The following Barnard faculty members work extensively with BCRW on the Transnational Feminisms Initiative.
Yvette Christiansë is a South African-born poet, novelist, and scholar. She is the author of two books of poetry: Imprendehora and Castaway. Her acclaimed first novel, Unconfessed, is based on the life of a slave woman in the Cape Colony and was a finalist for the 2007 Hemingway/PEN International Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry has been published in the U.S., South Africa, Australia, Canada, France and Italy. She is also the recipient of The Harri Jones Memorial Prize for poetry (Australia). She teaches poetry and prose of former English colonies (with an emphasis on South Africa, the Caribbean and Australia), narratives of African Diaspora, 20th Century African American Literatures, poetics and creative writing. Her research interests include the nexus between theories of race and gender, class and postcoloniality. Her manuscript on Toni Morrison’s poetics and is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. She is currently writing a book on representations of Liberated Africans or Recaptives between 1807 and 1886. Christiansë was born in South Africa under apartheid and immigrated with her parents to Australia at age 18.
Shayoni Mitra works at the intersection of performance and politics. Her interest in political theatre stems from her years as an actor with Delhi based street theatre group Jana Natya Manch. She is currently revising toward publication her manuscript, “Contesting Capital: A History of Political Theatre in Postcolonial Delhi,” which interrogates the ever shifting, adapting expressions of political theatre under different configurations of power. It is a historical look at both proscenium and street theatre from the decade of Independence in the 1940s to the twenty first century. The manuscript covers a range of styles including folk and revolutionary singing troupes, large open-air performances, topical agit-prop plays, intimate and improvized activist pieces and feminist performances. Prof. Mitra has taught courses on Indian, Asian and non-Western performances as well as modern Theatre History and Performance Studies. Her teaching bridges the gap between the global North and South, putting into dialogue the histories of Western Realism with classical, folk, stylized, avant garde and improvized forms from around the world. She actively embraces the scholar-practitioner-activist role encouraging the connections between pedagogy and praxis. Before coming to Barnard, she taught at Brown and New York University in the United States and conducted lectures and theatre workshops in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Milia University and Delhi University in India. Among her current projects is her collaboration with a group of sex workers in Sangli, Maharashtra, India examining the ways in which they use theatre for their political mobilization.
Maja Horn is an associate professor at Barnard College in Spanish and Latin American Cultures. She received her B.A. in Latin American Literature from Smith College in 1998, an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU in 2002, and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Cornell University in 2005. Before joining the Barnard faculty in 2006, she was a research associate at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she developed and taught a performance studies concentration. Professor Horn specializes in contemporary Caribbean cultures with a focus on literature, visual and performance art, and political culture. She published the book Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature, and is currently completing a second book on queer Dominican literature, visual and performance arts. She also has published widely on Latin American and Caribbean arts for various art magazines in the U.S. and in the Dominican Republic. At Barnard College she teaches courses on Caribbean literature, visual and performance arts, as well as courses about gender and sexualities in the Americas.
Abosede George joined the faculty of Barnard in 2007. She specializes in women’s history, urban history, the history of childhood in Africa, the study of gender and sexuality in African History, and the history of development work in Africa. She is currently working on a book about the politics of girl-saving and transformations in girlhood in 20th-century colonial Lagos, Nigeria. She maintains faculty affiliations with the Africana Studies Program at Barnard, the Institute for African Studies at Columbia (IAS), the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference (CCASD). She received her B.A. from Rutgers University (1999) and her Ph.D. from Stanford (2006).
Kaiama L. Glover is an Assistant Professor of French at Barnard College. She received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University. Her teaching and research interests include francophone literature, particularly that of Haiti and the French Antilles, colonialism and postcolonialism, and African cinema. She has published articles in The French Review, Small Axe, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Postcolonial Writings, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, among others. She has been on the editorial board of the Romanic Review since 2002, on the editorial board of Small Axe since 2012, is a founder and co-coordinator of the Transnational and Transcolonial Caribbean Studies Research Group, and has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review. Professor Glover’s book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, addresses the general issue of canon formation in the francophone Caribbean and the particular fate of the Haitian Spiralist authors vis-à-vis this canon. Her current projects include Disorderly Women, a study of the ethics of narcissism and configurations of the feminine in 20th and 21st century Caribbean fiction, “New Narratives of Haiti,” a special issue of Transition magazine (May 2013), and Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, an edited volume of critical essays forthcoming with Yale French Studies.
Neferti Xina M. Tadiar joined the faculty of Barnard in 2006, after teaching in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz for nine years. Her academic interests include transnational and third world feminisms; postcolonial and Marxist theory; critical theories of race and subjectivity; literary and social theory; cultural studies of the Asia Pacific region; and Philippine studies. Professor Tadiar’s work examines the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality, and liberatory movements in the context of global relations. Her research focuses on contemporary Philippine and Filipino cultures and their relation to political and economic change, while addressing broader issues of gender, race, and sexuality in the discourses and material practices of nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization. Professor Tadiar is working on two book projects: Present Senses: Aesthetics, Affect, Asia in the Global (with Jonathan L. Beller) and Remaindered Life: Becoming Human in a Time of War. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order, which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism for 2005. Professor Tadiar is co-Editor of the journal, Social Text.
