• Contributors

Heather Alumbaugh (heather.alumbaugh@mountsaintvincent.edu) is an Assistant Professor of English and cofounder and codirector of the Women's Studies Program at the College of Mount Saint Vincent. Her area of research includes twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, with a focus on modernism, regionalism, and ethnic literatures.

Christopher Allan Black (christopher.black@okstate.edu) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Oklahoma State University, where he teaches first-year composition. His interests include early American literature with a particular emphasis on nineteenth-century antebellum literature.

Beauty Bragg (beauty.bragg@gcsu.edu) is an Associate Professor of English at Georgia College and State University. She teaches literature and culture of the African diaspora with a particular focus on African Americans. Her writings on rap music, gender, and contemporary literature have been published in scholarly journals and magazines such as Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Gender Forum, and Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. Her current research focuses on how popular fiction by African American women has been impacted by the representation of women in commercial rap and hip-hop culture.

Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao (jcabusao@bryant.edu) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University. His teaching and research focus on US ethnic studies (specifically, comparative approaches to Asian American and African American studies), cultural studies (literary and cultural theory, critical pedagogies), and women's studies (feminist movement and social change).

Marci L. Carrasquillo (marci.carrasquillo@simpson.edu) is an Assistant Professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa, where she teaches ethnic American literatures and women's literature. A 2005 recipient of a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, currently she is at work on her first book, tentatively titled Chueco Roads: Remapping the American Road Trip. The manuscript traces the trajectory and transformations of the road trip plot in Latina/o literature since the liberation movements of the 1960s. [End Page 199]

Martha J. Cutter (martha.cutter@uconn.edu) is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches classes in ethnic literature, African American literature, and women's literature. She is the former editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and since 2006 she has edited MELUS. Her first book, Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's Writing, 1850-1930 (University Press of Mississippi, 1999) won the Nancy Dasher Award from the College English Association for the best book of literary criticism published between 1999 2001. Her second book, Lost and Found in Translation, was published in 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. Her articles have appeared in American Literature, African American Literature, MELUS, Callaloo, Women's Studies, Legacy, Criticism, and other journals, and she has contributed chapters to Mixed Race Literature (2002) and Passing and the Fictions of Identity (1996). She is currently at work on a book about racial passing.

Catherine Fung (cmfung@ucdavis.edu) is a PhD Candidate in English at University of California, Davis, where she lectures in Asian American Studies. Her research focuses on Asian American literature, intersections between law and literature, critical race studies, and gender. Her dissertation engages with imaginings of Southeast Asia and the status of the refugee within debates surrounding citizenship, migration, and diaspora.

David Todd Lawrence (DTLAWRENCE@stthomas.edu) is an Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, where he teaches African American literature and culture, folklore studies and ethnography, and American cultural studies. He has written on the Black Arts Movement, graffiti and contested space, and the role of the pimp figure in African American expressive culture.

A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, is a Professor of American literature at Nihon University, Tokyo. Publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in The Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); Postindian Conversations (with Gerald Vizenor) (1999); Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won an American Book Award in 2004; Gothic To Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2008); and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010). His essay collections include Other British, Other Britain: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction (1995); Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor (2000); and China Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (2008). [End Page 200]

Julie Avril Minich (minichja@muohio.edu) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Miami University of Ohio, where she teaches courses in Latina/o cultural studies and literary theory. Minich received her PhD from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University in 2008. She has published articles on representations of disability in the work of Cherríe Moraga and in contemporary Spanish cinema. Currently, Minich is at work on a book manuscript titled Accessible Citizenships: Theorizing Disability in Latina/o American Culture.

Kevin Piper (kcpiper@wisc.edu) is a PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His dissertation, "The Knowledge of Others: Cosmopolitanism and Modern Curiosity," examines a set of modernist writers for their fascination with expressive forms outside their national or ethnic affiliations. The dissertation, along with his interest in American immigrant writings, is informed by a concern with the ways national and ethnic narratives are bound up with the cosmopolitan attitudes of modern writers. Piper received the Leon Edel prize for his article "'An Interspace Worth Mentioning': Henry James's Approach and the Critique of Mastery," which was published in the The Henry James Review.

John D. "Rio" Riofrio (jdriofrio@wm.edu) received his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is now an Assistant Professor of Latino/a Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at The College of William and Mary. He recently published a review of CNN's documentary Latino in America in the journal Latino Studies and is currently at work on a book manuscript that explores how the demographic shift in Latino/a immigration to the US is changing the way we understand the Latino/a literary imagination.

Catherine Rottenberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics and the Gender Studies Program at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, where her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century African American and Jewish American literature. Her recent publications include Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish American Literature (2008) and articles in African American Review and the Journal of American Studies. She is currently working on a project that examines the representation of Harlem in 1920s and 1930s African American fiction as a site that facilitates breakdown of traditional gender roles (and thus allows African American women more "freedom") while disciplining black women and their bodies in very specific ways. [End Page 201]

Jolie A. Sheffer (jsheffer@bgsu.edu) is an Assistant Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. She is completing a book on multicultural discourse at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on the intersection of miscegenation and incest in popular domestic allegories by ethnic women writers.

Tino Villanueva is the author of six books of poetry, among them Shaking Off the Dark (1984); Chronicle of My Worst Years (1994); Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993), which won a 1994 American Book Award; and Primera causa/First Cause (1999), a chapbook on memory and writing. Villanueva has been anthologized in An Ear to the Ground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 1989), and Poetas sin fronteras (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2000). Some of his poems have been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, and Portuguese. His art work has appeared on the covers and pages of national and international journals such as Nexos, Green Mountains Review, TriQuarterly, and Parnassus. He teaches in the Department of Romance Studies at Boston University. [End Page 202]

Copyright © 2010 MELUS, The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

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