerly a librarian at U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library and the Institute of Industrial Relations, Cushing has published three books about poster art; Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art, Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Visions of Peace and Justice: Thirty Years of Political Posters from the Archives of Inkworks Press, and has more on the way. Much of his renowned archival work was done with a collection of Cuban political posters from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Email: lcushing@igc.org
MUNIS FARUQUI is an Assistant Professor in the Deptartment of South and Southeast Asian History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses on Islam and the Muslim experience in South Asia. He is currently working on a monograph that focuses on the figure of the Mughal Prince to explore questions of state formation, imperial power, and dynastic decline in 16th- and 17th-Century South Asia. Recent and forthcoming publications include an examination of the creation of the Mughal Empire under Emperor Akbar; an investigation into the founding decades of the princely state of Hyderabad; and a study of the mystic and Mughal prince, Dara Shikoh. His other research interests include Islam's interaction with non-Muslim religious traditions, prosopographical approaches to studying Mughal history, and the development of Persianate cultural traditions in South Asia.
Email: faruqui@berkeley.edu
CATHERINE FOSTER earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research focuses on household archaeology, microdebris analysis and domestic economies during the Uruk/Late Chalcolithic Period in southeastern Turkey (ca. 3600–3000 BCE). Other interests include deportation in the Near East, ancient music, archaeology and the media, museology, religion and burial practices during the Late Chalcolithic of the southern Levant (Israel, Syria, Jordan). She has conducted fieldwork in Jordan, Turkey, and North America.
Email: cpfoster@berkeley.edu
TIM GILL did his undergraduate work in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1982. He then earned a law degree from Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley, in 1985, and has practiced maritime law in the Bay Area since that time. He is currently a principal in a firm that manages ocean-going cargo ships. He began his study of archaeology in 2000, entering the doctoral program in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley in 2001 and obtaining his Masters degree in 2002. He has done archaeological field work at a Neolithic site in Northern Spain (2000), in the caves of Geissenklösterle and Hohle Fels in Southwestern Germany (2001 and 2002), and in France since 2005. He is currently working to complete his dissertation, which is entitled “Conceptual Blending, Metaphors, and the Construction Of Meaning in Ice Age Europe: An Inquiry Into the Viability of Applying Theories of Cognitive Science to Human History in Deep Time.” His interest is in the development of the cognitive capabilities of our species, with a focus on anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals in Ice Age Europe approximately 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Understanding the “art” of the Ice Age is a key component of that inquiry.
Email: Tim.Gill@ASMHQ.com
DARCY GRIMALDO GRIGSBY is a Professor in the History of Art Department at UCB. She specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French art and visual and material culture, particularly in relation to colonial politics. Her first book,Extremities.Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, was published by Yale University Press in 2002. Her second book,Colossal: Engineering Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century (reconnecting the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Towe, and Panama Canal) is due out this fall. Now she is working on two books, one on the cartes-de-visite of the illiterate ex-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, and the other on the relationship between France and the Caribbean called Creole Looking.
Email: dgrigsby@berkeley.edu
ANDREW JONES is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies. He teaches courses on modern and vernacular Chinese literature and popular culture. His research interests include music, cinema, and media technology, modern and contemporary fiction, children's literature, and the cultural history of the global 1960s. He is the author of Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001), co-editor of a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique entitled “The Afro-Asian Century,” and translator of literary fiction by Yu Hua as well as Eileen Chang's Written on Water (Columbia University Press, 2005). He is currently at work on a study of evolutionary thinking and developmentalist narrative in modern Chinese literature.
Email: afjones@berkeley.edu
ROSEMARY JOYCE is professor and department chair in Anthropology at U. C. Berkeley. 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
IAN LOWMAN is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on the history of identity formation in Cambodian history during the Angkor period, 9th-15th centuries. His work, based on new readings of Old Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions, engages with theoretical approaches to political identity, ethnicity, and the nation in pre-modern world history. His other research interests include the comparative history of early Southeast Asia, pre-colonial Khmer literature, Theravada Buddhism, and Southeast Asian nationalism. In 2007–2008, Ian received a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship to conduct his dissertation research in France and Cambodia.
Email: inl79@berkeley.edu
PETER K. MARSH is an ethnomusicologist and music historian with broad interdisciplinary training and experience as a teacher, scholar, and administrator, and a specialist in Asian music. He has written extensively on the music and culture of Mongolia and Inner Asia, and specifically on issues related to musical tradition and modernity. His latest book, The Horse-head Fiddle and the Reimagination of Tradition in Mongolia (Routledge Press, 2009) examines processes of folklorization in contemporary Mongolian music. He is Assistant Professor of Music at California State University, East Bay.
Email: peter.marsh@csueastbay.edu
RAKA RAY is Associate Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asia Studies, and Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She grew up in Calcutta, India, but has moved steadily west since then, receiving her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College, and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has been at Berkeley since 1993. Professor Ray’s areas of specialization are gender and feminist theory, domination and inequality, cultures of servitude and social movements. Her book on domestic workers (with Seemin Qayum) Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity and Class in India was published by Standford University Press this year.
Email: rakaray@berkeley.edu
NATASHA REICHLE is a curator of Southeast Asian art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. She received her Ph. D. in Art History from U. C. Berkeley in 2002 with a focus on the art and architecture of Indonesia. Her publications includeViolence and Serenity: Late Buddhist Sculpture from Indonesia University of Hawaii Press (July 2007).
Email: NReichle@asianart.org
MARJORIE SCHWARZER is Professor and Chair of the Museum Studies Department at John F. Kennedy University. Her book, Riches, Radicals and Rivals: 100 Years of Museums in America, was published in 2006 by the American Association of Museums in celebration of its 100th anniversary and was the basis for a nationally broadcast public television program. Schwarzer holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in art history from Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to holding leadership positions at museums in Chicago and Boston, she has coordinated large-scale exhibit projects for Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry and the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2003, Schwarzer received the Harry Morrison Award for Distinguished Teaching from John F. Kennedy University.
Email: schwarzer@jfku.edu
LUCIA VOLK is an anthropologist teaching in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at San Francisco State University. Professor Volk’s research focuses on how a society transitions from a culture of violence to a culture of peace. She has done ethnographic research in Lebanon at different points during the 1990's, analyzing the country's reconstruction efforts after a 16-year-long civil war. She examines the role of national museums, school curricula, and state-sponsored reconstruction projects, as well as family-based practices that anchor what it means to be post-war Lebanese.
Email: lvolk@sfsu.edu
NOGA WIZANSKY holds an Interdisciplinary doctorate in History of the Visual Arts from UC Berkeley. Her dissertation on visual art and cultural criticism produced during the inter-war years in Germany is titled "Crosscut: Handicraft and Abstraction in Weimar Germany." Noga has taught art and architectural history, art practice, women's studies, and European intellectual history at U. C. Berkeley and the California College of the Arts. She is currently employed by the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, and also works privately as a writer and studio artist.
Email: nwizansk@berkeley.edu