Contributors
- Contributors
Mel Y. Chen is an assistant professor at the Department of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences. Her book project "Speech Lost from Speech: On the Borders of Linguistic Self-Possession" explores stealth and explicit dehumanization; gendered, immigrant and racialized silences of language theories; and the stakes and workings of linguistic reclamation, integrating feminist and critical race theory, linguistics and cognitive science, and queer studies. Her current work focuses on delineating coordinations among human animality, queer sexuality, and race, and traces ethical contours of a queer-of-color approach to animality through a consideration of gender and sexuality in twentieth-century U.S. cultural representations. Her short film Local Grown Corn (2007) explores interweavings of immigration, childhood, disability, and friendship; it has played in both Asian and queer film festivals.
Jim Cocola is a resident scholar at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Virginia, he focused on modern and contemporary American literatures and cultures, completing a dissertation titled "Topopoiesis: Contemporary American Poetries and the Imaginative Making of Place." He also served as a lecturer in the English Department and an instructor in the Media Studies Department at UVA. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the minnesota review, n+1, and SEL. In the fall he begins work as an assistant professor of modern American literature, film, and media in the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Catherine Cocks is a member of the faculty at the School for Advanced Research and the author of Doing the Town: The Rise of [End Page 411] Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1915 (2001), The Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era (2009), with Peter Holloran and Alan Lessoff, and articles on tourism and the history of sexuality. Her current project, "Tropical Whites: Tourism, Culture, and the Modern Self, 1880–1940," is a study of the emergence of a resort region encompassing Southern California, Florida, the Caribbean, and Mexico between 1880 and 1940.
Mark B. Feldman is a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. His book manuscript "Still Wild: The Human and the Animal in American Literary Naturalism" traces how literary naturalism grappled with the implications of evolutionary theory. This marked the emergence of a new, Darwinian self and entailed the rethinking of key aspects of human experience, including setting or habitat; interiority or consciousness; education; reproduction; and temporality. Mark's current project on contemporary New York City investigates how writers, artists, and architects have used an ecological perspective to reimagine what a city is and to alter its form. He argues that a new, ecologically inspired poetics of urbanism can be discerned in writings and art about New York City and in projects that reshape the city. Mark's work has appeared in Mosaic, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and Nineteenth Century Studies.
Cheryl J. Fish is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College and visiting professor of women's studies at the Graduate School, City University of New York. She has an essay forthcoming in MELUS on gender and ecojustice in Ruth Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats and Judith Helf and Daniel Gold's documentary Blue Vinyl, and another on teaching interdisciplinary environmental humanities in the MLA collection Teaching North American Environmental Literature (2008). She is also the author of Black and White Women's Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations (2004) and was a Fulbright Lecturer in North American Studies in Finland in 2007.
Abby Hickcox is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She received her master's degree in environmental studies from the Gaylord Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her master's research investigated overlapping land tenure, conservation, and development dynamics in western Mexico. Her current research interests center on the role of nature in identity formation and governance, particularly race, class, gender, and environmentalism. Ongoing projects [End Page 412...
