FACULTY PRESENTERS
Sherene H. Razack is Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Gender Studies, UCLA. Her books include: Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (2015); At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour On Terror (2014, ed. With Suvendrini Perera); States of Race (2011, co-editor with Malinda Smith and Sunera Thobani); Casting Out: Race and the Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics (2008) ; Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (2004)
Gary Fields is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.
Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Faculty Affiliate in the Feminist Studies Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB, she has co-founded Wireframe, a new digital media studio that supports critical game design, data visualization, VR/augmented realities, digital arts and activism. She is known as the creator of the data-body, VJ Um Amel, and the R-Shief software system. Her creative research uses computer analytics, visualization, and immersive worldbuilding techniques to map how participation in social media has influenced the formation of a virtual body politic. Shereen Sakr has shown in solo and group exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums including the San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art in Jordan, Camera Austria, Cultura Digital in Brazil, DC Fridge Art Gallery, 100 Copies in Egypt, among other venues. Her journal articles appear in Middle East Critique, Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies, Parson’s Journal for Information Mapping, Thoughtmesh: Critical Code Journal, and Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities (forthcoming). Over the last two decades, she has been a leading voice in the open source movement, in particular for Arabic localization. She is Co-Editor for the open access journal: Media Theory, and also for After Video published by Open Humanities Press. In addition, she is Research Collaborator in the Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab at MIT. Professor Shereen Sakr holds an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and a PhD in Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California. Reviews of her work appear in The Wall Street Journal, Science, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Voice of America, The Monocle, Art Territories, Digital Media and Learning, Egypt Independent, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya, and The Creators Project.
GRADUATE STUDENT PRESENTERS
Ali A. Olomi (PhD Candidate, Department of History, UC Irvine)
Ali A. Olomi is a scholar of Middle East history specializing in the intellectual and cultural history of the region with an emphasis on how the Middle East relates to and encounters the wider Mediterranean world. A graduate of UCLA’s College of Letters and Sciences, he is a social and political commentator with a keen interest in the historical underpinnings of current events. He is currently pursuing higher academia at UCI, is a lecturer, cultural consultant, writer, and researcher. His research interests include questions about empire and colonialism, modernity, gender and sexuality, intellectual and cultural history, orientalism, history of religion, Islam, mysticism, religious terrorism/insurgency, and Muslim-Christian and Muslim-Jewish relations. He has an interest in world history and situating the history of the Middle East in a global perspective.
Michael Moshe Dahan (PhD Candidate, Department of Drama, UC Irvine)
Michael is a scholar, filmmaker and artist who earned his MFA in Studio Art with a Critical Theory Emphasis from UC Irvine in 2012. His current work interrogates the intersection of psychoanalysis, political economy, post-colonial theory and aesthetic production emerging from Israel/Palestine. Specifically, his research deploys performative economic theories, psychoanalysis, and epigenetic approaches to historical trauma to examining disproportionate prisoner exchanges between Israel and Palestine. By assessing the performative capacity of exchange, his work proposes that these prisoner-swaps emerge as a form of differential judgment—a political valuation and overall depreciation of human life—that unleash a leakage of the unconscious, a drive towards what Bataille names an ‘expenditure without reserve,’ and one that turns the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian state out on itself, ejecting it outside the frame of its own ethical inside. His experimental film, Two Points of Failure, was screened at the Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Jihlava, Bucharest, and Melbourne International Film Festivals, as well as the Tribeca Film Festival and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. Before receiving his MFA, he spent nearly a decade working as a film executive.
Sasha Crawford-Holland (MA Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies, USC)
Sasha Crawford-Holland is an M.A. student and Annenberg Fellow in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California. He completed his B.A. in Cultural Studies at McGill University and has held research positions at the Deutsche Kinemathek, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Shoah Foundation. Sasha’s research examines the visual culture of militarism. His work has been published in Television & New Media and is forthcoming in Synoptique.
Sintia Issa (PhD Candidate, Visual Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Sintia Issa is a visual culture theorist, writer, and educator. Currently based in the Bay Area, she is pursuing a PhD program in visual studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz to research the histories, politics, itineraries, and visual culture of waste from the eastern Mediterranean, taking the ‘garbage crisis’ in Lebanon as a point of departure. Over the past five years, she taught and developed courses in visual and design culture in various academic institutions in Beirut, most notably at the School of Architecture and Design of the Lebanese American University where she accepted several appointments. She also worked with Beirut Art Center in multiple capacities, but was mostly keen to conceive and execute an educational program that brought together contemporary art and the nearby communities. She studied art history at the department of art at the University of Toronto, and graduated with a HBA, then MA, receiving both distinctions and scholarships. As a student in Toronto, then as faculty in Beirut, she served on various curricular and hiring committees.
RESPONDENTS
Harry Hvdson (MA Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies, USC)
Harry is a Masters student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Their projects think the work of abolition, rhetorics of porosity, and the body. They will begin their PhD studies at USC in the Fall.
Mariam Rahmani (PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature, UCLA)
Mariam Rahmani is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in modern Iran, the politics of translation, and postcolonial literature and theory. She is currently working on a translation from Persian/Farsi into English of Mahsa Mohebali’s Don’t Worry (Tehran: 2008), for which she was recently awarded a PEN/Heim translation grant (2018). She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MSt in Islamic Art from the University of Oxford.
Eszter Zimanyi (PhD Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies, USC)
Eszter is a PhD student and Annenberg Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her work has been published in Transnational Cinemas, Media Fields Journal, Jadaliyya, and Enclave Review. She served as the lead research assistant for the book Fifty Years of the Battle of Algiers: Past as Prologue, authored by Sohail Daulatzai, as well as the editorial assistant for Return of The Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop. Eszter also acted as a curatorial assistant for Histories Absolved: Revolutionary Cuban Poster Art and the Muslim International, which showcased rare posters from Cuba’s OSPAAAL collective. Most recently, Eszter co-edited an issue of the media studies journal Spectator. Her current research considers the historical and ideological connections between the Cold War and the War on Terror through examining narratives of displacement and exile between Eastern Europe and the greater Middle East, with a particular focus on Europe’s contemporary migrant/refugee crisis. Eszter‘s research interests include migration, diaspora, and refugee studies, global and transnational media, postcolonial and postsocialist studies, documentary, and digital media.
(B)orders of Empire 