Border Crossings Speaker Bios

Kaveh Askari (ktaskari at gmail.com) is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at Western Washington University. He is currently revising a manuscript on the pictorial tradition in American silent cinema and editing a special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture on early cinema in the Middle East and North Africa.

Michael Baskett (eiga at ku.edu) teaches Film Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas where his area of specialization is in Japanese and East Asian film studies.

Jennifer M. Bean is Director of Cinema Studies, Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Washington. She is co-editor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke UP, 2002) and the author of The Play in the Machine: Gender, Genre, and the Cinema of Modernity (forthcoming Duke UP).

Manishita Dass (mdass at umich.edu) is an Assistant Professor in Screen Arts & Cultures and Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Michigan.

Paul Dobryden (pdobryden at berkeley.edu) is a second-year graduate student in the Department of German at Berkeley. He is interested German silent cinema, early 20th century mass culture, and the aftereffects of WWI.

Allyson Nadia Field (afield at fas.harvard.edu) is a 2007-2008 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is completing her dissertation, Filming Back and Black: Strategies of African American Political Modernism.

Leigh Goldstein (leigh.goldstein at gmail.com) is a graduate student in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

Laura Horak (horak at berkeley.edu) is a third-year graduate student in Film Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She curated the Girls Will Be Boys film series at the Pacific Film Archive and writes for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Priya Jaikumar (pjaikumar at cinema.usc.edu) is Associate Professor at the USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Her research has focused on colonial and postcolonial visuality, cinema, and state power in India and Britain.

Anupama Kapse (an_prab at berkeley.edu) is a PhD candidate in the department of Film Studies, UC Berkeley, where she is currently completing her dissertation, The Moving Image: Melodrama and Indian Cinema, 1913-1947. Her interests include visual culture, race, gender and postcolonial theory.

Arne Lunde (lunde at humnet.ucla.edu) teaches Nordic cinema and literature in the Scandinavian Section at UCLA. His presentation is drawn from his book manuscript, Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Whiteness and Ethnic Identity in Classical Hollywood Cinema.

Neepa Majumdar is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s, forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

Daisuke Miyao (dmiyao at uoregon.edu) is Assistant Professor of Japanese Film at University of Oregon and author of Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Durham: Duke UP, 2007).

Lauren Rabinovitz (lauren-rabinovitz at uiowa.edu) is Chair of American Studies and Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts at the University of Iowa. She is the author of numerous books, including: For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (1998).

Laura Isabel Serna (sernali at post.harvard.edu) is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University. An interdisciplinary scholar who works at the interstices of cultural history and film studies she is completing a book on early American films and Mexican audiences.

Sheila Skaff (sskaff at utep.edu) is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896-1939 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007), as well as numerous articles and reviews of East European cinema.

Shelley Stamp (stamp at ucsc.edu) is author of Movie-Struck Girls and co-editor of American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices and a special issue of Film History on "Women and the Silent Screen."

Yiman Wang (yw3 at ucsc.edu) is Assistant Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently working on a book project entitled Re-figuring Utopia, Remaking Chinese Cinema.

Joshua Yumibe (yumibe at oakland.edu) is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Oakland University. He is preparing a manuscript titled "Moving Color: An Aesthetic History of Applied Color Silent Cinema."