Iftikhar Dadi is Associate Professor, Department of History of Art and Interim Chair, Department of Art at Cornell University. His research interests include modern South Asian & Islamic art and visual cultures, and critical and postcolonial theory.  

Recent publications include Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (University of North Carolina Press, 2010); “Ibrahim El Salahi and Calligraphic Modernism in a Comparative Perspective,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 2010); “Shirin Neshat’s Photographs as Postcolonial Allegories,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Autumn 2008); and “Ghostly Sufis and Ornamental Shadows: Spectral Visualities in Karachi’s Public Sphere,” in Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia, ed. Martina Rieker and Kamran Ali (Oxford, 2008).

Iftikhar is also an artist who collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi. Together, they have shown their work in numerous international venues. These include Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil; Asia-Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Museum, Australia; Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool, UK; Walker Art Center, Minnesota; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Queens Museum of Art, New York City.

Fouad Makki is Assistant Professor of Development Sociology. His areas of interest include classical and contemporary social theory, the historical sociology of development and modernity, and the contested dynamics of nationalism and colonial empires.

Barry Maxwell teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in American Studies at Cornell University.  He holds graduate degrees from Stanford (Ph.D.) and Simon Fraser (M.A.). At work on a book called A Grammar of Enclosure, which takes up the theft of the commons in the Americas, he is also in the last stages of editing Recognition at the Crossroads, the selected prose of the poet Lorenzo Thomas.  He has published on Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Michael Ondaatje, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.  Two further articles from this hand are "Jazz in Jail: The Supplement of the Musicians' Narratives" (Genre XXXV: 3-4 , 2002, a special issue on prison writing), and "'I hate it when things become so pat as to be oppressive': Staying Out of Range of the Commonplace in Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook" in Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-Cultural Literature of the United States (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000).  His "Chromatic Shadows, So What:  Notes toward Clearer Reception of David Hammons's Signals"  appears in Diaspora Memory Place. David Hammons/ Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons/ Pamela Z, edited by Cheryl Finley and Salah M. Hassan (Munich: Prestel, 2008).  In 2008, Barry Maxwell was a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Natalie Melas holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English, French, Ancient Greek) from UC Berkeley. Her areas of interest include transcultural theory (between postcolonialism and globalism), the politics of disciplinary histories, cultural comparison, postcolonial neo-formalism, turn-of-the-century English literature, Anglophone and especially Francophone Caribbean literature and theory, modern reconfigurations of antiquity, Homer. She has published essays on the fate of the humanities in the contemporary university, on incommensurability, on Joseph Conrad, on French Caribbean Literature and her book, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison, (Stanford University Press, 2007).  She is co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009). Her current project addresses the formation of alternative modernities in the broken link between modernism and colonialism.

Viranjini Munasinghe is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Cornell University. She received her B.A. in Social Anthropology (1985) from Sussex University, England and Ph.D. (1994) from Johns Hopkins University in Cultural Anthropology. She is an historical anthropologist working in the Caribbean (Trinidad) and the Asian Diaspora in the Americas. Her academic interests include cultural and racial mixture (creolization, hybridity, syncretism), race, ethnicity, nationalism, comparison, ethnic studies, postcolonial theory and anthropological theory. Her book, Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad, (Cornell Press, 2001) explores the question of alternative modernities through the nation form. Her essays have appeared in American Ethnologist, the Journal of Asian American Studies, South Asian Review, Social Analysis and Transforming Anthropology. Her current research analyzes how nations are constituted through projects of comparison.

Sunn Shelley Wong is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies. She received her B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Simon Fraser University, and her doctorate in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published articles on twentieth-century American poetry, as well as Asian American and African American prose fiction.  She is presently working on two book projects--one on the subject of race and time in relation to Asian American and African American literature entitled The Waiting Room; and the second, a collaborative project with Cornell colleagues Natalie Melas and Viranjini Munasinghe on the subject of race and comparison in an interdisciplinary frame.

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