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Spring 2003 Faculty Fellows

Spring seminar: Human Communities: Local, Global, and Virtual

Katie Arens concentrates on intellectual history, both theoretical and cultural. Much of her current work examines quasi-minority communities, including the case of the Texas Germans, within the supposed dominant cultures of Europe and the US. She also has books in progress on the cultural politics of the Austrian Volkstheater tradition and on the varieties and trajectories of 19th and 20th century Kantian and Hegelian discourses.

Ann Cvetkovich is interested in the formation of subcultures, local counterpublics, and lesbian communities. Her forthcoming book, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, addresses questions of trauma and community. She has also co-edited the volume Articulating the Local and the Global: Globalization and Cultural Studies.

Henry Dietz has long worked on issues of urban poverty, especially in Third World urban settings and principally in Latin America. He explores the intersections of people and politics and how poor urban citizens build and maintain a sense of community. His most recent books are Urban Poverty, Political Participation and the State: Lima, 1971-1990 and Urban Elections in Democratic Latin America.

William Glade is a leading authority on Latin American economic history and development, entrepreneurship in developing economies, and the role of both public enterprises and privatization in development. He is American co-chair of the binational Fulbright commission in Mexico and has a book in progress on cultural exchange within the territory encompassed by the North American free Trade Agreement.

Christopher Griffin is an associate curator at the Blanton Museum of Art, where he develops interdisciplinary and web-based programs and educational materials to engage both University and community constituencies with the Blanton’s collections. He also holds graduate degrees and is an active scholar in philosophy and literary studies.

Steven Hoelscher is a cultural geographer who works on American cities, regions, and landscapes and on ethnicity, tourism, and the cultural history of photography. He is the author most recently of Textures of Place: Geographies of Imagination, Experience, and Paradox.

Leslie Jarmon teaches and researches cultures of communication‹how such cultures, both verbal and nonverbal, function and how speakers and writers negotiate them, often across various sorts of social and linguistic boundaries. She has been a regional coordinator of U.S. Peace Corps training for Latin America and the Caribbean, and, in her work with the Graduate School’s Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program, teaches the culture of academic writing to international students.
Dr. Jarmon passed away on November 24, 2009.

Laura Stein writes and teaches on communication law and policy and on the history and theory of communications media. Her current work focuses more particularly on the communications objectives, strategies, and dynamics of marginalized activist communities and on the transformative effects of local and global media and the policy implications of these effects.

Kathleen Stewart uses particular multi-sited ethnographic case studies to examine the effects of public culture on forms of political engagement and disaffection and on the ordinary practices of everyday life. She is currently completing a book entitled The Private Life of Public Culture and has outlined another on forms of utopian imagination and personal and communal acts of practical risk-taking.

Seth Wolitz works across several cultures and languages, often focusing on the literature and experience of Jewish diasporic communities. Among his particular interests is the "bifocality of Jewish identity" in the history and culture of Jewish communities in Texas. He has also recently published The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer.